The Case of Richard Meynell Part 68

She too stopped to look at him, and at his dog. The mere neighbourhood of a living being brought a kind of comfort.

"It's going to snow--" she said, as she stood beside him, surprised by the sound of her own voice amid the roar of the wind.

"Aye--it's onding o' snaw--" said the shepherd, his shrewd blue eyes travelling over her face and form. "An' it'll mappen be a rough night."

"Are you taking your sheep into shelter?"

He pointed to a half-ruined fold, with three sycamores beside it, a stone's throw away. The gate of it was open, and the dog was gradually chasing the sheep within it.

"I doan't like leavin' 'em on t' fells this bitter weather. I'm afraid for t' ewes. It's too cauld for 'em. They'll be for droppin' their lambs too soon if this wind goes on. It juist taks t' strength out on 'em, doos the wind."

"Do you think it's going to snow a great deal?"

The old man looked round at the clouds and the mountains; at the powdering of snow that had already whitened the heights.

"It'll be more'n a bit!" he said cautiously. "I dessay we'll have to be gettin' men to open t' roads to-morrow."

"Does it often block the roads?"

"Aye, yance or twice i' t' winter. An' ye can't let 'em bide. What's ter happen ter foak as want the doctor?"

"Did you ever know people lost on these hills?" asked the girl, looking into the blackness ahead of them. Her shrill, slight voice rang out in sharp contrast to the broad gutturals of his Westmoreland speech.

"Aye, missy--I've known two men lost on t' fells sin I wor a lad."

"Were they shepherds, like you?"

"Noa, missy--they wor tramps. Theer's mony a fellow cooms by this way i'

th' bad weather to Pen'rth, rather than face Shap fells. They say it's betther walkin'. But when it's varra bad, we doan't let 'em go on--noa, it's not safe. Theer was a mon lost on t' fells nine year ago coom February. He wor an owd mon, and blind o' yan eye. He'd lost the toother, dippin' sheep."

"How could he do that?" Hester asked indifferently, still staring ahead into the advancing storm, and trembling with cold from head to foot.

"Why, sum o' the dippin' stuff got into yan eye, and blinded him. It was my son, gooin afther th' lambs i' the snaw, as found him. He heard summat--a voice like a lile child cryin'--an he scratted aboot, an dragged th' owd man out. He worn't deed then, but he died next mornin'.

An t' doctor said as he'd fair broken his heart i' th' storm--not in a figure o' speach yo unnerstan--but juist th' plain truth."

The old man rose. The sheep had all been folded. He called to his dog, and went to shut the gate. Then, still curiously eyeing Hester, he came back, followed by his dog, to the place where she stood, listlessly watching.

"Doan't yo go too far on t' fells, missy. It's coomin' on to snaw, an it'll snaw aw neet. Lor bless yer, it's wild here i' winter. An when t'

clouds coom down like yon--" he pointed up the valley--"even them as knaws t' fells from a chilt may go wrang."

"Where does this path lead?" said Hester, absently.

"It goes oop to Marly Head, and joins on to th' owd road--t' Roman road, foak calls it--along top o' t' fells. An' if yo follers that far enoof you may coom to Ullswatter an' Pen'rth."

"Thank you. Good afternoon," said Hester, moving on.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The old shepherd looked after her doubtfully"]

The old shepherd looked after her doubtfully, then said to himself that what the lady did was none of his business, and turned back toward one of the farms across the bridge. Who was she? She was a strange sort of body to be walking by herself up the head of Long Whindale. He supposed she came from Burwood--there was no other house where a lady like that could be staying. But it was a bit queer anyhow.

Hester walked on. She turned a craggy corner beyond which she was out of sight of any one on the lower stretches of the road. The struggle with the wind, the roar of water in her ears, had produced in her a kind of trance-like state. She walked mechanically, half deafened, half blinded, measuring her force against the wind, conscious every now and then of gusts of snow in her face, of the deepening gloom overhead climbing up and up the rocky path. But, as in that fatal moment when she had paused in the Burwood lane, her mind was not more than vaguely conscious of her immediate surroundings. It had become the prey of swarming recollections--captured by sudden agonies, unavailing, horror-stricken revolts.

At last, out of breath, and almost swooning, she sank down under the shelter of a rock, and became in a moment aware that white mists were swirling and hurrying all about her, and that only just behind her, and just above her, was the path clear. Without knowing it, she had climbed and climbed till she was very near the top of the pa.s.s. She looked down into a witch's cauldron of mist and vapour, already thickened with snow, and up into an impenetrable sky, as it seemed, close upon her head, from which the white flakes were beginning to fall, steadily and fast.

She was a little frightened, but not much. After all, she had only to rest and retrace her steps. The watch at her wrist told her it was not much past four; and it was February. It would be daylight till half-past five, unless the storm put out the daylight. A little rest--just a little rest! But she began to feel ill and faint, and so bitterly, bitterly cold. The sense of physical illness, conquering the vague overwhelming anguish of heart and mind, began to give her back some clearness of brain.

Who was she?--why was she there? She was Hester Fox-Wilton--no! Hester Meryon, who had escaped from a man who had called himself, for a few days at least, her husband; a man whom in scarcely more than a week she had come to loathe and fear; whose nature and character had revealed to her infamies of which she had never dreamed; who had claimed to be her master, and use her as he pleased, and from whom she had escaped by night, after a scene of which she still bore the marks.

