A MIDNIGHT WALK.
When young Lord Stanton left his own house with Wild Bampfylde there was
a tingle of excitement in the young man’s veins. Very few youths of his
age are to be found so entirely home-bred as Geoff. He had never been in
the way of mischief, and he had no natural tendency to lead him
thitherward, so that he had passed these first twenty years of his
existence without an adventure, without anything occurring to him that
might not have been known to all the world. To leave your own house
when other people are thinking of going to bed, for an expedition you
know not where, under the guidance of you know not whom, is a
sufficiently striking beginning to the path of mystery and adventure;
and there was a touch of personal peril in it which gave Geoff a little
tingle in his veins. His brother had been killed by some one with whom
this wild fellow was closely connected; it was a secret of blood which
the young man had set himself to solve one way or other; and this no
doubt affected his imagination, and for a short time the consciousness
of danger was strong in him, quickening his pulses and making his heart
beat. This was increased by a sense of wrong-doing, in so far as Geoff
felt that he might be exposing the tranquil household he had left behind
to agonies of apprehension about him, did he not return sufficiently
early to escape being found out. Finally, on the top of this
consciousness of conditional fault came a feeling, perhaps the most
strong of all, of the possible absurdity of his position. Romantic
adventure, if it never ceases to be attractive to the young, is looked
upon with different eyes at different periods, and the nineteenth
century has agreed to make a joke of melodrama. Instead of being moved
by a fine romantic situation, the modern youth laughs; and the idea of
finding himself in such picturesque and dramatic circumstances strikes
him as the most curious and laughable, if not ridiculous, idea. To
recognize himself as setting out, like the hero of a novel or a play (of
the old school), to search out a mystery--into the haunts of a
law-defying and probably law-breaking class, under the guidance of a
theatrical vagrant, tramp, or gipsy, to ask counsel of the weird old
woman, bright-eyed and solemn, who held all the threads of the story in
her hands, filled Geoff with mingled confusion and amusement. He had
almost laughed to himself as he realized it; but with the laugh a flush
came over his face--what would other people think? He felt that he would
be laughed at as romantic, jibed at as being able to believe that any
real or authentic information could be obtained in this ridiculous way.
’Lizabeth Bampfylde in the witness-box would no doubt be valuable, but
the romances she might tell in her own house, to a young man evidently
so credulous and of such a theatrical temperament--these two things
were entirely different, and he would be thoroughly laughed at for his
foolishness.
This consciousness of something ridiculous in the whole business
reassured him, however; and better feelings rose as he went on with a
half-pleased, half-excited, exhilaration and curiosity. The night was
fine, warm, and genial, but dark; a few stars shone large and lambent in
the veiled sky, but there was as yet no moon, so that all the light
there was was concentrated above in the sky, and the landscape
underneath was wrapped in darkness, a soft, cool, incense-breathing
obscurity--for night is as full of odours as the morning. It is full of
sounds too, all the more mysterious for having no kind of connection
with the visible; and no country is so full of sounds as the North
country, where the road will now thread the edge of a dark, unseen,
heathery, thymy moor, and now cross, at a hundred links and folds, the
course of some invisible stream, or some dozens of little runlets
tinkling on their way to a bigger home of waters. Now dark hedgerows
would close in the path; now it would open up and widen into that world
of space, the odorous, dewy moorland; now lead by the little street, the
bridge, the straggling outskirts of a village. Generally all was quiet
in the hamlets, the houses closed, the inhabitants in bed, but sometimes
there would be a sudden gleam of lightness into the night, a dazzle from
an open door or unshuttered window. The first of these rural places was
Stanton, the village close to the great House, where Geoff unconsciously
stole closer into the shadow, afraid to be seen. Here it was the smithy
that was still open, a dazzling centre of light in the gloom. The smith
came forward to his door as they passed, roused by the steady tread of
their footsteps, and looked curiously out upon them, his figure relieved
against the red background of light. “What, Dick! is’t you, lad?” he
said, peering out. “Got off again? that’s right, that’s right; and who’s
that along with you this fine night?” Bampfylde did not stop to reply,
to Geoff’s great relief. He went on with long swinging steps, taking no
notice. “If anybody asks you, say you don’t know,” he said as he went
on, throwing back a sort of challenge into the gloom. He did not talk to
his companion. Sometimes he whistled low, but as clearly as a bird,
imitating indeed the notes of the birds, the mournful cry of the
lapwing, the grating call of the corn-crake; sometimes he would sing to
himself low crooning songs. In this way they made rapid progress to the
foot of the hills.
