Richard Le Gallienne - The Haunted Orchard

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to find out
how to volunteer, please contact LibriVox dot org. Recording by
Peter Yearsley. The Haunted Orchard by Richard le Gallienne. Spring

(00:22):
was once more in the world. As she sang to
herself in the faraway woodlands, her voice reached even the
ears of the city, weary with the long winter. Daffodils
flowered at the entrances to the subway, Furniture removing vans
blocked the side streets. Children clustered like blossoms on the doorsteps.

(00:44):
The open cars were running, and the cry of the
cash clo man was once more heard in the land. Yes,
it was the spring, and the city dreamed wistfully of
lilacs and the dewy piping of birds in gnarled old
apple trees of dogwood lighting up with sudden silver, the

(01:06):
thickening woods of water plants unfolding their glossy scrolls in
pools of morning freshness. On Sunday mornings, the outbound trains
were thronged with the eager pilgrims hastening out of the
city to behold once more the ancient marvel of the spring,
And on Sunday evenings the railway TERMINI were a flower

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with banners of blossom from rifled woodland and orchard, carried
in the hands of the returning pilgrims, whose eyes still
shone with the spring magic, in whose ears still sang
the fairy music. And as I beheld these signs of
the vernal equinox, I knew that I too must follow

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the music forsake a while the beautiful sireen we call
the city, and in the green silences meet once more,
my sweetheart Solitude. As the train drew out of the
grand Central, I hummed to myself, I've a neater, sweeter
maiden in a greener, cleaner land. And so I said

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good bye to the city, and went forth with beating
heart to meet the Spring. I had been told of
an almost forgotten corner on the south coast of Connecticut,
where the Spring and I could live in an inviolate loneliness,
a place uninhabited save by birds and blossoms, woods and

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thick grass, and an occasional silent farmer, and pervaded by
the breath and shimmer of the sound. Nor had rumor
lied for. When the train set me down at my destination,
I stepped out into the most wonderful green hush, a
leafy sabbath silence through which the very train, as it

(03:01):
went farther on its way, seemed to steal as noiselessly
as possible, for fear of breaking the spell. After a
winter in the town, to be dropped thus suddenly into
the intense quiet of the countryside makes an almost ghostly
impression upon one, as of an enchanted silence, a silence

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that listens and watches, but never speaks. Finger on lip.
There is a spectral quality about everything upon which the
eye falls. The woods like great green clouds, the wayside flowers,
the still farm houses half lost in orchard ploom, all
seem to exist in a dream. Everything is so still,

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everything so supernaturally green. Nothing moves or talks except the
gentle sussureus of the spring wind swaying the young buds
high up in the quiet sky, or a bird now
and again, or a little brook singing softly to itself
among the crowding rushes. Though from the houses, one notes

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here and there there are evidently human inhabitants of this
green silence, none are to be seen. I have often
wondered where the country folk hide themselves, as I have
walked hour after hour past farm and croft and lonely
door yards, and never caught sight of a human face.

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If you should want to ask, the way a farmer
is as shy as a squirrel, And if you knock
at a farmhouse door, all is as silent as a
rabbit warren. As I walked along in the enchanted stillness,
I came at length to a quaint old farmhouse, old
colonial in its architecture, embowered in white lilacs, and surrounded

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by an orchard of ancient apple tre trees which cast
a rich shade on the deep spring grass. The orchard
had the impressiveness of those old religious groves dedicated to
the strange worship of Sylvan gods, gods to be found
now only in Horace or Catulus, and in the hearts
of young poets, to whom the beautiful antique Latin is

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still dear. The old house seemed already the abode of
solitude as I lifted the latch of the white gate
and walked across the forgotten grass and up on to
the verandah already festooned with wisteria, and looked into the
window I saw Solitude sitting by an old piano on

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which no composer later than Bach had ever been played.
In other words, the house was empty. And going round
to the back, where old barns and stables leaned together
as if falling asleep, I found a broken pane, and
so climbed in and walked through the echoing rooms. The

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house was very lonely. Evidently no one had lived in
it for a long time, yet it was all ready
for some occupant, for whom it seemed to be waiting.
Quaint old four poster bedsteads stood in three rooms, dimity
curtains and spotless linen, old oak chests and mahogany presses,

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and opening drawers in chippendale sideboards. I came upon beautiful, frail,
old silver and exquisite china that set me thinking of
a beautiful grandmother of mine, made out of old lace
and laughing wrinkles and mischievous old blue eyes. There was
one little room that particularly interested me, a tiny bedroom,

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all white, and at the window the red roses were
already in bud. But what caught my eye with peculiar
sympathy was a small bookcase in which were some twenty
or thirty volumes wearing the same forgotten expression, forgotten and
yet cared for, which lay like a kind of memorial

