The Trees of Pride | Page 7

the scenery,
and wondered what would happen next.
"The prospect is certainly beautiful," he assented, in the same
enigmatic manner. "There is only one thing in it I am doubtful about."
While she stood in silence he slowly lifted his black stick like a long

black finger and pointed it at the peacock trees above the wood. And a
queer feeling of disquiet fell on the girl, as if he were, by that mere
gesture, doing a destructive act and could send a blight upon the
garden.
The strained and almost painful silence was broken by the voice of
Squire Vane, loud even while it was still distant.
"We couldn'tt make out where you'd got to, Barbara," he said. "This is
my friend, Mr. Cyprian Paynter." The next moment he saw the stranger
and stopped, a little puzzled. it was only Mr. Cyprian Paynter himself
who was equal to the situation. He had seen months ago a portrait of
the new Cornish poet in some American literary magazine, and he
found himself, to his surprise, the introducer instead of the introduced.
"Why, Squire," he said in considerable astonishment, "don't you know
Mr. Treherne? I supposed, of course, he was a neighbor."
"Delighted to see you, Mr. Treherne," said the Squire, recovering his
manners with a certain genial confusion. "So pleased you were able to
come. This is Mr. Paynter---my daughter," and, turning with a certain
boisterous embarrassment, he led the way to the table under the tree.
Cyprian Paynter followed, inwardly revolving a puzzle which had
taken even his experience by surprise. The American, if intellectually
an aristocrat, was still socially and subconsciously a democrat. It had
never crossed his mind that the poet should be counted lucky to know
the squire and not the squire to know the poet. The honest patronage in
Vane's hospitality was something which made Paynter feel he was,
after all, an exile in England.
The Squire, anticipating the trial of luncheon with a strange literary
man, had dealt with the case tactfully from his own standpoint. County
society might have made the guest feel like a fish out of water; and,
except for the American critic and the local lawyer and doctor, worthy
middle-class people who fitted into the picture, he had kept it as a
family party. He was a widower, and when the meal had been laid out
on the garden table, it was Barbara who presided as hostess. She had
the new poet on her right hand and it made her very uncomfortable. She
had practically offered that fallacious jongleur money, and it did not
make it easier to offer him lunch.
"The whole countryside's gone mad," announced the Squire, by way of
the latest local news. "It's about this infernal legend of ours."

"I collect legends," said Paynter, smiling.
"You must remember I haven't yet had a chance to collect yours. And
this," he added, looking round at the romantic coast, "is a fine theater
for anything dramatic."
"Oh, it's dramatic in its way," admitted Vane, not without a faint
satisfaction. "It's all about those things over there we call the peacock
trees--I suppose, because of the queer color of the leaf, you know,
though I have heard they make a shrill noise in a high wind that's
supposed to be like the shriek of a peacock; something like a bamboo
in the botanical structure, perhaps. Well, those trees are supposed to
have been brought over from Barbary by my ancestor Sir Walter Vane,
one of the Elizabethan patriots or pirates, or whatever you call them.
They say that at the end of his last voyage the villagers gathered on the
beach down there and saw the boat standing in from the sea, and the
new trees stood up in the boat like a mast, all gay with leaves out of
season, like green bunting. And as they watched they thought at first
that the boat was steering oddly, and then that it wasn't steering at all;
and when it drifted to the shore at last every man in that boat was dead,
and Sir Walter Vane, with his sword drawn, was leaning up against the
tree trunk, as stiff as the tree."
"Now this is rather curious," remarked Paynter thoughtfully. "I told you
I collected legends, and I fancy I can tell you the beginning of the story
of which that is the end, though it comes hundreds of miles across the
sea."
He tapped meditatively on the table with his thin, taper fingers, like a
man trying to recall a tune. He had, indeed, made a hobby of such
fables, and he was not without vanity about his artistic touch in telling
them.
"Oh, do tell us your part of it?" cried Barbara Vane, whose air of sunny
sleepiness seemed