Bag and Baggage/The Hamadryad

UST outside Winton in Hampshire, if you leave the town due west, you come, climbing all the way, to a scarce noticeable bifurcation of the road, the right prong of which is nothing less than the original Roman thoroughfare to old Sarum. Making straight, after its kind, for its destination, this antique track (for it is little more at this date) conducts you from the outset into an immense solitude of downs, over which it passes in a long series of dips and rises, now by grass, now by hedgerows, until, at some three miles distant, it runs into timber very quiet and remote. Here is the wood of Lamont, notable for its strange flowers and insects, for its grassy glades and tangled coverts. These are nowadays jealously 'preserved'; but in the time of which I write—which was many years ago—a kindly tolerance admitted to their peaceable enjoyment all who were indisposed to abuse the privilege accorded them. But, even then, the place was so removed, and so devoid of attraction to the commonplace wayfarer, that few came to take advantage of its liberties, and those few mostly botanists or entomologists.

One September evening, in a year long past, a young man—an aurelian, to use the older and prettier term—came trudging over the downs to spend a ghostly vigil in Lamont. He carried in his pockets a dark lantern, a bottle of beer and sugar mixed, a brush, a nest of specimen boxes, and a little phial of chloroform, with a square or two of blotting-paper to finish. Such was the necessary paraphernalia of a moth-trapper by night, when the rarest and most beautiful species are to be secured. Young Mirvan had no other equipment about him but a hazel stick, which he swung regularly as he strode along.

It was a still and lovely night, with an autumnal keenness in the air which was both sweet and bracing. Low in the sky hung a full moon, so radiant and so large in seeming, that it appeared like the glowing sail of some fairy craft, just risen above the horizon of billowing hills, and reflected in their milky greenness as in water. Nearer, the undulating spaces were all sown with shadowy furrows and dense clumps of gloom, with here and there the spark of some distant homestead starring the slopes. No sound, but the occasional short bay of a dog, faint and far, broke the stillness. The lonely road and the lonely moon-drowned country possessed, and were possessed by, the solitary walker.

So detached from the world, his heart should have beat with a corresponding serenity. He was engaged in a pursuit which he loved, both for its environments and its curious interests. He had already one of the finest collections of lepidoptera in the county, and he asked nothing better than to be left in peaceable enjoyment of his hobby. But, alas! that was no longer to be. For family reasons he was to make, in a few days' time, a marriage de convenance with a cousin whom he did not love, and who regarded him merely as a necessary step to affluence and a position. Between the young mystic, the half-recluse and self-sufficer, and the near soulless girl of the world there could never be anything in common, and Mirvan felt that his days of irresponsible dreaming were numbered. This was to be his last night-visit, he felt, to the ghostly woods of Lamont, and, so far as that side of him was concerned, the thought was like a death-bed sorrow. The mystery and the loneliness of things had never before appeared to him so beautiful.

At the bottom of a long slope, so filled with misty greenness that it seemed to him as if he were walking into the sea, he turned into a close lane, which, at a few hundred yards' distance, brought him to the skirts of the wood, into which he passed with a sure knowledge, and was soon fathoms deep in foliage. Finding and traversing a silent glade or two, he presently, always easily ascending, came out into a clear grassy space, beyond which stretched the high woods all bathed in moonlight. And here, conscious even in his depression of some return of the accustomed glow, he felt for his brush and bottle, and stole in among the broken shadows. Selecting some likely trees, he painted their trunks here and there with patches of his mixture, and afterwards, having so treated as many as his memory might retain, with- drew to a neighbouring oak, and, seating himself among its roots, gave himself over, while he waited, to wistful meditation.

He was in a singularly emotional mood. His isolation in this world of leaf and moonlight; his passionate sense of strange delights, half hidden, half recognised, to be forgone; his dread of the bondage to come, all wrought upon him to a moving degree. He had never before so felt the haunting mystery of trees—their high-whispered secrets, the strange things they harboured, the way they disposed themselves to screen from mortal eyes the movements of things still stranger. He could have imagined the woods, for some reason, busy with unseen life; have imagined that an inarticulate giggle of voices, now hushed, now faintly audible, was whispering somewhere in their recesses. A silent white thing rushed past him, and it was only when it stooped, and rose again, that he recognised it, or thought he recognised it, for an owl. Once his eyes, unconsciously fixed upon a curious luminous halo in the grass a little distance away, were astonished into a belief that the thing undulated—was in movement. He was startled into rising and seeking the place; but discovered for his pains no more than a ring of white funguses, on whose surface the moon-beams seemed to boil and quiver. As he returned to his seat, tiny travelling sparks appeared to run from him in all directions, like glow-worms suddenly galvanised into activity. He rubbed his eyes, bewildered and a little agitated.

