VI
THE GROVE OF ASHTAROTH
"C'est enfin que dans leurs prunelles Rit et pleure-fastidieux-- L'amour des choses eternelles Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!" --PAUL VERLAINE.
We were sitting around the camp fire, some thirty miles north of aplace called Taqui, when Lawson announced his intention of finding ahome. He had spoken little the last day or two, and I had guessed thathe had struck a vein of private reflection. I thought it might be anew mine or irrigation scheme, and I was surprised to find that it wasa country house.
"I don't think I shall go back to England," he said, kicking asputtering log into place. "I don't see why I should. For businesspurposes I am far more useful to the firm in South Africa than inThrogmorton Street. I have no relation left except a third cousin, andI have never cared a rush for living in town. That beastly house ofmine in Hill Street will fetch what I gave for it,--Isaacson cabledabout it the other day, offering for furniture and all. I don't wantto go into Parliament, and I hate shooting little birds and tame deer.I am one of those fellows who are born Colonial at heart, and I don'tsee why I shouldn't arrange my life as I please. Besides, for tenyears I have been falling in love with this country, and now I am up tothe neck."
He flung himself back in the camp-chair till the canvas creaked, andlooked at me below his eyelids. I remember glancing at the lines ofhim, and thinking what a fine make of a man he was. In his untannedfield-boots, breeches, and grey shirt, he looked the born wildernesshunter, though less than two months before he had been driving down tothe City every morning in the sombre regimentals of his class. Being afair man, he was gloriously tanned, and there was a clear line at hisshirt-collar to mark the limits of his sunburn. I had first known himyears ago, when he was a broker's clerk working on half-commission.Then he had gone to South Africa, and soon I heard he was a partner ina mining house which was doing wonders with some gold areas in theNorth. The next step was his return to London as the newmillionaire,--young, good-looking, wholesome in mind and body, and muchsought after by the mothers of marriageable girls. We played polotogether, and hunted a little in the season, but there were signs thathe did not propose to become the conventional English gentleman. Herefused to buy a place in the country, though half the Homes of Englandwere at his disposal. He was a very busy man, he declared, and had nottime to be a squire. Besides, every few months he used to rush out toSouth Africa. I saw that he was restless, for he was always badgeringme to go big-game hunting with him in some remote part of the earth.There was that in his eyes, too, which marked him out from the ordinaryblond type of our countrymen. They were large and brown andmysterious, and the light of another race was in their odd depths.
To hint such a thing would have meant a breach of friendship, forLawson was very proud of his birth. When he first made his fortune hehad gone to the Heralds to discover his family, and these obliginggentlemen had provided a pedigree. It appeared that he was a scion ofthe house of Lowson or Lowieson, an ancient and rather disreputableclan on the Scottish side of the Border. He took a shooting inTeviotdale on the strength of it, and used to commit lengthy Borderballads to memory. But I had known his father, a financial journalistwho never quite succeeded, and I had heard of a grandfather who soldantiques in a back street at Brighton. The latter, I think, had notchanged his name, and still frequented the synagogue. The father was aprogressive Christian, and the mother had been a blonde Saxon from theMidlands. In my mind there was no doubt, as I caught Lawson'sheavy-lidded eyes fixed on me. My friend was of a more ancient racethan the Lowsons of the Border.
"Where are you thinking of looking for your house?" I asked. "In Natalor in the Cape Peninsula? You might get the Fishers' place if you paida price."
"The Fishers' place be hanged!" he said crossly. "I don't want anystuccoed, over-grown Dutch farm. I might as well be at Roehampton asin the Cape."
He got up and walked to the far side of the fire, where a lane ran downthrough the thornscrub to a gully of the hills. The moon was silveringthe bush of the plains, forty miles off and three thousand feet belowus.
"I am going to live somewhere hereabouts," he answered at last. Iwhistled. "Then you've got to put your hand in your pocket, old man.You'll have to make everything, including a map of the countryside."
"I know," he said; "that's where the fun comes in. Hang it all, whyshouldn't I indulge my fancy? I'm uncommonly well off, and I haven'tchick or child to leave it to. Supposing I'm a hundred miles fromrail-head, what about it? I'll make a motor-road and fix up atelephone. I'll grow most of my supplies, and start a colony toprovide labour. When you come and stay with me, you'll get the bestfood and drink on earth, and sport that will make your mouth water.I'll put Lochleven trout in these streams,--at 6,000 feet you can doanything. We'll have a pack of hounds, too, and we can drive pig inthe woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at ourfeet. I tell you I'll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamedof. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns androse-gardens." Lawson flung himself into his chair again and smileddreamily at the fire.
"But why here, of all places?" I persisted. I was not feeling verywell and did not care for the country.
"I can't quite explain. I think it's the sort of land I have alwaysbeen looking for. I always fancied a house on a green plateau in adecent climate looking down on the tropics. I like heat and colour,you know, but I like hills too, and greenery, and the things that bringback Scotland. Give me a cross between Teviotdale and the Orinoco,and, by Gad! I think I've got it here."
I watched my friend curiously, as with bright eyes and eager voice hetalked of his new fad. The two races were very clear in him--the onedesiring gorgeousness, the other athirst for the soothing spaces of theNorth. He began to plan out the house. He would get Adamson to designit, and it was to grow out of the landscape like a stone on thehillside. There would be wide verandahs and cool halls, but greatfireplaces against winter time. It would all be very simple andfresh--"clean as morning" was his odd phrase; but then another ideasupervened, and he talked of bringing the Tintorets from Hill Street."I want it to be a civilised house, you know. No silly luxury, but thebest pictures and china and books. I'll have all the furniture madeafter the old plain English models out of native woods. I don't wantsecond-hand sticks in a new country. Yes, by Jove, the Tintorets are agreat idea, and all those Ming pots I bought. I had meant to sellthem, but I'll have them out here."
