ON THE MOORLAND
Trix was walking over the moorland. The Duchessa and Miss Tibbutt had
departed to what promised to be an exceedingly dull garden party some
five miles distant. It had been decreed that it was entirely unnecessary
to inflict the same probable dulness on Trix, therefore she had been left
to freedom and her own devices for the afternoon.
Trix was playing the game of "I remember." It can be a quite
extraordinarily fascinating game, or an exceedingly painful one. Trix was
finding it extraordinarily fascinating. It was so gorgeously delightful
to find that nothing had shrunk, nothing lessened in beauty or mystery. A
larch copse was every bit as much a haunt of the Little People as
formerly; the moss every bit as much a cool green carpet for their
tripping feet. A few belated foxglove stems added to the old-time
enchantment of the place. Even a little stream rippling through the wood,
was a veritable stream, and not merely a watery ditch, as it might quite
well have proved. Then there was the view from the gate, through a frame
of beech trees out towards the sea. It was still as entrancing an ocean,
sun-flecked and radiant. There were still as infinite possibilities in
the unknown Beyond, could one have chartered a white-winged boat, and
have sailed to where land and water meet. There was a pond, too,
surrounded by blackberry bushes and great spear-like rushes, perhaps not
quite the enormous lake of one's childhood, but a reasonably large pond
enough, and there were still the blackberry bushes and the spear-like
rushes. And, finally, there was the moorland, glowing with more radiant
crimson lakes and madders than the most wonderful paint box ever held,
and stretching up and down, and up again, till it melted in far away
purples and lavenders.
Trix's heart sang in accord with the laughing sun-kissed earth around
her. It was all so gorgeous, so free and untrammelled. She lay upon the
hot springy heather, and crushed the tiny purple flowers of the wild
thyme between her fingers, raising the bruised petals to her face to
drink in their strong sweet scent.
From far off she could hear the tinkle of a goat bell, and the occasional
short bark of a sheep dog. All else was silence, save for the humming of
the bees above the heather. Tiny insects floated in the still air,
looking like specks of thistle-down as the sun caught and silvered their
minute wings. Little blue butterflies flitted hither and thither like
radiant animated flowers.
For a long time Trix sat very still, body and soul bathed in the beauty
around her. At last she got to her feet, and made her way across the
heather, ignoring the small beaten tracks despite the prickliness of her
chosen route.
After some half-hour's walking she came to a stone wall bordering a hilly
field, a low wall, a battered wall, where tiny ferns grew in the
crevices, and the stones themselves were patched with orange-coloured
lichen.
Trix climbed the wall, and walked across the soft grass. A good way to
the right was a fence, and beyond the fence a wood. Trix made her way
slowly towards it. Thistles grew among the grass,--carding thistles, and
thistles with small drooping heads. She looked at them idly as she
walked. Suddenly a slight sound behind her made her turn, and with the
turning her heart leapt to her throat.
From over the brow of the hilly field behind her, quite a number of
cattle were coming at a fair pace towards her.
Now Trix hated cows in any shape or form, and these were the unpleasant
white-faced, brown cattle, whose very appearance is against them. They
were moving quickly too, quite alarmingly quickly.
Trix cast one terrified and pathetic glance over her shoulder. The glance
was all-sufficient. She ran,--ran straight for the wood, the cattle after
her. Doubtless curiosity, mere enquiry maybe, prompted their pursuit.
Trix concerned herself not at all with the motive, the fact was
all-sufficient. Fear lent wings to her feet, and with the horned and
horrid beasts still some ten yards behind her, she precipitated herself
across the fence to fall in an undignified but wholly relieved heap among
a mass of bracken and whortleberry bushes. The briefest of moments saw
her once more on her feet, struggling, fighting her way through
shoulder-high bracken. Five minutes brought her to an open space beyond.
Trembling, breathless, and most suspiciously near tears, she sank upon
the ground.
"The beasts!" ejaculated Trix opprobriously, and not as the mere
statement of an obvious fact. She took off her hat, which flight had
flung to a somewhat rakish angle, and blinked vigorously towards the
trees. She was _not_ going to cry.
Presently fright gave place to interest. She gazed around, curious,
speculative. It was an unusual wood, a strange wood, a wood of holly
trees, with a scattered sprinkling of beech trees. The grey twisted
trunks of the hollies gleamed among the dark foliage, giving an eerie and
almost uncanny atmosphere to the place. It was extraordinarily silent,
too; and infinitely lonelier than the deserted moorland. It gave Trix an
odd feeling of unpleasant mystery. Yet there was nothing for it but to
face the mystery, to see if she could not find some way out further adown
the wood. Not for untold gold would she again have faced those horned
beasts behind her.
