Princess Puck

The parish church of Ashelton was very old. It was said in Miss Gruet’s selected history of the county to be of great antiquarian interest; but antiquaries did not abound in Ashelton, and neither the inhabitants nor their friends troubled their heads much about the stone-work of the fourteenth century, or any of the other commended points of interest. At one time there had been a couple of letters in a Wrugglesby paper about a little Last Judgment window of obscure meaning; but the letters had long been forgotten, and the rector’s new organ partly hid the window now.

Bill paid particular attention to the window on the first Sunday that she went to Ashelton church; but she had just been reading about it and knew where to look for it. For the rest, that which chiefly pleased her were the grinning goblin faces which looked out from the capitals of pillars and the niches of windows,—from every place where the old builders could put them; there was even one carved at the end of Theresa’s pew. Everybody had a pew, and almost everybody went to church in Ashelton. The Morton’s pew was conveniently situated for keeping an eye on the rest of the congregation. There was only one better placed for that purpose, Miss Minchin’s; but she, as she always maintained, had not selected it herself, her dear mother having done so long before her time,—in which case, it is possible to conceive that Miss Minchin inherited her tastes, as well as her pew, from her mother. Bill, from her place of vantage, looked at everybody, and everybody, with even greater interest, looked at her. In fact so much did they look that she, though as a rule somewhat indifferent on the subject of clothes, was rather glad that Polly had furbished up her winter hat before she left Wrugglesby. She gave the hat a little pull forward as she thought of it, and looked across Mrs. Perry’s purple bonnet to the Harborough chapel. It was to the left of the chancel, a step higher than the main body of the church and in a measure cut off from it by a continuance of the slender oak screen which stood before the chancel itself. Bill looked at it thoughtfully, opining that there could never have been enough Harboroughs to fill it, unless they brought their servants with them. There was a small altar with a cross upon it, and above, an old window where fat cherubs smiled in starch-blue smoke. She wondered what its meaning was, as others had wondered before her, and came to the conclusion that it was a pity the starch clouds, if they were clouds, were not red instead of blue: “It could not possibly make the place darker than it now is,” she thought, “and it would look very much nicer.”

It is to be feared that Bill did not pay very much attention to the sermon. She looked about her over much, but she could still say with truth, when asked by Miss Gruet afterwards, that she had enjoyed the service, for she had a keen ear for music, and the music at Ashelton church was very good. She listened with rapt attention to what Miss Minchin called “the set pieces,” and joined enthusiastically in the hymns, singing loud and sweet, for though her flexible voice was perhaps better suited to the mimicry of other sounds than anything else, it still possessed a rich sweetness in its many-noted variations.

When Bella came home from visiting Theresa in the winter she confessed to Polly that she had found Sunday afternoon a little dull; that is to say the first Sunday afternoon; on the second she had gone for a walk and—Bill had not heard any more, so she did not know what prevented the second Sunday afternoon from being as dull as the first. She did not herself find the afternoon dull, as she went up to the garret to look over some books. Theresa in bringing away her girlish treasures from Miss Brownlow’s had accidentally brought a few things which were not hers.

“I have been meaning to take them back several times,” she said, “but I keep forgetting. I really hardly know what they are now; there are one or two books belonging to Polly and to you, or your father. I put them in a box in the garret when I had to turn the spare room out; you might get them down some time and put them with your things, if you will.”

Bill said she would, and chose Sunday afternoon to do it. She left Robert and Theresa reading and dozing by the fire with the port and oranges on the table beside them. “Don’t you want any dessert?” Theresa had said. But Bill did not care about port and oranges; she filled her pocket with nuts and went to the garret to eat them while she looked over the books. These she found in a lidless packing-case neatly covered over with brown paper. The one on the top was Holy Living and Dying. “That’s Auntie’s: Theresa must have got it from the top shelf in the dining-room; the books there were mostly hers; I suppose she thought they all were and took the lot.” The next was a small brown volume, Plain Truths for Plain People, in which she found Polly’s name—“That’s just the book for Polly; a plain person she certainly is, and the plain truth is a very good thing for her to start on, considering how she can trim it.” The two volumes were laid aside, and the next dive into the box brought out a book she was pleased to see but did not before know that they possessed, an old history of that part of the county. “Whose is this, I wonder?—why, it’s mine!” She had turned to the first page and seen her own name Wilhelmina Alardy.

“That’s funny,”—she was cracking her nuts with her teeth as she looked. “At least, I don’t know that it is so funny after all; I expect it was stuck up at the top with the other old things, so I never knew about it. Of course I am not that Wilhelmina; that’s Grandmother.”

