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| Across The Moors |
It really was most unfortunate. guy had a temperature of nearly a hundred, and a pain in her side, and Mrs. Workington Bancroft knew that it was appendicitis. But there was no one whom she could send for *-the doctor. James had gone with the jaunting car to meet her husband who had at last managed to get away for a week's shooting. Adolph, she had sent to the Ever shams, only half an hour before, with a note for Lady Eva. The cook could not walk, even if dinner could be served without her. Kate, as usual, was not to be trusted. There remained Miss Craig. "Of course, you must see that Peggy is really ill,*' said she, as the governess came into the room, in answer to her summons. "The difficulty is, that there is absolutely no one whom I can send for the doctor." Mrs. Working ton Bancroft paused; she was always willing that those beneath her should have the privilege of offering the services that it was her right to command.
"So, perhaps, Miss Craig," she went
on, "you would not mind walking over to Cubits' Farm. I hear there is a
Liverpool doctor staying there. Of course, I know nothing about him, but we must
take the risk, and I expect he'll be only too glad to be earning something
during his holiday. It's nearly four miles, I know, and I'd never dream of
asking you if it was not that I dread appendicitis so." "Very
well," said Miss Craig, "I suppose I must go; but I don't know the
way." "Oh you can't miss it," said Mrs. Working ton Bancroft, in
her anxiety temporarily forgiving the obvious unwillingness of her governess'
consent. "You follow the road across the moor for two miles until you
come to Redman's Cross. You turn to the left there and follow a rough path
that leads through a larch plantation. And Debits' farm lies just below you in
the valley." "And take Pontiff with you," she added, as the girl
left the room.
"There's absolutely nothing to be afraid
of, but I expect you'll feel happier with the dog." "Well,
miss," said the cook, when Miss Craig went into the kitchen to get her
boots, which had been drying by the fire; "of course, she knows best, but I
don't think it's right after all that's happened for the mistress to send you
across the moors on a night like this. It's not as if the doctor could do
anything for Miss Margaret if you do bring him. Every child is like that once
in a while. He'll only say put her to bed, and she's there already."
"I don't see what there is to be afraid of, cook," said Miss Craig as
she laced her boots, "unless you believe in ghosts." "I'm not so
sure about that. Anyhow I don't like sleeping in a bed where the sheets are too
short for you to pull them over your head. But don't you be frightened, miss?
It's my belief that their bark is worse than their bite." But though Miss
Craig amused herself for some minutes by trying to imagine the bark of a ghost
(a thing altogether different from the classical ghost bark), she did not feel
entirely at ease.
She was naturally nervous, and living as she
did in the hinterland of the servants' hall, she had heard vague details of
true stories that were only myths in the drawing room. The very name of
Redman's Cross sent a shiver through her; it must have been the place where
that horrid murder was committed. She had forgotten the tale, though she
remembered the name. Her first disaster came soon enough. Pontiff, who was
naturally slow-witted, took more than five minutes to find out that it was only
the governess he was escorting, but once the discovery had been made, he
promptly turned tail, paying not the slightest heed to Miss Craig's feeble
whistle. And then, to add to her discomfort, the rain came, not in heavy drops,
but driving in sheets of thin spray that blotted out what few landmarks there
were upon the moor. They were very kind at Tebbits' farm. The doctor had gone
back to Liverpool the day before, but Mrs. Tebbit gave her hot milk and turf
cakes and offered her reluctant son to show Miss Craig a shorter path onto
the moor, that avoided the larch wood. He was a monosyllabic youth, but his
presence was cheering, and she felt the night doubly black when he left her at
the last gate. She trudged on wearily.
Her thoughts had already gone back to the
almost exhausted theme of the bark of ghosts when she heard steps on the road
behind her that were at least material. Next minute the figure of a man
appeared: Miss Craig was relieved to see that the stranger was a clergyman. He
raised (lies hat. "I believe we are both going in the same
direction," he said. "Perhaps I may have the pleasure of escorting
you." She thanked him. "It is rather weird at night," she went
on, "and what with all the tales of ghosts and bogies that one hears from
the country people, I've ended by being half afraid myself." "I can
understand your nervousness," he said, "especially on a night like
this. I used at one time to feel the same, for my work often meant lonely walks
across the moor to farms which were only reached by rough tracks difficult
enough to find even in the daytime." "And you never saw anything to
frighten you nothing immaterial I mean?" "I can't really say that I
did, but I had an experience eleven years ago which served as the turning point
in my life, and since you seem to be now in much the same state of mind as I
was then in, I will tell it to you.
