CHAPTER VI

THE BUSH-BEATING

In all the bleak country “the wood” represented mystery, glamour.  It made a dark wedge between two folds of moorland, its tree-tops level with the piled boulders on the northern side, like a deeply green tarn lapping the edge of some rocky shore.  Oak, beech and ash, hawthorn, sycamore and elder, went to make the solid bosses of verdure that filled the valley, while at one end a grove of furs stood up blackly, winter and summer.  Giant laurels, twisted and writhing creations of a nightmare, spread their snake-like branches beneath the rocky wall at one side of the wood, and in spring they shook their pale, sickly tassels in a gloom that was as green, as freckled with shallows of light, as underseas.  A stream gurgled through its depths, increasing the illusion of a watery element.  All over the sloping floor of the wood, where the red leaves drifted high in due season, huge boulders were piled, moss-grown, lividly decked with orange fungi, and surrounded by a thick undergrowth of holly and elder bushes.  This place had no name beyond “the wood”—­enough distinction in that county where a copse of ash or fir was all that scarred moor and pasture with shadow.  It was just within Ishmael’s property, marking his most inland boundary, and he cherished it as something dearer than all his money-yielding acres.  It had been his ambition to make it the home of every bird that built its nest there, of every badger or rabbit or toad or slow-worm that sheltered in its fastnesses.  No life should cry there for the teeth of the trap, no feathers scatter for the brutal violating of the sheltering bushes.  Thus Ishmael, but otherwise Archelaus....  There was little doubt what he and his fellows had come for:  there were a half-dozen of them when all were met, and all carried cudgels or flails made of knotted cloth, and walked cautiously, whispering to each other lest the birds should take premature flight.  Ishmael and Killigrew lagged behind them, waiting for certainty before discovering themselves.

It was deadlily dark in the wood, with a darkness more unbroken than the stillness which yet seemed part of it.  A thousand little scraping noises broke the quiet air, chill and dank.  Leaves pattered against each other, twigs rubbed faintly, brittle things broke under the lightest foot.  Still hardly a wing unfolded ever so little, not a distressful chirp heralded the slaughter that threatened.  Gradually, to eyes growing used to the gloom, differing shades of darkness became apparent; it was faintly marked by them as the silence by the sounds....

Still the feathers were unstirred on the breasts where tiny beaks were thrust in sleep; round, bright eyes were filmed by the delicate lids; the bushes held undisturbed the little lives confided to them.