woman flushed. "See here, Mr. Robson," she said, "I am of the sea, and
she of the fell, but we are the same nation. We are not of yours, but
you can make us so. Directly I saw her I knew what she was; and so did
she know me. How? By the eyes and understanding. I felt who she was.
As she is now so was I once. As I am now so will she be. I'll answer
for her; I'm here to do it. When once I'd followed my man I never
looked back; no more will she. The woman obeys the man--that's the
law. If a girl of your people was taken with a man of mine she'd lose
her speech and forsake her home and ways. That's the law all the world
over. God Almighty's self, if He were a woman, would do the same. He
couldn't help it. The law is His; but He made it so sure that not
Himself could break it."
"What law do you mean?" she was asked. She said, "The law of life. The
woman follows the man."
This proposition he was not prepared to deny, and the end of it was
that Mr. Robson baptised the girl, taking Miranda for godmother.
Mabilla they called her by her sponsor's desire, "Mabilla
By-the-Wood," and as such she was published and married. You may be
disposed to blame him for lightness of conscience, but I take leave to
tell you that he had had the cure of souls in Dryhope for
five-and-thirty years. He claimed on that score to know his people.
The more he knew of them, the less he was able to question the lore of
such an one as Miranda King. And he might remind you that Mabilla King
is alive to this hour, a wife and mother of children. That is a fact,
and it is also a fact, as I am about to tell you, that she had a hard
fight to win such peace.
Married, made a woman, she lost her haunted look and gained some
colour in her cheeks. She lost her mortal chill. Her clothing, the
putting up of her hair made some difference, but loving entreaty all
the difference in the world. To a casual glance there was nothing but
refinement to distinguish her from her neighbours, to a closer one
there was more than that. Her eyes, they said, had the far, intent,
rapt gaze of a wild animal. They seemed to search minutely, reaching
beyond our power of vision, to find there things beyond our human ken.
But whereas the things which she looked at, invisible to us, caused
her no dismay, those within our range, the most ordinary and
commonplace, filled her with alarm. Her eyes, you may say, communed
with the unseen, and her soul followed their direction and dwelt
remote from her body. She was easily startled, not only by what she
saw but by what she heard. Nobody was ever more sensitive to sound.
They say that a piano-tuner goes not by sound, but by the vibrations
of the wire, which he is able to test without counting. It was so with
her. She seemed to feel the trembling of the circumambient air, and to
know by its greater or less intensity that something--and very often
what thing in particular--was affecting it. All her senses were
preternaturally acute--she could see incredible distances, hear,
smell, in a way that only wild nature can. Added to these, she had
another sense, whereby she could see what was hidden from us and
understand what we could not even perceive. One could guess as much,
on occasions, by the absorbed intensity of her gaze. But when she was
with her husband (which was whenever he would allow it) she had no
eyes, ears, senses or thoughts for any other living thing, seen or
unseen. She followed him about like a dog, and when that might not be
her eyes followed him. Sometimes, when he was afield with his sheep,
they saw her come out of the cottage and slink up the hedgerow to the
fell's foot. She would climb the brae, search him out, and then crouch
down and sit watching him, never taking her eyes off him. When he was
at home her favourite place was at his feet. She would sit huddled
there for hours, and his hand would fall upon her hair or rest on her
shoulder; and you could see the pleasure thrilling her, raying out
from her--just as you can see, as well as hear, a cat purring by the
fire. He used to whisper in her ear as if she was a child: like a
child she used to listen and wonder. Whether she understood him or no
it was sometimes the only way of soothing her. Her trembling stopped
at the sound of his voice, and her eyes left off staring and showed
the glow of peace. For whole long evenings they sat close together,
his hand upon her hair and his low voice murmuring in her ear.
This much the neighbours report and the clergyman confirms, as also
that all went well with the young couple for the better part of two
years. The girl grew swiftly towards womanhood, became sleek and
well-liking; had a glow and a promise of ripeness which bid fair to be
redeemed. A few omens, however, remained, disquieting when those who
loved her thought of them. One was that she got no human speech,
though she understood everything that was said to her; another that
she showed no signs of motherhood; a third that Bessie Prawle could
not abide her. She alone of all the little community avoided the King
household, and scowled whensoever she happened to cross the path of
this gentle outland girl. Jealousy was presumed the cause; but I
think there was more in it than that. I think that Bessie Prawle
believed her to be a witch.