"The time of year was late September. I
had been over to Weston Dale to see an old woman who was dying, and then, just
as I was about to start on my way home, word came to me of another of my
parishioners who had been suddenly taken ill only that morning. It was after
seven when at last I started. A farmer saw me on my way, turning back when I
reached the moor road. "The sunset the previous evening had been one of
the most lovely I ever remember seeing. The whole vault of heaven had been
scattered with flakes of white cloud, tipped with rosy pink like the strewn
petals of a full-blown rose. "But that night all was changed. The sky was
an absolutely dull slate color, except in one corner of the west where a thin
rift showed the last saffron tint of the sullen sunset. As I walked, stiff and
footsore, my spirits sank. It must have been the marked contrast between the
two evenings, the one so lovely, so frill of promise (the corn was still out in
the fields spoiling for fine weather), the other so gloomy, so sad with all the
dead weight of autumn and winter days to come. And then added to this sense of
heavy depression came another different feeling which I surprised myself by recognizing
as fear. "I did not know why I was afraid.
"The moors lay on either side of me,
unbroken except for a straggling line of turf shooting butts, that stood within
a stone's-throw of the road. "The only sound I had heard for the last half
hour was the cry of the startled grouse—Go back, go back, go back. But yet the
feeling of fear was there, affecting a low center of my brain through some
little-used physical channel.
"I buttoned my coat closer and tried to
divert my thoughts by thinking of next Sunday's sermon. "I had chosen to
preach on Job. There is much in the old-fashioned notion of the book, apart
from all the subtleties of the higher criticism, that appeals to country
people; the loss of herds and crops, the breakup of the family. I would not
have dared to speak, had not I too been a farmer; my own glebe land had been
flooded three weeks before, and I suppose I stood to lose as much as any man in
the parish.
As I walked along the road repeating to myself
the first chapter of the book, I stopped at the twelfth verse. " 'And the
Lord said unto Satan: Behold all that he hath is in thy power' . . . "The
thought of the bad harvest (and that is an awful thought in these valleys)
vanished. I seemed to gaze into an ocean of infinite darkness. "I had
often used, with the Sunday glibness of the tired priest, whose duty it is to
preach three sermons in one day, the old simile of the chess board. God and the
Devil were the players: and we were helping one side or the other. But until
that night I had not thought of the possibility of my being only a pawn in the
game, that God might throw away that the game might be won. "I had reached
the place where we are now, I remember it by that rough stone water-trough,
when a man suddenly jumped up from the roadside. He had been seated on a heap
of broken road metal. " 'Which way are you going, guvnor?' he said.
"I knew from the way he spoke that the man was a stranger. There are many
at this time of the year who come up from the south, tramping northwards with
the ripening corn.
I told him my destination. " 'We'll go
along together,' he replied. "It was too dark to see much of the man's
face, but what little I made out was coarse and brutal. "Then he began the
half-menacing whine I knew so well—he had tramped miles that day, he had had
no food since breakfast, and that was only a crust. " 'Give us a copper,'
he said, 'it's only for a night's lodging.' "He was whittling away with a
big clasp knife at an ash stake he had taken from some hedge." The
clergyman broke off. "Are those the lights of your house?" he said.
"We are nearer than I expected, but I shall have time to finish my story.
I think I will, for you can run home in a couple of minutes, and I don't want
you to be frightened when you are out on the moors again.
41As the man talked he seemed to have stepped
out of the very background of my thoughts, his sordid tale, with the sad lies
that hid a far sadder truth. "He asked me the time. "It was five
minutes to nine. As I replaced my watch I glanced at his face. His teeth were
clenched, and there was something in the gleam of his eyes that told me at once
his purpose. "Have you ever known how long a second is? For a third of a
second, I stood there facing him, filled with an overwhelming pity for myself
and him; and then without a word of warning, he was upon mc. I felt nothing. A
flash of lightning ran down my spine, I heard the dull crash of the ash stake,
and then a very gentle patter like the sound of a far-distant stream. For a
minute I lay in perfect happiness watching the house's lights as they
increased in number until the whole heaven shone with twinkling lamps. "I
could not have had a more painless death." Miss Craig looked up. The man
was gone; she was alone on the moor. She ran to the house, her teeth
chattering, and ran to the solid shadow that crossed and recrossed the kitchen
blind. As she entered the hall, the clock on the stairs struck the hour. It was
nine o'clock.
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