Geoff had been glad of the silence at first; it served to deliver him
from those uncomfortable thoughts which had filled his mind, the
vagabond’s carelessness reassuring and calming his excitement; for
neither the uneasy sense of danger he had started with, nor the equally
uneasy sense of the ludicrous which had possessed him, were consistent
with the presence of this easy, unexcited companion, who conducted
himself as if he were alone, and would stop and listen to the whirr and
flutter of wild creatures in the hedgerows or on the edge of the moor,
as if he had forgotten Geoff’s very presence. All became simple as they
went on, the very continuance of the walk settling down and calming the
agitation of the outset. By and by, however, Geoff began to be impatient
of the silence, and of the interest his companion showed in everything
except himself. Could he be, perhaps, one of the “naturals” who are so
common in the North, a little less imbecile than usual, but still
incapable of continuous attention? Thus, after his first half-alarmed,
half-curious sense of the solemnity of the enterprise, Geoff came back
to an everyday boyish impatience of its unusual features and a
disposition to return to the lighter intercourse of ordinary life.
“How far have we to go now?” he asked. They had come to the end of the
level, and were just about to ascend the lower slopes of hilly country
which shut in the valley. The fells rising before them made the
landscape still more dark and mysterious, and seemed to thrust
themselves between the wayfarers’ eyes and that light which seemed to
retire more and more into the clear pale shining of the sky.
“Tired already?” said the man, with a shrug of his shoulders. He had
stopped to investigate a hollow under a great gorse-bush, just below the
level of the road, from which came rustlings and scratchings
indistinguishable. Bampfylde raised himself with a half-laugh, and came
back to Geoff’s side. “These small creatures is never tired,” he said;
“they scuds about all day, and sleep that light at night that a breath
wakes them; and yet they’re but small, not so big as my hand; and knows
their way, they does, wherever they’ve got to go.”
“I allow they are cleverer than I am,” said Geoff, good-humouredly, “but
then they cannot speak to ask their way. Men have a little advantage.
And even I am not so ignorant as you think. I have been on the fells in
a mist, and knew my way, or guessed it. At all events, I got home again,
and that is something.”
“There will be no mist to-night,” said Bampfylde, looking up at the sky.
“No; but it is dark enough for anything. Look here, I trust you, and you
might trust me. You know why I am going.”
“How do you trust me, my young lord?”
“Well,” said Geoff; “supposing I am a match for you, one man against
another, how can I tell you have not got comrades about? My brother lost
his life--by some one connected with you. Did you know my brother?”
The suddenness of this question took his companion by surprise. He
wavered for a moment, and fell backward with an involuntary movement of
alarm.
“What’s that for, lad, bringing up a dead man’s name out here in the
dark, and near midnight? Do you want to fley me? _I_ never meddled with
him. He would be safe in his bed this night, and married to his bonnie
lady, and bairns in his house to heir his title and take your lordship
from you, if there had been nobody but me.”
“I believe that,” said Geoff, softened. “They say you never harmed man.”
“No, nor beast--except varmint, or the like of a hare or so--when the
old wife wanted a bit o’ meat. Never man. For man’s blood is precious,”
said the wild fellow with a shudder. “There’s something in it that’s not
in a brute. If I were to kill you or you me in this lonesome place,
police and that sort might never find it out; but all the same, the
place would tell--there would be something there different; they say
man’s blood never rubs out.”
Geoff felt a little thrill run through his own veins as he saw his
companion shiver and tremble; but it was not fear. The words somehow
established perfect confidence between himself and his guide; and he had
all the simplicity of mind of a youth whose faith had never been
tampered with, and who believed with the unshaken sincerity of
childhood. “The stain on the mind never wears out,” he said,
thoughtfully. “I knew a boy once who had shot his brother without
knowing it. How horrible it was! he never forgot it; and yet it was not
his fault.”
“Ah! I wish as I had been that lucky--to shoot my brother by accident,”
said Wild Bampfylde, with a long sigh, shaking into its place a pouch or
game-bag which he wore across his shoulder. “It would have been the best
thing for him,” he added, in answer to Geoff’s cry of protest; “then he
wouldn’t have lived--for worse----”
“Have you a brother so unfortunate?”
“Unfortunate! I don’t know if that is what you call it. Yes,
unfortunate. He never meant bad. I don’t credit it.”
“You are not speaking,” said Geoff, in a very low voice, overpowered at
once with curiosity and interest, “of John Musgrave?”
“The young Squire? No, I don’t mean him; he’s bad, and bad enough, but
not so bad. You’ve got a deal to learn, my young lord. And what’s your
concern with all that old business? If another man’s miserable, _that_
don’t take bit or sup from you--nor a night’s rest, unless you let it.
You’ve got everything that heart could desire. Why can’t you be content,
and let other folks be?”
