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    Peacock House and Other Mysteries
    Peacock House and Other Mysteries
    Peacock House and Other Mysteries
    Ebook389 pages6 hours

    Peacock House and Other Mysteries

    By Eden Phillpotts

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    About this ebook

    This volume contains a collection of thrilling and mysterious short stories by the English author, Eden Phillpotts. These exciting tales will appeal to lovers of mystery fiction, and are not to be missed by fans and collectors of Phillpotts' work. The stories contained herein include: 'Peacock House', 'The King of Kanga', 'Count Rollo', 'Red Dragon', 'Crazywell', 'The Iron Pineapple', 'Grey Lady Drive', 'Three Dead Men', 'Madonna of the Fireflies', 'My First Murder', 'The Astral Lady', 'Yellow Peril', 'The Cairn', 'Stepan Trofimitch', etcetera. Eden Phillpotts (1862 - 1960) was an English author, poet and dramatist. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateApr 15, 2014
    ISBN9781473392823
    Peacock House and Other Mysteries
    Author

    Eden Phillpotts

    Eden Phillpotts was an English author, poet, and dramatist. Born in Mount Abu, India, he was educated in Devon, England, and worked as an insurance officer for ten years before studying for the stage and eventually becoming a writer. Over the course of his career, he published scores of novels, many of which were mysteries. He died in 1960.

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      Peacock House and Other Mysteries - Eden Phillpotts

      PEACOCK HOUSE

      JANE CAMPBELL’s long journey was ended, and in August sunset light, a dogcart, which conveyed her upon the last stage, drove up an avenue of old elms, left the trees, skirted a little lake, and presently brought the visitor before the face of Pole Manor, a minor mansion lying at the foothills of Dartmoor. Two storeys high and built of granite, rose this Georgian house but the porch and its pillars were of red, conglomerate stone. They broke the unbending gravity of the grey front with a touch of colour. Behind rolled blue hills, now melting into the splendour of gold and orange above them; while southward, beyond a little park, extended meadow lands, wooded ridges, and fields of corn yellowing to harvest.

      The dogcart brought up, and a footman descended from the porch. He assisted the traveller, who was a pleasant-looking, red-haired woman of robust build; then he turned his attention to her luggage, untied a bicycle fastened to the back seat, set it against the steps, and picked up Miss Campbell’s plain, leathern trunk and suit-case. These he took into the hall and handed to another man. The cart drove away down a road to the left of the house, and presently a stable boy came up this path and trundled off the bicycle. He waited until beyond observation, then mounted it for his private amusement.

      Jane had come to visit her godfather. She was a schoolmistress at Glasgow, and when in doubt as to where the latter part of her summer holiday might be spent, to her amazement received a letter from a friend of her dead father, the old soldier who had been her man gossip. From him she had never heard until now, and only once had she seen him, when he came, three-and-thirty years before, to Colonel Campbell’s funeral. Then she was but two years old, and had, therefore, no recollection of him. Indeed, if she ever thought of him, it was with impatience, for she had been saddled with his surname and regarded it as rather stupid so to be. Jane Goodenough Campbell she was called, but few knew it save herself. Since her mother’s death she was exceedingly alone in the world. She had been an only child, and of her father’s people none remained; of her mother’s, but an old aunt and some distant cousins whom she never saw.

      She lived a monotonous, independent life, enjoyed the business of teaching, harboured no dreams, and was of a practical and stolid temperament. With men she was cold, and no romance added shadow or lustre to her recollections. She had once liked a man, and even sought to let him know it; but she understood not how to do so, and the schoolmaster in question soon found out her temperamental lack and turned away.

      Now came something of an adventure, and after fearing that such a visit as General George Goodenough proposed was quite out of her province, Jane, greatly daring, determined to accept the invitation, and did so. She had regretted it half a dozen times on the journey, and wished more than once that her destination was one of the whitewashed, thatched cottages that peered from nook and dingle upon her five-mile drive. Some weeks in one of them had better suited her modest ideas of rest and pleasure than a formal visit. But it was too late. She had glimpsed the unpromising front of Pole Manor; she had passed through the lifeless hall and was waiting in an equally lifeless drawing-room for her host.

