Van Cheele Character Analysis

‘There is a wild beast in your woods,’ said the artist Cunningham, as he was being driven to the station. It was the only remark he had made during the drive, but as Van Cheele had talked incessantly his companion’s silence had not been noticeable.

‘A stray fox or two and some resident weasels. Nothing more formidable,’ said Van Cheele. The artist said nothing.

‘What did you mean about a wild beast?’ said Van Cheele later, when they were on the platform.

‘Nothing. My imagination. Here is the train,’ said Cunningham.

He had a stuffed bittern in his study, and knew the names of quite a number of wild flowers, so his aunt had possibly some justification in describing him as a great naturalist. At any rate, he was a great walker. It was his custom to take mental notes of everything he saw during his walks, not so much for the purpose of assisting contemporary science as to provide topics for conversation afterwards. When the bluebells began to show themselves in flower he made a point of informing every one of the fact; the season of the year might have warned his hearers of the likelihood of such an occurrence, but at least they felt that he was being absolutely frank with them.

‘You can’t live in these woods,’ said Van Cheele.

‘They are very nice woods,’ said the boy, with a touch of patronage in his voice.

‘But where do you sleep at night?’

‘I don’t sleep at night; that’s my busiest time.’

Van Cheele began to have an irritated feeling that he was grappling with a problem that was eluding him.

‘What do you feed on?’ he asked.

‘Flesh,’ said the boy, and he pronounced the word with slow relish, as though he were tasting it.

‘Flesh! What flesh?’

‘Since it interests you, rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs in their season, children when I can get any; they’re usually too well locked in at night, when I do most of my hunting. It’s quite two months since I tasted child-flesh.’

And then, as Van Cheele ran his mind over the various depredations that had been committed during the last month or two, he came suddenly to a dead stop, alike in his walk and his speculations. The child missing from the mill two months ago – the accepted theory was that it had tumbled into the mill-race and been swept away; but the mother had always declared she had heard a shriek on the hill side of the house, in the opposite direction from the water. It was unthinkable, of course, but he wished that the boy had not made that uncanny remark about child-flesh eaten two months ago. Such dreadful things should not be said even in fun.

His position as a parish councillor and justice of the peace seemed somehow compromised by the fact that he was harbouring a personality of such doubtful repute on his property; there was even a possibility that a heavy bill of damages for raided lambs and poultry might be laid at his door.

‘Where’s your voice gone to?’ said his aunt. ‘One would think you had seen a wolf.’

Van Cheele, who was not familiar with the old saying, thought the remark rather foolish; if he had seen a wolf on his property his tongue would have been extraordinarily busy with the subject.

A naked homeless child appealed to Miss Van Cheele as warmly as a stray kitten or derelict puppy would have done.

‘We must do all we can for him,’ she decided, and in a very short time a messenger, dispatched to the rectory, where a page-boy was kept, had returned with a suit of pantry clothes, and the necessary accessories of shirt, shoes, collar, etc. Clothed, clean, and groomed, the boy lost none of his uncanniness in Van Cheele’s eyes, but his aunt found him sweet.

‘We must call him something till we know who he really is,’ she said. ‘Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names.’

Cunningham was not at first disposed to be communicative.

‘My mother died of some brain trouble,’ he explained, ‘so you will understand why I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly fantastic nature that I may see or think I have seen.’

‘Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold and grey. And at the same moment an astounding thing happened – the boy vanished too!’

‘What! vanished away into nothing?’ asked Van Cheele excitedly.

‘No; that is the dreadful part of it,’ answered the artist; ‘on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.’

Mrs Toop, who had eleven other children, was decently resigned to her bereavement, but Miss Van Cheele sincerely mourned her lost foundling. It was on her initiative that a memorial brass was put up in the parish church to ‘Gabriel-Ernest, an unknown boy, who bravely sacrificed his life for another.’

Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.