Landscape with figures
there for the rest of my life—now.” He looked fondly at his wench, who
leaned against his shoulder.
“No,” said Blackwood promptly, “do not let us go back—not unless the
danger is really considerable.”
“Great things are awaiting us in Europe,” said Terence. “I feel it. I
have seen Europe in a vision, and we are to arrive there safely after
this time of exile and cleansing purgatory.”
“The Valley would be a very nice place with a decent up-to-date
hotel and a golf-course,” said Sprot. “I should like to see a little
enterprise and capital put into that Valley. Men were made to work, not
to think. I shall never forget....” He shuddered as he thought of that
frightful period of imprisonment with twelve lunatics on the mountain
of meditation.
“I have not yet understood,” remarked Lord Sombrewater, “what there
was to prevent your coming away.”
“What there was...! Well, if you were put on a rock surrounded by
water, and every time you put your foot in the water to wade across you
were sort of shrivelled all up your legs and spine with a frightful
tingling pain, you’d soon know what there was to prevent you coming
away.”
“Couldn’t you jump?”
“Jump? I tried once! Those devils always seemed to know what you were
thinking about, night and day, and when I jumped one of them gave me a
twitch that sent me in head first. Not till my dying day shall I forget
it. I couldn’t remember where I was for a week. My God! if I had my way
with them!” He went purple at the thought of the indignities to which
he had been subjected. “Go back you may,” he added, “but you go without
George Sprot.”
“There are some experiments that I greatly desire to make,” added
Frew-Gaff. “I believe I can reproduce some things we have seen lately,
if I can only grasp one or two principles that baffle me.” He kindled
his brows.
“That you never will,” thought Lychnis. She despised them for having
hopes and fears. It was all one to her, she told herself, if she were
slain there that night. She was looking out through the window of the
inn. Opposite, a toppling jade crag flamed with a faint fire of sunset
from beyond the Valley. The scene did not move her greatly, she found.
She was calm in face of the once heart-hurting beauty of sunsets. She
turned once more to examine her thoughts, all upside down as Ambrose
had put them. He sat there with his back to her, but the current of all
her moods was toward him.
As the last rays of light departed from the Chinese landscape, stranger
here to them than in the Valley, they heard sounds of considerable
excitement in the village. They all went out into the street, and
presently little crowds of chattering peasants began to pass the inn.
The innkeeper came out at Lord Sombrewater’s request. Such-a-one had
vanished.
“Ask what the trouble is, Lychnis,” commanded Lord Sombrewater.
“Refugees,” the innkeeper conveyed, standing impassively with his hands
hidden in his sleeves.
“What is happening, then?” she asked.
He directed their gaze across the Valley. A young moon had risen over
the zigzagging mountain, and there on the precipitous side of it, not
half a mile from the inn, were a hundred lights—the camp-fires of the
revolutionaries—and on other hills there were other lights.
Even as the Sages were looking at one another, and Ruby and Fulke,
in each other’s arms, were making appointments for eternity, a flash
came from the hillside. The revolutionaries had discharged their
field-piece. The shell burst very short. They tried again, with the
same effect, and this seemed to put them in a frenzy, for they began
a furious cannonade and opened fire with their rifles. But not a shot
came over the village, and they slew nothing but the breeze. The
villagers, perceiving that the strangers were miraculously protected,
sought to share in the working of the charm, and soon the party was
surrounded by a dense crowd of bead-eyed Orientals, chattering in the
dark. The flash of guns and a flare in the sky told that the attack was
proceeding over a wide front.
Lychnis watched the proceedings with unconcern.
Very soon, perceiving the uselessness of his artillery, the enemy
commander changed tactics, and seemed, from the noise that his troops
made, about to deliver a hand assault.
“There are perhaps five thousand of them,” muttered Sombrewater.
“Richard—if we could get the girls away? If you could steal down to the
river and get off in the boats?”
“It could be tried,” said Sir Richard tentatively. “But it is for you
to go, Arnold....”
“Leg it with me,” suggested Quentin, prepared to die if his last hours
might be amorous.
“I will not leave this spot in any circumstances whatever,” Lychnis
answered, low and decisively.
Lord Sombrewater was about to speak, but the words perished in his
mouth, for at that moment the colossal apparition of a dragon, with
eyes like burning topaz, writhed in fearful silence through the Valley
and vanished among the hills. The clamour of the attack ceased, and the
people of the village prostrated themselves.
“We were rewarded by heaven,” said Quentin devoutly, “for the purity of
our lives!”
But the attack was forward again. The enemy came on, yelling like
pandemonium, and one after another the flame-beasts came galloping out
of the mountains, and where they passed through the attacking forces
their trail was blazed with paralysed men.
“This helps,” exclaimed Sombrewater, “but they’re still swarming up
every valley. Do you see them where the flame goes? They’re not being
held.” He sought for his daughter’s hand, and she gave it him. She wore
the smile of a holy one. It had come to her that there was nothing but
a quietness akin to the quietness of space in her heart. The world
might crack and she would be calm, for there was now nothing in her
subject to death.
