Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  The landlady who came from a different part of the shire, was more communicative. She had not known the former Dubellays and so had no standard of comparison, but she was inclined to regard the present squire as not quite right in the head. ‘They do say,’ she would begin, but she, too, suffered from some inhibition, and what promised to be sensational would tail off into the commonplace. One thing apparently puzzled the neighbourhood above others, and that was his rearrangement of the house. ‘They do say,’ she said in an awed voice, ‘that he have built a great church.’ She had never visited it - no one in the parish had, for Squire Dubellay did not allow intruders - but from Lyne Hill you could see it through a gap in the woods. ‘He’s no good Christian,’ she told me, ‘and him and Vicar has quarrelled this many a day. But they do say as he worships summat there.’ I learned that there were no women servants in the house, only the men he had brought from London. ‘Poor benighted souls, they must live in a sad hobble,’ and the buxom lady shrugged her shoulders and giggled.

  On the last day of December I decided that I needed exercise and must go for a long stride. The snow had ceased that morning, and the dull skies had changed to a clear blue. It was still very cold, but the sun was shining, the snow was firm and crisp underfoot, and I proposed to survey the country. So after luncheon I put on thick boots and gaiters, and made for Lyne Hill. This meant a considerable circuit, for the place lay south of the Vauncastle park. From it I hoped to get a view of the other side of the house.

  I was not disappointed. There was a rift in the thick woodlands, and below me, two miles off, I suddenly saw a strange building, like a classical temple. Only the entablature and the tops of the pillars showed above the trees, but they stood out vivid and dark against the background of snow. The spectacle in that lonely place was so startling that for a little I could only stare. I remember that I glanced behind me to the snowy line of the Welsh mountains, and felt that I might have been looking at a winter view of the Apennines two thousand years ago.

  My curiosity was now alert, and I determined to get a nearer view of this marvel. I left the track and ploughed through the snowy fields down to the skirts of the woods. After that my troubles began. I found myself in a very good imitation of a primeval forest, where the undergrowth had been unchecked and the rides uncut for years. I sank into deep pits, I was savagely torn by briars and brambles, but I struggled on, keeping a line as best I could. At last the trees stopped. Before me was a flat expanse which I knew must be a lake, and beyond rose the temple.

  It ran the whole length of the house, and from where I stood it was hard to believe that there were buildings at its back where men dwelt. It was a fine piece of work — the first glance told me that — admirably proportioned, classical, yet not following exactly any of the classical models. One could imagine a great echoing interior dim with the smoke of sacrifice, and it was only by reflecting that I realised that the peristyle could not be continued down the two sides, that there was no interior, and that what I was looking at was only a portico.

  The thing was at once impressive and preposterous. What madness had been in Dubellay when he embellished his house with such a grandiose garden front? The sun was setting and the shadow of the wooded hills darkened the interior, so I could not even make out the back wall of the porch. I wanted a nearer view, so I embarked on the frozen lake.

  Then I had an odd experience. I was not tired, the snow lay level and firm, but I was conscious of extreme weariness. The biting air had become warm and oppressive. I had to drag boots that seemed to weigh tons across that lake. The place was utterly silent in the stricture of the frost, and from the pile in front no sign of life came.

  I reached the other side at last and found myself in a frozen shallow of bulrushes and skeleton willow-herbs. They were taller than my head, and to see the house I had to look upward through their snowy traceries. It was perhaps eighty feet above me and a hundred yards distant, and, since I was below it, the delicate pillars seemed to spring to a great height. But it was still dusky, and the only detail I could see was on the ceiling, which seemed either to be carved or painted with deeply-shaded monochrome figures.

  Suddenly the dying sun came slanting through the gap in the hills, and for an instant the whole portico to its farthest recesses was washed in clear gold and scarlet. That was wonderful enough, but there was something more. The air was utterly still with not the faintest breath of wind — so still that when I had lit a cigarette half an hour before the flame of the match had burned steadily upward like a candle in a room. As I stood among the sedges not a single frost crystal stirred... But there was a wind blowing in the portico.

  I could see it lifting feathers of snow from the base of the pillars and fluffing the cornices. The floor had already been swept clean, but tiny flakes drifted on to it from the exposed edges. The interior was filled with a furious movement, though a yard from it was frozen peace. I felt nothing of the action of the wind, but I knew that it was hot, hot as the breath of a furnace.

  I had only one thought, dread of being overtaken by night near that place. I turned and ran. Ran with labouring steps across the lake, panting and stifling with a deadly hot oppression, ran blindly by a sort of instinct in the direction of the village. I did not stop till I had wrestled through the big wood, and come out on some rough pasture above the highway. Then I dropped on the ground, and felt again the comforting chill of the December air.

  The adventure left me in an uncomfortable mood. I was ashamed of myself for playing the fool, and at the same time hopelessly puzzled, for the oftener I went over in my mind the incidents of that afternoon the more I was at a loss for an explanation. One feeling was uppermost, that I did not like this place and wanted to be out of it. I had already broken the back of my task, and by shutting myself up for two days I completed it; that is to say, I made my collation as far as I had advanced myself in my commentary on the text. I did not want to go back to the Hall, so I wrote a civil note to Dubellay, expressing my gratitude and saying that I was sending up the manuscript by the landlord’s son, as I scrupled to trouble him with another visit.