Bill looked long at the book, for she had not many relics, or even tales, of her own grandmother, as she counted her father’s mother in distinction from her mother’s mother whom she shared equally with the cousins. There was not, to be sure, much of this lady to share; not one of the four cousins had even a memory of her, though of their own grandmothers the others each had something to tell. Polly had a good many tales about hers, with an ugly old portrait, too, and a heavy locket she used to wear. Bella and Theresa could remember theirs plainly; they had stayed with her when they were little girls, and still had the coral necklaces she gave them the last Christmas she was alive. But Bill had neither tales nor trinkets; her parents had both died when she was very young, and Miss Brownlow knew no traditions of the Alardys and few facts concerning them, except that Bill’s father was an only son, and that for relations the girl must depend on her; so it happened that Bill knew little about her grandmother, except that she herself was named after her. There was a little wooden box-ottoman in the spare bedroom at Langford House, which, she had been told, used to belong to this grandmother. She had looked inside it once and found nothing but papers, which did not prove very interesting; a few letters, not easy to decipher and not, so far as she had tried them, entertaining; half a dozen bills, part of an old account-book, some recipes for cough-mixture and tea-cakes, a few odd sheets of paper and manuscript music, and some legal-looking documents which were quite beyond her comprehension. The greater part of this miscellaneous collection seemed to have belonged to her mother; a few of the less intelligible were of an older date, and the music and some scraps of poetry were not dated at all. Bill had thought of carrying the poetry away, as the only thing there which interested her; but since she had gone to the box without Miss Brownlow’s permission, she decided that she had better not take anything out, and learned the lines by heart instead. Then she shut the box, and gave up any hope of boasting as intimate an acquaintance with her grandmother as the other cousins did with theirs.

That was in the winter. She had not thought any more about it until this Sunday afternoon when she unexpectedly came upon the history of the county with her grandmother’s name on the fly-leaf. She was delighted with her discovery, partly because it was her grandmother’s, but chiefly because it was the very book she wanted. Settling herself comfortably on an empty tea-chest, she proceeded to study it and the old map of the district which she found folded inside. When at last she was called down-stairs for tea she was still full of her treasure, and told Robert and Theresa about it. They listened, amused by the interest she attached to it and the attraction she found in both book and map.

“I believe the map must be a good one,” she said at last; “it is so clear, I think I could find my way anywhere by it.”

“Where do you want to find your way?” Robert asked smiling.

“Oh, to lots of places, to Gurnett for one. I think I shall walk to Gurnett to-morrow; may I, Theresa?”

“It is rather a long way, but go if you like.” Theresa perhaps thought a long walk would be better for her young cousin than spending too much time with the animals in the yard.

The next morning, accordingly, Bill, armed with her map and some sandwiches for refreshment by the way, started on her walk. The distance might be long, but she could not remember any time in her life when she had been really tired. It seemed to her that mere walking was not enough, and once fairly started in the lonely lanes and quiet fields, she broke into a run for pure lightness of heart and ecstasy of living. Soon she was out on a road again, and here she walked more soberly, looking to right and left, noting the veil of green that was spreading over the hedges, enjoying to the full the day and the walk and the solitude.

And so Gurnett was reached, almost too soon, and the sandwiches eaten behind a grassy bank, very much too soon considering it was not yet twelve. After that the map was pulled out and considered thoughtfully. It was some time before she could find on it the exact spot where she now was, but at last she did. “Here I am, here—oh, yes, these must be the cross-roads; there is Wood Hall, over there, and here comes the lane between, the second turning after the cross-roads. The little path ought to cross just where the road joins the lane; I wonder if I shall find it; it seems to go straight from Corbycroft on one side of the lane to Wood Hall on the other, or rather to the little church in Wood Hall grounds. I don’t see what it can have been made for, but it must be a real path since it is marked; if anyone says anything to me I shall show him the map.”

Having come to this satisfactory conclusion Bill folded up her map and went on. In due time she came to the junction of the road and lane, but there was no indication that a footpath existed in any direction. In fact, the country itself on the left-hand side had undergone something of a change, for whereas her map showed that there had been a sort of park, the property of the distant hall, Corbycroft, there now seemed to be nothing but pasture-fields. She climbed the steep bank, the lane here being considerably below the level of the fields, and looked round. There was nothing but pasture-land, green, curving, sloping gradually away from her. A clump of elms stood in the centre, beautiful trees, tawny with the catkins which hung from their black branches; but there was no park, only pasture-land sloping down to the farm in the distance. And the farm looked very much as if it were a farm and not a hall; perhaps it was the remains of the old hall patched up and serving as a farm-house; though, to be sure, her history had spoken of a hall, a small off-manor belonging to the Corbys, a family who seemed to have had their head-quarters and more important property away in the north of the county, in the direction of the coast. The map and history were alike old, and Bill was forced to admit that things might have changed since they were made.

