'Twixt Dog and Wolf (Valancourt Classics) Read online

  Helios touched upon the Western Sea. What had been like a bank of cloud grew suddenly solid. It was the Island of Lesbos. A great streak as of blood marked the Hydra promontory. The cliff put on that crimson stain each evening because at that hour had leapt up the flames of the hero’s funeral pyre on Mount Œta—the flames, as Glaucon had said just now, that bore him to heaven.

  The young priest was but newly returned from service in the Macedonian legion and in the army of Domitius Ahenobarbus. Under that General the Romans had penetrated further than their arms had ever before reached into the territory of the Germans. He had lately lost a brother quartered at Aliso, fallen among the Cherusci, fierce and cunning.

  In all these lands he had found his gods reverenced even by men who did not respect the might of Cæsar. Yea, far as the world extended on every side—Tyrians and Turones, Scythians and Sigambri, Gauls and Goths—men worshipped the gods of Greece.

  ‘At this moment,’ the young legionary said to himself, ‘the camp-fires are being lighted along the Roman lines. The Germans are driving their cattle home by the swampy woodland paths. Their small houses shine white through the dusk, and unnumbered cranes rise from the dim marshes and wheel on high uttering their doleful chorus.’

  An awe fell upon his soul, for, as if in answer to his thought, behold there came out of the sunset, black against its crimson, a marshalled flight of swans winging straight towards him in a long line. The clang of their wings was like the clash of arms in the distance. This must indeed be the first token from the god. Now of a sudden they changed front, the whole line shook, then it reformed. Alas! it turned further to the south, and passed him on the left hand. And trouble smote the heart of the watcher.

  As he stood musing, the sun went down, and a wind passed by, and with the wind the reeds began once again to shake their heads and whisper.

  ‘Before this temple was . . .’ they murmured.

  Glaucon would not listen. Was it indeed an outward voice or the thought which Lysias had imparted that leapt once more into his mind? The after-glow had nearly gone. Night, rising from the east, was spreading wide her sombre mantle. Yet, though her garment floated from her, it was not possible to read the expression on her shaded face. Glaucon turned his eyes towards her countenance and his back upon the sea. Every moment she drew nearer, yet none could hear her tread. The waves and the sparrows had alike ceased talking, and through the Greek’s mind, though he had for a moment forgotten where he was or why, reverberated the dreadful echo of the Soothsayer’s prophecy, his message of hope and fear.

  Now the marble temple looked like a wraith. Still there came the murmur of the reeds.

  ‘Before this temple was . . .’

  Before! Who had reigned here when nought but the bare slope rose above the sea, when even the grove of Apollo was unplanted? Even then the reeds had grown in the river, and among the reeds had sported the nymphs, and with the nymphs had played great Pan himself.

  And Glaucon shuddered and was afraid. Images of death began to rise in his mind, of pale ghosts and spiritless lemures.[4] He no longer saw the conquering arms of the Romans or heard the tread of their legionaries up the rocky passes. Rather he beheld the wild-eyed Germans and their vast marshes black as those of Styx, over which travelled fatuous wandering lights. Or, again, he saw that dreadful island of which he had once beheld the faint outline opposite the coast of Gaul, whither it was said the coloni[5] on the Gaulish coast had laid upon them the task of ferrying over the dead—the dead who journeyed thither from all known lands. At depth of night to each fisherman in rotation there came a knock upon his door and a whispering breath summoning him to the beach. There he found his boat got ready for a voyage, empty to mortal eyes, yet weighed down as if by a heavy freight. And the mariner set sail and carried his unseen burden to the island in the sea, whence voices could be heard and people answering as if in rotation till the boat again grew light.

  Such were the thoughts of Glaucon, for of a truth Pan or another had touched his cheek.

  Now he had wandered unwittingly into the grove. Surely he deemed he could hear a light sound of muttering ghosts. The dark branches swayed and groaned above his head. A cold terror lay upon his limbs and rooted him to the earth, and lifted the hair upon his head, while all the time he could hear the murmur of the rushes by the river, now quite audible.

