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"That was this morning—not an hour ago!"
"I have been widening your horizon longer than that, Mr. Vane; but never mind!"
"You mean you have been making a fool of me!" I said, turning from him.
"Excuse me: no one can do that but yourself!"
"And I decline to do it."
"You mistake."
"How?"
"In declining to acknowledge yourself one already. You make yourself such by refusing what is true, and for that you will sorely punish yourself."
"How, again?"
"By believing what is not true."
"Then, if I walk to the other side of that tree, I shall walk through the kitchen fire?"
"Certainly. You would first, however, walk through the lady at the piano in the breakfast-room. That rosebush is close by her. You would give her a terrible start!"
"There is no lady in the house!"
"Indeed! Is not your housekeeper a lady? She is counted such in a certain country where all are servants, and the liveries one and multitudinous!"
"She cannot use the piano, anyhow!"
"Her niece can: she is there—a well-educated girl and a capital musician."
"Excuse me; I cannot help it: you seem to me to be talking sheer nonsense!"
"If you could but hear the music! Those great long heads of wild hyacinth are inside the piano, among the strings of it, and give that peculiar sweetness to her playing!—Pardon me: I forgot your deafness!"
"Two objects," I said, "cannot exist in the same place at the same time!"
"Can they not? I did not know!—I remember now they do teach that with you. It is a great mistake—one of the greatest ever wiseacre made! No man of the universe, only a man of the world could have said so!"
"You a librarian, and talk such rubbish!" I cried. "Plainly, you did not read many of the books in your charge!"
"Oh, yes! I went through all in your library—at the time, and came out at the other side not much the wiser. I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies. To be sure I have given up reading for a good many years—ever since I was made sexton.—There! I smell Grieg's Wedding March in the quiver of those rose-petals!"
I went to the rose-bush and listened hard, but could not hear the thinnest ghost of a sound; I only smelt something I had never before smelt in any rose. It was still rose-odour, but with a difference, caused, I suppose, by the Wedding March.
When I looked up, there was the bird by my side.
"Mr. Raven," I said, "forgive me for being so rude: I was irritated. Will you kindly show me my way home? I must go, for I have an appointment with my bailiff. One must not break faith with his servants!"
"You cannot break what was broken days ago!" he answered.
"Do show me the way," I pleaded.
"I cannot," he returned. "To go back, you must go through yourself, and that way no man can show another."
Entreaty was vain. I must accept my fate! But how was life to be lived in a world of which I had all the laws to learn? There would, however, be adventure! that held consolation; and whether I found my way home or not, I should at least have the rare advantage of knowing two worlds!
I had never yet done anything to justify my existence; my former world was nothing the better for my sojourn in it: here, however, I must earn, or in some way find, my bread! But I reasoned that, as I was not to blame in being here, I might expect to be taken care of here as well as there! I had had nothing to do with getting into the world I had just left, and in it I had found myself heir to a large property! If that world, as I now saw, had a claim upon me because I had eaten, and could eat again, upon this world I had a claim because I must eat—when it would in return have a claim on me!
"There is no hurry," said the raven, who stood regarding me; "we do not go much by the clock here. Still, the sooner one begins to do what has to be done, the better! I will take you to my wife."
"Thank you. Let us go!" I answered, and immediately he led the way.
CHAPTER V. THE OLD CHURCH
I followed him deep into the pine-forest. Neither of us said much while yet the sacred gloom of it closed us round. We came to larger and yet larger trees—older, and more individual, some of them grotesque with age. Then the forest grew thinner.
"You see that hawthorn?" said my guide at length, pointing with his beak.
I looked where the wood melted away on the edge of an open heath.
"I see a gnarled old man, with a great white head," I answered.
"Look again," he rejoined: "it is a hawthorn."
"It seems indeed an ancient hawthorn; but this is not the season for the hawthorn to blossom!" I objected.
"The season for the hawthorn to blossom," he replied, "is when the hawthorn blossoms. That tree is in the ruins of the church on your home-farm. You were going to give some directions to the bailiff about its churchyard, were you not, the morning of the thunder?"
"I was going to tell him I wanted it turned into a wilderness of rose-trees, and that the plough must never come within three yards of it."
"Listen!" said the raven, seeming to hold his breath.
I listened, and heard—was it the sighing of a far-off musical wind—or the ghost of a music that had once been glad? Or did I indeed hear anything?
"They go there still," said the raven.
"Who goes there? and where do they go?" I asked.