Until the day break, and the shadows flee away.
It was not at first that Ralph was a prey to sentiments of horror. His
physical energy dominated all emotion, and left no room for terrible
imaginings--no room for a full realization of what had occurred. That
which appeared to paralyze the others--that which by its ghastly
reality appeared to fix them to the earth with the rigidity of
stone--endowed him with a power that seemed all but superhuman, and
inspired him with an impulse that leapt to its fulfilment.
Mounted on the young horse, he galloped after the mare along the long
range of the pikes, in and out of their deep cavernous alcoves, up and
down their hillocks and hollows, over bowlders, over streams, across
ghylls, through sinking sloughs and with a drizzling rain overhead. At
one moment he caught sight of the mare and her burden as they passed
swiftly over a protruding headland which was capped from his point of
view by nothing but the mist and the sky. Then he followed on the
harder; but faster than his horse could gallop over the pathless
mountains galloped the horse of which he was in pursuit. He could see
the mare no more. Yet he rode on and on.
When he reached the extremity of the dark range and stood at that
point where Great Howe fringes downward to the plain, he turned about
and rode back on the opposite side of the pikes. Once more he rode in
and out of cavernous alcoves, up and down hillocks and hollows, over
bowlders, over streams, across rivers, through sinking sloughs, and
still with a drizzling rain overhead. The mare was nowhere to be seen.
Then he rode on to where the three ranges of mountains meet at Angle
Tarn and taking first the range nearest the pikes he rode under the
Bow Fell, past the Crinkle Crags to the Three-Shire Stones at the foot
of Greyfriars, where the mountains slope downward to the Duddon
valley. Still the mare was nowhere to be seen.
Returning then to the Angle Tarn, he followed the only remaining range
past the Pike of Stickle until he looked into the black depths of the
Dungeon Ghyll. And still the mare was nowhere to be seen. Fear was
behind her, and only by fear could she be overtaken. It was at about
two o'clock in the afternoon that the disaster had occurred. It was
now fully three hours later, and the horse Ralph rode, fatigued and
wellnigh spent, was slipping its feet in the gathering darkness. He
turned its head towards Wythburn, and rode down to the city by Harrop
Tarn.
At the first house--it was Luke Cockrigg's, and it stood on the bank
above the burn--he left the horse, and borrowed a lantern. The family
would have dissuaded him from an attempt to return to the fells, but
he was resolved. There was no reasoning against the resolution
pictured on his rigid and cadaverous countenance.
The drizzling rain still fell and the night had closed in when Ralph
set his face afresh towards the mountains.
And now the sickening horrors of sentiment overtook him, for now he
had time to reflect upon what had occurred. The figure of the
riderless horse flying with its dead burden before the wind had fixed
itself on his imagination; and while the darkness was concealing the
physical surroundings, it was revealing the phantasm in the glimmering
outlines of every rock and tree. Look where he would, peering long and
deep into the blackness of a night without moon or stars, without
cloud or sky, with only a blank density around and about, Ralph seemed
to see in fitful flashes that came and went--now on the right and now
on the left of him, now in front and now behind, now on the earth at
his feet and now in the dumb vapor floating above him--the spectre of
that riderless horse. Sometimes he would stop and listen, thinking he
heard a horse canter close past him; but no, it was the noise of a
hidden river as its waters leapt over the stones. Sometimes he thought
he heard the neigh of a horse in the distance; but no, it was only the
whinny of the wind. His dog had followed close behind him when he fled
from the pass, and it was still at his heels. Sometimes Laddie would
dart away and be lost for a few minutes in the darkness. Then the
dog's muffled bark would be heard, and Ralph's blood would seem to
stand still with a dread apprehension that dared not to take the name
of hope. No; it was only a sheep that had strayed from its fold, and
had taken shelter from wind and rain beneath a stone in a narrow
cleft, and was now sending up into the night the pitiful cry of a lost
and desolate creature.