  ‘Before men worshipped Zeus or Apollo they worshipped him, mighty Pan.’

  Yet there was worse to come. He tried not to listen. A chilly wind blew through him, and panic fear rested upon his soul. Shrilly muttered the ghosts in the trees. At last the branches parted to show him the great sweep of the river, not half empty as he knew it, but in full flood—a sheet of slate-coloured water, and along by the edge of the stream moved a great company.

  ‘If we had eyes to see,’ Lysias had said.

  Glaucon’s eyes were opened, and he did see—a great company, satyrs girt with sedge, nymphs with dark weeds in their tresses, whose hair yet hung down in dank masses; a wailing dirge rose from their lips. Now came in view the end of the procession; they were carrying the Great God himself. He was pale as a corpse.

  ‘Worshipped mighty Pan,’ the reeds whispered again, ‘and now Great Pan is dead.’

  Unspeakable terror! A light was moving towards him among the trees. When it drew nearer he saw that in the light was framed a face, pale, too, but not lifeless, haggard, with long hair, the colour of wine, falling upon his shoulders—a face at once severe and mild. Upon the forehead there were drops of blood, and about the wine-coloured locks a dusky crown.

  Glaucon burst from the enclosure, and ran he knew not whither. All along the shore of the Ægean he went. And now the wind was rising, the sky was overcast, the promontories were hidden by clouds. Beneath his feet, as he hurried on, the rushes and the waves sent up the same fearful murmur, which anon swelled into a mighty voice, and the voice sped before him proclaiming:

  ‘Great Pan is dead.’

  And people lying awake that night by casements overlooking the dark sea heard the same tone, which ran along the coast of the Ægean, and always the word was:

  ‘Great Pan is dead.’

  [1]temenos: a sacred grove.

  [2]Marcomanni: a Germanic tribe, fought against by the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century A.D.

  [3]Gryneian Apollo: Grynion (or Gryna, or Grynus), a town in Asia Minor, had a temple dedicated to Apollo, which also functioned as an oracle.

  [4]lemures: in Roman mythology, lemures were vengeful and malignant spirits of the restless dead.

  [5]coloni: tenant farmers.

  II

  ELIZABETH

  ‘What is this place?

  A place inhabitable.

  The dreadful maids, daughters of Earth and Gloom

  Possess it.’—Œdip. Col.[1]

  I

  Elizabeth hastened her steps. She did so by instinct so long as Rettenberg Castle remained in sight, and consciously or unconsciously breathed a sigh of relief so soon as she had passed the elbow which shut in her own Valley of the Lehen. Now she had her back upon the Mosel, her face looking up the valley to the west. The flat watered meadows at her right had put on their darkest green, and in the high woods upon the other hand night had already set her foot. Over the castle there had hung a half moon. But the friendly planet travelled with her, and now looked down through the black branches of the trees. The yellow glow of sunset was still before her face. The woman passed on, fearing no ill.

  Of a sudden from out of the wood floated a single point of light. It rose, then sank as if to anchor upon a wild briar beside the path, then mounted again, hung for one instant suspense against the orange sky, and disappeared. Elizabeth crossed herself. Once in her life, while she was yet a child, had she seen such a vision. Yet these fairy tap
ers were known to all men by tradition: they were the candles of the elves, those beings who had lived and lorded it ages ago as kings of the mountains and the valleys, until Christ the Lord came, and drove them away. They were deposed, but not destroyed: they lived on, and now kept vast treasures hidden in caves and beneath rivers; and it was said that to men who feared them not. . . .

  Elizabeth had bent down her head when she saw the light; and crossed herself. She thought that at that moment it disappeared; at the same instant she heard faint and very far off a single bell from St. Boniface’s minster at Andersbach, which lay just so far below Lehndorf that Rettenberg stood above it.

  But now another and another minute flame sailed out of the wood. A vision passed before the peasant woman’s mind of the great minster church, of the priests walking therein carrying tapers. She could no longer keep her eyes closed. The elves’ candles crossed and re-crossed her path, rose, descended, went out, lighted themselves again. Nay, it was not possible to feel afraid at heart, nor hate these heathen fairies as they ought to be feared and hated; not even as she feared the Freyherr’s men, and hated the sight of Rettenberg.

