Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn Part 5

It was a hot, dry summer and the stream was low, and in stooping to dip her hand in the water she had lost her balance and fallen in, and although the water was but three feet deep she had in her feebleness been unable to save herself. She was lying on her back on the clearly seen bed of many-coloured pebbles, her head pointing downstream, and the swift fretting current had carried away her hood and pulled out her long abundant silver-white hair, and the current played with her hair, now pulling it straight out, then spreading it wide over the surface, mixing its silvery threads with the hair-like green blades of the floating water-gra.s.s. And the dead face was like marble; but the wide-open eyes that had never wholly lost their brilliance and the beautiful lungwort blue colour were like living eyes--living and gazing through the crystal-clear running water at the group of nuns staring down with horror-struck faces at her.

Thus ended Elfrida's darkened life; nor did it seem an unfit end; for it was as if she had fallen into the arms of the maiden who had in her thoughts become one with the stream--the saintly Editha through whose sacrifice and intercession she had been saved from death everlasting.

AN OLD THORN

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAWTHORN AND IVY NEAR THE GREAT RIDGE WOOD.]

I

The little village of Ingden lies in a hollow of the South Wilts.h.i.+re Downs, the most isolated of the villages in that lonely district. Its one short street is crossed at right angles in the middle part by the Salisbury road, and standing just at that point, the church on one hand, the old inn on the other, you can follow it with the eye for a distance of nearly three miles. First it goes winding up the low down under which the village stands, then vanishes over the brow to reappear again a mile and a half further away as a white band on the vast green slope of the succeeding down, which rises to a height of over 600 feet. On the summit it vanishes once more, but those who use it know it for a laborious road crossing several high ridges before dropping down into the valley road leading to Salisbury.

When, standing in the village street, your eye travels up that white band, you can distinctly make out even at that distance a small, solitary tree standing near the summit--an old thorn with an ivy growing on it. My walks were often that way, and invariably on coming to that point I would turn twenty yards aside from the road to spend half an hour seated on the turf near or under the old tree. These half-hours were always grateful; and conscious that the tree drew me to it I questioned myself as to the reason. It was, I told myself, nothing but mental curiosity: my interest was a purely scientific one. For how comes it, I asked, that a thorn can grow to a tree and live to a great age in such a situation, on a vast, naked down, where for many centuries, perhaps for thousands of years, the herbage has been so closely fed by sheep as to have the appearance of a carpet, or newly mown lawn? The seed is carried and scattered everywhere by the birds, but no sooner does it germinate and send up a shoot than it is eaten down to the roots; for there is no scent that attracts a sheep more, no flavour it has greater taste for, than that of any forest seedling springing up amidst the minute herbaceous plants which carpet the downs. The thorn, like other organisms, has its own unconscious intelligence and cunning, by means of which it endeavours to save itself and fulfil its life. It opens its first tender leaves under the herbage, and at the same time thrusts up a vertical spine to wound the nibbling mouth; and no sooner has it got a leaf or two and a spine than it spreads its roots all round, and from each of them springs a fresh shoot, leaves and protecting spine, to increase the chances of preservation. In vain! the cunning animal finds a way to defeat all this strategy, and after the leaves have been bitten off again and again, the infant plant gives up the struggle and dies in the ground. Yet we see that from time to time one survives--one perhaps in a million; but how--whether by a quicker growth or a harder or more poisonous thorn, an unpalatable leaf, or some other secret agency--we cannot guess. First as a diminutive scrubby shrub, with numerous iron-hard stems, with few and small leaves but many thorns, it keeps its poor flowerless frustrate life for perhaps half a century or longer, without growing more than a couple of feet high; and then, as by a miracle, it will spring up until its top shoots are out of reach of the browsing sheep, and in the end it becomes a tree with spreading branches and fully developed leaves, and flowers and fruit in their season.

