To the boy and girl who by the light of the May moon penetrated the forest glades, they seemed to be peopled with fearful forms and more fearful possibilities. Moonlight and towering tree-trunks, thick undergrowths of hazel and elder, made strange combinations; and as at the sound of their footsteps great owls and woodpeckers started from their roosting-places and screeched and whirred round their heads, hares and foxes rushed through the grass and brambles, and the wind stirred and echoed through the tree-tops, they shuddered, and Nella felt that she had hardly counted the cost of the undertaking. The path was tolerably plain to them; it was a horse track, and led through the forest down to the shore, and they pursued it for about a mile, in almost entire silence, and then turned aside to the right into a narrower one, which shortly led them, to what was always called the blasted oak. This was a great withered tree, which stood alone in the centre of a clearing, without a leaf or a twig to break the forlorn aspect of its wide-stretching arms now glimmering white in the moonlight.
“Now,” said Nella, “we must sound a hunting horn, and some one will show us the way to the witch.”
Harry took hold of the horn that was slung round his neck; to sound it required a considerable effort; but he was ashamed to hesitate in Nella’s presence, and putting it to his lips, blew a blast much fainter than that with which he was accustomed to summon the dogs on a hunting morning. It seemed to them as if the whole forest rang with the sound, as if it echoed away through glade and thicket till it must rouse Northberry Manor itself, nay, as if it might call the whole country to arms.
Nella shrank up to Harry and they both stood trembling and terrified. No one answered their summons.
“The witch will not come, Nella,” said Harry in, it must be confessed, a tone of relief.
“Then we must blow again,” said Nella; but, as she spoke, they saw running in the grass in front of them a little white rabbit. Instead of starting from them it ran up to Nella’s feet, and then away from her for a short distance, then back again. “Is that the witch?” she whispered. “Must I follow that? I will cross myself first.” As the rabbit retained its form and showed no alarm at the holy sign, Nella, summoning all her courage, quitted Harry’s hand—as no two people could, it was supposed, approach the witch together—and followed the little creature, which now turned and ran back into the wood. Nella, child as she was, was of the stuff that makes heroes. She conquered her terrors, and clasping her cross tight, she followed the mysterious summons. It did not occur to her that the animal was pulled by a string attached to its neck. It did not lead her very far, for she soon found herself in front of a low hut, under the door of which the rabbit disappeared. Nella tapped timidly, the door was flung back, and she stepped into a tiny room, very full of smoke, since the chimney consisted only of a hole in the roof. Neither in that respect nor in any other did it differ from the huts of the peasantry round, except that a torch was stuck into a wooden stand of peculiar shape in the centre. The roof was so low that the tall Nella could have touched it with her hand, and on the floor under the torch sat a very little woman, with black eyes, sharp features, and a red cloak over her head. She rose as Nella entered, and stood upright, even then hardly reaching to the girl’s shoulder, and said a few words in a language which Nella recognised, though she did not quite understand. “I cannot speak Cornish,” she said.
Perhaps the witch was not accustomed to visitors with their wits so much about them, though the old Cornish language still crossed the border into Devon, and was not unknown there among the peasantry. Still, it added to the mystery of the witch’s proceedings in the eyes of some of her visitors, and increased the confidence of those to whom it was familiar.
“And what do you want of me then, maiden?” she said in English.
“I am Eleanor Northberry; I want to know where my sister is who was stolen away by the Moors, and I will give you these pearls if you will tell me,” said Nella, who had rehearsed her little speech. She looked at the witch as she spoke, in full confidence of receiving an answer, and with less fear than she had expected. Somehow, there was something very commonplace about the witch now that she had found her.
“You have asked a hard question, my lady,” said the witch in a much more respectful tone. She knew her position too well to frighten the young lady of the Manor to death, aware that, though feared and tolerated, a little too much licence would bring the laws against witchcraft in full operation upon her. She turned her back on Nella, and mumbled and muttered a little to herself, and then facing round, said in a wheedling tone, “Sure, it’s the face of the lovely young lady herself, I read in the stars. Wouldn’t you like to hear what suitors you will have, my pretty lady—about the great lord across the sea?”