The Devil's GardenMaxwell, W. B. (William Babington)
General
The Devil's Garden
Maxwell, W. B. (William Babington)
Fiction
No one noticed him three hours later when he left the train at a
station short of Manninglea Cross; and soon he was far from other men,
striking across the dark country, with the stars high over his head,
and his native air blowing into his lungs. He came down over the heath
on the Abbey side of the Cross Roads, and reached Hadleigh Wood just
before dawn.
He felt at home now, alone with the wild animals, on ground that he
had learned the tricks of when he was like a wild animal himself. He
knew his wood as well as any of them. He could make lairs beneath the
hollies, glide imperceptibly among the trees, crawl on his belly from
tussock to tussock, and startle the very foxes by creeping quite close
before they smelled peril. So he hid and glided as the sun climbed the
sky, and then waited and watched when the sun was high, now here, now
there, but always very near the open rides along which people would be
passing. And that day many passed, but not the man he wanted.
He was three days and nights in the wood; and on the morning of the
fourth day somebody saw him.
He had moved stealthily to the stream to drink, and while creeping
back on hands and knees among some holly bushes by a glade, he paused
suddenly. Out there on the grass, so small that she had not shown
above the lowest bushes, there was a little girl--a child of about
five, in a tattered pinafore, picking daisies and making a daisy
chain. Breathless and with a beating heart, he watched her, and he
dared not move forward into the sunlight or backward into the shade.
She had not seen him yet. She was playing with the chain of flowers--a
small wood goblin sprung out of nowhere, a little black-haired devil
fired up from hell through the solid earth and out into this empty
glade to squat there right in his track. Then she stood upon her feet,
and admired the length of the chain as she held it dangling.
Then she dropped the chain, gave a little cry like the note of a
frightened bird, and scampered away--never looking back.
Never looking back. But she had seen him. He tried to hope that she
had not seen him.
He was hungry now. His provisions were exhausted; he had eaten nothing
since last night, and he felt excited and fretful. He said to
himself: "If to-day my enemy is not delivered into my hands, I must go
out into the open and seek him at all risks, at all costs." It was a
dominant idea now. Nothing else mattered.
But that day the man came. When the day was almost over, when the
whole wood was fading to the neutral tints of dusk, he came. He was on
horseback, sitting easily and proudly, and his chestnut horse paced
daintily and noiselessly over the moss.
Dale took off his hat. Then presently he came out of the bracken into
the ride, gripped the horse by its bridle, and spoke to the rider.
"Halloa! Dale? But, my good fellow, what the deuce--Damn you, let go.
What are you trying to--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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