They came to the Haunted Wood and entered. In its dark green shadows, where all things trod softly, they dared not shout. They whispered their assertion that they had guessed his whereabouts. Only the little river answered, now mocking them secretly, now babbling hoarsely, alarmed that it would never get out. They began to tiptoe. Fear of the silence seized them. A branch cracked; they only just saved themselves from running. It seemed as though a magician had waved his wand, casting a spell; everything slept. Everything except the river—and at last, because its voice was solitary, it became terrible, like that of a dying man in a shuttered room, who muttered deliriously and tossed upon his bed.
The green stretch of grass, with the cowslips scattered over it, brought relief to their suspense. But, here again, there was no welcome. Bees hummed above the flowers, quite indifferent to their presence. The bee-hive cottage stood with door and windows wide, as though its inhabitants had been called away suddenly and would never return. Beneath the smiling of the summer stillness lay the threat that something evil had happened. Even Canute had vanished.
They stole round the house and at last crossed the threshold. Everything was as they remembered it, even to the mandolin lying across the chair. They listened. Voices! Yes, certainly. Then laughter, clear and pleasant; it broke off in the middle, as if someone paused for breath. It came from the Faun Man’s room overhead, which Harry had never invited them to enter. Hand-in-hand they’ climbed the stairs—steep and narrow stairs, which ended abruptly in a white door. They tapped. A man answered. Peter raised the latch.
The ceiling sloped down from the centre, giving to the room the appearance of a tent. There were two lattice-windows, on opposite sides, which opened outward on to the thatch. Against one of them stood a desk, littered with papers, from which a rush-bottomed chair had been pushed back. A pen, lying on a sheet of partly written foolscap, had rolled across it, leaving blots, as if the writer had put it down and turned hastily at the sound of someone’s entrance. In one corner of the room there was a high-peaked saddle and on the walls a strange collection of memories and travel—a study of a girl’s head by Rossetti, old Indian muskets used in frontier warfares, a pair of sabres, a college oar with the names of the crew gilded on it, and everywhere the faces of women. Among them one face occurred often—Peter had noticed its frequence on the walls downstairs. And now he saw the living woman before him.
She was dressed in white, lying on a rose-colored couch, stretched out carelessly full-length, with her small feet crossed. Her age might have been anywhere from twenty upward. It didn’t matter—one forgot years and only thought of youth in looking at her. Was not Helen past mid-life when two continents went to war for her beauty? Somehow she reminded one of Helen—was it the way in which experience mixed with artlessness in her expression? The mind went back. Dr. Faustus might have addressed his sonorous lines to her:
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies:
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.