A Romance of Wastdale

by A. E. W. Mason

Gordon remained quite still in his bed, and the match burned down to his fingers. But there was no further movement. Then he rose and crept to the window. The night was like a bandage before his eyes. But after a while it thinned to a veil, and he made out the barn wall facing him (for his room lay at the side of the house), and as he watched something moved from the shadow of it, stood for a second in the open opposite the window, and then slipped round the corner of the barn and disappeared down the lane.

It could be no one but Hawke, Gordon thought. The man's own remark flashed into his mind. "I suppose that you and I are the only living beings awake for ten miles round." For some reason he had been waiting until all was quiet in the house. Gordon flung on his clothes hurriedly, lit the candle, and went downstairs. But as he pushed open the door of the parlour a sudden gust of wind extinguished the light in his hand. The room was in darkness; only facing where he stood there was a panel of twilight, and through it he could see the boughs of trees rising and falling.

The door into the lane stood open, and the lamp had been turned out.

Gordon stood fixed there in a panic, listening. But no sound menaced him. Inside, the beat of the clock merely emphasized the silence; outside, the wind moaned among the hills with a dreary lift and drop, like surf upon a distant beach. He walked through the garden and strained his eyes up and down the road. No moving thing was visible, but he remembered that Hawke had scanned the surroundings too, and he hung on the gate, charged with expectancy.

After a time he noticed a white speck in the black of the opposite field. He observed it casually at first, but it grew larger and approached him, and shaped itself into the figure of a woman. She climbed over a stile in the boundary wall facing the gate and brushed quickly by without noticing his presence. She was closely muffled in a large shawl, so that Gordon could see nothing of her face. But it struck him, from the momentary glimpse of her which he caught as she swung past him, that there was something familiar in her gait and bearing. The perception was a spark to the train of his fears. They flashed into one monstrous conjecture. Gordon thrust it down; it sprang up again and clutched at his throat, stifling him.

Beyond that field, the track from Styhead--the track which he had watched that afternoon--ran towards the lake. If you came from the Pass to the upper part of Wastdale--say to the Inn--you crossed the field, you joined the lane at the very spot where Gordon stood. And over the Pass the woman had come--must have come. For Gordon's farm was the outpost of the village. The next house was built in Borrowdale.

In the stillness he could hear the footsteps rattling on the loose stones. Then all at once they stopped, and Gordon felt his heart stop with them. The silence, however, pointed to the necessity of speed, and he followed the woman cautiously down the lane, creeping close under cover of the wall.

But there was no one outside the Inn, and no sign of life within it. The front stared blindly into the night. He stole up to the door and laid his ear to the panel. A second after the bolt grated with an almost imperceptible jar as it was eased into its socket. He just heard a faint rustling sound as of feet stealthily receding along a flagged passage, and all was quiet again.

He raised his hand to the bell, but a sudden thought checked his impulse. Suppose that his conjecture was false! And yet another thought came to second the first. Suppose that his conjecture was true! His arm dropped nervously to his side. For the girl's sake he dared not rouse the inmates.

And yet what action should he take? He stood paralysed, feeling the question beat into his brain like a hammer, until a yellow beam of light leaped out on to the trees at the west corner of the house. Gordon hurried round to the spot and perceived that it came from a window on the first floor in the end of the building. He looked eagerly about for a means of reaching it. Immediately under the window the space was clear, but a little farther towards the back of the Inn an outhouse with a thatched sloping roof jutted forth at a right angle. From the extreme point of that roof Gordon believed that he could command a view of the room. In this way he would at all events ascertain the truth.