“When we could help them, Bampfylde?” said Geoff. “Is that the way you
would be done by? Left to languish abroad; left with a stain on your
name, and no one to hold out a hand for you--nobody to try to get you
righted; only thinking of their own comfort, and the bit and the sup and
the night’s rest?”
“You’ve never done without neither one nor t’other,” came in a hoarse
undertone from Bampfylde’s lips. “It’s fine talking; but it’s little you
know.”
“No, I’ve never had the chance,” said Geoff. “I can’t tell what it’s
like, that’s true; but if it ever comes my way----”
“Ah, ay! it’s fine talking--it’s fine talking!”
Geoff did not know how to reply. He went on impatiently, tossing aloft
his young head, as a horse does, excited by his own words like the
playing of a trumpet. They proceeded so up a stiff bit of ascent that
taxed their strength and their breathing, and made conversation less
practicable. The winding mountain road seemed to pierce into the very
fastnesses of the hills, and the tall figure of the vagrant a stop in
advance of him appeared to Geoff like the shadow of some ghostly pioneer
working his way into the darkness. No twinkle of a lamp, no outline of
any inhabited place looming against the lighter risings of the manifold
slopes, encouraged their progress. The hills, which would have made the
very brightness of the morning dark, increased the gloom of the night.
Only the tinkle of here and there a little stream, the sound of their
own footsteps as they passed on, one in advance of the other, the small
noises which came so distinctly through the air--here a rustle, there a
jar of movement, something stirring under a stone, something moving amid
the heather, were to be heard. Bampfylde himself was stilled by these
great shadows. His whistle dropped; and the low croon of song which he
had raised from time to time did not take its place. He became almost
inaudible, as he was almost invisible; only the sound of a measured step
and a large confused outline seen at times against the uncertain
openings and bits of darkling sky.
When they came abreast again, however, on a comparatively smooth level,
after a stiff piece of climbing, he spoke suddenly. “It’s queer work
going like this through the dark. Many a night I have done it with no
company, and then a man’s drawn out of himself watching the living
things: one will stir at your foot, and one go whirr and strike across
your very face, for they put more trust in you in the dark. You see they
have the use of their eyesight, and the like of you and me haven’t. So
they know their advantage. But put a man down beside another man, and
a’s changed. I cannot understand the meaning of it. It puts things in
your head, and it puts away the innocent creatures. Men’s seldom
innocent: but they’re awful strange,” said the vagrant, with a sigh.
“Do you think they are so strange? I am not sure that I do,” said Geoff,
bewildered a little. “They are just like everything else--one is dull,
one is clever; but except for that----”
“Clever! it’s the creatures that are clever. Did you ever see a bird
make a fuss to get you off where her nest was? A woman wouldn’t have
sense to do that. She’d run and shriek, and get hold of her bairns; but
the bird’s clever. That’s what I calls clever. It’s something stranger
than that. When a man’s beside you, all’s different; there’s him
thinking and you thinking; and though you’re close, and I can grip
you”--here Bampfylde seized upon Geoff with a sudden, startling grasp,
which alarmed the young man--“I can’t tell no more than Adam where your
mind is. Asking your pardon, my young lord, I didn’t mean to startle
you,” he added, dropping his hold. “Now the creatures is all there; you
know where you have ’em. Far the contrary with a man.”
Geoff was not given to abstract thoughts, and this sudden entry into the
regions of the undiscovered perplexed him. “You like company, then?” he
said, doubtfully. He knew a great deal more than his companion did of
almost everything that could be suggested, but not of this.
“Like company? it’s confusing, very confusing. But the creatures is
simple. You can watch their ways, and they’re never double-minded.
They’re at one thing, one thing at a time. Now, a man, there’s notions
in his head, and you can never tell how they got there.”
“I suppose,” said young Geoff, perplexed yet reverential, “it is because
men are immortal; not like the beasts that perish.”
“Ay, ay--I suppose they perish,” said Bampfylde. “What would they be
like us for, and sicken, and pine? They get the good of it all the time;
run wild as they like, and do mischief as they like, and never put in
gaol for it. You think they’re sleeping now? and so they are, and waking
too--as still as the stones and as lively as the stars up yonder. That’s
them; but us, if we’re sleeping, it’s for hours long, and dreams with
it; one bit of you lying like a log, t’other bit of you off at the ends
of the airth. So, if you’re woke sudden, chances are you aren’t there to
be woke--and there’s a business; but the creatures, they’re always
there.”
“That is true,” said Geoff, who was slightly overawed, and thought this
very fine and poetical--finer than anything he had ever realized before.
“But sometimes they are ill, I suppose, and suffer too?”
