Charred Wood.

by Myles Muredach.

CHAPTER I

THE LADY OF THE TREE

The man lay in the tall gra.s.s. Behind him the wall of the Killimaga estate, from its beginning some fifty yards to his left, stretched away to his right for over a thousand feet. Along the road which ran almost parallel with the wall was the remnant of what had once been a great woods; yearly the county authorities determined to cut away its thick undergrowth--and yearly left it alone. On the left the road was bare for some distance along the bluff; then, bending, it again sought the shelter of the trees and meandered along until it lost itself in the main street of Siha.s.set, a village large enough to support three banks and, after a fashion, eight small churches. In front, had the lounger cared to look, he would have seen the huge rocks topping the bluff against which the ocean dashed itself into angry foam. But the man didn't care to look--for in the little clearing between the wall of Killimaga and the bluff road was peace too profound to be wantonly disturbed by motion. And so he lay there lazily smoking his cigar, his long length concealed by the tall gra.s.s.

Hearing a slight click behind him and to his right, the man slowly, even languidly, turned his head to peer through the gra.s.s. But his energy was unrewarded, for he saw nothing he had not seen before--a long wall, its rough stones half hidden by creeping vines, at its base a rank growth of shrubs and wild hedge; behind it, in the near distance, the towers of a house that, in another land, perched amid jutting crags, would have inspired visions of far-off days of romance.

Even in its New England setting the great house held a rugged charm, heightened by the big trees which gave it a setting of rich green.

Some of the trees had daringly advanced almost to the wall itself, while one--a veritable giant--had seemingly been caught while just stepping through.

With a bored sigh, as if even so slight an effort were too great, the smoker settled himself more comfortably and resumed his indolent musing. Then he heard the sound again. This time he did not trouble to look around. Something white swished quickly past him and he stared, bewildered. It was a woman, young, if her figure were to be trusted. His cigar dropped in the gra.s.s, and there he let it lie. His gaze never left her as she walked on; and he could scarcely be blamed, for he was still under thirty-five and feminine early twenties has an interest to masculine full youth. He had never seen anyone quite so charming. And so he watched the lady as she walked to the edge of the bluff overlooking the sea, and turned to the left to go along the pathway toward the village.

Five hundred yards away she was met by a tall man wearing a long black coat. Was it the priest he had noticed that morning at the door of the Catholic church in the village? Yes, there was no doubt about that; it was the priest. He had just lifted his hat to the lady and was now turning to walk back with her by the way he had come. They evidently knew each other well; and the man watching them almost laughed at himself when he realized that he was slightly piqued at the clergyman's daring to know her while he did not. He watched the pair until they disappeared around the bend of the bluff path. Then he settled back to look for his cigar. But he did not find it, for other matters quickly absorbed his attention.

From out a clump of bushes on his left, where they evidently had been hiding, two men appeared. He recognized them both. One was a book agent who was stopping at the hotel in the village; the other was the local constable. The book agent had a paper in his hand.

"That her?" he asked.

"Yaas, sir!"--the constable was surely a native New Englander--"I seed her face plain."

"I didn't," said the agent, with annoyance. "I have never seen her without that confounded veil. This is the first time she's had it thrown back. But the description is right? Look at it."

He showed the paper to the constable, tapping it as he read.

"'Brown hair, blue eyes'--did you see her eyes?"

"I sure did," answered the constable; "and they wuz blue."

"All right, then. 'Blue eyes, regular features'--how about that?"

"Reg'lar enough," said the constable. "She'd no pug nose, I kin tell ya that."

"'Regular features,' then, is right. 'Five feet four inches tall'--that's right. 'Small hands and feet'--that's right. 'About twenty-three years old; good figure.'"

"She sure hez all them," vouchsafed the wearer of the star. "I knowed her right away, and I've seed her often. She's been in Siha.s.set well nigh on a month."

"But where--" the agent turned to look at the unbroken wall--"where in thunder did she come from?"

The constable, pushing back his helmet, scratched his head.

"Damfino," he said. "That's the rub. There's no gate on this side of Killimaga."

"Killimaga?"

"A rich old Irishman built it and put a wall around it, too. We folks of Siha.s.set don't like that; it shuts off the view of the house and lawn. Lawn's what makes things purty. He wuz a queer old mug--wanted to shut hisself up."

"But how did she get out?" insisted the agent, coming back to the issue.

"Search me," offered the constable. He looked toward the top of the wall. "Clumb the fence, mebbe."

"With her dress looking as it does?"

"There's no other way. I dunno."

The agent was puzzled. "I want a closer inspection of that wall.

We'll walk along this side."

Both agent and constable started off, keeping well behind the wild hedge along the wall so that they might not be seen from the bluff road.

The man lying in the gra.s.s was more puzzled than the agent. Why a book agent and a constable should be so anxious about a lady who was--well, just charming--but who had herself stepped out of nowhere to join a priest in his walk, was a problem for some study. He got up and walked to the wall. Then he laughed. Close examination showed him marks in the giant tree, the vertical cuts being cleverly covered by the bark, while the horizontal ones had creepers festooned over them. A door was well concealed. But the tree? It was large, yet there could not be room in it for more than one person, who would have to stand upright and in a most uncomfortable position. The man himself had been before it over an hour. How long had the lady been in the tree? He forgot his lost cigar in trying to figure the problem out.

