She dropped the gold and the scrap of paper as though they had been red-hot cinders, and stood looking at them as if she expected them to speak. And they did speak. No tongue could have been more eloquent than that little bit of metal, no voice more full of entreaty than the scrawled characters of Joel's handwriting. They were urgent. With them she could not expostulate, excuse herself, or maintain a virtuous reserve.
Her dead hopes, dreams, promises came again to life and seemed to stand about her, looking into her face with blinkless eyes. They entreated her, for old sake's sake, to grant his wish.
She knit her brows in perplexity. Should she go? Would it be wise to go? Why should she not go? Wherein lay the unwisdom? She wanted to see Joel for the last time, to tell him that they must never meet again; that he must forget her, as she would endeavour to forget him. He need not leave High Fold in order to escape her; for she and Peter were going away; but he must not follow or attempt to renew their friendship. So plausible, so self-controlled, so wise appeared her reasons to her own mind that she could find no serious objection to complying with his request.
She forgot, or would not allow herself to remember, that this was the call which she had feared. But a thing far off looks so different to the same thing at hand that she did not recognise them as one and the same.
Musing thus, and undecided still, with her eyes flitting about the room as though in fear of seeing something which would turn her from the purpose she wanted to form, it seemed to her that she saw the grey-clad figures of the miller and his wife come in at the door and sit down in their vacant chairs. They did not look at her, they were but shadows, but Lucy fled. She was afraid of Peter's dead father and mother. They had loved him so, his honour was their honour, and they had died heart-broken thinking her unworthy to be his wife. She had bitterly resented their reproachful eyes, she bitterly resented that they should cross her vision now, as though they had come to guard their son's good name when he was away.
Lucy put on her cloak and went out.
In order to escape any undesirable questions or inquisitive eyes she did not follow the road through the forest, but took one of the innumerable paths that led along the fells, opposite to Greystones, on the other side of the beck.
Heavy clouds, that were purple underneath, but stained with a murky brown along their upper edges, lay motionless upon the higher hills, levelling their rugged peaks as with a knife. No gleam of sunlight or patch of blue lit the savage landscape. It was made of iron and bronze, a hard menacing corner of the world, whose scars and gashes, dealt by an earlier age, kindly Time had not yet managed to rub out or smooth into pleasant lines. The weather had been fine for several days, and a high wind had dried the dead bracken and benty grass, but there was every appearance of coming rain.
From a field in the bottom of the dale, near Greystones, smoke was rolling as though a subterranean fire had broken through the earth's crust, and begun to belch forth its pent up energies in fountains of acrid vapour. Now and then a red tongue leaped among it, only to be smothered by a denser cloud.
The Need Fire[1] was an ancient institution to which the dalesfolk had formerly resorted in times of disaster. All the household fires were extinguished, and it was lit by rubbing together two pieces of wood, which had never been inside a human habitation. Peter had smiled when he had heard that it was to be lighted in Boar Dale, and passed on from farm to farm through that district. But Timothy Hadwin believed in it, and Barbara was strongly in its favour.