  I got a reply at once, saying that Mr Dubellay would like to give himself the pleasure of dining with me at the inn before I went, and would receive the manuscript in person.

  It was the last night of my stay in St Sant, so I ordered the best dinner the place could provide, and a magnum of claret, of which I discovered a bin in the cellar. Dubellay appeared promptly at eight o’clock, arriving to my surprise in a car. He had tidied himself up and put on a dinner jacket, and he looked exactly like the city solicitors you see dining in the Junior Carlton.

  He was in excellent spirits, and his eyes had lost their air of being on guard. He seemed to have reached some conclusion about me, or decided that I was harmless. More, he seemed to be burning to talk to me. After my adventure I was prepared to find fear in him, the fear I had seen in the faces of the men-servants. But there was none; instead there was excitement, overpowering excitement.

  He neglected the courses in his verbosity. His coming to dinner had considerably startled the inn, and instead of a maid the landlady herself waited on us. She seemed to want to get the meal over, and hustled the biscuits and the port on to the table as soon as she decently could. Then Dubellay became confidential.

  He was an enthusiast, it appeared, an enthusiast with a single hobby. All his life he had pottered among antiquities, and when he succeeded to Vauncastle he had the leisure and money to indulge himself. The place, it seemed, had been famous in Roman Britain — Vauni Castra — and Faxeter was a corruption of the same. ‘Who was Vaunus?’ I asked. He grinned, and told me to wait.

  There had been an old temple up in the high woods. There had always been a local legend about it, and the place was supposed to be haunted. Well, he had had the site excavated and he had found — Here he became the cautious solicitor, and explained to me the law of treasure trove. As long as the objects found were not intrinsically valuable, not gold or
jewels, the finder was entitled to keep them. He had done so — had not published the results of his excavations in the proceedings of any learned society — did not want to be bothered by tourists. I was different, for I was a scholar.

  What had he found? It was really rather hard to follow his babbling talk, but I gathered that he had found certain carvings and sacrificial implements. And - he sunk his voice - most important of all, an altar, an altar of Vaunus, the tutelary deity of the vale.

  When he mentioned this word his face took on a new look — not of fear but of secrecy, a kind of secret excitement. I have seen the same look on the face of a street-preaching Salvationist.

  Vaunus had been a British god of the hills, whom the Romans in their liberal way appear to have identified with Appolo. He gave me a long confused account of him, from which it appeared that Mr Dubellay was not an exact scholar. Some of his derivations of place-names were absurd - like St Sant from Sancta Sanctorum - and in quoting a line of Ausonius he made two false quantities. He seemed to hope that I could tell him something more about Vaunus, but I said that my subject was Greek, and that I was deeply ignorant about Roman Britain. I mentioned several books, and found that he had never heard of Haverfield.

  One word he used, ‘hypocaust’, which suddenly gave me a clue. He must have heated the temple, as he heated his house, by some very efficient system of hot air. I know little about science, but I imagined that the artificial heat of the portico, as contrasted with the cold outside, might create an air current. At any rate that explanation satisfied me, and my afternoon’s adventure lost its uncanniness. The reaction made me feel friendly towards him, and I listened to his talk with sympathy, but I decided not to mention that I had visited his temple.

  He told me about it himself in the most open way. ‘I couldn’t leave the altar on the hillside,’ he said, ‘I had to make a place for it, so I turned the old front of the house into a sort of temple. I got the best advice, but architects are ignorant people, and I often wished I had been a better scholar. Still the place satisfies me.’

  ‘I hope it satisfies Vaunus,’ I said jocularly.

  ‘I think so,’ he replied quite seriously, and then his thoughts seemed to go wandering, and for a minute or so he looked through me with a queer abstraction in his eyes.

  ‘What do you do with it now you’ve got it?’ I asked.

  He didn’t reply, but smiled to himself.

  ‘I don’t know if you remember a passage in Sidonius Apollinaris,’ I said, ‘a formula for consecrating pagan altars to Christian uses. You begin by sacrificing a white cock or something suitable, and tell Apollo with all friendliness that the old dedication is off for the present. Then you have a Christian invocation—’

  He nearly jumped out of his chair.

  ‘That wouldn’t do — wouldn’t do at all!... Oh Lord, no!... Couldn’t think of it for one moment!’

  It was as if I had offended his ears by some horrid blasphemy, and the odd thing was that he never recovered his composure. He tried, for he had good manners, but his ease and friendliness had gone. We talked stiffly for another half-hour about trifles, and then he rose to leave. I returned him his manuscript neatly parcelled up, and expanded in thanks, but he scarcely seemed to heed me. He stuck the thing in his pocket, and departed with the same air of shocked absorption.

  After he had gone I sat before the fire and reviewed the situation. I was satisfied with my hypocaust theory, and had no more perturbation in my memory about my afternoon’s adventure. Yet a slight flavour of unpleasantness hung about it, and I felt that I did not quite like Dubellay. I set him down as a crank who had tangled himself up with a half-witted hobby, like an old maid with her cats, and I was not sorry to be leaving the place.