A tiny narrow path led downhill from the cleared space. Trix set off down
it, swinging her hat airily by the brim the while. Presently the sense of
uncanniness abated somewhat; the elfin in her went out to meet the
weirdness of the wood.
Now and again she stopped to pick and eat whortleberries from the massed
bushes beneath the trees. She did not particularly like them, truly;
nevertheless she was still young enough to pick and eat what nature had
provided for picking and eating, and that for the mere pleasure of being
able to do so. Also, at this juncture the action brought confidence in
its train.
Presently, through the trees facing her, she saw a wall, a high wall, a
brick wall, and quite evidently bordering civilization.
"It can't go on for ever," considered Trix. "It must come to an end some
time, either right, or left. And I'm not going back." This last
exceedingly firmly.
She went forward, scrutinizing, anxious. And then,--joyful and welcome
sight!--a door, an open door came into view. A mound of half-carted leaf
mould just without showed, to any one endowed with even the meanest
powers of deduction, that someone--some man, probably--was busy in the
neighbourhood.
Trix made hastily for the door. The next moment she was through it, to
find herself face to face with a man and a wheelbarrow. Trix came to a
standstill, a standstill at once sudden and unpremeditated. The man
dropped the wheelbarrow. They stared blankly at each other. And Trix was
far too flustered to realize that his stare was infinitely more amazed
than her own.
"You can't come through this way," said the man, decisive though
bewildered. His orders regarding the non-entrance of strangers had been
of the emphatic kind.
Trix's brain worked rapidly. The route before her must lead to safety,
and nothing, no power on earth, would take her back through the field
atop the wood. She was genuinely, quite genuinely too frightened. This is
by way of excuse, since here a regrettable fact must be recorded. Trix
gave vent to a sound closely resembling a sneeze. It was followed by one
brief sentence.
"There's someone at the gate," was what the man heard.
Again amazement was written on his face. He turned towards the gate. Trix
fled past him.
"I couldn't go back," she insisted to herself, as she vanished round the
corner of a big green-house. "And I _did_ say 'isn't there' even if it
was mixed up with a sneeze. And wherever have I seen that man's face
before?"
She whisked round another corner of the green-house, attempting no answer
to her query at the moment, ran down a long cinder path bordered by
cabbages and gooseberry bushes, and bolted through another door in
another wall. And here Trix found herself in an orchard, at the bottom of
which was a yew hedge wherein she espied a wicket gate. She made rapid
way towards it. And now she saw a big grey house facing her. There was no
mistaking it. Childhood's memories rushed upon her. It was Chorley Old
Hall.
Trix came through the wicket gate, and out upon a lawn, in the middle of
which was a great marble basin full of crystal water, from which rose a
little silver fountain. Before her was the big grey house, melancholy,
deserted-looking. The blinds were drawn down in most of the windows. It
had the appearance of a house in which death was present.
And then a spirit of curiosity fell upon her, a sudden strong desire to
see within the house, to go once more into the rooms where she had stood
in the old days, a small and somewhat frightened child.
There was not a soul in sight. Probably the man with the wheelbarrow had
not thought it worth while to pursue her. The garden appeared as deserted
as the house. Trix tip-toed cautiously towards it. She looked like a
kitten or a canary approaching a dead elephant.
To her left was a door. Quite probably it was locked; but then, by the
favour of fortune, it might not be. Of course she ran a risk, a
considerable risk of meeting some caretaker or other, and her presence
would not be particularly easy to explain. Curiosity and prudence wavered
momentarily in the balance. Curiosity turned the scale. She tried the
door. Vastly to her delight it yielded at her push. She slipped inside
the house, closing it softly behind her.
She found herself in a long carpeted passage, sporting prints adorning
the walls. She tip-toed down it, her step making no smallest sound on the
soft carpet. The end of the passage brought her into a big square hall.
To her right were wide deep stairs; opposite them was a door, in all
probability the front door; to her left was another door.
Trix recalled the past, rapidly, and in detail. The door to the left must
lead to the library,--that is, if her memory did not play her false. She
remembered the big room, the book-cases reaching from floor to ceiling,
and the man with the black eyes, who had terrified her. Something, some
fleeting shadow, of her old childish fear was upon her now, as she turned
the door handle. The door yielded easily. She pushed it wide open.
The room was shadowed, gloomy almost. The heavy curtains were drawn back
from the windows, but other curtains of some thinnish green material hung
before them, curtains which effectually blotted out any view from the
window, or view into the room from without. Before her were the old
remembered book-cases, filled with dark, rather fusty books.
Trix pushed the door to behind her, and turned, nonchalantly, to look
around the room. As she looked her heart jumped, leapt, and then stood
still.