The Sphinx, Vol. 13, No. 188

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THE SPHINX
January 13 th
[all rights reserved.]
THECyPRESS-H EDGE.
By GERTRUDE WARDEN,
Author of “Scoundrel or Saint ? ” “The Sentimental Sex,” “ A Wise and a Foolish Virgin,” <fcc.
I.
“ Dear Ced, — Come to me at once’ Here in the middle of France, between the Sa6ne and the Loire, I have discovered the ideal village you and I, as painter and poet, have sought for so long. Needless to say, few people live in it, and it is very difficult to get at. Coming from Paris you had better get out at Macon ; then you will have a twelve-mile drive in a jolting, ancient diligence from the village of Greux to this delightful spot. No tourist has ever been here. The peasants believe I am mad. They speak an unintelligible patois, and sport among the vines. The country teems with romance and legend, and you can live like a fighting-cock on a franc a day. Tear yourself, then, from the hollow gaieties of Paris, the bitter jests,of Monsieur Jean Sanspeur and the rest of the decadent literary gang, and come to this most lonely and beautiful hamlet, to steep yourself in fairy legendary lore —if you are clever enough to understand what the people say ! There is a ruined mill, and empty, haunted monastery, a churchyard frequented by a loup-t/arou, and a ravishing, fortified farmhouse, the turrets of which are just visible here and there above the most dark, mysterious, awe-inspiring, sketch-and-verse provoking hedge of cypresses, the like of which I have never seen before. And to this last place -theri? is the strangest mystery attached. They say — But I vow you shall not hear what they say until you come ! Think of it as subject for your next picture to be rejected by the Royal Academy — a wide, fertile plain, a blue line of low hills in the far distance, and the eerie evening light catching the turretted roof of the castle hidden behind the funereal hedge, through which-a white face peers Title, ‘The Cypress-Hedge.” The name of my village, by the way, is St. Jacques. Come to the little inn kept by Monsieur Boulecart, and ask for the mad Englishman. Thus, and thus only, you will discover your friend,
“ Barrym re Bray.”
It was May when I received this letter. I was -eight-and-twenty, staying in Paris, and immensely attracted by the bitter wit and brilliancy of “Jean Sanspeur,” as he called himself, a French writer who had recently scored some remarkable •successes by his novels and plays, each one of which was written with a view to shew his dislike and contempt for women.
Sanspeur was a celebrity. I was a comparatively unknown young English painter living on a small private income. I was neither brilliant nor witty, and so far from despising women I had been, and was still, as much in love as it is possible for a man to be. But I was a good listener, and Sanspeur, who was fully twelve years my senior, had taken a fancy to me and endeavoured to instil into me his ideas.
Now, however, he was leaving Paris, and the idea of joining my old friend, little, chubby Barrymore Bray, in a romantic village attracted me. After nearly four years of it I was as much in love as ever, and I wanted quiet and peace to dream about her. Barrymore was a sympathetic soul, and when I wearied of his constant chatter I left off listening to it. Then the title and idea. “ The Cypress-Hedge,” pleased my humour well. Without a word of farewell, therefore, I packed my belongings and set off in the early morning from Paris, arriving at the village of St. Jacques at about half-past five on a still and sultry evening.
Barrymore was charmed to receive me. He was a short, fat, fresh-coloured, wholesome-looking man, whom no one would have suspected of writing dismal poetry. Supper first, and then the mill and the cypress-hedge was his programme.
“ You must see the cypress-hedge first by moonlight,” he explained. “ And, my boy, if the ghostly stillness of the place, the impenetrable thickness of that black barrier, and the myster-
ious glimpse of the red-roofed turrets it encloses don’t fascinate you, then nature is a cheat, and has given you your elegant figure, and dreamy blue eyes, and all the rest of it for nothing.”
“ But is it inhabited ? ”
“ An old farmer and his wife have lived there for years. But they are hardly ever seen outside the gates. The peasants never pass the place at night without crossing themselves, and no one is allowed to enter ; but the story goes that the ghost of a murdered lady haunts the grounds, and that at night she may be heard singing in an unknown tongue.”
“ Have you heard her 1 ’’
“I? Well, no. You see, I’ve only been here a week, and with long out-door excursions I get tired and like to go to bed early. But you, my dear Cedric, are young and enterprising, and agogfoi adventure. Tow are the knight to interview the ghost ! Our host here tells me he believes the owner of the house, a man called Devigne, really does keep a lunatic relative shut up in the chateau under the care of the old couple. Who can tell ? But it’s romantic — very ! ”
Romantic indeed I found the place a few hours later, as I stood before the gates of the old chateau in the moonlight. Bolted, barred, and unused gates of rusty iron they were, and in and out of their interstices brambles clung and twined. No view of the house or garden was obtainable through or over them, for the grass grew long beneath them and cypress branches were intertwined above.
Some way to the left of these gates, however, Barrymore had discovered a small, exceedingly strong wooden door, almost hidden bv the hedge, and through this, no doubt, the farmer and his wife passed on their rare excursions into the village. The enclosure was a large one, but anything more profoundly melancholy it was impossible to imagine, and as the night wind faintly stirred the branches of the dark, closely-plaited cypress trees, it seemed as i hough we were lingering by a huge graveyard.
Suddenly Barrymore seized my arm. By the moonlight I could see his plump, pink face looked pale and troubled.