No, no, no; nowhere would the hills give up the object of his search;
and Ralph walked on and on with a heart that sank and still sank.
He knew these trackless uplands as few knew them, and not even the
abstraction of mind that came with these solitary hours caused him an
uncertain step. On and on, through the long dark night, to the Stye
Head once more, and again along the range of the rugged pikes, calling
the mare by the half-articulate cry she knew so well, and listening
for her answering neigh, but hearing only the surging of the wind or
the rumble of the falling ghyll; then on and on, and still on.
When the earliest gleams of light flecked the east, Ralph was standing
at the head of the Screes. Slowly the gray bars stretched across the
sky, wider and more wide, brighter and more bright, now changed to
yellow and now to pink, chasing the black walls of darkness that died
away on every side. In the basin below, at the foot of the steep
Screes, whose sides rumbled with rolling stones, lay the black mere,
half veiled by the morning mist. Still veiled, too, were the dales of
Ireton, but far away, across the undulating plains through which the
river rambled, flowed the wide Western Sea, touched at its utmost bar
by the silvery light of the now risen sun.
Ralph turned about and walked back, with the flush of the sky
reflected on his pale and stony face. His lantern, not yet
extinguished, burned small and feeble in his hand. Another night was
breaking to another day; another and another would yet break, and all
the desolation of a heart, the ruin of many hearts--what was it before
Nature's unswerving and unalterable course! The phantasms of a night
that had answered to his hallucinations were as nothing to the
realities of a morning whose cruel light showed him only more plainly
the blackness of his despair.
The sentiments of horror which now possessed him were more terrible
because more spiritual than before. To know no sepulture! The idea was
horrible in itself, horrible in its association with an old Hebrew
curse more remorseless than the curse of Cain, most horrible of all
because to Ralph's heightened imagination it seemed to be a symbol--a
symbol of retribution past and to come.
Yes, it was as he had thought, as he had half thought; God's hand was
on him--on him of all others, and on others only through him. Having
once conceived this idea in its grim totality, having once fully
received the impress of it from the violence and suddenness of a
ghastly occurrence, Ralph seemed to watch with complete
self-consciousness the action of the morbid fancy on his mind. He
traced it back to the moment when the truth (or what seemed to him the
truth) touching the murder of Wilson had been flashed upon him by a
look from Simeon Stagg. He traced it yet farther back to that night at
Dunbar, when, at the prompting of what he mistook for mercy, he had
saved the life of the enemy that was to wreck his own life and the
lives of all that were near and dear to him. To his tortured soul
guilt seemed everywhere about him, whether his own guilt or the guilt
of others, was still the same; and now God had given this dread
disaster for a sign that vengeance was His, that retribution had come
and would come.
Was it the dream of an overpowered imagination--the nightmare of a
distempered fancy? Yet it would not be shaken off. It had bathed the
whole world in another light--a lurid light.
Ralph walked fast over the fells, snatching at sprigs of heather,
plucking the slim boughs from the bushes, pausing sometimes to look
long at a stone, or a river, or a path that last night appeared to be
as familiar to him as the palm of his hand, and had suddenly become
strange and a mystery. The shadow of a supernatural presence hung over
all.
Throughout that day he walked about the fells, looking for the
riderless horse, and calling to it, but neither expecting to see nor
to hear it. He saw once and again the people of Wythburn abroad on the
errand that kept him abroad, but they never came within hail, and a
stifling sense of shame kept him apart, none the less that he knew not
wherefore such shame should fall on him, all the same that they knew
not that it had fallen.
The day would come when all men would see that God's hand was on him.
Yes, Ralph; but when that day does indeed come, then all men shall
also see that whom God's hand rests on has God at his right hand.
When the darkness was closing in upon a second night, Ralph was
descending High Seat towards Shoulthwaite Moss. Behind him lagged the
jaded dog, walking a few paces with drooping head and tail; then lying
for a minute, and rising to walk languidly again.