One day I was visited by an artist from a distance who, when shown the thorn, p.r.o.nounced it a fine subject for his pencil, and while he made his picture we talked about the hawthorn generally as compared with other trees, and agreed that, except in its blossoming time when it is merely pretty, it is the most engaging and perhaps the most beautiful of our native trees. We said that it was the most _individual_ of trees, that its variety was infinite, for you never find two alike, whether growing in a forest, in groups, or ma.s.ses, or alone. We were almost lyrical in its praises. But the solitary thorn was always best, he said, and this one was perhaps the best of all he had seen: strange and at the same time decorative in its form, beautiful too in its appearance of great age with unimpaired vigour and something more in its expression--that elusive something which we find in some trees and don't know how to explain.

Ah, yes, thought I, it was this appeal to the aesthetic faculty which attracted me from the first, and not, as I had imagined, the mere curiosity of the naturalist interested mainly and always in the _habits_ of living things, plant or animal.

Certainly the thorn had strangeness. Its appearance as to height was deceptive; one would have guessed it eighteen feet; measuring it I was surprised to find it only ten. It has four separate boles, springing from one root, leaning a little away from each other, the thickest just a foot in circ.u.mference. The branches are few, beginning at about five feet from the ground, the foliage thin, the leaves throughout the summer stained with grey, rust-red, and purple colour. Though so small and exposed to the full fury of every wind that blows over that vast naked down, it has yet an ivy growing on it--the strangest of the many strange ivy-plants I have seen. It comes out of the ground as two ivy trunks on opposite sides of the stoutest bole, but at a height of four feet from the surface the two join and ascend the tree as one round iron-coloured and iron-hard stem, which goes curving and winding snakewise among the branches as if with the object of roping them to save them from being torn off by the winds. Finally, rising to the top, the long serpent stem opens out in a flat disc-shaped ma.s.s of close-packed branchlets and twigs densely set with small round leaves, dark dull green and tough as parchment. One could only suppose that thorn and ivy had been partners from the beginning of life, and that the union was equally advantageous to both.

The small ivy disc or platform on top of the tree was a favourite stand and look-out for the downland birds. I seldom visited the spot without disturbing some of them, now a little company of missel-thrushes, now a crowd of starlings, then perhaps a dozen rooks, crowded together, looking very big and conspicuous on their little platform.

Being curious to find out something about the age of the tree, I determined to put the question to my old friend Malachi, aged eighty-nine, who was born and had always lived in the parish and had known the downs and probably every tree growing on them for miles around from his earliest years. It was my custom to drop in of an evening and sit with him, listening to his endless reminiscences of his young days.

That evening I spoke of the thorn, describing its position and appearance, thinking that perhaps he had forgotten it. How long, I asked him, had the thorn been there?

He was one of those men, usually of the labouring cla.s.s, to be met with in such lonely, out-of-the-world places as the Wilts.h.i.+re Downs, whose eyes never look old however many their years may be, and are more like the eyes of a bird or animal than a human being, for they gaze at you and through you when you speak without appearing to know what you say.

So it was on this occasion; he looked straight at me with no sign of understanding, no change in his clear grey eyes, and answered nothing.

But I would not be put off, and when, raising my voice, I repeated the question, he replied, after another interval of silence, that the thorn "was never any different." 'Twas just the same, ivy and all, when he were a small boy. It looked just so old; why, he remembered his old father saying the same thing--'twas the same when he were a boy, and 'twas the same in his father's time. Then anxious to escape from the subject he began talking of something else.

It struck me that after all the most interesting thing about the thorn was its appearance of great age, and this aspect I had now been told had continued for at least a century, probably for a much longer time. It produced a reverent feeling in me such as we experience at the sight of some ancient stone monument. But the tree was alive, and because of its life the feeling was perhaps stronger than in the case of a granite cross or cromlech or other memorial of antiquity.

Sitting by the thorn one day it occurred to me that, growing at this spot close to the road and near the summit of that vast down, numberless persons travelling to and from Salisbury must have turned aside to rest on the turf in the shade after that laborious ascent or before beginning the long descent to the valley below. Travellers of all conditions, on foot or horseback, in carts and carriages, merchants, bagmen, farmers, drovers, gipsies, tramps and vagrants of all descriptions, and from time to time troops of soldiers. Yet never one of them had injured the tree in any way! I could not remember ever finding a tree growing alone by the roadside in a lonely place which had not the marks of many old and new wounds inflicted on its trunk with knives, hatchets, and other implements. Here not a mark, not a scratch had been made on any one of its four trunks or on the ivy stem by any thoughtless or mischievous person, nor had any branch been cut or broken off. Why had they one and all respected this tree?