      A housekeeper welcomed her—a cheerful old woman in black, with a little black cap on her few white hairs. The footman who took her luggage upstairs was also old and grey. A sense of age clung to everything, and the drawing-room seemed naked and archaic to Jane’s eye. The furniture was tired-looking, faded, of little worth. Only a magnificent mantelshelf of the Adam period attracted her, and from it she lifted her eyes to the roof and saw that the ceiling was also distinguished.

      Then came somebody on a stick. She heard the stick tapping, but no sound of feet. The door opened and a lame, bent figure appeared. Here indeed was eld, and her heart sank. She knew that a contemporary of her father, who had married at forty-five, must be stricken in years, but Time’s self stood personified before her, and General Goodenough, by reason of indifference to appearances, looked even more ancient than he was. He had been tall, but was now withered and shrunken. He wore a black skull-cap on his bald head, and a great, white beard and whiskers still thick and flowing. His face was thin and his cheeks hollow; his eyes were dim behind their glasses, and a network of wrinkles extended from his high, narrow brow over his temples to his cheek-bones. His expression belied him and belonged, as it seemed, to his soldier days; for it was still stern. But his voice was not. Though dimmed by the throttle of eighty-five years, it had good, deep notes yet, and it sounded kindly on the ear of all who ever heard it. His clothes seemed ridiculous to Jane. Such a venerable figure, she thought, should have worn Victorian garments at the least; but the General was clad in a very shabby Norfolk jacket, a waistcoat of fawn-coloured leather, and knickerbockers, from which appeared legs still fairly sturdy, in homespun stockings. On one foot was a red slipper; the other had been tied up in a shawl.

      He bowed, shook Jane’s hand with gnarled fingers distorted by chalk stones, and sank into a chair.

      Welcome, he said. I take this visit kindly, young lady. But don’t be discouraged. A touch of gout—quite unexpected, probably brought on by the excitement of entertaining you. Deal gently with me; distract my mind, and it will be gone in twenty-four hours. Have you made a comfortable journey?

      Very much so, General Goodenough.

      Do you know Devon?

      I do not. I visited Cornwall once and found the air almost too strong.

      Did you? Here the air is soft, or bracing, at will. The valleys are as good as a Turkish bath this summer; but Dartmoor, five miles up above us, is always bracing.

      You’re not in pain? she asked.

      Thank you, no. Mere discomfort. Gout won’t kill me. A man is as old as his arteries, Jane Campbell; and though I’m in my eighty-fifth year, my arteries happen to be only seventy, or thereabout. So the doctor tells me. Don’t think you’ve come to an invalid. Your good mother—I was so sorry to find she had gone. I hoped to have entertained you both.

      She died ten years ago.

      Well, well. And you don’t remember your father, my dear old companion in arms?

      Not very well, General. Just a shadow. I was a tiny thing when he died. But I dream about him sometimes—strange to say.

      So do I. It is said, you know, that we never see the faces of the dead in dream. For that matter, I have no other faces to see now. Your father possessed one or two gifts of the Scots and lacked some of their reputed failings. He had second sight—couldn’t explain it, even disavowed it; but things happened to him only to be so understood. And he was a Scot in his love of metaphysics. What a man to split straws and prove black was white! I should have hated it in anybody else; but nothing was wrong that he did. A great man, and loved a joke, and couldn’t keep money in his purse. Dear, dear me! Really great; and so he was passed over, and the show puppets, for whom he pulled the strings in such masterly fashion, got the honours. A common thing in India half a century ago. A mad world, Jane, and it always was—it always was. I read little but history nowadays, and I see the only thing that changes not is human nature.

      Psychology is in the air so much, she said. I suppose there is something in what you speak of as second sight. But it isn’t called that now.

      Inherited, they say, answered the old man. Are you interested in it?

