The Arthur Machen MEGAPACK ®. Arthur Machen
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to whom? I cannot see my way to accepting such an explanation. What put the plate into your head in connection with these flint signs, or whatever one may call them?”
“It was the figure of the Bowl,” said Vaughan. “I happen to possess a very large and very valuable Charles II punch-bowl. The chasing is really exquisite, and the thing is worth a lot of money. The sign I described to you was exactly the same shape as my punch-bowl.”
“A queer coincidence certainly. But the other figures or devices: you have nothing shaped like a pyramid?”
“Ah, you will think that queerer. As it happens, this punch-bowl of mine, together with a set of rare old ladles, is kept in a mahogany chest of a pyramidal shape. The four sides slope upwards, the narrow towards the top.”
“I confess all this interests me a good deal,” said Dyson. “Let us go on then. What about the other figures; how about the Army, as we may call the first sign, and the Crescent or Half-moon?”
“Ah, there is no reference that I can make out of these two. Still, you see I have some excuse for curiosity at all events. I should be very vexed to lose any of the old plate; nearly all the pieces have been in the family for generations. And I cannot get it out of my head that some scoundrels mean to rob me, and are communicating with one another every night.”
“Frankly,” said Dyson, “I can make nothing of it; I am as much in the dark as yourself. Your theory seems certainly the only possible explanation, and yet the difficulties are immense.”
He leaned back in his chair, and the two men faced each other, frowning, and perplexed by so bizarre a problem.
“By the way,” said Dyson, after a long pause, “what is your geological formation down there?”
Mr. Vaughan looked up, a good deal surprised by the question.
“Old red sandstone and limestone, I believe,” he said. “We are just beyond the coal measures, you know.”
“But surely there are no flints either in the sandstone or the limestone?”
“No, I never see any flints in the fields. I confess that did strike me as a little curious.”
“I should think so! It is very important. By the way, what size were the flints used in making these devices?”
“I happen to have brought one with me; I took it this morning.”
“From the Half-moon?”
“Exactly. Here it is.”
He handed over a small flint, tapering to a point, and about three inches in length.
Dyson’s face blazed up with excitement as he took the thing from Vaughan.
“Certainly,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “you have some curious neighbours in your country. I hardly think they can harbour any designs on your punch-bowl. Do you know this is a flint arrowhead of vast antiquity, and not only that, but an arrow-head of a unique kind? I have seen specimens from all parts of the world, but there are features about this thing that are quite peculiar.”
He laid down his pipe, and took out a book from a drawer.
“We shall just have time to catch the 5.45 to Castletown,” he said.
II
The Eyes on the Wall
Mr. Dyson drew in a long breath of the air of the hills and felt all the enchantment of the scene about him. It was very early morning, and he stood on the terrace in the front of the house. Vaughan’s ancestor had built on the lower slope of a great hill, in the shelter of a deep and ancient wood that gathered on three sides about the house, and on the fourth side, the south-west, the land fell gently away and sank to the valley, where a brook wound in and out in mystic esses, and the dark and gleaming alders tracked the stream’s course to the eye. On the terrace in that sheltered place no wind blew, and far beyond, the trees were still. Only one sound broke in upon the silence, and Dyson heard the noise of the brook singing far below, the song of clear and shining water rippling over the stones, whispering and murmuring as it sank to dark deep pools. Across the stream, just below the house, rose a grey stone bridge, vaulted and buttressed, a fragment of the Middle Ages, and then beyond the bridge the hills rose again, vast and rounded like bastions, covered here and there with dark woods and thickets of undergrowth, but the heights were all bare of trees, showing only grey turf and patches of bracken, touched here and there with the gold of fading fronds. Dyson looked to the north and south, and still he saw the wall of the hills, and the ancient woods, and the stream drawn in and out between them; all grey and dim with morning mist beneath a grey sky in a hushed and haunted air.
Mr. Vaughan’s voice broke in upon the silence.
“I thought you would be too tired to be about so early,” he said. “I see you are admiring the view. It is very pretty, isn’t it, though I suppose old Meyrick Vaughan didn’t think much about the scenery when he built the house. A queer grey, old place, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and how it fits into the surroundings; it seems of a piece with the grey hills and the grey bridge below.”
“I am afraid I have brought you down on false pretences, Dyson,” said Vaughan, as they began to walk up and down the terrace. “I have been to the place, and there is not a sign of anything this morning.”
“Ah, indeed. Well, suppose we go round together.”
They walked across the lawn and went by a path through the ilex shrubbery to the back of the house. There Vaughan pointed out the track leading down to the valley and up to the heights above the wood, and presently they stood beneath the garden wall, by the door.
“Here, you see, it was,” said Vaughan, pointing to a spot on the turf. “I was standing just where you are now that morning I first saw the flints.”
“Yes, quite so. That morning it was the Army, as I call it; then the Bowl, then the Pyramid, and yesterday, the Half-moon. What a queer old stone that is,” he went on, pointing to a block of limestone rising out of the turf just beneath the wall.
“It looks like a sort of dwarf pillar, but I suppose it is natural.”
“Oh, yes, I think so. I imagine it was brought here, though, as we stand on the red sandstone. No doubt it was used as a foundation stone for some older building.”
“Very likely.” Dyson was peering about him attentively, looking from the ground to the wall, and from the wall to the deep wood that hung almost over the garden and made the place dark even in the morning.
“Look here,” said Dyson at length, “it is certainly a case of children this time. Look at that.”
He was bending down and staring at the dull red surface of the mellowed bricks of the wall Vaughan came up and looked hard where Dyson’s finger was pointing, and could scarcely distinguish a faint mark in deeper red.
“What is it?” he said. “I can make nothing of it.”
“Look a little more closely. Don’t you see it is an attempt to draw the human eye?”
“Ah, now I see what you mean. My sight is not very sharp. Yes, so it is, it is meant for an eye, no doubt, as you say. I thought the children learnt drawing at school.”
“Well, it is an odd eye enough. Do you notice the peculiar almond shape; almost like the eye of a Chinaman?”
Dyson looked meditatively at the work of the undeveloped artist, and scanned the wall again, going down on his knees in the minuteness of his inquisition.
“I should like very much,” he said at length, “to know how a child in this out of the way place could have any idea of the shape of the Mongolian eye. You see the average child has a very distinct impression of the subject; he draws a circle, or something like a circle, and puts a dot in the centre. I don’t think any child imagines that the eye is really made like that; it’s just a convention of infantile art. But this almond-shaped thing puzzles