“Prithee, let us go on,” said Olivier. “Look you, Madame, and see how the ancient trees have put on the emerald freshness of April, how innocently they rejoice in the sun’s return.”
“But the stories people tell, Olivier.”
“They are stories to frighten babes and beldames. Let us go on. There is enchantment here, but only the enchantment of beauty.”
Indeed, as he had said, the great-limbed oaks and venerable beeches were fresh with their new-born foliage. The forest wore an aspect of blitheness and vertumnal gaiety, and it was hard to believe the old superstitions and legends. The day was one of those days when hearts that feel the urgency of an unavowed love are fain to wander indefinitely. So, after certain feminine demurs, and many reassurances, Adèle allowed Olivier to persuade her, and they went on.
The feet of animals, if not of men, had continued the path they were following, and had made an easy way into the wood of fabulous evil. The drooping boughs enfolded them with arms of soft verdure, and seemed to draw them in; and shafts of yellow sunshine rifted the high trees to aureole the lovely secret lilies that bloomed about the darkly writhing coils of enormous roots. The trees were twisted and knotted, were heavy with centurial incrustations of bark, were humped and misshapen with the growth of unremembered years; but there was an air of antique wisdom about them, together with a tranquil friendliness. Adèle exclaimed with delight; and neither she nor Olivier was aware of anything sinister or doubtful in the unison of exquisite beauty and gnarled quaintness which the old forest offered to them.
“Was I not right?” Olivier queried. “Is there ought to fear in harmless trees and flowers?”
Adèle smiled, but made no other answer. In the circle of bright sunlight where they were now standing, she and Olivier looked at each other with a new and pervasive intimacy. There was a strange perfume on the windless air, coming in slow wafts from an undiscernible source— a perfume that seemed to speak insidiously of love and languor and amorous yielding. Neither knew the flower from which it issued, for all at once there were many unfamiliar blossoms around their feet, with heavy bells of carnal white or pink, or curled and twining petals, or hearts like a rosy wound. Looking, they saw each other as in a sudden dazzle of flame; and each felt a violent quickening of the blood, as if they had drunk a sovereign philtre. The same thought was manifest in the bold fervor of Olivier’s eyes, and the modest flush upon the cheeks of Mme. la Comtesse. The long-cherished love, which neither had openly declared up to this hour, was clamoring importunately in the veins of both. They resumed their onward walk; and both were now silent through the self-same constraint and embarrassment.
They dared not look at each other; and neither of them had eyes for the changing wood through which they wandered, and neither saw the foul, obscene deformity of the grey boles that gathered on each hand, or the shameful and monstrous fungi that reared their spotted pallor in the shade, or the red, venerous flowers flaunting in the sun. The spell of their desire was upon the lovers; they were drugged with the mandragora of passion; and everything beyond their own bodies, their own hearts, the throbbing of their own delirious blood, was vaguer than a dream.
The wood thickened and the arching boughs above were a weft of manifold gloom. The eyes of ferine animals peered from their hidden burrows, with gleams of crafty crimson or chill, ferocious beryl; and the dank smell of stagnant waters, choked with the leaves of bygone autumn, arose to greet the lovers, and to break a little the perilous charm that possessed them.
They paused on the edge of a rock-encircled pool, above which the ancient alders twined their decaying tops as if to maintain for ever the mad posture of a superannuate frenzy. And there, between the nether boughs of the alders in a frame of new leaves, they saw the face that leered upon them.
The apparition was incredible; and, for the space of a long breath, they could not believe they had really seen it. There were two horns in a matted mass of coarse, animal-like hair above the semi-human face with its obliquely slitted eyes and fang-revealing mouth and beard of wild-boar bristles. The face was old—incomputably old, and its lines and wrinkles were those of unreckoned years of lust; and its look was filled with the slow, unceasing increment of all the malignity and corruption and cruelty of elder ages. It was the face of Pan, as he glared from his secret wood upon travelers taken unaware.
Adèle and Olivier were seized by a nightmare terror, as they recalled the old legends. The charm of their passionate obsession was broken, and the drug of desire relinquished its hold on their senses. Like people awakened from a heavy sleep, they saw the face, and heard through the tumult of their blood the cachinnation of a wild and evil and panic laughter as the apparition vanished among the boughs.
Shuddering, Adèle flung herself for the first time into the arms of her lover.
“Did you see it?” she whispered, as she clung to him. Olivier drew her close. In that delicious nearness, the horrible thing he had seen and heard became somehow improbable and unreal. There must have been a double sorcery abroad, to lull his horror thus; but he knew not whether the thing had been a momentary hallucination, a fantasy wrought by the sun amid the alder-leaves, or the demon that was fabled to dwell in Averoigne; and the startlement he had felt was somehow without meaning or reason. He could even thank the apparition, whatever it was, because it had thrown Adèle into his embrace. He could think of nothing now but the proximity of that warm, delectable mouth, for which he had hungered so long. He began to reassure her, to make light of her fears, to pretend that she could have seen nothing; and his reassurances merged into ardent protestations of love. He kissed her… and they both forgot the vision of the satyr….
They were lying on a patch of golden moss, where the sun-rays fell through a single cleft in the high foliage, when Raoul found them. They did not see or hear him; and their first intimation of his coming, as well as their last, was the rapier which he drove through Olivier’s body till it pierced the bosom of Adèle.
Adèle screamed and twisted in a brief agony, and the corpse of Olivier moved in a limp unison with her twisting. Raoul drew the rapier out and made sure of the woman with a second thrust. Then, with a vague feeling that he had avenged his honor in the proper fashion, and a sense of dull, unhappy confusion, of muddled and bleary wonder as to what it was all about, he stood looking down at his victims.
They were both very quiet now, as beseems a couple who have been slain in open adultery. And there was no movement, no sign of life, in the lonely forest where so few people ever came. Therefore, M. le Comte was startled beyond all measure when he heard the wild, malign, unhuman laughter, the mad and diabolical cachination which issued from the alder boughs.
He raised his bloody rapier, and peered at the boughs, but he could see nothing. The laughter ceased, and was not followed by any other sound. He crossed himself, and began hurriedly to retrace the path by which he had entered the wood.
THE PLANET OF THE DEAD
I
By profession, Francis Melchior was a dealer in antiques; by avocation, he was an astronomer. Thus he contrived to placate, if not to satisfy, two needs of a somewhat complex and unusual temperament. Through his occupation, he gratified in a measure his craving for all things that have been steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages, in the dusky amber flames of long-sunken suns; all things that have about them the irresoluble mystery of departed time. And through his avocation, he found a ready path to exotic realms in further space, to the only spheres where his fancy could dwell in freedom and his dreams could know contentment. For Melchior was one of those who are born with an immedicable distaste for all that is present or near at hand; one of those who have drunk too lightly of oblivion and have not wholly forgotten the transcendent glories of other aeons, and the worlds from which they were exiled into human birth; so that their furtive, restless thoughts and dim, unquenchable longings return obscurely toward the vanishing shores of a lost heritage. The earth is too narrow for such, and the compass of mortal time is too brief; and paucity and barrenness are everywhere; and in all places their lot is a never-ending weariness.