across ten miles of country, especially in mountain air, where slope gives back the echo to slope, and even a flung human voice can span valleys as lightly as the wind. This tune—it was a full minute before the procession of sounds became a tune to their unaccustomed ears—was muted and wild and sad, and the nature of the instrument, whatever it might be, seemed to determine that it must be slow.
“Some sort of a pipe,” said Dominic. “Maybe they’ve got a local version of the alphorn here. That’s modal, surely, that tune?”
“Mixolydian,” said Christine. “I think! I never heard anything like it before. That entry! Listen, there he goes again!”
Down from its first reedy, impetuous cry span the thread of sound, and settled low and softly, like a lark dropping. Full and deep the lament sang itself out, and was gone. They waited, but it did not come again.
“That’s all. What a pity!”
Tossa turned back once more, before they began to descend the valley path, and halted them again with an exclamation of delight. “Look, there go the goats!”
Sleek and dark and brilliant with rain, the chestnut goats minced daintily out of the grey of rocks along the skyline, into the beam of stormy sunlight, that turned each one into a garnet on a chain for a moment, out of it again through the narrow cleft of the southerly col, and so out of sight. Gaudy as players in a spotlight, they gleamed and passed. And after them, abrupt and tall and dazzling against the dark, a man walked into their vision.
Tiny and distant as they saw him, he filled the sky for a moment. A long, rangy figure, like most of them here, in the modified local dress that made them all look like Mirek’s brigand-patriot Janosik and his mountain boys. The brief glitter like a crown on his head must be the fine chains that ringed his hat, the light streaming down his body was the sheen of his rain-soaked frieze cloak. His swinging stride carried him into the gleam and out of it without pause; and they saw clearly, bright and ominous against the dark sky, the stock of the rifle projecting over his shoulder, and the inordinately long barrel swinging momentarily into sight below his hip as he turned through the col, and vanished in a swirl of his wet cloak, leaving the stage empty.
Below, near the Riavka hut, it had not rained at all. The meadows were dry and bright, the cloud had passed, torn its skirts on the summits, discharged its rage there, and dissolved in its own tears.
They lay in the blonde grass at the edge of the paddock, half asleep, reluctant to go indoors. And it was there that they heard the far-off pipe again. The notes came filtering into their consciousness like music heard in a dream, so distant they were, and so faint. If they had not heard them already once that day, they would probably not have been aware of them now; and even as it was, they had been listening to them inwardly for some minutes before they realised what it was that was stroking at their senses.
Dominic lay stretched out at ease, the breeze just stirring Tossa’s dark hair against his shoulder, and let his mind drift with the elusive sound rather dreamed than heard. That abrupt, cascading, improvised opening, hardly loud enough to be heard at all, and yet startling, and then the full, deep, remote air. He wondered how well Christine really knew her modes? “And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs.” Or Mixolydian, what’s the odds? To follow the tune you had to relax and let it take you along with it, for its progress was deliberate and abstracted, running line softly into line. Not until he stopped consciously listening did he catch the form of it, and fall into the loose, plaintive cadence so smoothly that the words came of themselves.
Curious how the simplest doggerel folk-songs have a way of making themselves applicable everywhere.
Like Tossa, with her tender conscience, and her sense of obligation to a man she had cordially disliked. He turned his head softly, to study through the seeding grasses her unconscious face, turned up to the slanting rays of the sun with eyes closed, half asleep, but still anxious in her half-sleep, and still vulnerable. Her eyelids, loftily arched and tenderly full, were veined as delicately as harebells, and her mouth, now that she wasn’t on guard, was soft and sad and uncertain as a solitary child’s.
He was leaning cautiously over her on one elbow when she opened her eyes, looked up dazedly and blindingly into his face, and smiled at him without reserve or defence, out of the charmed place of her half-sleep. And suddenly, in the same instant that her open acceptance of him made his heart turn over, the true significance of his own ramblings stung his mind. He rolled over and sat bolt upright, his fingers clenched into the grass.
He wasn’t mistaken. That was the air he’d been hearing now for two minutes at least, and he’d known it, and never grasped what it meant, or how downright impossible it was. The pastoral mood was right, the loose form was right, and the music was certainly modal; but how could some shepherd piper here in the Low Tatras, in the heart of Central Europe, be playing an unmistakably English folk-song called “Bushes and Briars”?
Chapter 6
THE MAN IN THE CHAPEL
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The astonishing thing was that no one else had noticed anything odd; they lay placidly chewing grass-stems on either side of him, and gave no sign. Nobody but himself had caught and identified the air; and in a moment more it was gone, and even the distances were silent.
He debated uneasily whether he ought to call Tossa’s attention to his discovery, but the decision was taken out of his hands. He had no opportunity to speak to her alone before they were called in to their early supper; and midway through the pork and dumplings Dana appeared in the doorway to announce in a flat, noncommittal voice: “Miss Barber, someone is asking for you on the telephone.”
Tossa dropped her fork with a clatter, suddenly jerked back into her private world of pitfalls and problems. Her face was tight and wild for an instant.
“