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charm upon everything in the old house. Yes, everything seemed forgotten,
and yet everything curiously, even religiously remembered. I took out
book after book from the shelves, once or twice flowers
fell out from the pages, and I caught sight of
a delicate handwriting here and there, and frail markings. It

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was evidently the little intimate library of a young girl.
What surprised me most was to find that quite half
the books were in French, French poets and French romances.
A charming, very rare edition of Roncis, a beautifully printed
edition of Alfred de Muse, and a copy of Teo
fhil Gautier's Mademoiselle de Mopins. How did these exotic books

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come to be there alone, in a deserted New England farmhouse.
This question was to be answered later in a strange way. Meanwhile,
I had fallen in love with the sad, old, silent place,
And as I closed the white gate and was once
more on the road. I looked about for some one

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who could tell me whether or not this house of
ghosts might be rented for the summer by a comparatively
living man. I was referred to a fine old New
England farmhouse shining white through the trees a quarter of
a mile away. There I met an ancient couple, a
typical New England farmer and his wife. The old man,

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lean chin bearded, with keen gray eyes, flickering occasionally with
a shrewd humor, the old lady with a kindly old
face of the withered apple type, and ruddy. They were
evidently prosperous people, but their minds, for some reason I
could not at the moment divine, seemed to be divided

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between their New England desire to drive a hard bargain
and their disinclination to let the house at all. Over
and over again they spoke of the loneliness of the place.
They feared I would find it very lonely, no one
had lived in it for a long time, and so on.
It seemed to me that afterwards I understood their curious hesitation,

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but at the moment only regarded it as a part
of the cecuitous New England method of bargaining. At all events.
The rent I offered finally overcame their disinclination, whatever its cause,
and so I came into possession for four months of
that silent old house, with the white lilacs and the

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drowsy barns, and the old piano and the strange orchard.
And as the summer came on and the year changed
its name from May to June, I used to lie
under the apple trees in the afternoons, dreamily reading some
old book, and through half sleepy eyelids, watching the silken

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shimmer of the sound. I had lived in the old
house for about a month when one afternoon a strange
thing happened to me. I remember the date well. It
was the afternoon of Tuesday, June thirteenth. I was reading,
or rather dipping here and there in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
As I read, I remember that a little unripe apple,

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with a petal or two of blossoms still clinging to it,
fell upon the old yellow page. Then I suppose I
must have fallen into a dream, though it seems to
me that both my eyes and my ears were wide open,
for I suddenly became aware of a beautiful young voice
singing very softly somewhere among the leaves. The singing was

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very frail, almost imperceptible, as though it came out of
the air. It came and went fitfully, like the elusive
fragrance of sweet briar, as though a girl was walking
to and fro dreamily humming to herself in the still afternoon.
Yet there was no one to be seen. The orchard
had never seemed more lonely. And another fact that struck

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me as strange was that the words that floated to
me out of the aerial music were French, half sad,
half gay, snatches of some long dead singer of old France.
I looked about for the origin of the sweet sounds,
but in vain could it be the birds that were
singing in French in this strange orchard. Presently the voice

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seemed to come quite close to me, so near that
it might have been the voice of a dryad singing
to me out of the tree against which I was leaning.
And this time I distinctly caught the words of the
sad little song shd ra signor shand to a gear
lecu gay dou ah lecuri moi gilletta pluu. But though

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the voice was at my shoulder, I could see no one.
And then the singing stopped with what sounded like a sob,
and a moment or two later I seemed to hear
a sound of sobbing far down the orchard. Then there
followed silence, and I was left to ponder on the
strange occurrence. Naturally, I decided it was just a day

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dream between sleeping and waking over the pages of an
old book. Yet when next day and the day after,
the invisible singer was in the orchard again, I could
not be satisfied with such a mere matter of fact explanation.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
Aha, clari fantine.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Went the voice to and fro through the thick orchard boughs.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
More a u promani je true lowsie bell cursion me suiebun.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
Louis eaalngto culjitter jammie journauble.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
It was certainly uncanny to hear that voice going to
and fro the orchard there somewhere amid the bright sun
dazzled boughs, Yet not a human creature to be seen,
not another house even within half a mile. The most
materialistic mind could hardly but conclude that here was something
not dreamed of in our philosophy. It seemed to me

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that the only reasonable explanation was the entirely irrational one,
that my orchard was haunted, haunted by some beautiful young
spirit with some sorrow of lost joy that would not
let her sleep quietly in her grave. And next day
I had a curious confirmation of my theory. Once more,

