The Bronze Bell | Page 3

muted murmur of the distant sea.
Amber had professed acquaintance with his way; it seemed rather to be
intimacy, for when he chose to forsake the main-travelled road he did
so boldly, striking off upon a wagon-track which, leading across the
fields, delved presently into the heart of the forest. Here it ran snakily
and, carved by broad-tired wheels and beaten out by slowly plodding
hoofs in a soil more than half sand, glimmered white as rock-salt where
the drifting leaves had left it naked.
Once in this semi-dusk made luminous by sunlight which touched and
quivered upon dead leaf and withered bush and bare brown bough like
splashes of molten gold, the young man moved more sedately. The
hush of the forest world bore heavily upon his senses; the slight and
stealthy rustlings in the brush, the clear dense ringing of some remote
axe, an attenuated clamour of cawing from some far crows' congress,
but served to accentuate its influence. On that windless day the vital
breath of the sea might not moderate the bitter-sweet aroma of decay
that swam beneath the unmoving branches; and this mournful fragrance
of dying Autumn wrought upon Amber's mood as might a whiff of
some exquisite rare perfume revive a poignant memory in the bosom of
a bereaved lover. His glance grew aimless, his temper as purposeless,
lively anticipation giving way to a retrospection tinged with indefinable

sadness.
Then into the silence crept a sound to rouse him from his formless
reverie: at first a mere pulsing in the stillness, barely to be
distinguished from the song of the surf; but presently a pounding, ever
louder and more insistent. He paused, attentive; and while he waited
the drumming, minute by minute gaining in volume, swept swiftly
toward him--the rhythmic hoofbeats of a single horse madly ridden.
When it was close upon him he stepped back into the tangled
undergrowth, making room; for the track was anything but wide.
Simultaneously there burst into view, at the end of a brief aisle of trees,
the horse--a vigorous black brute with white socks and muzzle--running
freely, apparently under constraint neither of whip nor of spur. In the
saddle a girl leaned low over the horn--a girl with eyes rapturous, face
brilliant, lips parted in the least of smiles. A fold of her black
habit-skirt, whipping out, almost snapped in Amber's face, so close to
him she rode; yet she seemed not to see him, and very likely did not. A
splendid sketch in black-and-white, of youthful spirit and joy of motion:
so she passed and was gone....
Hardly, however, had the forest closed upon the picture, ere a cry, a
heavy crashing as of a horse threshing about in the underbrush, and a
woman's scream of terror, sent Amber, in one movement, out into the
road again and running at a pace which, had he been conscious of it,
would have surprised him.
A short fifty yards separated him from the bend in the way round which
the horse and its rider had vanished. He had no more than gained this
point than he was obliged to pull up sharply to avoid running into the
girl herself.
Although dismounted, she was on her feet, and apparently uninjured.
She stood with one hand against the trunk of a tree, on the edge of a
small clearing wherein the axes of the local lumbermen had but lately
been busy. Her horse had disappeared; the rumble of his hoofs,
diminuendo, told the way he had gone.

So much Amber comprehended in a single glance; with a second he
sought the cause of the accident, and identified it with a figure so
_outré_ and bizarre that he momentarily and excusably questioned the
testimony of his senses.
At a little distance from the girl, in the act of addressing her, stood a
man, obese, gross, abnormally distended with luxurious and sluggish
living, as little common to the scene as a statue of Phoebus Apollo had
been: a babu of Bengal, every inch of him, from his dirty red-and-white
turban to his well-worn and cracked patent-leather shoes. His body was
enveloped in a complete suit of emerald silk, much soiled and faded,
and girt with a sash of many colours, crimson predominating. His
hands, fat, brown, and not overclean, alternately fluttered
apologetically and rubbed one another with a suggestion of extreme
urbanity; his lips, thick, sensual, and cruel, mouthed a broken stream of
babu-English; while his eyes, nearly as small and quite as black as
shoe-buttons --eyes furtive, crafty, and cold--suddenly distended and
became fixed, as with amazement, at the instant of Amber's
appearance.
Instinctively, as soon as he had mastered his initial stupefaction, Amber
stepped forward and past the girl, placing himself between her and this
preposterous apparition, as if to shield her.