But if the left side of the lane was disappointing, the right more than fulfilled expectations. The ground sloped sharply up on that side; Wood Hall evidently stood on a hill and appeared to be hidden among trees, for the slope as far as Bill could see was covered with wood. It was not a trim park but a thicket, a wild young forest growing up as it could about the stumps of veteran oaks and beeches long since sacrificed to the axe. In some places the young trees almost choked each other with their crowded growth; in others they struggled for existence with the old pollards that still held their ground. Brambles and moss and last year’s fern covered the paths and choked the water-courses; here and there a tree, too lightly rooted to withstand the winters’ storms, or too old to bear the weight of its years, had fallen and lay as it fell. All was neglected, all growing, in crowded thicket or open glade, as only nature unassisted can grow; for it was genuine woodland, where the sunshine filtered through a close-woven roof of branches and chased dancing shadows over last year’s leaves; thickets of thorn breaking into leaf, primroses hiding in the moss at their feet; beeches, tall and straight as pillars of stone, a cathedral twilight in their shade; pollard oaks still brown in sheltered places; the glossy darkness of holly, the stately grace of slim young larches lightly tasselled in earliest green; silver birches, old trees, their white bark cracked and swelled, blackened by many years; young trees, a lace-work of branches, a tangle of supple stems and bursting buds.

Bill was over the low boundary fence now. There was no evidence of a path, but there ought to have been; it was marked on her map and she was going to find it, so she began the ascent in the direction in which it should have been. Up she went, the ground soft and irregular, here the dead leaves of many years blown into hollows rustling about her feet, there the rich black earth patched with moss, emerald and gray and golden brown. An old pollard lay as it had fallen; about its head fungus had gathered, and under its side primroses grew. Higher up, where the leaves were fewer, in sheltered ledges, beneath the twisty coils of beech-roots there were more primroses, plenty of them, and everywhere anemones, fairy flowers that danced among the dead bracken. The sun, hidden by the hill, looked down through the forest aisles, threading the whole place with arrows of light so that all around there was a lattice of woven light and shadow, while, before, there lay a path golden as Jacob’s way to heaven.

Involuntarily the girl stood still, clasping her hands tight on one another, while her breath came fast. All round stretched this living woodland, thrilling with its growing, stirring life; the bare trees, brown and purple and deep blue in their shadows, yet touched with the breath of spring, faintest green, or gold, or sparkling where the sun caught their yet unopened buds. The very earth was audible, alive, as it breathed forth its moist sweetness; and the birds sang their anthem of praise for the world’s eternal, ever recurring youth.

She stood, a little brown figure in the lonely wood, her whole soul going out to the great mother Earth, her heart filled with a passionate, inarticulate gladness. “Oh, God!” she said, “how good, how good it all is!”

She said it aloud because she had not outgrown that stage of savagedom which feels, with the Druids of old, that God is in the woods. A chaffinch on a crab-tree above her head looked down and to another hid in the catkinned branches of a hornbeam cried, “Come and see, what d’ye think! What d’ye think!” And the other replied with exactly the same words, or at least it seemed so to Bill; she listened a moment, then answered them with a call so like their own that they might well have been puzzled by it if she had not at that moment begun to sing and frightened them both to the safe distance of a higher bough—

“There’s laughter for the May-time,”—

She sang and her voice was like a lark’s in its complete gladness—

“The morning of the year—the year”—

and the singing was merged into ripples of sound neither song nor laughter and yet a wild sweet blending of both.

“Well, young woman, I hope you are satisfied.”

Bill stopped abruptly and faced the speaker, an old man on the higher ground just above her. He may have approached by some path hidden in the thicket on the right, or he may have been close at hand waiting till now to declare himself; she did not know which, neither did she know what was expected of her, so she only answered truthfully, “Yes.”

“I am glad to hear it.” She looked puzzled, and he added abruptly: “You are trespassing,—do you know it?”

The light began to dawn on Bill’s mind; she had forgotten all about the map and the footpath, but now she remembered and answered eagerly: “No, no, I am not really, at least I don’t think I can be; there is a footpath somewhere about here; I can’t have got far from it.”

“There is no footpath.”

“But it is marked on my map,” and Bill began to unfold the paper in which she had for greater security wrapped her treasure.

“I can’t help your map; there is no footpath here and there never was. I think I should know considering that the place belongs to me.”

