Short Fiction by Arthur Machen (ebook reader .txt) 📕
- Author: Arthur Machen
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The women glared at one another with horror in their eyes, and he saw one or two of the oldest of them clumsily making an old sign upon their breasts. Then they began to speak again, and he remembered fragments of their talk.
“She has been up there,” said one, pointing vaguely over her shoulder.
“She’d never know the way,” answered another. “They be all gone that went there.”
“There be nought there in these days.”
“How can you tell that, Gwenllian? ’Tis not for us to say that.”
“My great-grandmother did know some that had been there,” said a very old woman. “She told me how they was taken afterwards.”
And then his uncle appeared at the door, and they went their way as they had come. Edward Darnell never heard any more of it, nor whether the girl died or recovered from her strange attack; but the scene had haunted his mind in boyhood, and now the recollection of it came to him with a certain note of warning, as a symbol of dangers that might be in the way.
It would be impossible to carry on the history of Edward Darnell and of Mary his wife to a greater length, since from this point their legend is full of impossible events, and seems to put on the semblance of the stories of the Graal. It is certain, indeed, that in this world they changed their lives, like King Arthur, but this is a work which no chronicler has cared to describe with any amplitude of detail. Darnell, it is true, made a little book, partly consisting of queer verse which might have been written by an inspired infant, and partly made up of “notes and exclamations” in an odd dog-Latin which he had picked up from the “Iolo MSS.,” but it is to be feared that this work, even if published in its entirety, would cast but little light on a perplexing story. He called this piece of literature In Exitu Israel, and wrote on the title page the motto, doubtless of his own composition, “Nunc certe scio quod omnia legenda; omnes historiæ, omnes fabulæ, omnis Scriptura sint de me narrata.” It is only too evident that his Latin was not learnt at the feet of Cicero; but in this dialect he relates the great history of the “New Life” as it was manifested to him. The “poems” are even stranger. One, headed (with an odd reminiscence of old-fashioned books) “Lines written on looking down from a Height in London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the Sun” begins thus:—
One day when I was all alone
I found a wondrous little stone,
It lay forgotten on the road
Far from the ways of man’s abode.
When on this stone mine eyes I cast
I saw my Treasure found at last.
I pressed it hard against my
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