"I am a bit overstrung," he thought, "and my fancy is playing tricks with me. I must rouse myself and do something. It is time I examined the trees."

Taking his nerves resolutely in hand, he lit his dark-lantern, and, directing the light in front of him, advanced towards the trunk most nearly in his path. As he approached it, a drift of floating gossamer seemed to interpose itself within the glow, and, wreathing fantastically a moment, display a little shadowy face and disappear. To say that he was not conscious of a shock and thrill would be to underrate his sensibility; but, though, in the sudden start he gave, he nearly dropped the lantern, his feeling was one of astonishment rather than of fear. And, in the same instant, all supernatural tremors were lost in the excitement of the collector, for the light of the bull's-eye had fallen full upon a great moth resting drunk and stupefied upon the wet bark of the tree.

It was a rare specimen of the rarest of all moths, the Clifden Nonpareil, which covers with fore-wings of marbled silver-grey the most beautiful under-wings of banded black and violet. The prize was a splendid one for a lepidopterist, and, as Mirvan dropped softly to his knees to make ready his box with a fragment of chloroformed blotting-paper, his heart was thumping as if it would suffocate him. He was hardly breathing, indeed, as he rose again prepared, and saw the big moth still motionlessly awaiting its capture. Holding the light steadily focussed on his prey, he advanced his right hand with the box in it—and instantly another little hand slipped in between.

It was like a flower, as soft, as semi-transparent—hardly more than a child's in size, but moulded to a ripe perfection. As Mirvan advanced the lantern, it disappeared.

He stood for some moments quite motionless; then, with a sigh, softly closed the shutter, and let the sense of moonlight regather about him. Even now he was so far from panic-struck that he could think with some vexation of his arrested deed. With the quenching of the light the silver moth had become one with the silver bark on which it lay.

And then, suddenly again, came the web of gossamer, drifting between with its fantastic convolutions, until it seemed to catch and wind itself about the tree. And, in the same instant, Mirvan was aware of the shadowy shape of a girl, standing by the trunk, and clinging to it as she regarded him.

At the first, he could separate her no more than the moth from the bark against which she rested; but presently the sense of a bewitching child-face, half shy, half alluring, of a faint glow-worm mist of hair, of limbs like rounded stones gleaming through dark water, grew upon him from doubt to certainty and from certainty to rapture. His inquietude from the outset had never approached fear nearer than its boundaries in a fearful joy. Now, at a leap, it had become an overmastering emotion of desire, a passion to absorb and possess. He forgot himself; or, rather, himself was gone—the thing of prescriptive conduct and staid conventions. All sorts of primitive impulses raced in his veins; long-buried impressions of hills and woodlands, of sweet midnight pursuits and thymy contacts glimmered in his brain. Melodious voices seemed to whisper from the thickets, only to become, when he turned to answer them, the murmur of far-running waters, or the rapture of bird song in some distant copse. He knew it, he thought. This was life in its heyday of joy and mystery. His heart throbbed with a delirious ecstasy; and in the midst he heard her speak.

"Spare my pretty moth!"

Was it a voice, a dream, a breath of music on the night? Quite overcome, he extinguished his lantern, and, throwing it on the grass, leaned towards the vision.

"It is the spoil of my life," he whispered. "At what price, you lovely thing?"

She seemed to laugh, putting her finger to her lips. Burning all through, Mirvan advanced a step. As he did so, the shape, winding its pale arms about the tree, as if it appealed to it for protection, appeared to dissolve and vanish where it stood.

He uttered a little despairing cry. What had become of her? In the agony of that impossible loss, he leapt and ran round the tree. He trod upon his lantern, and, stumbling, caught at the trunk. It seemed soft to his hand, warm and palpitating. In an access of emotion, he threw himself upon it, gripping and striving as if he would bear it down. "Your secret!" he panted; "yield it!"

And suddenly it seemed to melt beneath him; soft arms came about his neck; a voice sighed in his ear: "Captured! O, captured! A moth for a moth, you dearest!"

Intoxicated with bliss, he set his lips in the darkness to lips as sweet as wine.

From that dream, as from a deep swoon, Mirvan awoke to find himself lying on the grass in the grey dawn. The wood was all about him, quiet as death. Not a whisper broke its silences, not a thing seemed stirring in its thickets. He got to his feet, and stood in a dazed way, thinking it was time for him to be turning homewards. Once he started, and paused and came back. And a second time he started, and checked himself, and returned to the oak, and stood looking at it with glazed eyes.

"Was it all a moonstruck dream?" he murmured. "For your part in it, thanks, anyhow, dear oak."

