Lying Prophets | Page 5

a starry night, and went, each his way,
through the streets of the sleeping village.
CHAPTER TWO

IN A HALO OF GOLD
Edmund Murdoch's studio stood high on Newlyn hill, and Barron had
taken comfortable rooms in a little lodging-house close beside it. The
men often enjoyed breakfast in each other's company, but on the
following morning, when Murdoch strolled over to see his friend, he
found that his rooms were empty.
Barron, in fact, was already nearly a mile from Newlyn, and, at the
moment when the younger artist sought him, he stood upon a footpath
which ran through plowed fields to the village of Paul. In the bottom of
his mind ran a current of thought occupied with the problem of Joan
Tregenza, but, superficially, he was concerned with the spring world in
which he walked. He stood where Nature, like Artemis, appeared as a
mother of many breasts. Brown and solemn in their undulations, they
rose about and around him to the sky-line, where the land cut sharply
against a pale blue heaven from which tinkled the music of larks. He
watched a bird wind upward in a spiral to its song throne; he noted the
young wheat brushing the earth with a veil of green; he dawdled where
elms stood, their high tops thick with blossom; and he delayed for full
fifteen minutes to see the felling of one giant tree. A wedge-shaped cut
had been made upon the side where the great elm was to fall, and, upon
the other side, two men were sawing through the trunk. There was no
sound but the steady hiss of steel teeth gnawing inch by inch to the
wine-red heart of the tree. Sunshine glimmered on its leafy crown, and
as yet distant branch and bough knew nothing of the midgets and Death
below.
Barron took pleasure in seeing the great god Change at work, but he
mourned in that a masterpiece, on which Nature had bestowed half a
century and more of love, must now vanish.
"A pity," he said, while the executioners rested a few moments from
their labors, "a pity to cut down such a noble tree."
One woodman laughed, and the other--an old rustic, brown and
bent--made answer:

"I sez 'dang the tree!' Us doan't take no joy in thrawin' en, mister. I be
bedoled wi' pain, an' this 'ere sawin's just food for rheumatiz. My back's
that bad. But Squire must 'ave money, an' theer's five hundred pounds'
value o' ellum comin' down 'fore us done wi' it."
The saw won its way; and between each spell of labor, the ancient man
held his back and grumbled.
"Er's Billy Jago," confided the second laborer to Barron, when his
companion had turned aside to get some steel wedges and a
sledge-hammer. "Er's well-knawn in these paarts--a reg'lar cure. Er
used tu work up Drift wi' Mister Chirgwin."
Billy added two wedges to those already hammered into the saw-cut,
then, with the sledge, he drove them home and finished his task. The
sorrowful strokes rang hollow and mournful over the land, sadder to
Barron's ear than fall of earth-clod on coffin-lid. And, upon the sound,
a responsive shiver and uneasy tremor ran through trunk and bough to
topmost twig of the elm--a sudden sense, as it seemed, of awful evil
and ruin undreamed of, but now imminent. Then the monster staggered
and the midget struck his last blow and removed himself and his
rheumatism. Whereupon began that magnificent descent. Slowly, with
infinitely solemn sweep, the elm's vast height swung away from its
place, described a wide aerial arc, and so, with the jolting crash and
rattle of close thunder, roared headlong to the earth, casting up a cloud
of dust, plowing the grass with splintered limbs, then lying very still.
From glorious tree to battered log it sank. No man ever saw more
instant wreck and ruin fall lightning-like on a fair thing. The mass was
crushed flat and shapeless by its own vast weight, and the larger
boughs, which did not touch the earth, were snapped short off by the
concussion of their fall.
Billy Jago held his back and whined while Barron spoke, as much to
himself as the woodman.
"Dear God!" he said, "to think that this glory of the hedge-row--this
kingdom of song birds--should come to the making of pauper coffins
and lodging-house furniture!"

"Squire must have money; an' folks must have coffins," said Billy.
"You can sleep your last sleep so sound in ellum as you can in oak, for
that matter."
Feeling the truth of the assertion, Barron admitted it, then turned his
back on the fallen king and pursued his way with thoughts reverting to
the proposed picture. There was nothing to alarm Joan Tregenza about
him; which seemed well, as