III
To eyes prepared for coming disaster things small in themselves loom
out of a clear sky portentous. Such eyes had not young Andrew King the
bride-groom, a youth made man by love, secure in his treasure and
confident in his power of keeping what his confidence had won. Such
eyes may or may not have had Mabilla, though hers seemed to be centred
in her husband, where he was or where he might be. George King was old
and looked on nothing but his sheep, or the weather as it might affect
his sheep. Miranda King, the self-contained, stoic woman, had schooled
her eyes to see her common duties. Whatever else she may have seen she
kept within the door of her shut lips. She may have known what was
coming, she must have known that whatever came had to come. Bessie
Prawle, however, with hatred, bitter fear and jealousy to sharpen her,
saw much.
Bessie Prawle was a handsome, red-haired girl, deep in the breast,
full-eyed and of great colour. Her strength was remarkable. She could
lift a heifer into a cart, and had once, being dared to it, carried
Andrew King up the brae in her arms. The young man, she supposed,
owed her a grudge for that; she believed herself unforgiven, and saw
in this sudden marriage of his a long-meditated act of revenge. By
that in her eyes (and as she thought, in the eyes of all Dryhope) he
had ill-requited her, put her to unthinkable shame. She saw herself
with her favours of person and power passed over for a nameless,
haunted, dumb thing, a stray from some other world into a world of
men, women, and the children they rear to follow them. She scorned
Mabilla for flinching so much, she scorned her for not flinching more.
That Mabilla could be desirable to Andrew King made her scoff; that
Andrew King should not know her dangerous kept her awake at night.
For the world seemed to her a fearful place since Mabilla had been
brought into it. There were signs everywhere. That summer it thundered
out of a clear sky. Once in the early morning she had seen a bright
light above the sun--a mock sun which shone more fiercely than a fire
in daylight. She heard wild voices singing; on still days she saw the
trees in Knapp Forest bent to a furious wind. When Mabilla crept up
the fell on noiseless feet to spy for Andrew King, Bessie Prawle heard
the bents hiss and crackle under her, as if she set them afire.
Next summer, too, there were portents. There was a great drought, so
great that Dryhope burn ran dry, and water had to be fetched from a
distance for the sheep. There were heather fires in many places; smut
got into the oats, and a plague of caterpillars attacked the trees so
that in July they were leafless, and there was no shade. There was no
pasture for the kine, which grew lean and languid. Their bones stuck
out through their skin; they moaned as they lay on the parched earth,
and had not strength enough to swish at the clouds of flies. They had
sores upon them, which festered and spread. If Mabilla, the nameless
wife, was not responsible for this, who could be? Perhaps Heaven was
offended with Dryhope on account of Andrew King's impiety. Bessie
believed that Mabilla was a witch.
She followed the girl about, spying on everything she did. Once, at
least, she came upon her lying in the heather. She was plaiting rushes
together into a belt, and Bessie thought she was weaving a spell and
sprang upon her. The girl cowered, very white, and Bessie Prawle, her
heart on fire, gave tongue to all her bitter thoughts. The witch-wife,
fairy-wife, child or whatever she was seemed to wither as a flower in
a hot wind. Bessie Prawle towered above her in her strength, and
gained invective with every fierce breath she took. Her blue eyes
burned, her bosom heaved like the sea; her arm bared to the shoulder
could have struck a man down. Yet in the midst of her frenzied speech,
in full flow, she faltered. Her fists unclenched themselves, her arm
dropped nerveless, her eyes sought the ground. Andrew King, pale with
rage, sterner than she had ever seen him, stood before her.
He looked at her with deadly calm.
"Be out of this," he said; "you degrade yourself. Never let me see you
again." Before she had shrunk away he had stooped to the huddled
creature at his feet, had covered her with his arms and was whispering
urgent comfort in her ear, caressing her with voice and hands. Bessie
Prawle could not show herself to the neighbours for the rest of the
summer and early autumn. She became a solitary; the neighbours said
that she was in a decline.
The drought, with all the troubles it entailed of plague, pestilence
and famine, continued through August and September. It did not really
break till All-Hallow's, and then, indeed, it did.