“Are you Mr. Harborough?” Bill’s face beamed with satisfaction.

“I am; the fact seems to afford you pleasure.”

“I am pleased,” Bill admitted. Having once got herself into a difficulty she never had any hesitation about going through with it, in which course she was often helped by a serene unconsciousness of her position and offences, a quality Polly reckoned high in the list of her condemned exhibitions of no “gumption.” “I am pleased. I—I had heard about you.”

“I am indeed gratified”; he spoke with a sarcastic courtesy somewhat wasted on his hearer. “Judging by your flattering anxiety to make my acquaintance, I must conclude that what you heard was to my credit.”

“It was interesting,” Bill said doubtfully.

Whereupon the old man laughed. “In that case,” he said, “I must conclude it was not to my credit.”

Without replying Bill unfolded her map. “This is the footpath,” she said, and began tracing it with her finger.

“I don’t want to see your map, child.” He was looking curiously at the small brown figure. “Look up,” he said, “I would rather see your face. Tell me where you learnt to sing and laugh and whistle to the birds all in a breath.”

“I don’t know; I suppose I was made like that,” she still persistently spread out the map. “My cousin Polly,” she explained, without glancing up, “says my father was a singer, a poor one, you know, not anything much, but perhaps I inherited it from him. Sometimes, though, Polly says he was a ventriloquist or even a clown; I don’t think she really knows.—See, here is the footpath.”

“Whose is this map?” Mr. Harborough asked; he had taken it from her and was examining it through a gold-rimmed glass.

“Mine.”

“But you did not mark that path; it was done years ago.”

“Yes, when the map was made.”

“No, certainly not; it was put in afterwards, that is easy to see. Even if I did not know that, as no such path exists, it could not have been printed then or at any other time.”

He dropped his glass and handed the map back to Bill who, after looking at it a little, began to see that he was correct.

“Then there is no path here after all,” she said in a tone of woful disappointment. “I should like to know who marked it on the map?”

“So should I, so should I very much. Where did you get the thing?”

“I found it in an old book of my grandmother’s.”

“Your grandmother?” he said impatiently. “What was your grandmother, who was she, how did she come by the book and the map, whose were they before?”

Bill could give him no information, and he held out his hand for the map again. She gave it to him and he examined it critically. “There were very few people who could have put that in,” he said thoughtfully.

“Then there is a path!” Bill exclaimed.

“No, there is not, and there never was. Come with me, just a few steps. There,—now look down, your path should pass the pond by that stream, do you see? That boggy place, that is where it is marked to go; that place has always been the same. What do you think of men who chose that way by preference,—is it likely they would do it? What should you think of them?”

“I should think they were in a great hurry, and perhaps, that it was night,” and Bill looked down into the marshy, overgrown hollow, at a loss to understand.

Her companion’s voice aroused her: “What about this grandmother of yours?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t know anything; she has been dead a long time, but I will find out if I can.”

“Will you? Perhaps you think you will also find out about this mysterious path?”

“Yes.”

Bill was a painfully persistent person. It may have been that Mr. Harborough thought so, or it may have been that he still wished to keep her to enliven the tedium of the day, for he said coolly: “I will tell you if you like. There is no path, it is true, but the way marked on your map was taken one night by men in a hurry to reach the chapel of ease further on in these grounds.”

“They made a path for themselves!” Bill cried. “They were in a hurry and went the nearest way! What were they doing? Why did they want to go to the chapel?”

Mr. Harborough laughed at her eagerness. “My dear young lady,” he said, “I will explain if you wish, only we must really walk on. I am sorry to say I can no longer stand an indefinite time even to discuss anything so romantic as you seem to think this tale. Let us go on,—this way. Now for the romance: to begin with, do you know a certain old tradition in connection with carrying a corpse? It may linger still, though I hardly think it, but at the time I am speaking of it was not infrequently believed that the way along which a body had been carried for burial became a path for ever, became what is called a right of way. Mind, this is tradition I am telling you, not fact; it is not fact and it never was. If twenty bodies were carried through my grounds for burial no right of way would be established, but at one time some people firmly believed such a thing to be the case.”

“Then the men were carrying a body?” Bill’s face was flushed with excitement. “And the person who marked my map knew about it and believed the tradition?”

“Yes. The question is, who marked your map?”

“Did not many people know about carrying the body that way?”

“Not many, and certainly very few could have marked your map with the accuracy with which I believe it to be marked.”

“The burying was private, then?”

Bill was anxious to make the most of her romance. Her companion watched her eagerness with an amused face, and as they came suddenly on to a gravel path, he said with an air of impenetrable mystery: “Very private, I should say, at that time, very private indeed.”