It was more than a month before the legend of the peacock trees was again discussed in the Squire's circle. It fell out one evening, when his eccentric taste for meals in the garden that gathered the company round the same table, now lit with a lamp and laid out for dinner in a glowing spring twilight.
It was even the same company, for in the few weeks intervening they had insensibly grown more and more into each other's lives, forming a little group like a club. The American aesthete was of course the most active agent, his resolution to pluck out the heart of the Cornish poet's mystery leading him again and again to influence his flighty host for such reunions.
Even Mr. Ashe, the lawyer, seemed to have swallowed his half-humorous prejudices; and the doctor, though a rather sad and silent, was a companionable and considerate man.
Paynter had even read Treherne's poetry aloud, and he read admirably; he had also read other things, not aloud, grubbing up everything in the neighborhood, from guidebooks to epitaphs, that could throw a light on local antiquities.
And it was that evening when the lamplight and the last daylight had kindled the colors of the wine and silver on the table under the tree, that he announced a new discovery.
"Say, Squire," he remarked, with one of his rare Americanisms, "about those bogey trees of yours; I don't believe you know half the tales told round here about them. It seems they have a way of eating things.
Not that I have any ethical objection to eating things," he continued, helping himself elegantly to green cheese. "But I have more or less, broadly speaking, an objection to eating people."
"Eating people!" repeated Barbara Vane.
"I know a globe-trotter mustn't be fastidious," replied Mr. Paynter. "But I repeat firmly, an objection to eating people. The peacock trees seem to have progressed since the happy days of innocence when they only ate peacocks.
If you ask the people here--the fisherman who lives on that beach, or the man that mows this very lawn in front of us--they'll tell you tales taller than any tropical one I brought you from the Barbary Coast. If you ask them what happened to the fisherman Peters, who got drunk on All Hallows Eve, they'll tell you he lost his way in that little wood, tumbled down asleep under the wicked trees, and then--evaporated, vanished, was licked up like dew by the sun.
If you ask them where Harry Hawke is, the widow's little son, they'll just tell you he's swallowed; that he was dared to climb the trees and sit there all night, and did it. What the trees did God knows; the habits of a vegetable ogre leave one a little vague.
But they even add the agreeable detail that a new branch appears on the tree when somebody has petered out in this style."
"What new nonsense is this?" cried Vane. "I know there's some crazy yarn about the trees spreading fever, though every educated man knows why these epidemics return occasionally. And I know they say you can tell the noise of them among other trees in a gale, and I dare say you can.
But even Cornwall isn't a lunatic asylum, and a tree that dines on a passing tourist--"
"Well, the two tales are reconcilable enough," put in the poet quietly.
"If there were a magic that killed men when they came close, it's likely to strike them with sickness when they stand far off.
In the old romance the dragon, that devours people, often blasts others with a sort of poisonous breath."
Ashe looked across at the speaker steadily, not to say stonily.
"Do I understand," he inquired, "that you swallow the swallowing trees too?"
Treherne's dark smile was still on the defensive; his fencing always annoyed the other, and he seemed not without malice in the matter.
"Swallowing is a metaphor," he said, "about me, if not about the trees.
And metaphors take us at once into dreamland--no bad place, either.
This garen, I think, gets more and more like a dream at this corner of the day and night, that might lead us anywhere."
The yellow horn of the moon had appeared silently and as if suddenly over the black horns of the seaweed, seeming to announce as night something which till then had been evening.
A night breeze came in between the trees and raced stealthily across the turf, and as they ceased speaking they heard, not only the seething grass, but the sea itself move and sound in all the cracks and caves round them and below them and on every side. They all felt the note that had been struck-- the American as an art critic and the poet as a poet; and the Squire, who believed himself boiling with an impatience purely rational, did not really understand his own impatience.
In him, more perhaps than the others--more certainly than he knew himself--the sea wind went to the head like wine.
"Credulity is a curious thing," went on Treherne in a low voice.
"It is more negative than positive, and yet it is infinite.
Hundreds of men will avoid walking under a ladder; they don't know where the door of the ladder will lead.
They don't really think God would throw a thunderbolt at them for such a thing. They don't know what would happen, that is just the point; but yet they step aside as from a precipice.
So the poor people here may or may not believe anything; they don't go into those trees at night."
"I walk under a ladder whenever I can," cried Vane, in quite unnecessary excitement.
"You belong to a Thirteen Club," said the poet. "You walk under a ladder on Friday to dine thirteen at a table, everybody spilling the salt.
But even you don't go into those trees at night."
Squire Vane stood up, his silver hair flaming in the wind.
"I'll stop all night in your tomfool wood and up your tomfool trees," he said. "I'll do it for twopence or two thousand pounds, if anyone will take the bet."
Without waiting for reply, he snatched up his wide white hat and settled it on with a fierce gesture, and had gone off in great leonine strides across the lawn before anyone at the table could move.
