The club of masks

by Allen Upward

Nothing could have suited better with my plans. I knew the path, and knew that at a certain point another diverged from it and led through a well-remembered wood to the barn where I had asked Violet Bredwardine to meet me.

I passed out into the Castle grounds and clambered over the crumbling walls and fallen stones till I found myself on the path. And now every step became tragical. I was treading on the ashes of the fire in which two hearts had been scorched and branded with a mark that could never be effaced. The grass beside the narrow footway seemed to be stained with blood. I drew my breath in pain as I mounted the slope towards the lonely little farm-house in which I had passed the most glorious and the most miserable hours of my life. When I came to the gate into the wood, I stopped and leant upon it panting, and hardly able to proceed.

The wood was haunted by ghosts more dreadful to me than any spirits of the dead; the ghosts of passion and of pain, the ghosts of love and hatred, of that most terrible of all hatred which is born of love betrayed.

I shuddered as I thrust open the gate and stepped beneath the trees. A sombre fir drooped like a weeping willow over one spot where the way was crossed by a trickling spring that plunged and disappeared down a steep gully choked with brambles and dark ferns. But there was a worse point than that to pass. A tall beech sent out its roots on to the path, and on the smooth rind of its trunk were cut two initial letters entwined—a V and B. The very knife that had scored them there lay in my pocket; I had never parted with it. What madness had tempted me to blazon our secret to the inquisitive country-side? I had used one precaution: I had cut the proclamation of our love on the side of the trunk that was hidden from the public way. Now, when I reached the tree, I forced a passage through the undergrowth to see how time and weather had dealt with that vain memorial. A bitter shock awaited me. Every vestige of the monogram had been destroyed by deep cuts and slashes in the bark. Only a confused web of scars and scratches marked the place. The tree’s wounds seemed to reproduce the wounds upon two hearts.

My head drooped as I dragged myself up the rest of the ascent, and came out of the wood on the open hillside. The view was exquisite. The hills of three fair counties stretched away to the horizon, and at their feet the silver Wye clasped the rich cornfields and pastures in its shining arms. But the whole prospect was darkened over for my eyes by an invisible cloud. I turned to the spot where, scarcely a hundred yards away, there rose out of the bracken the high gray walls of the forsaken barn.

Its desolation seemed symbolical. When it was built centuries ago the surrounding land had borne crops worth harvesting instead of the thin grass and waste of bracken that now surrounded it on all sides. Tradition spoke of a time not remote when the hill swarmed with folk engaged in tilling the hard soil. Their ruined cottages still lined the lanes that crept along the crest, and peeped out of the sheltered nooks. The virgin prairies of the New World had tempted some of them away; others had migrated to the mining valleys whose smoke could almost be seen from where I stood.

So the gray ancient barn stood empty, its wooden doors dangling helpless from their rusty staples, and the wind whistling through the narrow slits that showed like the arrow holes of a Norman keep. I made my way across the standing bracken that rose up to my shoulders, and gained the open doorway. But there was no one within. A solitary sheep started up from the litter of chaff that strewed the floor, and bounded out through an opening in the opposite wall, leaving me alone.

And now I began to repent that I had named as the meeting-place the spot where we had parted in such misery those three years ago. I turned with a pang from the scene, and advanced slowly towards the brow of the hill. Just below the crest, seated on a moss-covered stone beside a spring, I found her.

Violet Bredwardine rose and stood where she was, more like a statue than a living woman. Her light ringlets, breaking from beneath a quaint straw helmet, surrounded her face like a halo, and made it seem more than ever like the face of the child angel she had seemed to me when I saw her first. Even then there had been a wistful look in her innocent blue eyes, as though the child angel had lost her way in this troubled earth of ours, and was seeking pitifully for some escape. And I dreamt—in my madness I had dreamt—that I could offer her the help she needed, and change the sadness of her life into joy.

I strode towards her, all the old, passionate impulses of the past flooding my heart like wine, and cried, “Violet!”