“‘If you take my advice, sir,’ the landlord said, ‘you will avoid the wood of Garvois after dark.’ ‘And why, pray?’ I asked. ‘Because, sir,’ he responded, ‘because it bears an evil reputation.’
“‘An evil reputation!’ I laughed. ‘Ma foi! it must bear a very evil reputation, a positively devilish reputation, to frighten an old soldier like me. Why, man alive, I have served in the French Army in the wildest regions of Algiers for years. A wood with an evil reputation, mille tonnerres,—that’s a joke I shan’t forget in a hurry.’ Then seeing him look glum, I remarked, for I had no wish to hurt his feelings, ‘I can appreciate your intended kindness, but you see I have been away from home for ten years—ten whole years, and I am dying to see my father. He is the only relative I have—therefore you can gather that I want to go by the quickest route, and the road through the wood, if I remember rightly, is twice as short as that by the plain. Is it not so?’
“The landlord shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the road over the plain is longer—certainly it is longer—and if you go by it you won’t arrive at your father’s house till morning, but, monsieur, if you go by the wood you may never reach home at all.’
“‘I will risk it,’ I laughed; ‘there can only be robbers or wolves, and I am prepared for either. I have these!’ And I tapped the ends of two six-shooters. ‘At all events, if anything happens, I will haunt the wood, and you may come and see me. Au revoir!’ I waved my hand as I spoke, and putting my pack in the proper place on my back, I stepped airily on to the broad, brown track leading to Garvois.
“Within an hour of my departure, the weather, which had been abominably cloudy for the time of the year, took a sudden turn for the worse, and the rain descended in torrents. I chuckled grimly, Mr. O’Donnell, for what after all are the discomforts of sodden clothes and squishy boots compared with what a soldier has to undergo in Africa—in the Sahara, where the sun is hell and the insects—devils. Rain, Mon Dieu! What’s rain! On and on I tramped, whistling gaily and running my hand over my pack now and again to see that everything was safe. I had a present there for my father, whom I loved more than anyone else in the world. ‘You see,’ he added with a smile, ‘I hadn’t met Jacqueline then.’
“Well, so long as I kept to the main track there was not much to complain about—it had recently been attended to, but the moment I turned off it, and on to the side one leading to the wood, my troubles began. Deep ruts, big holes, huge earth mounds, and sharp-edged stones made it bad enough in dry weather; it was now a quagmire—a quagmire that afforded every possibility of soon becoming dangerous.
“I had seen nothing like it since I was in Algiers, but, bah! a soldier can get used to anything. ‘It is a mere nothing,’ I said to myself. ‘I can dive, I can swim; it will take more than cold water to kill me; and if it were twenty times as bad I would face it.’ Ten years is a long time to be away from one’s home, Mr. O’Donnell. I trudged on, and was soon ankle-deep in black mud. At eight o’clock I was confronted by a long line of huge, black trees, that bent their dripping tops as if they had orders to salute me. Coming to a halt, and leaning against a slender, isolated pine, that creaked and groaned in the rough night air, I ruefully surveyed the prospect in front of me. The track through the wood was twelve miles—nothing of a walk if I had been fresh and the weather dry, but in my present condition a seemingly impossible one. For the last hour or so I had experienced nothing but a recurrence of slips and falls, I had done nothing but plunge in and out of abysses, and I had been completely battered to pieces by the wind. And the rain! I can stand any amount of heat, Mr. O’Donnell, but wet, no, it gets into every pore of my skin and completely demoralises me. I was exhausted, almost at the end of my tether, and I felt a very little more would see me on the ground, absolutely done. Now, of course, I am used to sleeping out of doors all night; but, then, Canada is not France, neither is it Africa, and the warmth and dryness of the Sahara had made me terribly susceptible to chills. A night in this wood would mean for certain either pneumonia or rheumatic fever—and I might never get home to see my father. So what alternative was there? Only to tramp back again over that dreadful track, and take the long route over the plains. I couldn’t do it; I hadn’t the strength. I would struggle on. I did so—I took the plunge. The desert, with the lights twinkling far away on its extremities, was speedily hidden from view; trees shut me in on all sides; I was at last in the forest. I had never known what it was to be nervous, but the silence I now experienced disquieted me. I had never felt anything like it. It struck me as an assumed silence—assumed purposely to cloak a deep-rooted and universal resentment. Moreover, I had an uncomfortable suspicion that it was the prelude to something hostile—to some peculiar antagonistic demonstration, the very nature of which was at present enigmatical. It was a silence savouring of a world other than ours—of a world I knew nothing about—indeed, at that period of my life I was an atheist, and neither believed in a God or a future existence. The rain pattered heavily on the foliage overhead, and the wind groaned, but the voices—the voices of the beings in this Unknown World—were still, absolutely still. In the gloom the trees assumed strange shapes; their motions, too, were strange—so strange that I did not think they could possibly have been caused by the wind. You may think I am hyper-imaginative, Mr. O’Donnell, but I do not think I am; my wife would tell me if I were, for she has never been slow in pointing out my faults, have you, Jacqueline?”
