VI
THE BLUEBELL WOOD AND THE CALM
STONE DOG
Man is an autobiographical animal, he speaks only from his thimbleful of human experience, and the I, I, I, of his talk drops out like an insistent drip of water. Even the knowledge we gain from books has to be grafted on to the knowledge we have of life before it bears fruit in our minds. Like patient clerks we are always adding up the columns of facts, fancies, and ideas, and arriving at the very tiny total at the end of the day.
In order to give themselves scope when they wish to soliloquise, many authors address their conversation to a cat, a grandfather clock, a dog, a picture on the wall, or what-not. Cats, I think, have the preference. I have often wondered what Crome, the painter, said to his cat when he pulled hairs out of her to make paint-brushes; or what Doctor Johnson said to his cat Hodge, about Boswell. Having explained this much, I may easily be forgiven for repeating the conversation I had with a Stone Dog who sat on his haunches outside the door of a woodman’s cottage.
The cottage stood on the edge of a wood, and was, as I shall point out, a remnant of departed glory, of which the dog was the most pertinent reminder.
A cottage on the borders of a wood is in itself one of the most valuable pictures for a romance. A woodcutter may be in league with goodness knows how many fairies, elves, and witches. It is a place where heroes meet heroines; where kings in disguise eat humble pie; where dukes, lost in hunting a white stag, meet enchanted princesses.
The wood, of which I speak, was once, years ago—about three hundred years—part of the park of Tanglewood Court, an extensive property, an old house, a great family possession.
Gone, like last winter’s snow, were the family of Bois; gone the pack; gone the glories of the great family; gone the portraits, the armour, the very windows of Tanglewood Court, of which but a fine ruin remained. And the lane, a mere cart track, was all that was left of the fine sweep of drive to the house; and a tangled undergrowth under ancient trees all that stood for the grand avenue down which my Lord Bois had once ridden so madly. They call the lane Purgatory Lane, and they tell a story of wild doings and of a beautiful avenue, that cannot have its place here.
The great gates that once swung open to admit the carriage of Perpetua Bois (of the red hair, the full voluptuous figure, the smile Sir Peter Lely painted) were now two stone stumps at the feet of which two slots, green and worn, showed where the hinges had been. These fine gates once boasted, on the top of stone pillars, the greyhounds of Bois in stone. One of these dogs had been rescued from the undergrowth by the woodcutter, the other lies broken and bramble-covered in the wood. I wonder if they miss each other.
So you see I was addressing myself to a high-born Jacobean dog.
This dog, very calm and dignified, with a stone tail and a back worn smooth by wind and weather, sat with his back to the cottage which had been built out of the remains of the old stone lodge by a gentleman of the name of Bellington, who was afterwards found drowned in the lake. That lake held many secrets, indeed, some said (the woodcutter’s wife told me this) it held Lady Perpetua’s jewels. That did not concern me, for it held for me the finer jewels of Water Lilies that grew there in profusion, though I will not deny that the idea of Lady Perpetua gave an added touch of romance. How often had the clear water of the lake reflected her satin-clad figure and the forms of her little toy spaniels?