      In psychology and second-self, rather than second sight. I’ve read Freud. He’s a pathologist, but seems to be more useful to the artists than the doctors. So far as I understand it, our unconscious minds seem to be very primitive and earthy and inferior, and impervious to conscience—most disappointing, in fact.

      You never found yourself possessed of any clairvoyant gift?

      No, indeed. I’m a schoolmistress, and the most matter of fact person in the world. I’m afraid you’ll find me very dull, General Goodenough.

      Call me ‘Godfather,’ he said. I expect you think it strange that I should claim such a spiritual relationship after so many years. There’s a respectable gap between the silver porringer and spoon I gave you when you were baptized and to-day. Still, bear no grudge. I’m lonely, and I must go soon, and there’s no one in the wide world linked to me, even as slightly as you are. The natural fate of all old bachelors, if they refuse to send in their papers at three score and ten. So I thought, if you were willing, that we might have a look at each other. A schoolmistress, eh?

      It was very good of you to ask me.

      And rather good of you to come—also rather brave. But your father’s daughter was sure to be brave. I counted on that. It took me some months to hunt you down. I thought you might be married and have a husband and perhaps half a dozen young people.

      She shook her head, smiling.

      I shall never marry, Godfather, she said,

      Don’t prophesy.

      A gong sounded, and the faint rumble reached them.

      You’re ready for your dinner, I hope? Would you like a cup of tea, or anything, now?

      No, thank you. I had some tea at Exeter.

      They met again at dinner, when Jane, in a new but unromantic gown, faced the General, who had donned evening dress.

      He treated her as though he had known her all his life, and was vivacious, humorous, and cheerful. She admired his tact, for finding that they had nothing of taste or experience in common, he sought to learn what interested her and made her talk about it.

      I catch your father, he said. It is wonderful to note how young people are often the unconscious echoes of those responsible for them. Not in what they say, or even think, for education has lifted them forward, and their values are changed; but in the manner of thought and the angle of vision. That is what is handed down—temperament; here cautious and reserved and self-contained, as you are; here dashing and reckless; here cold and calculating; here big-hearted; here small. An unconscious inflexion of voice, little mannerisms . . . You have your father’s accent, and you lift your chin when you’re going to speak, just as he used to do.

      Mother always said I grew up to remind her of him. Have you, by any chance, a picture of my father? I, to my sorrow, have none. He never would be photographed.

      He shook his head.

      I much fear not, save in my old heart; but we will see. It is barely possible.

      A curious emotion made Jane smile to herself that night, though little that happened ever amused her. Her host made her retire early, and, when she had done so, she reflected that he was treating her exactly as she habitually treated her pupils. To them she was old; to General Goodenough she appeared exceedingly young. She was accustomed to the companionship of immature intellects, as all teachers perforce must be; but now she perceived that to this venerable man she was immature herself; and indeed she knew it, for though clever and learned, her knowledge of life outside her scholastic circle was but small.

      She asked concerning his health next morning, and he declared his gout to be better. She was touched by his solicitude, and a thousand little attentions that it seemed impossible that a man should have considered.

      He took no breakfast himself, but drank a glass of hot water and ate a thin slice of toast only. For her, however, he had planned a generous meal: porridge, a grouse, scones and marmalade.

      Don’t forget the Devonshire cream, he said. I love to see young people eat.

      But I’m not young, Godfather; I’m five-and-thirty.

      To be five-and-thirty is to retain all the possibilities of youth, even if the bloom has been rubbed off, he said. One is generally younger at that age than ten years earlier. Today you are free of my company, to do as you please; tomorrow I shall be well enough to drive you to the Moor.

      May I take a long bicycle ride? It’s cool and fresh and delicious. I’ve been in your garden an hour.

      Alas! We are not gardeners.

      There are splendid possibilities about it.

      Most old Indians make gardens, he said. I have known old fellows who, if they could not have gardens, amused themselves by growing seeds of date and palm in little pots and watching them spring up. But I am an exception. Horticulture never attracted me.