  The village houses nodded friendly welcome. They stood scattered at irregular heights on the slightly rising ground, their brown faces and brown-thatched roofs beginning to grow together in the gathering gloom. On one flat space stood the village fountain. Only crazy Jutta remained near the splashing water, which had been surrounded by gossips half an hour earlier, and was even now repeating inarticulately the chattering talk to which it had been a listener.

  ‘Tu-whoo, tu-whoo,’ cried old Jutta. ‘Go and find wicked Hilda, Elizabeth of the Out-born. Then shalt thou come to thine own. But better come and live in the village, Elizabeth of the Corner.’ And now she changed her cry, and began to imitate the screech-owl.

  There were some indeed who said that Carl’s cottage, Elizabeth’s husband’s, lay not truly within the village boundary, or had not always been within it—inside, that is, the circle traced by the priest when thrice a year he went round the parish, and read a passage of Scripture at each of the gospel oaks, and the prayers against evil spirits which keep in air, whence are all kinds of pestilence, and diseases, and sickness, that they may be driven out and the air made pure and clean. It was a mere tale this concerning their house, ‘The Corner,’ a story of old days not worth thinking on. Priest Gebhard must have blessed their land a score of times by now. Yet this night Elizabeth shuddered for the first time at Jutta’s words.

  II

  Friendly and most pleasant was the shelter of her own dim roof, was the breath of her own kine[2] beneath it, of Tecla, the six-year-old cow, who had her calf at her side. Elizabeth heard and smelt before she saw them. When she had kindled her fire to prepare the supper the flames changed lights and shadows on the walls and in the pitched roof, and sent up fitful gleams into the gallery at one end, reached by a ladder wherein was her bed, hers and Carl’s. Beyond the passage they shone upon the nose and horns of Tecla, who turned her head and looked encouragingly and kindly down upon her mistress as she bent over her pot.

  Had not the cow lowed directly Elizabeth set foot within the door? It was a good sign! Yet Carl still delayed. Now she heard his step—from the side of the forest: would it had been from the other side. He was carrying something, too—she could tell that from his walk. In spite of herself Elizabeth gave a shiver, and did not look round the moment her husband lifted the latch. The fire upon the low hearth glowed dull red under the iron pot, and did not reach the figure of the man, who passed first into the cattle-stall before he came and sat himself down in the room—a thick-set man, with matted fair hair and red beard. Elizabeth was darker, with deep-seated eyes.

  ‘Good e’en.’ No other greeting passed between husband and wife. They drew their stools in silence to the hearth, and Elizabeth poured out the supper. But all the while Carl’s grey eyes were bright, and restless, and eager. When he had eaten, his tongue was loosed. ‘I have seen strange sights,’ he began, and then hesitated. His wife did not speak, but her eye searched his face in the firelight.

  ‘I was with young Willebald in the forest,’ he went on; ‘and we were—in faith we were digging for pig-roots. And anon Willebald grew so sleepy that he was fain to lie down. And he had his head against my foot. And I vow to you that, as he lay there, a little beast like to a snake came out of his mouth, and it got you upon the grass, and wriggled itself away an arm’s length about, till it came to the edge of the brook by which we were. And behold! I could not stir for wonder. But at the brook the little thing stayed, as if it were minded to pass over, but could not. Nay, it moved up and down at the edge of the water, as if it were seeking how to cross. Then at last I took my spear——’

  ‘O Carl,’ cried Elizabeth, ‘you carried a spear to dig for roots? And it is forbidden, thou knowest.’

  ‘Ay, ay,’ he answered in a gruff voice. But presently he went on with his tale:—‘And when I had laid my spear across the stream, the little beast like a snake, behold! it wriggled me across by the spear, and went away on the other side, and then it passed out of sight into a manner of cleft or cave under the rock.’ Carl stopped here suddenly in his story.