The day had been overcast, with a sky of a coppery tinge, and
intensely dry heat; a chance puff of wind smote one in the face, hot
as the breath of a man in fever. The sheep panted on the ground, their
dry tongues far out of their mouths; the beasts lay as if dead, and
flies settled upon them in clouds. All the land was of one glaring
brown, where the bents were dry straw, and the heather first burnt
and then bleached pallid by the sun. The distance was blurred in a
reddish lurid haze; Knapp Fell and its forest were hidden.
Mabilla, the dumb girl, had been restless all day, following Andrew
about like a shadow. The heat had made him irritable; more than once
he had told her to go home and she had obeyed him for the time, but
had always come back. Her looks roamed wide; she seemed always
listening; sometimes it was clear that she heard something--for she
panted and moved her lips. There was deep trouble in her eyes too; she
seemed full of fear. At almost any other time her husband would have
noticed it and comforted her. But his nerves, fretted by the long
scorching summer, were on this day of fire stretched to the cracking
point. He saw nothing, and felt nothing, but his own discomfort.
Out on the parched fell-side Bessie Prawle sat like a bird of omen and
gloomed at the wrath to come.
Toward dusk a wind came moaning down the valley, raising little spires
of dust. It came now down, now up. Sometimes two currents met each
other and made momentary riot. But farm-work has to get itself done
through fair or foul. It grew dark, the sheep were folded and fed, the
cattle were got in, and the family sat together in the kitchen,
silent, preoccupied, the men oppressed and anxious over they knew not
what. As for those two aliens, Miranda King and Mabilla By-the-Wood,
whatever they knew, one of them made no sign at all, and the other,
though she was white, though she shivered and peered about, had no
means of voicing her thought.
They had their tea and settled to their evening tasks. The old
shepherd dozed over his pipe, Miranda knitted fast, Mabilla stared out
of the window into the dark, twisting her hands, and Andrew, with one
of his hands upon her shoulder, patted her gently, as if to soothe
her. She gave him a grateful look more than once, but did not cease to
shiver. Nobody spoke, and suddenly in the silence Mabilla gasped and
began to tremble. Then the dog growled under the table. All looked up
and about them.
A scattering, pattering sound lashed at the window. Andrew then
started up. "Rain!" he said; "that's what we're waiting for," and made
to go to the door. Miranda his mother, and Mabilla his young wife,
caught him by the frock and held him back. The dog, staring into the
window-pane, bristling and glaring, continued to growl. They waited in
silence, but with beating hearts.
A loud knock sounded suddenly on the door--a dull, heavy blow, as if
one had pounded it with a tree-stump. The dog burst into a panic of
barking, flew to the door and sniffed at the threshold. He whined and
scratched frantically with his forepaws. The wind began to blow,
coming quite suddenly down, solid upon the wall of the house, shaking
it upon its foundations. George King was now upon his feet. "Good God
Almighty!" he said, "this is the end of the world!"
The blast was not long-lived. It fell to a murmur. Andrew King, now at
the window, could see nothing of the rain. There were no drops upon
the glass, nor sound upon the sycamores outside. But even while he
looked, and his grandfather, all his senses alert, waited for what was
to come, and the two pale women clung together, knowing what was to
come, there grew gradually another sound which, because it was
familiar, brought their terrors sharply to a point.
It was the sound of sheep in a flock running. It came from afar and
grew in volume and distinctness; the innumerable small thudding of
sharp hoofs, the rustling of woolly bodies, the volleying of short
breath, and that indefinable sense of bustle which massed things
produce, passing swiftly.
The sheep came on, panic-driven, voiceless in their fear, but speaking
aloud in the wildly clanging bells; they swept by the door of the
house with a sound like the rush of water; they disappeared in that
flash of sound. Old King cried, "Man, 'tis the sheep!" and flew for
his staff and shoes. Miranda followed to fetch them; but Andrew went
to the door as he was, shaking off his clinging wife, unlatched it and
let in a gale of wind. The dog shot out like a flame of fire and was
gone.
It was as if the wind which was driving the sheep was going to scour
the house. It came madly, with indescribable force; it rushed into the
house, blew the window-curtains toward the middle of the room, drove
the fire outward and set the ashes whirling like snow all about.
