Light had long since been extinguished in the few dwellings visible from Ringmoor. Trowlesworthy and Brisworthy and Ditsworthy--all were dim. No ray penetrated the sky or glowed upon the land; and night's self now began to darken, as the moon sank to her setting.
And then from afar, out of the gloom of the south, a distant beacon flashed even to this uplifted solitude; and a beam that blinked for the ships now reached one life-foundered creature, where she sat in a silence as deep, in a loneliness as vast, as the silence and the loneliness of the sea. The light was familiar to Rhoda; through wanderings and vigils in high places she had seen it many times; and she knew that it spoke of danger to the vessels and guarded them upon their ways.
Time rolled on; the earth rolled on; only this conscious fragment of life stranded here between time and earth lay still, chained down with her load of grief and horror. Long she remained, until there stole over Ringmoor the unspeakable stupor and lifelessness of the hour before dawn. Now even creatures of night had made an end of their labours and were sleeping in holt or den; and through this trance and absolute desistance, the woman's soul still battled with its burdens and cried out to her oblivious environment.
She walked onward again and forced herself and her pangs upon the earth's suspended animation. She outraged inert Ringmoor by thus moving and suffering within its bosom, when the rule of the time was cessation and dreamless peace. She rolled unsteadily in her going, where all else was stable and motionless; she throbbed in her body and in her soul, where all else was unconscious; her dust endured the tortures of hunger and profound physical exhaustion, where nearly all other living things were filled and sleeping; her mind rose, racked to a new and higher anguish at the thought of the future, where all else was mindless and without care or grief. She considered what must follow the rising of another sun, and she longed that she might wander and suffer here, through a moonless night, for evermore.
Again she sank to earth for a space, and again she rose and breasted the last slope which separated her from her home. Then another life made vocal utterance and complaint of fate. A dog-fox barked out of darkness, and the lonely ululation struck very loud upon the silence. To the fellow-being who heard him, his forlorn protest spoke of a creature to be envied; for he was only hungry and time would ease his want.
Among the burrows of the warren she threaded her way until, black against the night, towered Ditsworthy. And she opened the outer gate, reached the door, struck upon it and cried two words. Mournful they rose, and deep, and heavy with the weight of her torments.
"Father! Mother!"
They came down to her out of broken sleep. They found her collapsed and carried her in and roused the smouldering peat upon the hearth. Then to their questions as they crowded round her--men, women, boys, candle-lit, grotesque, hastily robed from bed--she answered slowly--
"Margaret is drowned--driven to it by me--and David have cast me out."
THE END