Mrs. Armand smiled. “No, Mr. O’Donnell,” she said, “he has many faults, but exaggeration is not one of them; indeed, he is so precise as to be sometimes dull.”
Mr. Armand continued: “I saw lights, too, Mr. O’Donnell,” he said; “all kinds of coloured lights, which I did not then attribute to possible spirit agency. I simply did not know what they were. I was not afraid, but I became wary, and moved furtively forward, as if I had been scouting in some enemy’s country. Every now and then I fancied I heard soft steps that I could associate with nothing human, stealing surreptitiously behind me. I paused and looked carefully over my shoulder, but there was nothing visible—only the gloom. At length the darkness became so intense that I could no longer see the track. I continued to advance, however, and after plunging through a succession of bogs and briars was finally brought to a peremptory halt by a stone wall. This wall was four feet or so in height, but what lay on the other side of it, or where indeed it began or ended, it was impossible to decide, and I was wondering what on earth I had better do next—for my energy was nearly spent—when a voice suddenly called out, ‘Keep along by the wall and I will meet you at the wicket gate!’ Overjoyed, I obeyed. The wall swerved sharply round, and a few yards beyond, with one hand on the gate and in the other a dark lantern, stood the slight, muffled-up figure of a woman. In a few words I explained the situation—how in the blinding rain and darkness of the forest I had lost my way, and was too exhausted to go any further. ‘I don’t mind sleeping anywhere,’ I pleaded, ‘so long as I can lie where it is dry and rest till morning. An attic, barn, anything will do.’
“‘I think I can offer you something better than that,’ the woman responded, as she led me through the gate and along a narrow winding path to a large, low, rakish-looking house, whose black walls, rising suddenly out of the ground before me, seemed startlingly familiar. My guide halted—a key turned, a door flew open—there was a rush of strange, musty air, and almost before I had time to realise it, I was inside the building. ‘I must apologise for the absence of light,’ the woman said, ‘but under the circumstances the omission is unavoidable. If we had been expecting you, it would, of course, have been different. If you will follow me, I will take you to your room.’ I tried to see her face, to make out what she was like, but I was frustrated in my desire by the way in which she held the lantern. Nor was I any more fortunate in the discernment of my surroundings; I could see the ground at my feet, but no more; all—everything—was shrouded in an impenetrable, sable mantle. The curious feeling that I had been there before, that I knew the house well, again came over me, although prior to now I had never seen any habitation in the wood, nor even known that one existed. I argued it was probably a scent—some peculiar odour in the atmosphere that had conjured back memories of some other and quite distinct place; but I had not much time for speculation, as the woman’s movements were very quick, and I had barely scraped the thickest of the mud from off my feet before she had begun to ascend a luxuriously-carpetted staircase. We crossed what I took to be a landing, and stepped some score or so paces down a corridor, finally halting before a half-open doorway.