Andrew King staggered before it a moment, then put his head down and
beat his way out. Mabilla shuddering shrank backward to the fireplace
and crouched there, waiting. Old King came out booted and cloaked, his
staff in his hand, battled to the door and was swept up the brae upon
the gale. Miranda did not appear; so Mabilla, white and rigid, was
alone in the whirling room.
Creeping to her through the open door, holding to whatever solid thing
she could come by, entered Bessie Prawle. In all that turmoil and
chill terror she alone was hot. Her grudge was burning in her. She
could have killed Mabilla with her eyes.
But she did not, for Mabilla was in the hands of greater and stronger
powers. Before Bessie Prawle's shocked eyes she was seen rigid and
awake. She was seen to cower as to some threatening shape, then to
stiffen, to mutter with her dry lips, and to grow still, to stare with
her wide eyes, and then to see nothing. A glaze swam over her eyes;
they were open, but as the eyes of the dead.
Bessie Prawle, horror-struck, stretched out her arms to give her
shelter. All her honest humanity was reborn in her in this dreadful
hour. "My poor lass, I'll not harm ye," she was saying; but Mabilla
had begun to move. She moved as a sleep-walker, seeing but not seeing
her way; she moved as one who must, not as one who would. She went
slowly as if drawn to the open door. Bessie never tried to stop her;
she could not though she would. Slowly as if drawn she went to the
door, staring before her, pale as a cloth, rigid as a frozen thing. At
the threshold she swayed for a moment in the power of the storm; then
she was sucked out like a dried leaf and was no more seen. Overhead,
all about the eaves of the house the great wind shrilled mockery and
despairing mirth. The fire leapt toward the middle of the room and
fell back so much white ash. Bessie Prawle plumped down to her knees,
huddled, and prayed.
Andrew King, coming back, found her there at it, alone. His eyes swept
the room. "Mabilla! Bessie Prawle, where is Mabilla?" The girl huddled
and prayed on. He took her by the shoulder and shook her to and fro.
"You foul wench, you piece, this is your doing." Bessie sobbed her
denials, but he would not hear her. Snatching up a staff, he turned,
threw her down in his fury. He left the house and followed the wind.
The wind caught him the moment he was outside, and swept him onward
whether he would or not. He ran down the bank of the beck which seemed
to be racing him for a prize, leaping and thundering level with its
banks; before he had time to wonder whether the bridge still stood he
was up with it, over it and on the edge of the brae. Up the moorland
road he went, carried rather than running, and where it loses itself
in the first enclosure, being hard up against the wall, over he
vaulted, across the field and over the further wall. Out then upon the
open fell, where the heather makes great cushions, and between all of
them are bogs or stones, he was swept by the wind. It shrieked about
him and carried him up and over as if he were a leaf of autumn. Beyond
that was dangerous ground, but there was no stopping; he was caught in
the flood of the gale. He knew very well, however, whither it was
carrying him: to Knapp, that place of dread, whither he was now sure
Mabilla had been carried, resumed by her own people. There was no
drawing back, there was no time for prayer. All he could do was to
keep his feet.
He was carried down the Dryhope fell, he said, into the next valley,
swept somehow over the roaring beck in the bottom, and up the rugged
side of Knapp, where the peat-hags are as high as rocks, and presently
knew without the help of his eyes that he was nearing the forest. He
heard the swishing of the trees, the cracking of the boughs, the sharp
crack and crash which told of some limb torn off and sent to ruin; and
he knew also by some hush not far off that the wind, great and furious
as it was, was to be quieted within that awful place. It was so. He
stood panting upon the edge of the wood, out of the wind, which roared
away overhead. He twittered with his foolish lips, not knowing what on
earth to do, nor daring to do anything had he known it; but all the
prayers he had ever learned were driven clean out of his head.
He could dimly make out the tree-trunks immediately before him, low
bushes, shelves of bracken-fern; he could pierce somewhat into the
gloom beyond and see the solemn trees ranked in their order, and above
them a great soft blackness rent here and there to show the sky. The
volleying of the storm sounded like the sea heard afar off: it was so
remote and steady a noise that lesser sounds were discernible--the
rustlings, squeakings, and snappings of small creatures moving over
small undergrowth. Every one of these sent his heart leaping to his
mouth; but all his fears were to be swallowed up in amazement, for as
he stood there distracted, without warning, without shock, there stood
one by him, within touching distance, a child, as he judged it, with
loose hair and bright eyes, prying into his face, smiling at him and
inviting him to come on.