But the oak did not respond by so much as a quivering leaf.

dutifully married, and kept to his marriage bond, found no more joy in his state than he had anticipated. His wife's was a small nature, dull and exacting, incapable of passion, save in its squalidest aspect of jealousy. The secrets of his soul were locked from her; and, though she could never have sympathised with them revealed, the thought of something withheld filled her with a perpetual sense of injury. She seemed always seeking for a proof of his hidden depravity of heart and mind.

At the end of a year a girl baby was born to them. Mirvan, after the first natural interest evoked by the knowledge of his being a father, took little notice of it. It appeared an ordinary unexciting child, and, though pretty, the farthest from precocious. When two years had passed it was still as speechless as on the day of its birth—in actual vociferation even less emphatic. He began to wonder, with only a faint stirring of curiosity rather than of concern, if it would ever come to articulate.

But on the morrow of the child's second birthday a curious change was announced. That night Mirvan had passed in a strange mood of agitation. He could not sleep; it had seemed to him that something was in the house—something not belonging to it. It was only at dawn that he had lost consciousness, under, as it appeared to him, the whispering branches of an oak tree. The nurse coming into the room, pale and startled, was the first to awake him to a sense of realities. She showed a disposition to cry. Would her master and mistress come at once, she said. Baby was sitting up in her cradle and talking.

They rose, and followed her out. That sense of estrangement between them made the mother hasten to claim the first right to her child. The best her narrow nature could exhibit was all devoted to this possession. She stopped, with a gasp, when she entered the night-nursery. The tiny being was seated up on her pillow, taking voluble stock of all the wonderful things about her. Her speech was ludicrously pretty, but comprehensible only in fragments. It was the look of sudden intelligence in her eyes that was the oddest part. It was baby, but indescribably developed between a single sleeping and waking.

Mirvan stole a look at his wife. A certain revulsion of feeling in her was patent to his soul. He, on the contrary, felt such an attraction to the child as he had never known before. From that day she was his constant delight and companion; and from that day, as he was aware, his wife hated him.

The nurse could not be induced to stay, and another was procured. But, indeed, her post was a sinecure. The child was always with her father; her elfish prattle followed his footsteps all day long. When she came near her mother, it was to be coldly repulsed, and often to answer pertly, "Baby not love you"; to which the woman would reply: "I don't want your love. You are no child of mine."

And thus another six months passed by; and every day of it added to the infant's precocity and strange beauty.

One evening Mirvan, thinking to interest his little daughter, took her into his study to show her his collection of moths and butterflies. But the sight of the first drawer of specimens, as he pulled it out and lowered it for her inspection, had a startlingly opposite effect to that which he had anticipated. She turned pale, shrinking back a little.

"How are they made to settle so still behind the little window?" she whispered.

"They do not settle; they are dead, baby," he answered, amused.

"Dead!" her face was going white. "Who killed them?"

"Why, I did," he said. "I caught, and drugged them to death, then put pins through their bodies, and stretched out their wings, and left them to dry."

She gave a single gasp; and then her infant fury broke. She screamed at and reviled him; she beat him with her little hands. She cried that he was cruel, cruel—that he was worse than the fox and stoat, that only slew for food—that she would never, never love him or speak to him again. Finally, she ran from the room in a storm of tears, and he heard her stamping up to her nursery.

Mirvan was utterly amazed, and more than a little distressed and troubled. All that evening he was haunted with a sense of guilt; and by and by, unable to sit out his depression, he stole upstairs to visit his rebellious little girl in her cot. She was lying to all appearance fast asleep, the sheet covering her face to the hair, and, unwilling to disturb her, he just dropped a remorseful pat on the counterpane, and left the room.

It thundered all night; and the next morning he was awakened, as once before, to find the nurse in his room.

"Please, ma'am," the girl was saying, "I think there's something wrong with baby. She won't speak, and I can't seem to make her understand."

He was up before his wife this time, and out and in the nursery. As he stood staring, with a dead feeling at his heart, his wife brushed past him, and fell on her knees beside the cot.

"Baby!" she whispered in a voice of rapture. "It is mother's own darling come back again."

"She don't seem to hear or understand," said the girl; "and there's something odd-looking about her."

The mother had the child in her arms, kissing and fondling her. She looked round fiercely at the speaker. "You are a fool," she said. "You can go."

But, indeed, from that moment the child never spoke or heard or saw again; and from that moment Mirvan gave himself up, wholly, patiently, remorsefully, to her care. He knew that those who have been once borrowed and returned by the fairies must never be allowed to reveal their experiences or to recognise their playfellows in all their time to come.