Damnable Tales by Richard Wells

Author:Richard Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800180611
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2021-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE MUSIC ON THE HILL

by

Saki

First published in the collection

The Chronicles of Clovis

1911

SYLVIA SELTOUN ATE her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessney with a pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a fervent Ironside might have permitted himself on the morrow of Worcester fight. She was scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belonged to that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by circumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupied with a series of small struggles, usually with the odds slightly against her, and usually she had just managed to come through winning. And now she felt that she had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. To have married Mortimer Seltoun, ‘Dead Mortimer’ as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women, was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Town and its group of satellite watering-places and ‘settling him down’, in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm which was his country house.

‘You will never get Mortimer to go,’ his mother had said carpingly, ‘but if he once goes, he’ll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell over him as Town does. One can understand what holds him to Town, but Yessney—’ and the dowager had shrugged her shoulders.

There was a sombre, almost savage wildness about Yessney that was certainly not likely to appeal to town-bred tastes, and Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more sylvan than ‘leafy Kensington’. She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch. Distrust of town-life had been a new thing with her, born of her marriage with Mortimer, and she had watched with satisfaction the gradual fading of what she called ‘the Jermyn-Street-look’ in his eyes as the woods and heather of Yessney had closed in on them yesternight. Her will-power and strategy had prevailed; Mortimer would stay.

Outside the morning-room windows was a triangular slope of turf, which the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected fuchsia bushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art appreciation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered.

‘It is very wild,’ she said to Mortimer, who had joined her; ‘one could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out.’

‘The worship of Pan never has died out,’ said Mortimer. ‘Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last.

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