"Who in God's name--?" cried Andrew King; but the child plucked him
by the coat and tried to draw him into the wood.
I understand that he did not hesitate. If he had forgotten his gods he
had not forgotten his fairy-wife. I suppose, too, that he knew where
to look for her; he may have supposed that she had been resumed into
her first state. At any rate, he made his way into the forest by
guess-work, aided by reminiscence. I believe he was accustomed to aver
that he "knew where she was very well," and that he took a straight
line to her. I have seen Knapp Forest and doubt it. He did, however,
find himself in the dark spaces of the wood and there, sure enough, he
did also see the women with whom his Mabilla had once been co-mate.
They came about him, he said, like angry cats, hissing and shooting
out their lips. They did not touch him; but if eyes and white hateful
faces could have killed him, dead he had been then and there.
He called upon God and Christ and made a way through them. His senses
had told him where Mabilla was. He found her pale and trembling in an
aisle of the trees. She leaned against a tall tree, perfectly rigid,
"as cold as a stone," staring across him with frozen eyes, her mouth
open like a round O. He took her in his arms and holding her close
turned and defied the "witches"--so he called them in his wrath. He
dared them in the name of God to touch him or his wife, and as he did
so he says that he felt the chill grow upon him. It took him, he said,
in the legs and ran up his body. It stiffened his arms till they felt
as if they must snap under the strain; it caught him in the neck and
fixed it. He felt his eyes grow stiff and hard; he felt himself sway.
"Then," he said, "the dark swam over me, the dark and the bitter cold,
and I knew nothing more." Questioned as he was by Mr. Robson and his
friends, he declared that it was at the name of God the cold got him
first. He saw the women hushed and scared, and at the same time one of
them looked over her shoulder, as if somebody was coming. Had he
called in the King of the Wood? That is what he himself thought. It
was the King of the Wood who had come in quest of Mabilla, had pulled
her out of the cottage in Dryhope and frozen her in the forest. It was
he, no doubt, said Andrew King, who had come to defy the Christian
and his God. I detect here the inspiration of his mother Miranda, the
strange sea-woman who knew Mabilla without mortal knowledge and spoke
to her in no mortal speech. But the sequel to the tale is a strange
one.
Andrew King awoke to find himself in Mabilla's arms, to hear for the
first time in his life Mabilla call him softly by his name. "Andrew,
my husband," she called him, and when he opened his eyes in wonder to
hear her she said, "Andrew, take me home now. It is all over," or
words to that effect. They went along the forest and up and down the
fells together. The wind had dropped, the stars shone. And together
they took up their life where they had dropped it, with one
significant omission in its circumstance. Bessie Prawle had
disappeared from Dryhope. She had followed him up the fell on the
night of the storm, but she came not back. And they say that she never
did. Nothing was found of her body, though search was made; but a comb
she used to wear was picked up, they say, by the tarn on Limmer Fell,
an imitation tortoise-shell comb which used to hold up her hair.
Miranda King, who knew more than she would ever tell, had a shrewd
suspicion of the truth of the case. But Andrew King knew nothing, and
I daresay cared very little. He had his wood-wife, and she had her
voice; and between them, I believe, they had a child within the year.
I ought to add that I have, with these eyes, seen Mabilla By-the-Wood
who became Mabilla King. When I went from Dryhopedale to Knapp Forest
she stood at the farmhouse door with a child in her arms. Two others
were tumbling about in the croft. She was a pretty, serious girl--for
she looked quite a girl--with a round face and large greyish-blue
eyes. She had a pink cotton dress on, and a good figure beneath it.
She was pale, but looked healthy and strong. Not a tall girl. I asked
her the best way to Knapp Forest and she came out to the gate to point
it to me. She talked simply, with a northern accent, and might have
been the child of generations of borderers. She pointed me the very
track by which Andrew King must have brought her home, by which the
King of the Wood swept her out on the wings of his wrath; she named
the tarn where once she dwelt as the spirit of a tree. All this
without a flush, a tremor or a sign in her blue eyes that she had ever
known the place. But these people are close, and seldom betray all
that they know or think.
OREADS