easier to offer him lunch.
"The whole countryside's gone mad," announced the Squire, by way of thelatest local news. "It's about this infernal legend of ours."
"I collect legends," said Paynter, smiling.
"You must remember I haven't yet had a chance to collect yours. Andthis," he added, looking round at the romantic coast, "is a fine theaterfor anything dramatic."
"Oh, it's dramatic in its way," admitted Vane, not without a faintsatisfaction. "It's all about those things over there we call thepeacock trees--I suppose, because of the queer color of the leaf, youknow, though I have heard they make a shrill noise in a high wind that'ssupposed to be like the shriek of a peacock; something like a bamboo inthe botanical structure, perhaps. Well, those trees are supposed to havebeen brought over from Barbary by my ancestor Sir Walter Vane, one ofthe Elizabethan patriots or pirates, or whatever you call them. They saythat at the end of his last voyage the villagers gathered on the beachdown there and saw the boat standing in from the sea, and the new treesstood up in the boat like a mast, all gay with leaves out of season,like green bunting. And as they watched they thought at first that theboat was steering oddly, and then that it wasn't steering at all; andwhen it drifted to the shore at last every man in that boat was dead,and Sir Walter Vane, with his sword drawn, was leaning up against thetree trunk, as stiff as the tree."
"Now this is rather curious," remarked Paynter thoughtfully. "I toldyou I collected legends, and I fancy I can tell you the beginning of thestory of which that is the end, though it comes hundreds of miles acrossthe sea."
He tapped meditatively on the table with his thin, taper fingers, likea man trying to recall a tune. He had, indeed, made a hobby of suchfables, and he was not without vanity about his artistic touch intelling them.
"Oh, do tell us your part of it?" cried Barbara Vane, whose air of sunnysleepiness seemed in some vague degree to have fallen from her.
The American bowed across the table with a serious politeness, and thenbegan playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger as he talked.
"If you go down to the Barbary Coast, where the last wedge of the forestnarrows down between the desert and the great tideless sea, you willfind the natives still telling a strange story about a saint of the DarkAges. There, on the twilight border of the Dark Continent, you feel theDark Ages. I have only visited the place once, though it lies, so tospeak, opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet youwould hardly believe how the topsy-turvydom and transmigration of thismyth somehow seemed less mad than they really are, with the wood loudwith lions at night and that dark red solitude beyond. They say thatthe hermit St. Securis, living there among trees, grew to love them likecompanions; since, though great giants with many arms like Briareus,they were the mildest and most blameless of the creatures; they did notdevour like the lions, but rather opened their arms to all the littlebirds. And he prayed that they might be loosened from time to time towalk like other things. And the trees were moved upon the prayers ofSecuris, as they were at the songs of Orpheus. The men of the desertwere stricken from afar with fear, seeing the saint walking with awalking grove, like a schoolmaster with his boys. For the trees werethus freed under strict conditions of discipline. They were to return atthe sound of the hermit's bell, and, above all, to copy the wild beastsin walking only to destroy and devour nothing. Well, it is said that oneof the trees heard a voice that was not the saint's; that in the warmgreen twilight of one summer evening it became conscious of some thingsitting and speaking in its branches in the guise of a great bird,and it was that which once spoke from a tree in the guise of a greatserpent. As the voice grew louder among its murmuring leaves the treewas torn with a great desire to stretch out and snatch at the birds thatflew harmlessly about their nests, and pluck them to pieces. Finally,the tempter filled the tree-top with his own birds of pride, the starrypageant of the peacocks. And the spirit of the brute overcame the spiritof the tree, and it rent and consumed the blue-green birds till not aplume was left, and returned to the quiet tribe of trees. But they saythat when spring came all the other trees put forth leaves, but thisput forth feathers of a strange hue and pattern. And by that monstrousassimilation the saint knew of the sin, and he rooted that one tree tothe earth with a judgment, so that evil should fall on any who removedit again. That, Squire, is the beginning in the deserts of the tale thatended here, almost in this garden."