He talked for a good hour of what he would do, and his dream grewricher as he talked, till by the time we went to bed he had sketchedsomething more like a palace than a country-house. Lawson was by nomeans a luxurious man. At present he was well content with a Wolseleyvalise, and shaved cheerfully out of a tin mug. It struck me as oddthat a man so simple in his habits should have so sumptuous a taste inbric-a-brac. I told myself, as I turned in, that the Saxon mother fromthe Midlands had done little to dilute the strong wine of the East.
It drizzled next morning when we inspanned, and I mounted my horse in abad temper. I had some fever on me, I think, and I hated this lush yetfrigid tableland, where all the winds on earth lay in wait for one'smarrow. Lawson was, as usual, in great spirits. We were not hunting,but shifting our hunting-ground, so all morning we travelled fast tothe north along the rim of the uplands.
At midday it cleared, and the afternoon was a pageant of pure colour.The wind sank to a low breeze; the sun lit the infinite green spaces,and kindled the wet forest to a jewelled coronal. Lawson gaspinglyadmired it all, as he cantered bareheaded up a bracken-clad slope."God's country," he said twenty times. "I've found it." Take a pieceof Sussex downland; put a stream in every hollow and a patch of wood;and at the edge, where the cliffs at home would fall to the sea, put acloak of forest muffling the scarp and dropping thousands of feet tothe blue plains. Take the diamond air of the Gornergrat, and the riotof colour which you get by a West Highland lochside in late September.Put flowers every
where, the things we grow in hothouses, geraniums likesun-shades and arums like trumpets. That will give you a notion of thecountryside we were in. I began to see that after all it was out ofthe common.
And just before sunset we came over a ridge and found something better.It was a shallow glen, half a mile wide, down which ran a blue-greystream in lings like the Spean, till at the edge of the plateau itleaped into the dim forest in a snowy cascade. The opposite side ranup in gentle slopes to a rocky knell, from which the eye had a nobleprospect of the plains. All down the glen were little copses, halfmoons of green edging some silvery shore of the burn, or delicateclusters of tall trees nodding on the hill brow. The place sosatisfied the eye that for the sheer wonder of its perfection westopped and stared in silence for many minutes.
Then "The House," I said, and Lawson replied softly, "The House!"
We rode slowly into the glen in the mulberry gloaming. Our transportwaggons were half an hour behind, so we had time to explore. Lawsondismounted and plucked handfuls of flowers from the water meadows. Hewas singing to himself all the time--an old French catch about CadetRousselle and his Trois maisons.
"Who owns it?" I asked.
"My firm, as like as not. We have miles of land about here. Butwhoever the man is, he has got to sell. Here I build my tabernacle,old man. Here, and nowhere else!"
In the very centre of the glen, in a loop of the stream, was one copsewhich even in that half light struck me as different from the others.It was of tall, slim, fairy-like trees, the kind of wood the monkspainted in old missals. No, I rejected the thought. It was noChristian wood. It was not a copse, but a "grove,"--one such asArtemis may have flitted through in the moonlight. It was small, fortyor fifty yards in diameter, and there was a dark something at the heartof it which for a second I thought was a house.
We turned between the slender trees, and--was it fancy?--an odd tremorwent through me. I felt as if I were penetrating the temenos of somestrange and lovely divinity, the goddess of this pleasant vale. Therewas a spell in the air, it seemed, and an odd dead silence.
Suddenly my horse started at a flutter of light wings. A flock ofdoves rose from the branches, and I saw the burnished green of theirplumes against the opal sky. Lawson did not seem to notice them. Isaw his keen eyes staring at the centre of the grove and what stoodthere.
It was a little conical tower, ancient and lichened, but, so far as Icould judge, quite flawless. You know the famous Conical Temple atZimbabwe, of which prints are in every guidebook. This was of the sametype, but a thousandfold more perfect. It stood about thirty feethigh, of solid masonry, without door or window or cranny, as shapely aswhen it first came from the hands of the old builders. Again I had thesense of breaking in on a sanctuary. What right had I, a common vulgarmodern, to be looking at this fair thing, among these delicate trees,which some white goddess had once taken for her shrine?
Lawson broke in on my absorption. "Let's get out of this," he saidhoarsely and he took my horse's bridle (he had left his own beast atthe edge) and led him back to the open. But I noticed that his eyeswere always turning back and that his hand trembled.
"That settles it," I said after supper. "What do you want with yourmediaeval Venetians and your Chinese pots now? You will have thefinest antique in the world in your garden--a temple as old as time,and in a land which they say has no history. You had the rightinspiration this time."
I think I have said that Lawson had hungry eyes. In his enthusiasmthey used to glow and brighten; but now, as he sat looking down at theolive shades of the glen, they seemed ravenous in their fire. He hadhardly spoken a word since we left the wood.
"Where can I read about these things?" he asked, and I gave him thenames of books. Then, an hour later, he asked me who were thebuilders. I told him the little I knew about Phoenician and Sabaenwanderings, and the ritual of Sidon and Tyre. He repeated some namesto himself and went soon to bed.
As I turned in, I had one last look over the glen, which lay ivory andblack in the moon. I seemed to hear a faint echo of wings, and to seeover the little grove a cloud of light visitants. "The Doves ofAshtaroth have come back," I said to myself. "It is a good omen.They accept the new tenant." But as I fell asleep I had a suddenthought that I was saying something rather terrible.