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I was lying under my favorite apple tree, half reading
and half watching, the sound lulled into a dream by
the whir of insects and the spices called up from
the earth by the hot sun. As I bent over
the page, I suddenly had the startling impression that some
one was leaning over my shoulder and reading with me,

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and that a girl's long hair was falling over me
down on to the page. The book was the ron
star I had found in the little bedroom. I turned,
but again there was nothing there. Yet this time I
knew that I had not been dreaming, and I cried out,
poor child, tell me of your grief, that I may

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help your sorrowing heart to rest. But of course there
was no answer.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yet.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
That night I dreamed a strange dream. I thought I
was in the orchard again in the afternoon, and once
again heard the strange singing, but this time, as I
looked up, the singer was no longer invisible. Coming toward
me was a young girl with wonderful blue eyes filled
with tears, and gold hair that fell to her waist.

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She wore a straight white robe that might have been
a shroud or a bridle dress. She appeared not to
see me, though. She came directly to the tree where
I was sitting, and there she knelt and buried her
face in the grass and sobbed, as if her heart
would break. Her long hair fell over her like a mantle,

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and in my dream I stroked it pityingly and murmured
words of comfort for a sorrow I did not understand.
Then I woke suddenly, as one does from dreams. The
moon was shining brightly into the room. Rising from my bed,
I looked out into the orchard. It was almost as
bright as day. I could plainly see the tree of

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which I had been dreaming, And then a fantastic notion
possessed me. Slipping on my clothes, I went out into
one of the old barns and found a spade. Then
I went to the tree where I had seen the
girl weeping in my dream, and dug down at its foot.
I had dug little more than a foot when my
spade struck upon some hard substance, And in a few

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more moments I had uncovered and exhumed a small box, which,
on examination proved to be one of those pretty old
fashioned Chippendale work boxes used by our grandmothers to keep
their thimbles and needles in their reels of cotton and
skeins of silk. After smoothing down the little grave in
which I had found it, I carried the box into

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the house, and under the lamp light examined its contents.
Then at once I understood why that sad young spirit
went to and fro the orchard, singing those little French
songs for the treasure trove I had found under the
apple tree. The buried treasure of an unquiet, suffering soul

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proved to be a number of love letters, written mostly
in French in a very picturesque hand. Letters too written,
but some five or six years before. Perhaps I should
not have read them. Yet I read them with such
reverence for the beautiful, impassioned love that animated them, and
literally made them smell sweet and blossom in the dust,

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that I felt I had the sanction of the dead
to make myself the confidant of their story. Among the
letters were little songs, two of which I I had
heard the strange young voice singing in the orchard. And
of course there were many withered flowers and suchlike remembrances
of by gone rapture. Not that night could I make

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out all the story, though it was not difficult to
define its essential tragedy. And later on a gossip in
the neighborhood and a headstone in the churchyard told me
the rest. The unquiet young soul that had sung so
wistfully to and fro the orchard was my landlord's daughter.
She was the only child of her parents, a beautiful,

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wilful girl, exotically unlike those from whom she was sprung,
and among whom she lived with a disdainful air of exile.
She was, as a child a little creature of fairy fancies,
and as she grew up it was plain to her
father and mother that she had come from another world
than theirs. To them, she seemed like a child in

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an old fairy tale. Strangely found on his hearth by
some shepherd as he returns from the fields at evening
a little fairy girl swaddled in fine linen and dowered
with a mysterious bag of gold. Soon she developed delicate
spiritual needs, to which her simple parents were strangers. From

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long truances in the woods. She would come home laden
with mysterious flowers, and soon she came to ask for
books and pictures and music, of which the poor souls
that had given her birth had never heard. Finally she
had her way and went to study at a certain
fashionable college, and there the brief romance of her life began.

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There she met a romantic young Frenchman who had read
Ronseis to her and written her those picturesque letters I
had found in the old mahogany work box. And after
a while the young Frenchman had gone back to France,
and the letters had ceased. Month by month went by,

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and at length one day, as she sat wistful at
the window, looking out at the foolish sunlit road, a
message came. He was dead. That headstone in the village
churchyard tells the rest. She was very young to die,
scarcely nineteen years and the dead, who have died young,

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with all their hopes and dreams still like unfolded buds
within their hearts, do not rest so quietly in the
grave as those who have gone through the long day
from morning untill evening, and are only too glad to sleep.
Next day, I took the little box to a quiet

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corner of the orchard and made a little pire of
fragrant boughs. For so I interpreted the wish of that young,
unquiet spirit. And the beautiful words are now safe, taken
up again into the aerial spaces from which they came.
But since then the birds sing no more little French

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songs in my old orchard. The End of the Haunted
Orchard by Richard Le Gallienne