Mark Griffin had never liked problems. That was one reason why he found himself now located in a stuffy New England inn just at the end of the summer season when all the "boarders" had gone except himself and the book agent.

Griffin himself, though the younger son of an Irish peer, had been born in England. The home ties were not strong and when his brother succeeded to the t.i.tle and estates in Ireland Mark, who had inherited a fortune from his mother, went to live with his powerful English relatives. For a while he thought of going into the army, but he knew he was a dunce in mathematics, so he soon gave up the idea. He tried Oxford, but failed there for the same reason. Then he just drifted.

Now, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, he was knocking about, sick of things, just existing, and fearfully bored. He had dropped into Siha.s.set through sheer curiosity--just to see a typical New England summer resort where the Yankee type had not yet entirely disappeared. Now that the season was over he simply did not care to pull out for New York and continue his trip to--nowhere. He was "seeing" America. It might take months and it might take years. He did not care. Then England again by way of j.a.pan and Siberia--perhaps.

He never wanted to lose sight of that "perhaps," which was, after all, his only guarantee of independence.

Siberia suited Mark Griffin's present mood, which was to be alone. He had never married, never even been in love, at least, not since boyhood. Of course, that had been mere puppy love. Still, it was something to look back to and sigh over. He liked to think that he could still feel a sort of consoling sadness at the thought of it. He, a timid, dreaming boy, had loved a timid, dreaming girl. Her brother broke up the romance by taunting Mark who, with boyish bashfulness, avoided her after that. Then her parents moved to London and Mark was sent to school. After school he had traveled. For the last ten years England had been merely a place to think of as home. He had been in India, and South America, and Canada--up on the Yukon. He would have stayed there, but somebody suggested that he might be a remittance man.

Ye G.o.ds! a remittance man with ten thousand pounds a year! And who could have had much more, for Mark Griffin was a master with his pen.

His imagination glowed, and his travels had fanned it into flame.

Every day he wrote, but burned the product next morning. What was the use? He had plenty to live on. Why write another man out of a job?

And who could be a writer with an income of ten thousand pounds a year?

But, just the same, it added to Mark Griffin's self-hatred to think that it was the income that made him useless. Yet he had only one real failure checked against him--the one at Oxford. But he knew--and he did not deceive himself--why there had been no others. He had never tried.

But there was one thing in Mark's favor, too. In spite of his wandering, in spite of the men and women of all kinds he had met, he was clean. There was a something in the memory of his mother--and in the memory, too, of that puppy love of his--that had made him a fighter against himself.

"The great courage that is worth while before G.o.d," his mother used to say, "is the courage to run away from the temptation to be unclean. It is the only time you have the right to be a coward. That sort of cowardice is _true courage_."

Besides her sweet face, that advice was the great shining memory he had of his mother, and when he began to wander and meet temptations, he found himself treasuring it as his best and dearest memory of her.

True, he had missed her religion--had lost what little he had had of it--but he had kept her talisman to a clean life.

His lack of religion worried him, though he had really never known much about his family's form of it. For that his mother's death, early boarding school, and his father's worse than indifference, were responsible. But as he grew older he felt vaguely that he had missed something the quality of which he had but tasted through the one admonition of his mother that he had treasured. His nature was full of reverence. His soul burned to respond to the call of faith, but something rebelled. He had read everything, and was humble enough to acknowledge that he knew little. He had given up the struggle to believe. Nothing seemed satisfactory. It worried him to think that he had reached such a conclusion, but he was consoled by the thought that many men had been of his way of thinking. He hoped this would prove excuse enough, but found it was not excuse enough for him. Here he was, rich, n.o.ble, with the English scales of caste off his eyes, doing nothing, indolent, loving only a memory, indifferent but still seeing a saving something of his mother and his child love in every woman to whom he spoke.

Now something else, yet something not so very different, had suddenly stepped into his life, and he knew it. The something was dressed in white and had stepped out of a tree. It was almost laughable. This woman had come into his dreams. The very sight of her attracted him--or was it the manner of her coming? She was just like an ideal he had often made for himself. Few men meet even the one who looks like the ideal, but he had seen the reality--coming out of a tree. He kept on wondering how long she had been there. He himself had been dreaming in front of the tree an hour before he saw her. Had she seen him before she came out? She had given no sign; but if she had seen him, she had trusted him with a secret. Mark looked at the tree. It was half embedded in the wall. Then he understood. The tree masked a secret entrance to Killimaga.

He was still smiling over his discovery when he heard the voices of the agent and constable. They were coming back, so he dropped into his hiding place in the tall gra.s.s.

"Well, Brown," the agent was saying, "I am going to tackle her. I've got to see that face. It's the only way! If I saw it once, I'd know for sure from the photograph they sent me."

"Ye'd better not," advised the constable. "She might be a-scared before--"

"But I've got to be sure," interrupted the agent.

"Aw, ye're sure enough, ain't ye? There's the photygraft, and I seed her."