It was the most solitary of habitations. About it hung an atmosphere of old forgotten things. It had a tragic air as though its past, by some strange process, were still in being. Even on a golden afternoon such as this, it could not exorcise the grey spirit that haunted it—the spirit of the ancient grey stones of which it was built. The slates were green with moss: the drip-stone was feathered with weeds which, before long, would belt it with a flowery garland: soon the great sycamores would burst into leaf; but even then the house would keep its gloom. It was a fitting habitation for Mistress Annas Lynn, who was nearly a hundred years old.
Lucy turned her eyes away from it, and looked at the mountain at the head of the dale, down whose sides the streams slid in thin white lines to fall with many a rainbow cascade into Swirtle Tarn, lying at its feet, blue as a violet. Thundergay dominated the dale. Its jagged peaks soared high above the fells around. It was the birth-place of eagles, mists and storms; and it was also the nurse of her sister Barbara.
Her mind turned to Barbara.
If Lucy ever visualised such abstract ideas as goodness, integrity, and justice, she saw them under the living form of her sister. Joel Hart she loved; Barbara she worshipped. With Joel she stood on an equality—he was as humanly imperfect as she—but Barbara stood on a mountain height, a great, grand figure, with a great, grand heart, sublime in her magnanimity, immovable as granite among the storms of her world.
She felt, too, that it was among the mountains that Barbara found her secret inspiration and strength. Since childhood she had spent the greater part of her life upon Thundergay, and, though it had been a rough nurse, beating her with winds like scorpions, training her by hunger and cold and weariness, yet she loved it still, but it had made her silent.
Lucy did not put her thought into these words, but she felt them, nevertheless.
She now left the cattle road, and followed a sheep-track round Swirtle Tarn. A shoulder of Thundergay seemed to block her way, but the track wound in and out of knowes and hollows, and led her at last through a gap, where she looked down upon a scene of pastoral beauty. A lawn of velvet grass lay by the margin of the tarn, dotted with sheep and a few lambs—the firstlings of the flock. It sloped gently upwards, and surged like a full green tide against the bases of the cliffs. Here was a cave, called for generations Ketel's Parlour, in memory of some Northern robber who had made it his eyrie. Now Barbara claimed it, and often slept there when her work kept her abroad at night. The flocks were her especial care, and she "shepherded and improved the same according to the due course of good shepherding," as the old title-deeds of Greystones recommended.
Lucy looked in. By the threshold her sister lay fast asleep, her long limbs sunk in repose upon a bed of straw. Her head was near the entrance, and the sun, as it got lower, flowed in golden ripples across the threshold. When it touched her eyes she would awake, for the sun was her clock by day, as the Great Bear was her clock by night.
Lucy did not speak, but took her knitting from her pocket, and sat down on a rock to wait.
The cave had been partly built up long, long ago, and two narrow slits of windows made in the artificial wall. The rusty remains of iron bolts and hinges showed that a door had once closed the entrance. A huge slab of slate lay across the threshold, and underneath it a little spring that babbled out of the floor of the cave disappeared, appearing again some few yards further down the slope.