"You little wild-cat! You think you can defy me--do you?"

And then her arms held--and her despairing eyes looking down into his mocking ones--and the helpless sense of indignity and wrong--and of her own utter and criminal folly.

And through her memory there ran in an ugly dance those things, those monstrous things, he had said to her about the Scotch woman. It was not at all absolutely sure that she, Hester, was his wife. He had shown her those letters at St. Germains, of course, to rea.s.sure her; and the letters were perfectly genuine letters, written by the people they professed to be written by. Still Scotch marriage law was a d.a.m.ned business--one never knew. He _hoped_ it was all right; but if she did hate him as poisonously as she said, if she did really want to get rid of him, he might perhaps be able to a.s.sist her.

Had he after all tricked and ruined her? Yet as her consciousness framed the question in the conventional phrases familiar to her through newspapers and novels, she hardly knew what they meant, this child of eighteen, who in three short weeks had been thrust through the fire of an experience on which she had never had time to reflect. Flattered vanity, and excitement, leading up almost from the first day to instinctive and fierce revolt--intervals of acquiescence, of wild determination to be happy, drowned in fresh rebellions of soul and sense--through these alternations the hours had rushed on, culminating in her furtive and sudden escape from the man of whom she was now in mad fear--her blind flight for "home."

The _commonness_ of her case, the absence of any romantic or poetic element in it--it was that which galled, which degraded her in her own eyes. Only three weeks since she had felt that entire and arrogant belief in herself, in her power over her own life and Philip's, on which she now looked back as merely ludicrous!--inexplicable in a girl of the most ordinary intelligence. What power had girls over men?--such men as Philip Meryon?

Her vanity was bleeding to death--and her life with it. Since the revelation of her birth, she seemed to have been blindly struggling to regain her own footing in the world--the kind of footing she was determined to have. Power and excitement; _not_ to be pitied, but to be followed, wooed, adored; not to be forced on the second and third bests of the world, but to have the "chief seat," the daintest morsel, the _beau role_ always--had not this been her instinctive, unvarying demand on life? And now? If she were indeed married, she was tied to a man who neither loved her, nor could bring her any position in the world; who was penniless, and had only entrapped her that he might thereby get some money out of her relations; who, living or dead, would be a disgrace to her, standing irrevocably between her and any kind of honour or importance in society.

And if he had deceived her, and she were not his wife--she would be free indeed; but what would her freedom matter to her? What decent man would ever love her now--marry her--set her at his side? At eighteen--eighteen!

all those chances were over for her. It was so strange that she could have laughed at her own thoughts; and yet at the same time it was so ghastly true! No need now to invent a half-sincere chatter about "Fate."

She felt herself in miserable truth the mere feeble mouse wherewith the great cat Fate was playing.

And yet--after all--she herself had done it!--by her own sheer madness.

She seemed to see Aunt Alice's plaintive face, the eyes that followed her, the lip that trembled when she said an unkind or wanton thing; she heard again the phrases of Uncle Richard's weekly letters, humorous, tender phrases, with here and there an occasional note of austerity, or warning.

Oh yes--she had done it--she had ruined herself.

She felt the tears running over her cheeks, mingling with the snow as it pelted in her face. Suddenly she realized how cold she was, how soaked.

She must--must go back to shelter--to human faces--to kind hands. She put out her own, groping helplessly--and rose to her feet.

But the darkness was now much advanced, and the great snowstorm of the night had begun. She could not see the path below her at all, and only some twenty yards of its course above her. In the whirling gloom and in the fury of the wind, although she turned to descend the path, her courage suddenly failed her. She remembered a stream she had crossed on a little footbridge with a rail; could she ever see to recross it again?--above the greedy tumult of the water? Peering upward it seemed to her that she saw something like walls in front of her--perhaps another sheepfold? That would give her shelter for a little, and perhaps the snow would stop--perhaps it was only a shower. She struggled on, and up, and found indeed some fragments of walls, beside the path, one of the many abandoned places among the Westmoreland fells that testify to the closer settlement of the dales in earlier centuries.

And just as she clambered within them, the clouds sweeping along the fell-side lifted and parted for the last time, and she caught a glimpse of a wide, featureless world, the desolate top of the fells, void of shelter or landmark, save that straight across it, from gloom to gloom, there ran a straight white thing--a ghostly and forsaken track. The Roman road, no doubt, of which the shepherd had spoken. And a vision sprang into her mind of Roman soldiers tramping along it, helmeted and speared, their heads bent against these northern storms--shivering like herself.

She gazed and gazed, fascinated, till her bewildered eyes seemed to perceive shadows upon it, moving--moving--toward her.

A panic fear seized her.

"I must get home!--I must!--"

And sobbing, with the sudden word "mother!" on her lips, she ran out of the shelter she had found, taking, as she supposed, the path toward the valley. But blinded with snow and mist, she lost it almost at once. She stumbled on over broken and rocky ground, wishing to descend, yet keeping instinctively upward, and hearing on her right from time to time, as though from depths of chaos, the wild voices of the valley, the wind tearing the cliffs, the rushing of the stream. Soon all was darkness; she knew that she had lost herself; and was alone with rock and storm. Still she moved; but nerve and strength ebbed; and at last there came a step into infinity--a sharp pain--and the flame of consciousness went out.