      You must tell me your hobbies.

      They are easily told: reading and driving. This year I’ve had an excitement. A regiment, long resident in India, was sent to Dartmoor, to be braced and hardened. With that exquisite foresight so characteristic of our War Office these unfortunate Third Devons were brought straight from the Plains to the side of Cosdon Beacon, and there, under canvas in a harsh April, reminded of the glories of an English Spring. The weather, unhappily, could not have been worse; the ambulance was busy taking poor Tommies to the hospital at Okehampton. A man or two died of pneumonia. The officers welcomed my modest hospitality—good fellows.

      I’ll take a long ride; but I promise not to go up to the Moor. You have to show me that.

      Disregard all hours save that for dinner, he said. At eight o’clock I shall expect you to dine. Until then you are free of me.

      But this she would not have.

      No, no; I’m coming back for lunch, please. Perhaps I’ll take it with me sometimes—with you on your drives.

      I have no motor-car. You must be resigned to that; but I love horses and drive myself still very creditably.

      They pleased one another, and Jane pleased herself also, to find that she could be so cheerful and at her ease with a strange man. But she understood why. This gracious and kind-hearted old figure was not a man. He had passed beyond manhood into the neuter state of the aged. She liked his physical weakness. It inspired instincts that belonged to her; for had she not been a schoolmistress, she must have been a nurse.

      She thought kindly about him as she rode away, but her imagination was not equal to picturing her future spent at Pole Manor, though her reason told her that such a purpose might lurk in the General’s mind. She guessed that he would soon empty her and weary of the content; while, for her part, she knew that a life plunged into such silence, even with this amiable old spirit for company, must quickly desolate and distract a being devoted to the stir and bustle of a girls’ school.

      She wondered as to General Goodenough’s acquaintance, and suspected he had but few friends. His house did not suggest hospitality, though he himself did.

      The cool grey of the morning broke to pearl when Jane had ridden five miles, and she regretted her promise, for the valley lanes were hot and the hills beckoned. Climb indeed she did presently, and won to a little knap crowned with shade of beeches. Then an expanse of country was flung beneath her, and she rejoiced in beholding gentle and distinguished scenery of a sort unfamiliar to her. For she was something of a connoisseur of natural beauty, and protested at those who were learned in art and understood pictures, but cared nothing for the scenes of inspiration where a man had sweated, or frozen, for his achievement. She blamed those who only valued a work itself, but found no pleasure in its sources. She knew the meaning of scenery, distrusted the obvious and rhetorical, but found by experience much that promised least was like a fugue, whose fullness and significance could often only be won after many hours of patient service.

      The quiet lands undulating in the diffused light of thin clouds pleased her, and she knew that this manifestation, albeit lumpy and over-green with the heaviness of English foliage, must be fairer at spring and autumn time. For it was built on a large pattern, finely knit together and broken by great passages of level earth where a river twinkled through the haze.

      She thirsted presently, looked for a roof tree, and longed to be on the banks of the distant stream far below. Then, half a mile beneath her, she thought that she saw the gables and twisted chimneys of an old house; and since inviting meadows sloped towards it, she left her bicycle hidden under a holly and descended for something to drink. Jane remembered at a later date that the hour was just after noon when she took her way.

      Descending over a shorn hayfield and passing through a belt of trees, the wanderer entered suddenly upon a different world, and in the glen through which she was now proceeding, the very air seemed charged and charmed with a different quality. It was lustrous, burnished and radiant with light. The sun, that had created but a bright and misty zone behind the clouds all day, here emerged and rained into a woodland whereon no proleptic shadow of autumn had yet appeared. It seemed as though the valley still lay in the lap of early summer; the very flowers were not the ragworts and hawkweeds of a later time; but woodbine scented the thickets, the dogrose had not yet dropped her petals, the wayfaring-tree still blossomed.