“By Jove!” he whispered. “There is a woman singing in the garden ! Sounds uncanny, doesn’t it ? ”
Very soft and sad the notes sounded in the moonlight quiet. The voice was a sweet soprano, and the air and words, which I presently caught, were both oddly, even painfully, familiar to me.
The last time I had heard them was upon the stage in England, for the song was a pretty ballad with a “ willow-waly,” refrain from one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and the singer had been Clare Hayward, a most beautiful and fascinating young English actress and vocalist, whose portrait I had sketched a hundred times, and whose image was, and ever would be, clearly printed upon my heart, though she had disappeared from the London world for nearly four years.
Not only the song but the voice, too, I seemed to recognise. How could I ever forget Clare Hayward’s voice, so sweet, so sad, and of so strangely penetrating a quality !
Trembling in every limb I waited, hanging upon each note until the song had ceased, to be followed by a deep, sobbing sigh, so near to where I stood on the other side of the cypress-hedge that it seemed to throb from the singer’s heart into mine.
“ Clare ! ”
I whispered the name at first in broken accents. Barrymore stared at me, and then, as I believe genuinely frightened, he incontinently
“Clare ! ” I cried again more loudly, and listening in the stillness I fancied I could hear the rustle of a woman’s dress.
Frantic now to discover some means of pene-trating that deathlike barrier between us, I hurried backwards and forwards, seeking for some means of effecting an entry into the mysterious garden.
But as I strained my eyes with this idea, the dark branches were slowly parted at a spot not far from the wooden door, and through the opening thus framed a woman’s face peered out at me, white and ghostly in the moonlight.
And pale and changed though it was, the once lovely outlines thin and aged, the dark eyes filled with an unutterable sadness, the face was that of the woman 1 loved—Clare Hayward !
II.
As suddenly and strangely as she had appeared, so did the woman behind the cypress-hedge vanish.
Whether she knew me again, whether she even saw me, I could not tell, although her eyes seemed to be fixed for that brief moment upon my face.
Until long past midnight I lingered there, murmuring prayers and entreaties in vain. More than once I tried to break through the funereal hedge ; but within the garden it was protected by stout stakes placed aslant each other and firmly fixed in the ground.
Barrymore was fast asleep when at length, wearied, excited, and half- way between hope and despair, I reached the inn; and, after lying awake for the rest of the night, I resolved to confide in him fully in the morning.
He was delighted. I could see that he did not quite believe my story, but he resolved to put it into verse form at once.
“ The idea of your lady-love dying behind the cypress-hedge while you are eating your heart out on the other side and can’t get at her is most old-world and touching,” he said. “ The Queen Anne period will lie the best for the verses, I think, and----”
“ Barrymore, don’t be an idiot! It was Clare Hayward. What does it all mean ?”
“ Presumably she is taking a holiday at St. Jacques, as we are doing, and has chosen a nice quiet house where she won’t be bothered.”
“ But she has disappeared for nearly for four years. And then the story of the prisoner —and of the lunatic----”
“I don’t suppose Miss Clare Hayward is the sort of girl to be kept anywhere against her will, from what I saw of her on the one or two occasions when I met her. Besides, we all heard she had eloped—”
“ Does this look like an elopement? The village people have all told you that only the farmer and his wife and what they call ‘ a ghost ’ are to bo found at the chateau.”
“ Possibly she eloped with the farmer.”
“ For Heaven’s sake talk seriously ! You have heard the old couple have lived here about twenty years, and that they are supposed to be eaietakers to this man Devigne, who never comes here. We must find out this Devigne, and make him release Miss Hayward.”
“ Softly, softly ! Would it not be better to ascertain first whether Miss Hayward wants to be released ? ”
“ Do you suppose a lovely, gifted girl of six or seven-and-twenty leaves a brilliant stage career to live alone in a hole, a vault, like that ? ”
“It does seem odd. But, my poor Cedric, I see only one other explanation. She may really be mad, and her relatives may have placed her in restraint here.”
“ It is not possible ! ” I maintained, stoutly, “ No one was ever more sweetly sane than she. Don’t you remember her bantering replies to my ardent love-letters—I shewed you one or two. I might, indeed, have shewn you them all, much as I prized them, for she never gave me one word
of direct encouragement----”
“ Still, I think she liked you, Ced. I heard she had a Tartar of a mother. Perhaps the old
lady didn’t think you a good enough match-----”
“ I was not. But no one would have been ^odtl enough for that peerless girl. She liked me. I really believe, as well as any man ; but she owned to me she had never really loved as she felt she could love. She was a girl of deep, restrained feeling—-but mad, never ! ”
“ Well, what do you mean to do ? ”
“ Haunt the place, paint the place, never leave it until I see her and speak to her. Meantime, we must make inquiries right and left, and hunt this Devigne out. There is certainly some mystery and foul play about this. I believe Clare has been kidnapped, and is detained here against her will----”
“ By whom ? Not a soul ever comes here, so our landlord says.”
“ I can’t argue about it. Nor could you if you felt as I do. I am going now to set up my easel before the cypress-hedge. Don’t expect me to dinner. I shall take some food with me. You know the people here — it is your part to ask questions.”
So I left Barrymore, and for three days early morning found me seated before the cypress-hedge, and moon rise found me wandering round the hidden garden. Once only did I see the