Old fires and Profitable Ghosts. Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

child I saw a lamb gazing up at the butcher's knife. My dear Violet, that was a hideous time!

      And just then by chance a book fell into my hands—Lamartine's Chûte d'un Ange. Do you know the Seventh and Tenth Visions of that poem, which describe the favourite amusements of the Men-gods? Before the Deluge, beyond the rude tents of the nomad shepherds, there rose city upon city of palaces built of jasper and porphyry, splendid and utterly corrupt; inhabited by men who called themselves gods and explored the subtleties of all sciences to minister to their vicious pleasures. At ease on soft couches, in hanging gardens set with fountains, these beings feasted with every refinement of cruelty. Kneeling slaves were their living tables; while for their food—

      Tous les oiseaux de l'air, tous les poissons de l'onde,

       Tout ce qui vole ou nagc ou rampe dans le monde,

       Mourant pour leur plaisir des plus cruels trépas

       De sanglantes saveurs composent leurs repas. …

      ​

      In these lines I believed that I discerned the very God of the universe, the God whom men worship

      Dans les infâmes jeux de leitr divin loisir

       Le sitpplice de l'homme est leur premier plaisir.

       Pour que leur œilf féroce a l'envi s'en repaisse

       Des bourreaux devant eux en immolent sans cesse.

       Tantôt ils font hitter, dans des combats affreux,

       L'homme centre la brute et les hommes entre eux,

       Aux longs ruisseaux de sang qui conlent de la veine,

       Aux palpitations des membres sur l'arlène,

       Se levant à demi de leurs lits de repos

       Des frissons de plaisir frémissent sur leurs peaux.

       Le cri de la torture est leur douce harmonie,

       Et leur œil dans son œil boit sa lente agonie.

       I charged the Supreme Power with a cruelty deliberate, ruthless, serene. Nero the tyrant once commanded a representation in grim earnest of the Flight of Icarus; and the unhappy boy who took the part, at his first attempt to fly, fell headlong beside the Emperor's couch and spattered him with blood and brains. For the Emperor, says Suetonius, perraro praesidere, ceterum accubans, parvis primum foraminibus, deinde toto podio adaperto, spectare consuerat. So I believed that on the stage of this world men agonised for the delight of one cruel intelligence which watched from behind the curtain of a private box.

      II

      In this unhappy condition of mind, then, I was lying in my library chair here at Sevenhays, at two o'clock on the morning of January 4th. I had just ​finished another reading of the Tenth Vision and had tossed my book into the lap of an armchair opposite. Fire and lamp were burning brightly. The night outside was still and soundless, with a touch of frost.

      I lay there, retracing in thought the circumstances of Harry's last parting from me, and repeating to myself a scrap here and there from the three letters he wrote on his way—the last of them, full of high spirits, received a full three weeks after the telegram which announced his death. There was a passage in this last letter describing a wonderful ride he had taken alone and by moonlight on the desert; a ride (he protested) which wanted nothing of perfect happiness but me, his friend, riding beside him to share his wonder. There was a sentence which I could not recall precisely, and I left my chair and was crossing the room towards the drawer in the writing-table where I kept his letters, when I heard a trampling of hoofs on the gravel outside, and then my Christian name called—with distinctness, but not at all loudly.

      I went to the window, which was unshuttered; drew up the blind and flung up the sash. The moon, in its third quarter and about an hour short of its meridian, shone over the deodars upon the white gravel. And there, before the front door, sat Harry on his sorrel mare Vivandière, holding my own Grey Sultan ready bridled and saddled. He was dressed in his old khaki riding suit, and his face, as he sat ​askew in his saddle and looked up towards my window, wore its habitual and happy smile.

      Now, call this and what follows a dream, vision, hallucination, what you will; but understand, please, that from the first moment, so far as I considered the matter at all, I had never the least illusion that this was Harry in flesh and blood. I knew quite well all the while that Harry was dead and his body in his grave. But, soul or phantom—whatever relation to Harry this might bear—it had come to me, and the great joy of that was enough for the time. There let us leave the question. I closed the window, went upstairs to my dressing-room, drew on my riding-boots and overcoat, found cap, gloves, and riding-crop, and descended to the porch.

      Harry, as I shall call him, was still waiting there on the off side of Grey Sultan, the farther side from the door. There could be no doubt, at any rate, that the grey was real horseflesh and blood, though he seemed unusually quiet after two days in stall. Harry freed him as I mounted, and we set off together at a walk, which we kept as far as the gate.

      Outside we took the westward road, and our horses broke into a trot. As yet we had not exchanged a word; but now he asked a question or two about his people and his friends; kindly, yet most casually, as one might who returns after a week's holidaying. I answered as well as I could, with trivial news of their health. His mother had borne the winter better than usual—to be sure, there had ​been as yet no cold weather to speak of; but she and Ethel intended, I believed, to start for the south of France early in February. He inquired about you. His comments were such as a man makes on hearing just what he expects to hear, or knows beforehand. And for some time it seemed to be tacitly taken for granted between us that I should ask him no questions.

      "As for me——" I began, after a while.

      He checked the mare's pace a little. "I know," he said, looking straight ahead between her ears; then, after a pause, "it has been a bad time for you. You are in a bad way altogether. That is why I came."

      "But it was for you!" I blurted out. "Harry, if only I had known why you were taken—and what it was to you!"

      He turned his face to me with the old confident comforting smile.

      "Don't you trouble about that. That's nothing to make a fuss about. Death?" he went on musing—our horses had fallen to a walk again—"It looks you in the face a moment: you put out your hands: you touch—and so it is gone. My dear boy, it isn't for us that you need worry."

      "For whom, then?"

      "Come," said he, and he shook Vivandière into a canter.

      ​

      III

      I cannot remember precisely at what point in our ride the country had ceased to be familiar. But by-and-by we were climbing the lower slopes of a great down which bore no resemblance to the pastoral country around Sevenhays. We had left the beaten road for short turf—apparently of a copper-brown hue, but this may have been the effect of the moonlight. The ground rose steadily, but with an easy inclination, and we climbed with the wind at our backs; climbed, as it seemed, for an hour, or maybe two, at a footpace, keeping silence. The happiness of having Harry beside me took away all desire for speech.

      This at least was my state of mind as we mounted the long lower slopes of the down. But in time the air, hitherto so exhilarating, began to oppress my lungs, and the tranquil happiness to give way to a vague discomfort and apprehension.

      "What is this noise of water running?"

      I reined up Grey Sultan as I put the question. At the same moment it occurred to me that this sound of water, distant and continuous, had been running in my ear for a long while.

      Harry, too, came to a halt. With a sweep of the arm that embraced the dim landscape around and ahead, he quoted softly—

      ἐν δ῾ἐτίθει ποταμοῖο