  My third and last visit to St Sant was in the following June — the midsummer of 1914. I had all but finished my Theocritus, but I needed another day or two with the Vauncastle manuscript, and, as I wanted to clear the whole thing off before I went to Italy in July, I wrote to Dubellay and asked if I might have another sight of it. The thing was a bore, but it had to be faced, and I fancied that the valley would be a pleasant place in that hot summer.

  I got a reply at once, inviting, almost begging me to come, and insisting that I should stay at the Hall. I couldn’t very well refuse, though I would have preferred the inn. He wired about my train, and wired again saying he would meet me. This time I seemed to be a particularly welcome guest.

  I reached Faxeter in the evening, and was met by a car from a Faxeter garage. The driver was a talkative young man, and, as the car was a closed one, I sat beside him for the sake of fresh air. The term had tired me, and I was glad to get out of stuffy Cambridge, but I cannot say that I found it much cooler as we ascended the Vaun valley. The woods were in their summer magnificence but a little dulled and tarnished by the heat, the river was shrunk to a trickle, and the curious hill-tops were so scorched by the sun that they seemed almost yellow above the green of the trees. Once again I had the feeling of a landscape fantastically un-English.

  ‘Squire Dubellay’s been in a great way about your coming, sir,’ the driver informed me. ‘Sent down three times to the boss to make sure it was all right. He’s got a car of his own, too, a nice little Daimler, but he don’t seem to use it much. Haven’t seen him about in it for a month of Sundays.’

  As we turned in at the Hall gates he looked curiously about him. ‘Never been here before, though I’ve been in most gentlemen’s parks for fifty miles round. Rum old-fashioned spot, isn’t it, sir?’

  If it had seemed a shuttered sanctuary in midwinter, in that June twilight it was more than ever a place enclosed and guarded. There was almost an autumn smell of decay, a dry decay like touchwood. We seemed to be descending through layers of ever-thickening woods. When at last we turned through the iron gate I saw that the lawns had reached a further stage of neglect, for they were as shaggy as a hay-field.

  The white-faced butler let me in, and there, waiting at his back, was Dubellay. But he was not the man whom I had seen in December. He was dressed in an old baggy suit of flannels, and his unwholesome red face was painfully drawn and sunken. There were dark pouches under his eyes, and these eyes were no longer excited, but dull and pained. Yes, and there was more than pain in them — there was fear. I wondered if his hobby were becoming too much for him.

  He greeted me like a long-lost brother. Considering that I scarcely knew him, I was a little embarrassed by his warmth. ‘Bless you for coming, my dear fellow,’ he cried. ‘You want a wash and then we’ll have dinner. Don’t bother to change, unless you want to. I never do.’ He led me to my bedroom, which was clean enough but small and shabby like a servant’s room. I guessed that he had gutted the house to build his absurd temple.

  We dined in a fair-sized room which was a kind of library. It was lined with old books, but they did not look as if they had been there long; rather it seemed like a lumber room in which a fine collection had been stored. Once no doubt they had lived in a dignified Georgian chamber. There was nothing else, none of the antiques which I had expected.

  ‘You have come just in time,’ he told me. ‘I fairly jumped when I got your letter, for I had been thinking of running up to Cambridge to insist on your coming down here. I hope you’re in no hurry to leave.’

  ‘As it happens,’ I said, ‘I am rather pressed for time, for I hope to go abroad next week. I ought to finish my work here in a couple of days. I can’t tell you how much I’m in your debt for your kindness.’

  ‘Two days,’ he said. ‘That will get us over midsummer. That should be enough.’ I hadn’t a notion what he meant.

  I told him that I was looking forward to examining his collection. He opened his eyes. ‘Your discoveries, I mean,’ I said, ‘the altar of Vaunus..

  As I spoke the words his face suddenly contorted in a spasm of what looked like terror. He choked and then recovered himself. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said rapidly. ‘You shall see it — you shall see everything — but not no
w — not tonight. Tomorrow — in broad daylight — that’s the time.’

  After that the evening became a bad dream. Small talk deserted him, and he could only reply with an effort to my commonplaces. I caught him often looking at me furtively, as if he were sizing me up and wondering how far he could go with me. The thing fairly got on my nerves, and to crown all it was abominably stuffy. The windows of the room gave on a little paved court with a background of laurels, and I might have been in Seven Dials for all the air there was.

  When coffee was served I could stand it no longer. ‘What about smoking in the temple?’ I said. ‘It should be cool there with the air from the lake.’

  I might have been proposing the assassination of his mother. He simply gibbered at me. ‘No, no,’ he stammered. ‘My God, no!’ It was half an hour before he could properly collect himself. A servant lit two oil lamps, and we sat on in the frowsty room.

  ‘You said something when we last met,’ he ventured at last, after many a sidelong glance at me. ‘Something about a ritual for re-dedicating an altar.’

  I remembered my remark about Sidonius Apollinaris.

  ‘Could you show me the passage? There is a good classical library here, collected by my great-grandfather. Unfortunately my scholarship is not equal to using it properly.’