Short Fiction, Arthur Machen [books suggested by bill gates TXT] 📗

went on, that horrible whistling following them, she looking straight ahead and walking fast, really feeling more huffy and put out than frightened. And when they got to the next stile, she got over and turned round, and ‘lo and behold,’ as she says, there was no Uncle Robert to be seen! She felt herself go quite white with alarm, thinking of that whistle, and making sure he’d been spirited away or snatched in some way or another, and she had just screamed out ‘Robert’ like a mad woman, when he came quite slowly round the corner, as cool as a cucumber, holding something in his hand. He said there were some flowers he could never pass, and when aunt saw that he had got a dandelion torn up by the roots, she felt as if her head were going round.”

Mary’s story was suddenly interrupted. For ten minutes Darnell had been writhing in his chair, suffering tortures in his anxiety to avoid wounding his wife’s feelings, but the episode of the dandelion was too much for him, and he burst into a long, wild shriek of laughter, aggravated by suppression into the semblance of a Red Indian’s war-whoop. Alice, who was washing-up in the scullery, dropped some three shillings’ worth of china, and the neighbours ran out into their gardens wondering if it were murder. Mary gazed reproachfully at her husband.

“How can you be so unfeeling, Edward?” she said, at length, when Darnell had passed into the feebleness of exhaustion. “If you had seen the tears rolling down poor Aunt Marian’s cheeks as she told me, I don’t think you would have laughed. I didn’t think you were so hardhearted.”

“My dear Mary,” said Darnell, faintly, through sobs and catching of the breath, “I am awfully sorry. I know it’s very sad, really, and I’m not unfeeling; but it is such an odd tale, now, isn’t it? The Sandpiper, you know, and then the dandelion!”

His face twitched and he ground his teeth together. Mary looked gravely at him for a moment, and then she put her hands to her face, and Darnell could see that she also shook with merriment.

“I am as bad as you,” she said, at last. “I never thought of it in that way. I’m glad I didn’t, or I should have laughed in Aunt Marian’s face, and I wouldn’t have done that for the world. Poor old thing; she cried as if her heart would break. I met her at Victoria, as she asked me, and we had some soup at a confectioner’s. I could scarcely touch it; her tears kept dropping into the plate all the time; and then we went to the waiting-room at the station, and she cried there terribly.”

“Well,” said Darnell, “what happened next? I won’t laugh any more.”

“No, we mustn’t; it’s much too horrible for a joke. Well, of course aunt went home and wondered and wondered what could be the matter, and tried to think it out, but, as she says, she could make nothing of it. She began to be afraid that uncle’s brain was giving way through overwork, as he had stopped in the City (as he said) up to all hours lately, and he had to go to Yorkshire (wicked old storyteller!), about some very tiresome business connected with his leases. But then she reflected that however queer he might be getting, even his queerness couldn’t make whistles in the air, though, as she said, he was always a wonderful man. So she had to give that up; and then she wondered if there were anything the matter with her, as she had read about people who heard noises when there was really nothing at all. But that wouldn’t do either, because though it might account for the whistling, it wouldn’t account for the dandelion or the Sandpiper, or for fainting fits that turned purple, or any of uncle’s queerness. So aunt said she could think of nothing but to read the Bible every day from the beginning, and by the time she got into Chronicles she felt rather better, especially as nothing had happened for three or four Sundays. She noticed uncle seemed absentminded, and not as nice to her as he might be, but she put that down to too much work, as he never came home before the last train, and had a hansom twice all the way, getting there between three and four in the morning. Still, she felt it was no good bothering her head over what couldn’t be made out or explained anyway, and she was just settling down, when one Sunday evening it began all over again, and worse things happened. The whistling followed them just as it did before, and poor aunt set her teeth and said nothing to uncle, as she knew he would only tell her stories, and they were walking on, not saying a word, when something made her look back, and there was a horrible boy with red hair, peeping through the hedge just behind, and grinning. She said it was a dreadful face, with something unnatural about it, as if it had been a dwarf, and before she had time to have a good look, it popped back like lightning, and aunt all but fainted away.”

“A redheaded boy?” said Darnell. “I thought⁠—What an extraordinary story this is. I’ve never heard of anything so queer. Who was the boy?”

“You will know in good time,” said Mrs. Darnell. “It is very strange, isn’t it?”

“Strange!” Darnell ruminated for a while.

“I know what I think, Mary,” he said at length. “I don’t believe a word of it. I believe your aunt is going mad, or has gone mad, and that she has delusions. The whole thing sounds to me like the invention of a lunatic.”

“You are quite wrong. Every word is true, and if you will let me go on, you will understand how it all happened.”

“Very good, go ahead.”

“Let me see, where was I? Oh, I know, aunt saw