engulfed her. Along the path, from darkness into darkness, she
proceeded and bore her weight of agony through the insensible waste, as
a raindrop passes over a leaf and leaves no sign. Futile shadow of a
shade, she crept across the darkness and vanished beneath it; broken
with the greatest suffering her spirit was built to bear, she put forth
upon the void and tottered forward to the shuffle of her footsteps and
the muffled drumming of her own pulse.
She rested presently where a great stone thrust up out of night beside
her way. She knew it for a friend and sank upon it now, and put her
forehead against it. Here reigned such a peace as only the deaf and the
desert sentinel can know--a peace beyond all experience of gregarious
man---a peace impossible within any hand-wrought dwelling but the grave.
There was no wind to strike sound from dry heath, or rush, or solitary
stone; no water flowed near enough to send its voices hither; no rain
fell to utter its whisper on earth. The silence was consummate.
Light had long since been extinguished in the few dwellings visible from
Ringmoor. Trowlesworthy and Brisworthy and Ditsworthy--all were dim.
No ray penetrated the sky or glowed upon the land; and night’s self now
began to darken, as the moon sank to her setting.
And then from afar, out of the gloom of the south, a distant beacon
flashed even to this uplifted solitude; and a beam that blinked for the
ships now reached one life-foundered creature, where she sat in a
silence as deep, in a loneliness as vast, as the silence and the
loneliness of the sea. The light was familiar to Rhoda; through
wanderings and vigils in high places she had seen it many times; and she
knew that it spoke of danger to the vessels and guarded them upon their
ways.
Time rolled on; the earth rolled on; only this conscious fragment of
life stranded here between time and earth lay still, chained down with
her load of grief and horror. Long she remained, until there stole over
Ringmoor the unspeakable stupor and lifelessness of the hour before
dawn. Now even creatures of night had made an end of their labours and
were sleeping in holt or den; and through this trance and absolute
desistance, the woman’s soul still battled with its burdens and cried
out to her oblivious environment.
She walked onward again and forced herself and her pangs upon the
earth’s suspended animation. She outraged inert Ringmoor by thus moving
and suffering within its bosom, when the rule of the time was cessation
and dreamless peace. She rolled unsteadily in her going, where all else
was stable and motionless; she throbbed in her body and in her soul,
where all else was unconscious; her dust endured the tortures of hunger
and profound physical exhaustion, where nearly all other living things
were filled and sleeping; her mind rose, racked to a new and higher
anguish at the thought of the future, where all else was mindless and
without care or grief. She considered what must follow the rising of
another sun, and she longed that she might wander and suffer here,
through a moonless night, for evermore.
Again she sank to earth for a space, and again she rose and breasted the
last slope which separated her from her home. Then another life made
vocal utterance and complaint of fate. A dog-fox barked out of
darkness, and the lonely ululation struck very loud upon the silence.
To the fellow-being who heard him, his forlorn protest spoke of a
creature to be envied; for he was only hungry and time would ease his
want.
Among the burrows of the warren she threaded her way until, black
against the night, towered Ditsworthy. And she opened the outer gate,
reached the door, struck upon it and cried two words. Mournful they
rose, and deep, and heavy with the weight of her torments.
"Father! Mother!"
They came down to her out of broken sleep. They found her collapsed and
carried her in and roused the smouldering peat upon the hearth. Then to
their questions as they crowded round her--men, women, boys, candle-lit,
grotesque, hastily robed from bed--she answered slowly--
"Margaret is drowned--driven to it by me--and David have cast me out."
THE END
* * * * * * * *
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