      Jane, emerging from the forest and passing into a meadow, came suddenly to a low bank where the grassland broke, and above which extended a garden to the front of a beautiful dwelling-house. Upon its wall hung a great magnolia with ivory cups glittering in the sunshine, and the lawn of the formal garden was such as the stranger had never seen. To the right and left stood wonders of topiary in the shape of yew trees, clipped to the shape of peacocks with tails outspread, and between them a round pond lay; while above the water, in the midst of it, stood a marble urchin holding a great fish, from whose mouth leapt up a fountain. It flashed aloft and fell purring upon the water-lilies below.

      Two living peacocks strutted on the gravel terrace before the house, and when Jane ascended to the garden by a flight of steps and felt the velvet of the lawn under her feet, one bird lifted the glittering mass of bronze and purple he dragged behind him and opened his tail fanwise, till it arched and quivered like a dark rainbow above his head.

      Other sign of life there was none, and seeing no entrance at the front of the house, Jane was about to pass round and follow the path that curved to the right. But the sight of a great magnolia cup low on the tree tempted her to smell the fragrance; and from that, moved by an impulse that seemed natural at the time, yet made her wonder afterwards, she found herself peeping into the window beyond it.

      The room was occupied, but those within did not regard her, and she perceived that their own affairs shut out any thought or sight of another face. The sun beat down, and through two windows of the chamber cast its radiance on the oaken floor. The walls were of dark crimson and upon them hung old portraits in golden frames, while at the centre was a table of polished mahogany spread with a meal. Silver glittered upon the rich wood; and a bowl of strawberries stood between two tall vases of Bohemian glass, from which sprayed down dark, Tuscan roses and the snowy stars of syringas.

      Three people sat at the table, and while the obvious details of the room were unconsciously impressed on the watcher’s memory, the living beings she more directly regarded and remembered for ever.

      All sense of her own impropriety deserted Jane; she forgot the glamorous garden and its adornments; her purpose in being there fled from her; as still as a statue she stood and stared upon the remarkable trio assembled so near and yet so far removed from her by their own present passions.

      A young man and a young woman were seated at each end of the oval table; while between them sat a man of middle age, who directly faced the eavesdropper. The girl was fair and seemed to have sprung out of some picture by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Her flaxen hair had been drawn to her crown, yet little curls, amber bright, hid her ears. She was in summer muslin sprigged with blue lavender, with a bunch of lavender ribbon at her throat for sole adornment. Her face was pale and pure—a beautiful, but fragile, Greuze face, with red, small lips, and large, lovely blue eyes. The younger man wore a black tail coat and riding-breeches. He was clean shorn, of good height and well-knit, with a fierce, intent expression on his countenance. Brown, curly hair clustered low on his forehead. The natural expression of neither did Jane see, for the woman was evidently trembling with terror and the youth strained to some great indignation at what he heard. His attitude echoed his emotion, for he leant over the table with a large, white fist clenched upon it, and he had upset and broken a wine-glass at his elbow, from which purple wine trickled over the table edge to the floor.

      The elder of the men was speaking vehemently and fury contorted his features. He had shaven lips and chin, black, curly whiskers and black hair streaked with grey. He wore a dull, russet-coloured coat, very high in the neck, and a black stock with a diamond pin in it. His heavy jowl was as red as a peony, and his round, brown eyes bulged like a fish’s from under stormy eyebrows and a wrinkled forehead. Jane had never seen such passion blaze on any human countenance; she did not know that a face could writhe with such contortions of malice and hate. The stout, middle-aged sufferer shot his lips and spewed moisture, like a gargoyle that she had seen leer down from a mediæval rain-shoot. It seemed that he roared at the others, for the girl shrank back in her chair and put her little white hands over her ears. She wore a wedding ring, Jane noted; then the watcher, echoing some of this tremendous surge of passion and almost sharing the other woman’s terror, turned her eyes again quickly to the raging creature who faced her. She could not hear what he said, but saw the table shiver as he struck, the silver leap, and roses fall from a glass. Then she witnessed death, sudden and terrible, for as the younger man leapt up, with the intention of silencing his tormentor, the elder tore a heavy pistol from his breast, pointed it and fired point-blank at the head of the girl upon his left hand. There was a stab of flame, and the woman, shot through her fair head, fell forward, then slipped out of her chair and dropped to the ground. The murderer had only time to fire once, for as he turned upon the other man, his weapon was torn from his hand and exploded into the air. Then, snatching a great silver knife from the table, the younger drove it with all his strength into the other’s breast and left it there. His victim fell and lay without movement, while the man who had slain him hastened to the girl, bent over her, perceived that she was dead, then turned and strode to the window where Jane watched, flung it open and emerged. He almost brushed her elbow, but was apparently unconscious of her presence, for his blazing eyes saw nothing. He passed her and vanished so quickly that she had but a glimpse of the unspeakable agony on his face. It seemed rather an incarnation of all human woe than a living man who swept out of her sight; and now, looking into the room again, Jane saw the door open and two liveried servants enter.

