He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is--how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently;they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers--whispers that startle--ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night-birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves--it may be the leap of a wood-rat, it may be the footfall of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig?--what the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, transla-tions in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!
Surrounded at a little distance by armed and watchful friends, Byring felt utterly alone. Yielding himself to the solemn and mysterious spirit of the time and place, he had forgotten the nature of his connection with the visible and audible aspects and phases of the night. The forest was boundless; men and the habitations of men did not exist. The uni-verse was one primeval mystery of darkness, with-out form and void, himself the sole, dumb questioner of its eternal secret. Absorbed in thoughts born of this mood, he suffered the time to slip away unnoted.
Meantime the infrequent patches of white light lying amongst the tree-trunks had undergone changes of size, form and place. In one of them near by, just at the roadside, his eye fell upon an object that he had not previously observed. It was almost before his face as he sat; he could have sworn that it had not before been there. It was partly covered in shadow, but he could see that it was a human figure.
Instinctively he adjusted the clasp of his swordbelt and laid hold of his pistol--again he was in a world of war, by occupation an assassin.
The figure did not move. Rising, pistol in hand, he approached. The figure lay upon its back, its upper part in shadow, but standing above it and looking down upon the face, he saw that it was a dead body.
He shuddered and turned from it with a feeling of sickness and disgust, resumed his seat upon the log, and forgetting military prudence struck a match and lit a cigar. In the sudden blackness that followed the extinction of the flame he felt a sense of relief; he could no longer see the object of his aversion. Never-theless, he kept his eyes in that direction until it appeared again with growing distinctness. It seemed to have moved a trifle nearer.
'Damn the thing!' he muttered. 'What does it want?'
It did not appear to be in need of anything but a soul.
Byring turned away his eyes and began humming a tune, but he broke off in the middle of a bar and looked at the dead body. Its presence annoyed him, though he could hardly have had a quieter neigh-bour. He was conscious, too, of a vague, indefinable feeling that was new to him. It was not fear, but rather a sense of the supernatural--in which he did not at all believe.
'I have inherited it,' he said to himself. 'I sup-pose it will require a thousand ages--perhaps ten thousand--for humanity to outgrow this feeling.
Where and when did it originate? Away back, prob-ably, in what is called the cradle of the human race --the plains of Central Asia. What we inherit as a superstition our barbarous ancestors must have held as a reasonable conviction. Doubtless they believed themselves justified by facts whose nature we can-not even conjecture in thinking a dead body a malign thing endowed with some strange power of mis-chief, with perhaps a will and a purpose to exert it.
Possibly they had some awful form of religion of which that was one of the chief doctrines, sedulously taught by their priesthood, as ours teach the im-mortality of the soul. As the Aryans moved slowly on, to and through the Caucasus passes, and spread over Europe, new conditions of life must have re-sulted in the formulation of new religions. The old belief in the malevolence of the dead body was lost from the creeds and even perished from tradition but it left its heritage of terror, which is transmitted from generation to generation--is as much a part of us as are our blood and bones.'
In following out his thought he had forgotten that which suggested it; but now his eye fell again upon the corpse. The shadow had now altogether un-covered it. He saw the sharp profile, the chin in the air, the whole face, ghastly white in the moonlight.
The clothing was grey, the uniform of a Confederate soldier. The coat and waistcoat, unbuttoned, had fallen away on each side, exposing the white shirt.
The chest seemed unnaturally prominent, but the abdomen had sunk in, leaving a sharp projection at the line of the lower ribs. The arms were extended, the left knee was thrust upward. The whole posture impressed Byring as having been studied with a view to the horrible.
'Bah!' he exclaimed; 'he was an actor--he knows how to be dead.'
He drew away his eyes, directing them resolutely along one of the roads leading to the front, and re-sumed his philosophizing where he had left off.
'It may be that our Central Asian ancestors had not the custom of burial. In that case it is easy to understand their fear of the dead, who really were a menace and an evil. They bred pestilences. Children were taught to avoid the places where they lay, and to run away if by inadvertence they came near a corpse. I think, indeed, I'd better go away from this chap.'
