He said, “There’s a house here.” He called aloud in Spanish, “Is anybody there? I am a friend. Is anybody there?” In front of him he could see this thicket, which smelled so sweet, all starred either with blossoms or with fruits. He knew from the look and feel of the place that it had been made by good people and was good, and that the people were there, watching him, to see what he would do.
“I am not armed,” he said. “I am an English sailor going to the coast. Don’t turn your dogs at me, but let me have shelter.”
Nobody answered, but he felt quite certain that the thicket was full of people looking at him.
He said, “Don’t shoot. You see I put my hands up. I am alone.”
He went forward to the thicket and there saw that there was no one, only a profusion of creeping flowers that looked at him like eyes, out of the darkness of the hedge. It must have been years since anybody had lived there. The hedge, which had been planted, had gone back to jungle. He walked round it till he came to what had been the gate. There he could see within a little ruined chapel with one bell. As he came through the gateway in the first of the dusk, a bird, perhaps an owl, which had been perched beneath the bell, flew out with a cry. Her wings struck the bell, which jangled a little. It was exactly as though Sard had rung the door-bell. He drew his breath and stood still in the court, wondering who would answer the bell.
It was still not more than twilight, but birds were stirring in the scrub, and colours could be seen. Some blue birds with orange breasts came wavering down among the bushes, tore a few petals apart, from wantonness, and flew on, talking to each other.
Sard stepped across the courtyard and looked in at the deserted chapel’s western door. It must have been built very soon after the Conquest. It had been deserted for perhaps half a century, which in that dry climate had not been enough to destroy it. The roof had gone, except over the altar. From the wall-plate of the falling roof great strings of flowers hung. Many flowers and grasses had sprouted among the stones. Just over the altar a bough had thrust through the wall, and had blossomed there with a white clustered blossom which smelled sweeter than honeycomb. The wall above the altar had once been painted in fresco. Most of the paintings were now gone, but Sard saw, as it were, the heads of men, eagerly looking upward. To right and to left of the door within the enclosure there were marks in the earth which showed where the mission huts had once stood. But monks, converts, mission, and the very memory of their dealings were utterly gone. Sard might well have been the first man to have stood there, since the mission ended. It ended in pestilence, he thought; nobody was left alive here for the mission to save. He judged that the pestilence which had destroyed the mission might still be there, in the air, the earth, the water. Yet the place seemed good, it was unvisited, it seemed sheltered, and there were no scorpions nor snakes.
He lay down in the shelter of the altar, and instantly fell asleep. He had not slept long before he became aware that somebody was calling him by name from infinitely far away, in a voice which was familiar and yet strange. The voice called, “Harker! Sard Harker! Sard!” from a distance so great that it seemed like another continent. He knew, in his sleep, that the voice wanted him to wake. He woke and sat up and found it still twilight there in the chapel, with the stars not yet gone from the hole in the roof. No one was calling, the blue birds were back again, tearing the blossoms, no call had disturbed them. He thought, “I wonder whose voice that was. I seem to know the voice”; and while he wondered, he fell asleep.
In his sleep he saw the owner of the voice, a boy called Peter Maxwell, who had been dead eleven years. He saw Peter, not as he had ever known him, but eager, like the faces in the fresco. He knew that Peter had some message for him, yet could not say it, having no longer any human tongue or any use for human thought. He saw Peter leaning out of the altar wall from the place where the branch was blossoming. Peter was stretching out his right hand to him, but what he wanted he could not tell. He cried out, “Peter, old man, is that you?” and in his gladness at seeing Peter so near, he woke up and saw the blossoming branch shaking, as though someone had brushed it by. It was daylight but not sunlight as he rose up. No one was there, no one had been there; the birds were still tearing the blossoms, uttering little cries. No man could have been within a mile of them, probably no human being was within ten miles, and yet he expected to see Peter Maxwell.
“Peter,” he said, “Peter.”