      Then she shrank back, and, alarmed for herself, turned into a shrubbery, where she could not be seen, and so regained the meadows beneath the garden. Still hastening, not without personal fear, she ran, passed the belt of trees and breasted the hayfield as swiftly as she might. Not until she was at the summit of the knoll did she stay her progress, sink down beside her bicycle and slowly regain her breath.

      Horror and thankfulness shared Jane’s mind. She was appalled at what she had seen, but unspeakably glad that into this tragedy she could not be drawn and need not enter. Neither the murdered man nor woman had seen her, while for the youth, who had so terribly slain the slayer, she could only hope that he might escape. Her sympathies were with him—she knew not why. For an hour she lay retracing every incident of the scene and marvelling that all had happened in so brief a space of time. She looked at her watch and perceived that she had not been half an hour from the hilltop. Then she brooded on the story of these unfortunate people and what must have preceded this grim climax in their lives.

      She rose presently, mounted and returned home, conscious that the outer world was changed, that autumn’s stealthy signs were now again on field and hedge; that the sun had retreated behind the clouds. Very poignant emotions filled Jane’s heart and head, yet a feeling of gratitude that she had played no part in this awful scene also persisted, and a nature prone to reserve and caution determined her to keep silence before General Goodenough. To tell him was to endanger her own privacy, for it might be that he would demand she should make public what she had accidentally seen, for the benefit of those who must be concerned with the crime. But Jane’s conscience did not prompt confession. She was of a practical mind. She knew that she could not bring the dead to life, and had no desire to say one word that might help to bring the living to death. Her instinct indeed forbade it. Therefore she held her peace and waited with profound but secret interest to learn what the morrow would bring and who were the unhappy ones involved.

      But the morning came, and neither General Goodenough, the housekeeper, nor any other exclaimed at the contents of the local newspaper. It arrived after breakfast and contained no sensation; neither, apparently, was any evil thing on the lips of tradesmen, the grooms, or the gardener. Jane marvelled, but still kept silence. Doubtless news travelled slowly upon the country-side, and she guessed it possible that the police, for their own ends, might be keeping the tragedy a secret.

      To-day the General found himself well, and drove her in a wagonette to the moor, where she wondered at stone-crowned heights and admired the fabric of autumn furze and heather mingled in a tapestry of purple and gold upon the granite hills.

      She called Dartmoor a little pocket Highlands, and General Goodenough pretended to be greatly annoyed at such patronage.

      A ‘pocket Highlands,’ indeed! he said. Was ever such a slight put upon our venerable tors? No, no, Jane, this wilderness echoes no other region on earth, believe me. The mountains are molehills, I grant you: the rivers mere filaments and threads of gold and silver twinkling over their granite aprons and stickles; but for all its smallness, there is a quality here of greatness, too, a spirit of distinction, austerity, and even grandeur that, once received and accepted, soon wins from the heart to the head, and makes you Dartmoor’s willing slave. You must confess, before you leave me, that there is nothing like this in Scotland. Better knowledge will show you the weakness of your parallel.