It was another subject to talk to Malachi about, and to him I went after tea and found him with three of his neighbours sitting by the fire and talking; for though it was summer the old man always had a fire in the evening.

They welcomed and made room for me, but I had no sooner broached the subject in my mind than they all fell into silence, then after a brief interval the three callers began to discuss some little village matter.

I was not going to be put off in that way, and, leaving them out, went on talking to Malachi about the tree. Presently one by one the three visitors got up and, remarking that it was time to be going, they took their departure.

The old man could not escape nor avoid listening, and in the end had to say something. He said he didn't know nothing about all them tramps and gipsies and other sorts of men who had sat by the tree; all he knowed was that the old thorn had been a good thorn to him--first and last. He remembered once when he was a young man, not yet twenty, he went to do some work at a village five miles away, and being winter time he left early, about four o'clock, to walk home over the downs. He had just got married, and had promised his wife to be home for tea at six o'clock.

But a thick fog came up over the downs, and soon as it got dark he lost himself. 'Twas the darkest, thickest night he had ever been out in; and whenever he came against a bank or other obstruction he would get down on his hands and knees and feel it up and down to get its shape and find out what it was, for he knew all the marks on his native downs; 'twas all in vain--nothing could he recognise. In this way he wandered about for hours, and was in despair of getting home that night, when all at once there came a sense of relief, a feeling that it was all right, that something was guiding him.

I remarked that I knew what that meant: he had lost his sense of direction and had now all at once recovered it; such a thing had often happened; I once had such an experience myself.

No, it was not that, he returned. He had not gone a dozen steps from the moment that sense of confidence came to him, before he ran into a tree, and feeling the trunk with his hands he recognised it as the old thorn and knew where he was. In a couple of minutes he was on the road, and in less than an hour, just about midnight, he was safe at home.

No more could I get out of him, at all events on that occasion; nor did I ever succeed in extracting any further personal experience in spite of his having let out that the thorn had been a good thorn to him, first and last. I had, however, heard enough to satisfy me that I had at length discovered the real secret of the tree's fascination. I recalled other trees which had similarly affected me, and how, long years ago, when a good deal of my time was spent on horseback, whenever I found myself in a certain district I would go miles out of my way just to look at a solitary old tree growing in a lonely place, and to sit for an hour to refresh myself, body and soul, in its shade. I had indeed all along suspected the thorn of being one of this order of mysterious trees; and from other experiences I had met with, one some years ago in a village in this same county of Wilts, I had formed the opinion that in many persons the sense of a strange intelligence and possibility of power in such trees is not a mere transitory state but an enduring influence which profoundly affects their whole lives.

Determined to find out something more, I went to other villagers, mostly women, who are more easily disarmed and made to believe that you too know and are of the same mind with them, being under the same mysterious power and spell. In this way, laying many a subtle snare, I succeeded in eliciting a good deal of information. It was, however, mostly of a kind which could not profitably be used in any inquiry into the subject; it simply went to show that the feeling existed and was strong in many of the villagers. During this inquiry I picked up several anecdotes about a person who lived in Ingden close upon three generations ago, and was able to piece them together so as to make a consistent narrative of his life. This was Johnnie Budd, a farm labourer, who came to his end in 1821, a year or so before my old friend Malachi was born. It is going very far back, but there were circ.u.mstances in his life which made a deep impression on the mind of that little community, and the story had lived on through all these years.

