The revelers melted into the night down the shuttered street, leaving Mr. Grace with the disregarded hat of money, the dead horse sprawled across the broken shafts and a gentleman, from whose hand a pair of white spats dangled, contemplating the ruin disconsolately.
CHAPTER XLI—TREE-TOPS
Tree-Tops stood half-way up the hill, looking out across a terraced garden. At the foot of the hill lay a plain, where hamlets nestled beneath the wings of trees, and meadows washed about the shores of yellow wheat-lands like green rivers in flood. In blue pastures, beyond the edge of the horizon, white clouds wandered like browsing sheep.
The windows of Tree-Tops were latticed. The roof was thatched. It was no more than a converted cottage. It blinked at you as though it wore spectacles.
Behind it ran a Roman road, buried deep in the leaves of centuries. On the brow of the hill was a legionaries’ camp. To show where the road ended a white cross had been cut, by turning back the sod from the underlying chalk. Gathered about the camp in a half-circle, spreading back for miles through uplands, was a beech-forest whose leaves fluttered like green butterflies crucified on boughs of silver. Clouds trailed slowly over it, or hung snared in its topmost branches.
Over the shoulder of the hill, immediately behind the Faun Man’s house, lay a golf-course with vivid squares of close-cropped turf from which red flags waved angrily as poppies. Across the valley shone fields of mustard, like sunlight falling in sudden patches.
The Faun Man puzzled Curious Corner. The village might have been named in prophecy of his advent, with such extraordinary oddness did he conduct his household. Like birds hopping in and out of a hedge, his visitors came and went without knocking. Nobody tried to explain anybody; no one at Tree-Tops thought explanation necessary.