The Trees of Pride | Page 8

in some vague degree to have fallen from her.
The American bowed across the table with a serious politeness, and
then began playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger as he
talked.
"If you go down to the Barbary Coast, where the last wedge of the
forest narrows down between the desert and the great tideless sea, you
will find the natives still telling a strange story about a saint of the Dark
Ages. There, on the twilight border of the Dark Continent, you feel the

Dark Ages. I have only visited the place once, though it lies, so to
speak, opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you
would hardly believe how the topsy-turvydom and transmigration of
this myth somehow seemed less mad than they really are, with the
wood loud with lions at night and that dark red solitude beyond. They
say that the hermit St. Securis, living there among trees, grew to love
them like companions; since, though great giants with many arms like
Briareus, they were the mildest and most blameless of the creatures;
they did not de vour like the lions, but rather opened their arms to all
the little birds. And he prayed that they might be loosened from time to
time to walk like other things. And the trees were moved upon the
prayers of Securis, as they were at the songs of Orpheus. The men of
the desert were stricken from afar with fear, seeing the saint walking
with a walking grove, like a schoolmaster with his boys. For the trees
were thus freed under strict conditions of discipline. They were to
return at the sound of the hermit's bell, and, above all, to copy the wild
beasts in walking only to destroy and devour nothing. Well, it is said
that one of the trees heard a voice that was not the saint's; that in the
warm green twilight of one summer evening it became conscious of
some thing sitting and speaking in its branches in the guise of a great
bird, and it was that which once spoke from a tree in the guise of a
great serpent. As the voice grew louder among its murmuring leaves
the tree was torn with a great desire to stretch out and snatch at the
birds that flew harmlessly about their nests, and pluck them to pieces.
Finally, the tempter filled the tree-top with his own birds of pride, the
starry pageant of the peacocks. And the spirit of the brute overcame the
spirit of the tree, and it rent and consumed the blue-green birds till not a
plume was left, and returned to the quiet tribe of trees. But they say that
when spring came all the other trees put forth leaves, but this put forth
feathers of a strange hue and pattern. And by that monstrous
assimilation the saint knew of the sin, and he rooted that one tree to the
earth with a judgment, so that evil should fall on any who removed it
again. That, Squire, is the beginning in the deserts of the tale that ended
here, almost in this garden."
"And the end is about as reliable as the beginning, I should say," said
Vane. "Yours is a nice plain tale for a small tea-party; a quiet little bit
of still-life, that is."

"What a queer, horrible story," exclaimed Barbara. "It makes one feel
like a cannibal."
"Ex Africa," said the lawyer, smiling. "it comes from a cannibal
country. I think it's the touch of the tar-brush, that nightmare feeling
that you don't know whether the hero is a plant or a man or a devil.
Don't you feel it sometimes in 'Uncle Remus'?"
"True," said Paynter. "Perfectly true." And he looked at the lawyer with
a new interest. The lawyer, who had been introduced as Mr. Ashe, was
one of those people who are more worth looking at than most people
realize when they look. If Napoleon had been red-haired, and had bent
all his powers with a curious contentment upon the petty lawsuits of a
province, he might have looked much the same; the head with the red
hair was heavy and powerful; the figure in its dark, quiet clothes was
comparatively insignificant, as was Napoleon's. He seemed more at
case in the Squire's society than the doctor, who, though a gentleman,
was a shy one, and a mere shadow of his professional brother.
"As you truly say," remarked Paynter, "the story seems touched with
quite barbarous elements, probably Negro. Originally, though, I think
there was really a hagiological story about some hermit, though some
of the higher critics say St. Securis never existed, but was only an
allegory of arboriculture, since his name is the Latin for an ax."