II

Johnnie had fallen on hard times when in an exceptionally severe winter season he with others had been thrown out of employment at the farm where he worked; then with a wife and three small children to keep he had in his desperation procured food for them one dark night in an adjacent field. But alas! one of the little ones playing in the road with some of her companions, who were all very hungry, let it out that she wasn't hungry, that for three days she had had as much nice meat as she wanted to eat! Play over, the hungry little ones flew home to tell their parents the wonderful news--why didn't they have nice meat like Tilly Budd, instead of a piece of rye bread without even dripping on it, when they were so hungry? Much talk followed, and spread from cottage to cottage until it reached the constable's ears, and he, already informed of the loss of a wether taken from its fold close by, went straight to Johnnie and charged him with the offence. Johnnie lost his head, and dropping on his knees confessed his guilt and begged his old friend Lampard to have mercy on him and to overlook it for the sake of his wife and children.

It was his first offence, but when he was taken from the lock-up at the top of the village street to be conveyed to Salisbury, his friends and neighbours who had gathered at the spot to witness his removal shook their heads and doubted that Ingden would ever see him again. The confession had made the case so simple a one that he had at once been committed to take his trial at the Salisbury a.s.sizes, and as the time was near the constable had been ordered to convey the prisoner to the town himself. Accordingly he engaged old Joe Blaskett, called Daddy in the village, to take them in his pony cart. Daddy did not want the job, but was talked or bullied into it, and there he now sat in his cart, waiting in glum silence for his pa.s.sengers; a bent old man of eighty, with a lean, grey, bitter face, in his rusty cloak, his old rabbit-skin cap drawn down over his ears, his white disorderly beard scattered over his chest. The constable Lampard was a big, powerful man, with a great round, good-natured face, but just now he had a strong sense of responsibility, and to make sure of not losing his prisoner he handcuffed him before bringing him out and helping him to take his seat on the bottom of the cart. Then he got up himself to his seat by the driver's side; the last good-bye was spoken, the weeping wife being gently led away by her friends, and the cart rattled away down the street. Turning into the Salisbury road it was soon out of sight over the near down, but half an hour later it emerged once more into sight beyond the great dip, and the villagers who had remained standing about at the same spot watched it crawling like a beetle up the long white road on the slope of the vast down beyond.

Johnnie was now lying coiled up on his rug, his face hidden between his arms, abandoned to grief, sobbing aloud. Lampard, sitting athwart the seat so as to keep an eye on him, burst out at last: "Be a man, Johnnie, and stop your crying! 'Tis making things no better by taking on like that. What do you say, Daddy?"

"I say nought," snapped the old man, and for a while they proceeded in silence except for those heartrending sobs. As they approached the old thorn tree, near the top of the long slope, Johnnie grew more and more agitated, his whole frame shaking with his sobbing. Again the constable rebuked him, telling him that 'twas a shame for a man to go on like that. Then with an effort he restrained his sobs, and lifting a red, swollen, tear-stained face he stammered out: "Master Lampard, did I ever ask 'ee a favour in my life?"

"What be after now?" said the other suspiciously. "Well, no, Johnnie, not as I remember."

"An' do 'ee think I'll ever come back home again, Master Lampard?"

"Maybe no, maybe yes; 'tis not for me to say."

"But 'ee knows 'tis a hanging matter?"

"'Tis that for sure. But you be a young man with a wife and childer, and have never done no wrong before--not that I ever heard say. Maybe the judge'll recommend you to mercy. What do you say, Daddy?"

The old man only made some inarticulate sounds in his beard, without turning his head.

"But, Master Lampard, suppose I don't swing, they'll send I over the water and I'll never see the wife and children no more."

"Maybe so; I'm thinking that's how 'twill be."

"Then will 'ee do me a kindness? 'Tis the only one I ever asked 'ee, and there'll be no chance to ask 'ee another."

"I can't say, Johnnie, not till I know what 'tis you want."

"'Tis only this, Master Lampard. When we git to th' old thorn let me out o' the cart and let me stand under it one minnit and no more."

"Be you wanting to hang yourself before the trial then?" said the constable, trying to make a joke of it.

"I couldn't do that," said Johnnie, simply, "seeing my hands be fast and you'd be standing by."

"No, no, Johnnie, 'tis nought but just foolishness. What do you say, Daddy?"

The old man turned round with a look of sudden rage in his grey face which startled Lampard; but he said nothing, he only opened and shut his mouth two or three times without a sound.