The King in Yellow
which might aid me in extricating myself from my present position. If
I could only find the ocean again all would be clear, for I knew one
could see the island of Groix from the cliffs.
I laid down my gun, and kneeling behind a rock lighted a pipe. Then I
looked at my watch. It was nearly four o’clock. I might have wandered
far from Kerselec since daybreak.
Standing the day before on the cliffs below Kerselec with Goulven,
looking out over the sombre moors among which I had now lost my way,
these downs had appeared to me level as a meadow, stretching to the
horizon, and although I knew how deceptive is distance, I could not
realize that what from Kerselec seemed to be mere grassy hollows were
great valleys covered with gorse and heather, and what looked like
scattered boulders were in reality enormous cliffs of granite.
“It’s a bad place for a stranger,” old Goulven had said: “you’d better
take a guide;” and I had replied, “I shall not lose myself.” Now I
knew that I had lost myself, as I sat there smoking, with the sea-wind
blowing in my face. On every side stretched the moorland, covered with
flowering gorse and heath and granite boulders. There was not a tree
in sight, much less a house. After a while, I picked up the gun, and
turning my back on the sun tramped on again.
There was little use in following any of the brawling streams which
every now and then crossed my path, for, instead of flowing into the
sea, they ran inland to reedy pools in the hollows of the moors. I
had followed several, but they all led me to swamps or silent little
ponds from which the snipe rose peeping and wheeled away in an ecstasy
of fright. I began to feel fatigued, and the gun galled my shoulder in
spite of the double pads. The sun sank lower and lower, shining level
across yellow gorse and the moorland pools.
As I walked my own gigantic shadow led me on, seeming to lengthen at
every step. The gorse scraped against my leggings, crackled beneath
my feet, showering the brown earth with blossoms, and the brake bowed
and billowed along my path. From tufts of heath rabbits scurried away
through the bracken, and among the swamp grass I heard the wild duck’s
drowsy quack. Once a fox stole across my path, and again, as I stooped
to drink at a hurrying rill, a heron flapped heavily from the reeds
beside me. I turned to look at the sun. It seemed to touch the edges
of the plain. When at last I decided that it was useless to go on, and
that I must make up my mind to spend at least one night on the moors, I
threw myself down thoroughly fagged out. The evening sunlight slanted
warm across my body, but the sea-winds began to rise, and I felt a
chill strike through me from my wet shooting-boots. High overhead gulls
were wheeling and tossing like bits of white paper; from some distant
marsh a solitary curlew called. Little by little the sun sank into the
plain, and the zenith flushed with the after-glow. I watched the sky
change from palest gold to pink and then to smouldering fire. Clouds
of midges danced above me, and high in the calm air a bat dipped and
soared. My eyelids began to droop. Then as I shook off the drowsiness
a sudden crash among the bracken roused me. I raised my eyes. A great
bird hung quivering in the air above my face. For an instant I stared,
incapable of motion; then something leaped past me in the ferns and the
bird rose, wheeled, and pitched headlong into the brake.
I was on my feet in an instant peering through the gorse. There came
the sound of a struggle from a bunch of heather close by, and then
all was quiet. I stepped forward, my gun poised, but when I came to
the heather the gun fell under my arm again, and I stood motionless
in silent astonishment. A dead hare lay on the ground, and on the hare
stood a magnificent falcon, one talon buried in the creature’s neck,
the other planted firmly on its limp flank. But what astonished me,
was not the mere sight of a falcon sitting upon its prey. I had seen
that more than once. It was that the falcon was fitted with a sort of
leash about both talons, and from the leash hung a round bit of metal
like a sleigh-bell. The bird turned its fierce yellow eyes on me, and
then stooped and struck its curved beak into the quarry. At the same
instant hurried steps sounded among the heather, and a girl sprang
into the covert in front. Without a glance at me she walked up to the
falcon, and passing her gloved hand under its breast, raised it from
the quarry. Then she deftly slipped a small hood over the bird’s head,
and holding it out on her gauntlet, stooped and picked up the hare.
She passed a cord about the animal’s legs and fastened the end of the
thong to her girdle. Then she started to retrace her steps through
the covert. As she passed me I raised my cap and she acknowledged
my presence with a scarcely perceptible inclination. I had been so
astonished, so lost in admiration of the scene before my eyes, that it
had not occurred to me that here was my salvation. But as she moved
away I recollected that unless I wanted to sleep on a windy moor that
night I had better recover my speech without delay. At my first word
she hesitated, and as I stepped before her I thought a look of fear
came into her beautiful eyes. But as I humbly explained my unpleasant
plight, her face flushed and she looked at me in wonder.
“Surely you did not come from Kerselec!” she repeated.
Her sweet voice had no trace of the Breton accent nor of any accent
which I knew, and yet there was something in it I seemed to have heard
before, something quaint and indefinable, like the theme of an old song.
I explained that I was an American, unacquainted with Finistère,
shooting there for my own amusement.
“An American,” she repeated in the same quaint musical tones. “I have
never before seen an American.”
For a moment she stood silent, then looking at me she said. “If you
should walk all night you could not reach Kerselec now, even if you had
a guide.”