  ‘It is an enchantment! Some ill is coming upon him!’ cried Elizabeth in deep distress, but rather as if speaking to herself. ‘And the lanterns of the elves? What should they signify?’

  ‘Nay, nay, listen,’ Carl answered testily. ‘Anon it comes me back again, and it crossed the spear, even as it had done before, only backwise—seest thou?—and then, behold! he slipped him into Willebald’s mouth again, whence he had come. What think you of that?’ Carl was wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Elizabeth could answer nothing but a long-drawn ‘O!’ Then he went on. ‘What thinkest thou of this? Willebald he wakes, and says, “Comrade,” he saith, “I dreamt the strangest of dreams, sure, that any man ever had. For me seemed I crossed a river upon a great round bridge, which was of iron at one end. And I wandered in a forest, till I came to a mighty great cave, and at the end thereof was a pit.” ’—(‘O Jesu!’ breathed again from the wife almost inaudibly)—‘ “And at the bottom of the pit was another mighty great cavern, great as the minster church at Andersbach, and therein were many men that walked and carried great jewels in their heads; and they shone,” said Willebald, “like sparks of flame.” ’

  ‘Like sparks of flame!’

  ‘But I said,’ Carl went on, ‘ “Comrade, thou art certainly damned, and I too maybe, if we stay here.” And then I told him what I had seen. Now, behold! Willebald is a stout-hearted man, and not as other men, nay, and he is but a youth and over rash. For when I told him my vision, I said that for sure the Devil was in this place, and we must run away; and I ran. But he came after, crying:—“No!” and that I should stay and show him the place where the little beast had entered into the rock; for that there surely we should find the treasure of jewels that he had seen in his sleep. But I withstood him, and would by no means stay, and was minded only to run away from that place. Yet now, forsooth, I almost think——’

  ‘O, no. It was well. Thou didst well,’ Elizabeth cried with fervour.

  ‘Nay, now I am at home,’ Carl went on, at once taking the opposite side from his wife, ‘I am minded to think——’

  ‘Carl,’ said Elizabeth, earnestly laying her hand upon his arm, ‘go not again—take not Willebald again into the forest. He is too bold. This evening I have seen——’

  But she never finished her sentence. For it was then that the two Foresters came into the cottage.

  III

  The latch opened, while she was speaking, and a mocking voice said: ‘Carl, take not Willebald into the forest!’

  Both the man and his wife started from their seats. A laugh came from the person who had spoken, and who was now in the room. At the same moment his comrade followed him.

  The dress of the two admitt
ed of no doubt as to their occupation: they were two of the Freyherr’s rangers. They wore jerkins, caps, and hose, all of untanned hide. Each had a boar-spear in his hand, but a spear, as Carl could not but note, of old-fashioned make; and they had long-bows at their backs. And that too, thought Carl, is strange. For all the other foresters carried cross-bows. They gave their names as Gotschalk and Rudolf.

  Though he now sat still, the peasant’s eyes glittered, not in a friendly way. By the villagers the lord’s men were dreaded and disliked, and yet welcomed for the sake of the news they brought—news of the castle, and thereby intelligence of a still wider world. As for Elizabeth, her thoughts were so haunted that evening by a fear of the supernatural that it was a pleasure to see creatures of flesh and blood. She got up to prepare a fresh supper of cabbage soup and porridge, and passed out of the firelight.

  The peasant and his wife had been seated upon two stools, the only ones the room contained. But along one end of the chamber and half way down another wall ran two settles, and it was on the nearer of these that the new-comers placed themselves. The glow of the embers hardly reached them. With a peasant’s caution, Carl forbore to begin a conversation, and at first the rangers seemed no more talkative than he. So for a while the company sat in silence and semi-darkness.

  ‘Ay,’ at last said Gotschalk to his comrade. ‘We are in luck to find Carl of the Corner not yet gone to roost, eh, Rudolf? We are weary,’ he went on to his host. ‘We have been all day a-hunting.’ ‘Ay, a-hunting,’ said the second ranger, and he gave a low guttural laugh, which seemed to Elizabeth, returning to the room at that moment, to jar her very spine.