It was true that the enemy were not being held, but the mind that
was defending the Sages had reserves in hand; indeed, he disposed of
the attack in a way that was cynically humorous. In the days when
Yuan had taken interest in appearances his interest had been keen and
productive. As he had told them, he was able to reproduce appearances
and conjure up phenomena. The secret of the toys he had devised for the
defence of the Valley had been communicated, in accordance with family
tradition, to the engineers, and they, doubtless, were handling the
matter at the present time. With great subtlety the fiery dragons were
managed so as to force the attack into certain defined areas. They did
not kill, except inadvertently, and, once he was used to them, they
served to provoke the enemy to defiance, so that he was gradually drawn
on. Yet for a long time it seemed to the Sages as if the defence must
fail. But now the dragons were followed by monsters in human form, with
blue, scowling faces and tongues of red fire, who floated over the
forest. Their robes seemed to blow and flap in the breeze, disclosing
the limbs of demons; shadows of hate lurked on their brows, and their
green eyeballs glowed balefully. Each carried a scimitar under his
arm, and one of them, by way of preparatory gesture, cynically shaved
a forest from the mountain. The revolutionaries were checked, but amid
scenes of compulsion and terror their commander forced his way to the
village—a big, hideous man—hewing and slaughtering with an immense
curved blade.
He was on them, with a dozen followers, before the Sages realized
what had happened, and Fulke and Ruby were already in their hands.
The commander himself, smiling like a death’s head, fixed his eyes on
Lychnis and swung his blade. She found herself looking darkness in
the face, and there was only one thought in her mind—Ambrose would
die too. His existence and hers would disappear in the non-existing.
Already from the cold threshold she looked back at the world, and saw
it as a bright place where those who had learnt to stare in the face
of darkness might command and enjoy desire. Then she saw Ambrose. His
eyes were very far away. He, too, was looking in the face of darkness.
Or did he not love her then? For her, now, he suddenly became the
darkness, the heedless, the unnameable. It was in him, in him, that her
existence was to disappear.
The bandit lifted his curved blade. It swung once, twice, hissing,
and she still brooded on her revelation. But Such-a-one appeared
at an upper window in the inn with a device in his hand, and at the
third death-bringing swing of the blade he dealt with the chemical
composition of the bandit in such a way that the characteristics which
distinguish the living from the dead suddenly ceased to be present.
Thus also with his followers.
The din and yelling were now terrific. Lychnis ran to help Ruby, who
had fainted, and tended her while the conflict raged. The angel of
annunciation had visited her and her eyes shone, and Ruby, coming to
herself, perceived that something had happened to her friend. “Oh,
Licky,” she exclaimed, “are we dead? For you look like a spirit in
heaven.”
“Yes,” answered Lychnis. “I have died, and I am looking back at the
world. I see that I never knew till I died what it was that I wanted.”
But Ruby, seeing the battle and hearing the din, was puzzled. “I do not
know what you mean,” she murmured. “I only feel that you have become
different from the living.”
“It is true, my dearest—really true.” Lychnis smiled at her friend.
A vast blaze of light thrust the reeling hills out into blackness,
and they saw a mass of the enemy pallid and paralysed in the ghastly
glare. Then Ruby shrieked, for a monstrous flame-demon swung a
scythe through a huge circle of the night, and the men who had been
standing huddled before him stood no more. The rest of the attacking
horde turned to save themselves while they could. Then, with a hiss
and a roar that seemed to blast the forests, fire sprang from every
hillside and streamed over the flying forces. The sky became full of
burning villages, and the ears were stifled with the streaming of
unearthly flames. Stricken phantom hosts scattered in panic terror
along the spines of the mountains; crags of burning sulphur toppled
down upon them in obliterating thunder; the mountains themselves seemed
to collapse upon flying armies of spectres; and of the actual and
substantial fugitives who sought among the rocks for some cover from
this spectacle there was none whose heart was not squeezed and ruptured
by the cold hand of fear.
Our friends watched in silence until the cynical and jocular fireworks
came to an end in fitful lightning and muttering thunder. The terror of
the Dragon was in their minds. But there were two in whom terror had no
place.
49
They did not at once enter the paradise that was now theirs. They did
not even speak of it to each other. They pondered the golden future
in secret, and only sometimes, by a glance more subtly effective than
kisses, acknowledged that their blood ran to the same rhythm. For those
who feed their hearts on the substance of eternity there is no haste.
At last, on a spring morning, the _Floating Leaf_ lay in Southampton
Water. They stood at the rail, the two of them, looking at the bed
of smokestacks, masts and cranes that flourished in the Hampshire
foreshore. It was necessary that something should be said, now that
this daily companionship was to end.
He regarded her steadfastly. The corners of her mouth were turned up,
and she smiled faintly at the water.
“You are making a fox-face,” he observed.
“I was thinking of the Valley.”
“Pleasantly?”
“Oh, very pleasantly! But how far away it seems, and how strange the
things we all talked about, even the words we used! They would sound
comic in this atmosphere. Was it real, or did we dream it? Or is this