This was pleasant news.
“But,” I began, “if I could only find a peasant’s hut where I might get
something to eat, and shelter.”
The falcon on her wrist fluttered and shook its head. The girl smoothed
its glossy back and glanced at me.
“Look around,” she said gently. “Can you see the end of these moors?
Look, north, south, east, west. Can you see anything but moorland and
bracken?”
“No,” I said.
“The moor is wild and desolate. It is easy to enter, but sometimes they
who enter never leave it. There are no peasants’ huts here.”
“Well,” I said, “if you will tell me in which direction Kerselec lies,
to-morrow it will take me no longer to go back than it has to come.”
She looked at me again with an expression almost like pity.
“Ah,” she said, “to come is easy and takes hours; to go is
different—and may take centuries.”
I stared at her in amazement but decided that I had misunderstood her.
Then before I had time to speak she drew a whistle from her belt and
sounded it.
“Sit down and rest,” she said to me; “you have come a long distance and
are tired.”
She gathered up her pleated skirts and motioning me to follow picked
her dainty way through the gorse to a flat rock among the ferns.
“They will be here directly,” she said, and taking a seat at one end of
the rock invited me to sit down on the other edge. The after-glow was
beginning to fade in the sky and a single star twinkled faintly through
the rosy haze. A long wavering triangle of water-fowl drifted southward
over our heads, and from the swamps around plover were calling.
“They are very beautiful—these moors,” she said quietly.
“Beautiful, but cruel to strangers,” I answered.
“Beautiful and cruel,” she repeated dreamily, “beautiful and cruel.”
“Like a woman,” I said stupidly.
“Oh,” she cried with a little catch in her breath, and looked at me.
Her dark eyes met mine, and I thought she seemed angry or frightened.
“Like a woman,” she repeated under her breath, “How cruel to say so!”
Then after a pause, as though speaking aloud to herself, “How cruel for
him to say that!”
I don’t know what sort of an apology I offered for my inane, though
harmless speech, but I know that she seemed so troubled about it that I
began to think I had said something very dreadful without knowing it,
and remembered with horror the pitfalls and snares which the French
language sets for foreigners. While I was trying to imagine what I
might have said, a sound of voices came across the moor, and the girl
rose to her feet.
“No,” she said, with a trace of a smile on her pale face, “I will not
accept your apologies, monsieur, but I must prove you wrong, and that
shall be my revenge. Look. Here come Hastur and Raoul.”
Two men loomed up in the twilight. One had a sack across his shoulders
and the other carried a hoop before him as a waiter carries a tray. The
hoop was fastened with straps to his shoulders, and around the edge of
the circlet sat three hooded falcons fitted with tinkling bells. The
girl stepped up to the falconer, and with a quick turn of her wrist
transferred her falcon to the hoop, where it quickly sidled off and
nestled among its mates, who shook their hooded heads and ruffled their
feathers till the belled jesses tinkled again. The other man stepped
forward and bowing respectfully took up the hare and dropped it into
the game-sack.
“These are my piqueurs,” said the girl, turning to me with a gentle
dignity. “Raoul is a good fauconnier, and I shall some day make him
grand veneur. Hastur is incomparable.”
The two silent men saluted me respectfully.
“Did I not tell you, monsieur, that I should prove you wrong?” she
continued. “This, then, is my revenge, that you do me the courtesy of
accepting food and shelter at my own house.”
Before I could answer she spoke to the falconers, who started instantly
across the heath, and with a gracious gesture to me she followed. I
don’t know whether I made her understand how profoundly grateful I
felt, but she seemed pleased to listen, as we walked over the dewy
heather.
“Are you not very tired?” she asked.
I had clean forgotten my fatigue in her presence, and I told her so.
“Don’t you think your gallantry is a little old-fashioned?” she said;
and when I looked confused and humbled, she added quietly, “Oh, I like
it, I like everything old-fashioned, and it is delightful to hear you
say such pretty things.”
The moorland around us was very still now under its ghostly sheet
of mist. The plovers had ceased their calling; the crickets and all
the little creatures of the fields were silent as we passed, yet it
seemed to me as if I could hear them beginning again far behind us.
Well in advance, the two tall falconers strode across the heather, and
the faint jingling of the hawks’ bells came to our ears in distant
murmuring chimes.
Suddenly a splendid hound dashed out of the mist in front, followed
by another and another until half-a-dozen or more were bounding and
leaping around the girl beside me. She caressed and quieted them with
her gloved hand, speaking to them in quaint terms which I remembered to
have seen in old French manuscripts.
Then the falcons on the circlet borne by the falconer ahead began
to beat their wings and scream, and from somewhere out of sight the
notes of a hunting-horn floated across the moor. The hounds sprang
away before us and vanished in the twilight, the falcons flapped and
squealed upon their perch, and the girl, taking up the song of the
horn, began to hum. Clear and mellow her voice sounded in the night air.
“Chasseur, chasseur, chassez encore,
Quittez Rosette et Jeanneton,
Tonton, tonton, tontaine, tonton,
Ou, pour, rabattre, dès l’aurore,
Que les Amours soient de planton,
Tonton, tontaine, tonton.”