CHAPTER XXXVII
SHEPHERD'S CROSS
The new cowman came on the day before Maynard left Falcon Farm and Mr. Stockman was satisfied with his ability and intelligence. And then came the moment when Joe shook hands and bade Lawrence farewell. All animosity had died, for the elder was not vindictive. He pictured the experiences that awaited his old servant and found it in his heart to be sorry for him. Only thought of the enormity of the deed he had so deliberately planned steeled Mr. Stockman.
"I shall hear tell of you, no doubt," were the last words that he said at parting.
To Holne went Maynard, put up with an acquaintance for that night, and, at five o'clock on the following morning, set out to meet Dinah at Shepherd's Cross, a mediæval monument that marked a forgotten monkish way of old. There Dinah, whose departure was designed to be secret, would meet him, and together they would descend to Brent, where neither was known, and so reach Plymouth, whence their steamer sailed that night.
The morning dawned fine and touched with frost. The wind blew gently from the east. There was no sting in it, but it created an inevitable haze, and distance quickly faded under its blue-grey mantle, while at hand all shone clear and bright in the sunrise fires. The heavy dew of a cloudless night was not yet dried off the herbage, and the grass, nibbled to a close and springy velvet by sheep and rabbits, spread emerald green between the masses of heather and furze, where the lover climbed Dene Moor. Still the autumn heath shone with passages of colour; but into the rich pink of a month earlier had crept a russet warmth, where innumerable heather bells passed to death with a redness that drowned the purple. As yet this new colour was genial in tone, shone in the sunlight and glowed along the reaches of the fading fern; but a time approached when from ruddy to sere the countless blossoms must sink. Then the light would fade and the flowers wither, till winter winds tinkled in their grey inflorescence and sang the song of another dying year. Now only the splendour of their passing and the pale gold, where brake died in patches amid the standing fern, prophesied changes to come. A few raddled sheep browsed their morning meal and made harmony with the bright colours of the dawn, while Maynard, stooping, picked up the wing feather of a carrion crow and reflected that this was the last black plume he would ever find to clean his pipe on Dartmoor. He was sorry to leave it, but had found no time for regret until this moment. Life had passed so swiftly and demanded so much thought and contrivance of late, that only now he spared a few minutes to consider all that he was leaving, and how much had been good and precious to him. He had formed a hazy and nebulous picture of his future environment, but knew that it could in no way resemble this. He guessed that he must often look back, and doubted whether his future scene of life would entirely take the place of the one he was about to leave. But he remembered Dinah's attitude and her expressed joy that the Vale should be left behind them and all things become new.
Now he centred upon her and again thin shadows crept through his mind. For good or evil they had listened to their own hearts alone; but he still found questions asking themselves and doubts limning deep in his soul when he thought of her; he still felt a smoulder of indignation in himself that this cup should be forced upon them. There was an ingredient of bitterness, a dumb question why fate should have called him and Dinah to do a thing against which he rebelled, and the doing of which was an outrage upon her love of truth and directness. She might make light of the burden, but he resented the fact that she was called to bear it. Such is the force of inherited conviction and tradition that he could not, as she had done, discredit and dismiss his past as an empty dream. She honestly so regarded Maynard's story; otherwise he knew she would never have come to him; but it was only for his sake that she made the sacrifice, and he felt it a cruel fact that any sacrifice should be called for from her. His past was real enough, and the shadow must fall on her and the children to be born of her. That the world would never see the shadow, or know of its existence, did not matter. For him and his wife it could never vanish. Even yet he did not perceive that no shadow whatever existed for Dinah. The thing that still haunted him like a fog, like the robe of the east wind hanging on the skirts of the moor, must, he felt, be appreciated by her also, and might, indeed, grow more solid and real for her in the future. Regret for the inevitable thus found a place in his mind despite his reason, because it sprang from foundations other than his reason.
Swinging forward with an ash sapling in his right hand and a leathern portmanteau in his left, Lawrence presently saw his goal ahead. Sunshine played over the blue hazes and touched the grey summit of Shepherd's Cross, where the ancient stone stood erect and solitary on the heath. It reared not far distant from rough, broken ground, where Tudor miners had streamed the hillside for tin in Elizabethan days. The relic glimmered with lichens, black and gold and ash colour. Upon its shaft stuck red hairs, where roaming cattle had rubbed themselves. It stood the height of a tall man above the water worn trough at its foot, and the cross was still perfect, with its short, squat arms unbroken, though weathered in all its chamfering by centuries of storm.
Here he sat down, knit his brows to scan the northern slope of the hill, whereon Dinah must presently appear, and wondered how far she might have already tramped upon her way. He had found his own climb from Holne shorter than he imagined and was at their place of meeting before the time.
Then, suddenly, behind him he heard feet shuffling and turned to see five men spring up from their hiding-places at hand. They were familiar faces that he saw, and for a moment no suspicion that they were here upon his account entered the mind of Maynard. It occurred to him that Shepherd's Cross might be a meeting-place for hounds at this early hour. Yet he did not know that cub-hunting was yet begun. And then he marked behind the four now beside him, the tall, thin figure of Arthur Chaffe—one who would certainly attend no meet of hounds.
He was not left long in doubt. The men brought ropes. They closed round him, as he rose to confront them, caught his arms, dragged him to the cross and, with the celerity of executioners, quickly had him fast bound by ankles and wrists against the granite—crucified thereto with his arms extended upon the arms of the cross and a dozen coils of rope about his shoulders, trunk and legs. John Bamsey handled one wrist and saw that his cords bit.