      She hoped they might approach the knoll of her adventure, so that an opportunity would offer to ask concerning the house beneath, but they did not go that way, and though the General met a man or two, who saluted him, and one on horseback, who stopped and was introduced to her, nobody brought any startling intelligence; none appeared aware of the dark events accomplished so near at hand on the previous morning.

      For three days Jane Campbell waited in vain expectation of some news, then, to her own amazement, she found the memory already fading under stress of new impressions. Of a stolid temperament, little happened to cause her excitation at any time; but this event had naturally done so, and she would not let it fade. She shook off the shadow of indifference and grew into an obstinate determination to learn more. It was preposterous that such a thing could occur and make no ripple in a civilised community. Finally, Jane found her mind balanced in uncertain fashion between a choice of actions. First she determined to tell General Goodenough her story in every particular; then she hesitated before a temptation to visit the house in the vale again. She thought to revisit it upon the old pretext, find the door and ask for a glass of water. Then, surely, something must reach her comprehension concerning the awful sights of the week before. Dead people must be buried; such tragedies must wing above the scene of their commission. It was contrary to reason that things so horrible and extravagant could happen and utter no reverberation beyond the spot of their occurrence.

      The latter idea more attracted Jane, and, after some few days, she begged again for a bicycle ride of exploration, took luncheon with her, and set out for a long day alone. Upon certain landmarks she depended to find the former way, and for a time she failed to do so; then, by chance, she came to a meeting of two roads that crossed at right angles, and she remembered the curious name of the spot lifted up on a sign-post. Beggar’s Bush, it was called, and thence she took the left-hand track, and presently found herself once more upon the knoll. There was no mistake, for the holly bushes reminded her where she had left her bicycle, and she found the spot where she had sat to reflect after her former adventure.

      She now prepared to revisit the scene of the tragedy. It was a lonely glen, and none met her on the road, or meadow, as she descended into it. Nor did the sun break forth and shine as on her first visit. Morning, indeed, had opened in clear splendour; but the day grew oppressively hot before noon, and already a thin web of brown and sulky cloud stole up against the little wind that blew. There was a heavy, sickly feeling in the air, and every sign of electric changes near at hand. Jane looked for the gabled roof and twisted chimneys beneath her, but she could not discern them. Neither were the white pigeons on the wing. The valley seemed to have receded somewhat and the trees towered higher, denser, more numerous than she remembered them. Then she went down over the shorn hayfield as before, passed the belt of wood, and presently, entering the glade beneath, started to cross the meadow, and lifted her eyes to the dwelling as she did so. It had vanished, and the sudden sense of this disappearance terrified Jane as though she had seen a ghost. But the thrill of fear arose from what she did not see, rather than from anything she did. A sensation, strange, and altogether beyond experience, crept into her consciousness, and she believed that she was moving in the spirit rather than the flesh, and standing in some corridor of long, vanished years, before the grey house rose, or the garden spread before it. Time, it seemed, had winged backward to the days when the glen was a wilderness and man had not built a home therein, spread his garden and set his fountain flashing. And into that far, anterior day she, too, had been caught up and whirled back, to behold a scene that existed thus before she was born. She rubbed her eyes and pinched her hand to waken out of this mysterious plunge into the past; and then she discovered that stark reality awaited her, while what she had before imagined real was the true dream and figment.

      The jungles and thickets before her resolved themselves, and beneath them, like a palimpsest of dead writing, that peered ghostly through a later script, she came upon decayed traces and shadows of what she had seen so vividly the week before. Here rose the fragments of steps in the bank up which she had climbed to the garden. They were weed-covered and broken, but again she ascended—to find, amid coarse brakes of thistle, briar and eagle-fern, the shattered circle of the fountain, its marbles green with moss, its statue vanished, and its waters dry. One of the yew trees clipped to the likeness of a peacock had disappeared, while the other still rose above the scrub round it; and on its now mature and lofty limbs, Jane fancied that she could make out a gesture of the old design. The tree had broken away and taken a natural shape;

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