sun still comparatively low in thesky; as if he were looking over a land of eternal sunrise.
"Silent upon a peak in Darien," he remarked, in a needlessly loud andcheerful voice; and though the claim, thus expressed, was illogical, itwas not inappropriate. He did feel as if he were a primitive adventurerjust come to the New World, instead of a modern traveler just come fromit.
"I wonder," he proceeded, "whether I am really the first that ever burstinto this silent tree. It looks like it. Those--"
He stopped and sat on his branch quite motionless, but his eyes wereturned on a branch a little below it, and they were brilliant with avigilance, like those of a man watching a snake.
What he was looking at might, at first sight, have been a large whitefungus spreading on the smooth and monstrous trunk; but it was not.
Leaning down dangerously from his perch, he detached it from the twig onwhich it had caught, and then sat holding it in his hand and gazing atit. It was Squire Vane's white Panama hat, but there was no Squire Vaneunder it. Paynter felt a nameless relief in the very fact that there wasnot.
There in the clear sunlight and sea air, for an instant, all thetropical terrors of his own idle tale surrounded and suffocated him. Itseemed indeed some demon tree of the swamps; a vegetable serpent thatfed on men. Even the hideous farce in the fancy of digesting a whole manwith the exception of his hat, seemed only to simplify the nightmare.And he found himself gazing dully at one leaf of the tree, whichhappened to be turned toward him, so that the odd markings, whichhad partly made the legend, really looked a little like the eye in apeacock's feather. It was as if the sleeping tree had opened one eyeupon him.
With a sharp effort he steadied himself in mind and posture on thebough; his reason returned, and he began to descend with the hat in histeeth. When he was back in the underworld of the wood, he studied thehat again and with closer attention. In one place in the crown there wasa hole or rent, which certainly had not been there when it had last lainon the table under the garden tree. He sat down, lit a cigarette, andreflected for a long time.
A wood, even a small wood, is not an easy thing to search minutely;but he provided himself with some practical tests in the matter. In onesense the very density of the thicket was a help; he could at least seewhere anyone had strayed from the path, by broken and trampled growthsof every kind. After many hours' industry, he had made a sort of new mapof the place; and had decided beyond doubt that some person or personshad so strayed, for some purpose, in several defined directions. Therewas a way burst through the bushes, making a short cut across a loopof the wandering path; there was another forking out from it as analternative way into the central space. But there was one especiallywhich was unique, and which seemed to him, the more he studied it, topoint to some essential of the mystery.
One of these beaten and broken tracks went from the space under thepeacock trees outward into the wood for about twenty yards and thenstopped. Beyond that point not a twig was broken nor a leaf disturbed.It had no exit, but he could not believe that it had no goal. After somefurther reflection, he knelt down and began to cut away grass and claywith his knife, and was surprised at the ease with which they detachedthemselves. In a few moments a whole section of the soil lifted like alid; it was a round lid and presented a quaint appearance, like a flatcap with green feathers. For though the disc itself was made of wood,there was a layer of earth on it with the live grass still growingthere. And the removal of the round lid revealed a round hole, black asnight and seemingly bottomless. Paynter understood it instantly. It wasrather near the sea for a well to be sunk, but the traveler had knownwells sunk even nearer. He rose to his feet with the great knife in hishand, a frown on his face, and his doubts resolved. He no longer shrankfrom naming what he knew. This was not the first corpse that had beenthrown down a well; here, without stone or epitaph, was the grave ofSquire Vane. In a flash all the mythological follies about saints andpeacocks were forgotten; he was knocked on the head, as with a stoneclub, by the human common sense of crime.
Cyprian Paynter stood long by the well in the wood, walked round it inmeditation, examined its rim and the ring of grass about it, searchedthe surrounding soil thoroughly, came back and stood beside the wellonce more. His researches and reflections had been so long that he hadnot realized that the day had passed and that the wood and the worldround it were beginning already to be steeped in the enrichment ofevening. The day had been radiantly calm; the sea seemed to be as stillas the well, and the well was as still as a mirror. And then, quitewithout warning, the mirror moved of itself like a living thing.
In the well, in the wood, the water leapt and gurgled, with a grotesquenoise like something swallowing, and then settled again with a secondsound. Cyprian could not see into the well clearly, for the opening,from where he stood, was an ellipse, a mere slit, and half masked bythistles and rank grass like a green beard. For where he stood now wasthree yards away from the well, and he had not yet himself realizedthat he had sprung back all that distance from the brink when the waterspoke.