"And the end is about as reliable as the beginning, I should say," saidVane. "Yours is a nice plain tale for a small tea-party; a quiet littlebit of still-life, that is."
"What a queer, horrible story," exclaimed Barbara. "It makes one feellike a cannibal."
"Ex Africa," said the lawyer, smiling. "It comes from a cannibalcountry. I think it's the touch of the tar-brush, that nightmare feelingthat you don't know whether the hero is a plant or a man or a devil.Don't you feel it sometimes in 'Uncle Remus'?"
"True," said Paynter. "Perfectly true." And he looked at the lawyer witha new interest. The lawyer, who had been introduced as Mr. Ashe, was oneof those people who are more worth looking at than most people realizewhen they look. If Napoleon had been red-haired, and had bent all hispowers with a curious contentment upon the petty lawsuits of a province,he might have looked much the same; the head with the red hair was heavyand powerful; the figure in its dark, quiet clothes was comparativelyinsignificant, as was Napoleon's. He seemed more at ease in the Squire'ssociety than the doctor, who, though a gentleman, was a shy one, and amere shadow of his professional brother.
"As you truly say," remarked Paynter, "the story seems touched withquite barbarous elements, probably Negro. Originally, though, I thinkthere was really a hagiological story about some hermit, though someof the higher critics say St. Securis never existed, but was only anallegory of arboriculture, since his name is the Latin for an ax."
"Oh, if you come to that," remarked the poet Treherne, "you might aswell say Squire Vane doesn't exist, and that he's only an allegory fora weathercock." Something a shade too cool about this sally drew thelawyer's red brows together. He looked across the table and met thepoet's somewhat equivocal smile.
"Do I understand, Mr. Treherne," asked Ashe, "that you support themiraculous claims of St. Securis in this case. Do you, by any chance,believe in the walking trees?"
"I see men as trees walking," answered the poet, "like the man cured ofblindness in the Gospel. By the way, do I understand that you supportthe miraculous claims of that--thaumaturgist?"
Paynter intervened swiftly and suavely. "Now that sounds a fascinatingpiece of psychology. You see men as trees?"
"As I can't imagine why men should walk, I can't imagine why treesshouldn't," answered Treherne.
"Obviously, it is the nature of the organism", interposed the medicalguest, Dr. Burton Brown; "it is necessary in the very type of vegetablestructure."
"In other words, a tree sticks in the mud from year's end to year'send," answered Treherne. "So do you stop in your consulting room fromten to eleven every day. And don't you fancy a fairy, looking in at yourwindow for a flash after having just jumped over the moon and playedmulberry bush with the Pleiades, would think you were a vegetablestructure, and that sitting still was the nature of the organism?"
"I don't happen to believe in fairies," said the doctor rather stiffly,for the argumentum ad hominem was becoming too common. A sulphuroussubconscious anger seemed to radiate from the dark poet.
"Well, I should hope not, Doctor," began the Squire, in his loud andfriendly style, and then stopped, seeing the other's attention arrested.The silent butler waiting on the guests had appeared behind thedoctor's chair, and was saying something in the low, level tones of thewell-trained servant. He was so smooth a specimen of the type thatothers never noticed, at first, that he also repeated the dark portrait,however varnished, so common in this particular family of Cornish Celts.His face was sallow and even yellow, and his hair indigo black. He wentby the name of Miles. Some felt oppressed by the tribal type in thistiny corner o
f England. They felt somehow as if all these dark faceswere the masks of a secret society.
The doctor rose with a half apology. "I must ask pardon for disturbingthis pleasant party; I am called away on duty. Please don't let anybodymove. We have to be ready for these things, you know. Perhaps Mr.Treherne will admit that my habits are not so very vegetable, afterall." With this Parthian shaft, at which there was some laughter, hestrode away very rapidly across the sunny lawn to where the road dippeddown toward the village.
"He is very good among the poor," said the girl with an