The Man Whom the Trees Loved | Page 6

she felt. Not that these things were important, but that she
considered them symptoms of something a little disordered. The ties
were unnecessarily flowing.
For all that he was an interesting man, and, in spite of his eccentricities
of dress and so forth, a gentleman. "Perhaps," she reflected in her
genuinely charitable heart, "he had other uses for the twenty guineas,
an invalid sister or an old mother to support!" She had no notion of the
cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also she forgave him
much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager enthusiasm of
manner. So many men of thirty were already blase.
Still, when the visit was over, she felt relieved. She said nothing about
his coming a second time, and her husband, she was glad to notice, had
likewise made no suggestion. For, truth to tell, the way the younger
man engrossed the older, keeping him out for hours in the Forest,
talking on the lawn in the blazing sun, and in the evenings when the
damp of dusk came creeping out from the surrounding woods, all
regardless of his age and usual habits, was not quite to her taste. Of
course, Mr. Sanderson did not know how easily those attacks of Indian
fever came back, but David surely might have told him.
They talked trees from morning to night. It stirred in her the old
subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of big
woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught her,
were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with
danger.
Her mind, as she watched these two, was charged with curious thoughts
of dread she could not understand, yet feared the more on that account.
The way they studied that old mangy cedar was a trifle unnecessary,
unwise, she felt. It was disregarding the sense of proportion which
deity had set upon the world for men's safe guidance.
Even after dinner they smoked their cigars upon the low branches that

swept down and touched the lawn, until at length she insisted on their
coming in. Cedars, she had somewhere heard, were not safe after
sundown; it was not wholesome to be too near them; to sleep beneath
them was even dangerous, though what the precise danger was she had
forgotten. The upas was the tree she really meant.
At any rate she summoned David in, and Sanderson came presently
after him.
For a long time, before deciding on this peremptory step, she had
watched them surreptitiously from the drawing-room window--her
husband and her guest. The dusk enveloped them with its damp veil of
gauze. She saw the glowing tips of their cigars, and heard the drone of
voices. Bats flitted overhead, and big, silent moths whirred softly over
the rhododendron blossoms. And it came suddenly to her, while she
watched, that her husband had somehow altered these last few
days--since Mr. Sanderson's arrival in fact. A change had come over
him, though what it was she could not say. She hesitated, indeed, to
search. That was the instinctive dread operating in her. Provided it
passed she would rather not know. Small things, of course, she noticed;
small outward signs. He had neglected The Times for one thing, left off
his speckled waistcoats for another. He was absent-minded sometimes;
showed vagueness in practical details where hitherto he showed
decision. And--he had begun to talk in his sleep again.
These and a dozen other small peculiarities came suddenly upon her
with the rush of a combined attack. They brought with them a faint
distress that made her shiver. Momentarily her mind was startled, then
confused, as her eyes picked out the shadowy figures in the dusk, the
cedar covering them, the Forest close at their backs. And then, before
she could think, or seek internal guidance as her habit was, this whisper,
muffled and very hurried, ran across her brain: "It's Mr. Sanderson.
Call David in at once!"
And she had done so. Her shrill voice crossed the lawn and died away
into the Forest, quickly smothered. No echo followed it. The sound fell
dead against the rampart of a thousand listening trees.
"The damp is so very penetrating, even in summer," she murmured
when they came obediently. She was half surprised at her open
audacity, half repentant. They came so meekly at her call. "And my
husband is sensitive to fever from the East. No, _please do not throw

away your cigars. We can sit by the open window and enjoy the
evening while you smoke_."
She was very talkative for a moment; subconscious excitement was the
cause.
"It is so still--so wonderfully still," she went on, as no one spoke; "so
peaceful, and the air so very sweet ...