“Then them that is merciful puts them out of their pain. The
hardest-hearted ones will do that. A bird with a broken wing, or a beast
with a broken leg, unless it be one of the gentlefolks’ pets, that’s
half mankind, and has to suffer for it because his master’s fond of him
(and that’s funny too)--the worst of folks will put them out of their
pain. But a man--we canna’ do it,” cried the vagrant; “there’s law
again’ it, and more than law. If it was nothing but law, little the
likes of me would mind; but there’s something written here,” he said,
putting his hand to his breast; “something that hinders you.”
“I hope so indeed,” said Geoff, a little breathless, with a sense of
horror; “you would not take away a life?”
“But the creatures, ay; they have the best of it. You point your gun at
them, or you wring their necks, and it’s all over. I’m fond of the
creatures--creatures of all kinds. I’m fond of being out with them on a
heathery moor like this all myself. They know me, and there’s no fear in
them. In the morning early, when the air’s all blue with the dawn, the
stirring and the moving there is, and the scudding about, setting the
house in order! A thing not the size of your hand will come out with two
bright eyes, and cock its head and look up at you. A cat may look at a
king; a bit of a moor chicken, or a rabbit the size o’ my thumb, up and
faces you, and, ‘Who are you, my man?’ That is what they looks like; but
you never see them like that after it’s full day.”
“Then is night their happy time?” said Geoff, humouring his strange
companion.
“Night, they’re free. There’s none about that wishes them harm; and
though I snare varmint, and sometimes take a hare or a bird,--I’ll not
deny it, my young lord, though you were to clap me in prison again
to-morrow--they’re not afraid o’ me; they know I’ll not harm them. Even
the varmint, if they didn’t behave bad and hurt the rest, I’d never have
the heart. When you go back, if you do go back----”
“I must go back,” said Geoff, very gravely. “Why should not I? You don’t
think I could stay up here?”
“I was not thinking one thing or another. The like of you is contrary.
I’ve little to do with men; but when you go, if you go, it might be
early morning, the blue time, at the dawn. Then’s the time to see; when
there’s all the business to be done afore the day, and after the night.
Children is curious,” said Bampfylde, with a softening of his voice,
which felt in the darkness like a slowly dawning smile; “but creatures
is more curious yet. I like to watch them. You’ll see all the life
that’s in the moors if it’s that time when you go.”
“I suppose if there is anything to tell me I cannot go sooner,” said
Geoff. His tone was grave, and so was his face, though that was
invisible. “Then it will be day before I get home, and they will all
know--perhaps I was a fool.”
“For coming?” said the man, turning round to peer into his face though
it was covered by the darkness; and then he gave a low laugh. “I could
have told you that!”
For a moment Geoff’s blood ran colder; he felt a little thrill of
dismay. Was this strange creature a “natural” as he had thought, or did
what he said imply danger? But no more was said for a long time.
Bampfylde sank back again all at once into the silence he had so
suddenly broken, or rather into the low crooning of monotonous old songs
with which he had beguiled the first part of the journey. There was a
kind of slumbrous soothing in them which half-interested, half-stupefied
Geoff. They all went to one tune, a tune not like anything he knew--a
kind of low chant, recalling several airs that did not vary from verse
to verse, but repeated itself, and so lulled the wayfarer that all
active sensation seemed to go from him, and the monotonous, mechanical
movement of his limbs seemed to beat time to the croon of sound which
accompanied the gradual march. There was something weird in it,
something like “the woven paces and the waving hands” of the
enchantress. Geoff felt his eyes grow heavy, and his head sinking on his
breast, as the low, regular tramp and chant went on.
At length, all at once, the hills seemed to clear away from the sky,
opening up on either hand; and straight before them, hanging low, like
a signal of trouble, a late risen and waning moon that seemed thrust
forward out into the air, and hanging from the sky, appeared in the
luminous but mournful heaven in front of them. There is always something
more or less baleful and troublous in this sudden apparition, so late
and out of date, of a waning moon; the oil seems low in the lamp, the
light ready to be extinguished, the flame quivering in the socket.
Between them and the sky stood a long, low cottage, rambling and
extensive, with a rough, grey stone wall built round it, upon which the
pale moonlight shone. Long before they reached it, as soon as their
steps could be audible, the mingled baying and howling of a dog was
heard, rising doleful and ominous in the silence; and from under the
roof--which was half rough thatch and half the coarse tiles used for
labourers’ cottages--a light strangely red against the radiance of the
moon flickered with a livid glare. A strange black silhouette of a house
it was, with the low moonlight full upon it, showing here and there in a
ghostly full white upon a bit of wall or roof, and contrasting with the
red light in the window: it made a mystic sort of conclusion to the
journey. Bampfylde directed his steps towards it without a word. He
knocked a stroke or two on the door, which seemed to echo over all the
country and up to the mountain-tops in their great stillness. “We are at
home, now,” he said.