Timothy talked cheerfully, and prepared their morning meal without ever remarking upon the previous night.
"Take an old man's advice, and a fishing-rod," he said, "and spend the day on Swirtle Tarn. I'll come too. It's a long time since I tempted trout with a bracken clock."
Soon after breakfast they sallied forth, and went up the dale past Greystones. Even on this June day the house seemed to stand aloof from the sunshine. It looked lonely and out in the cold, like a soul that had withdrawn itself from intercourse with its fellows. The heavy green of the sycamores, now in full leaf, hid the barns.
They kept by the beck-side. The bracken all about them was glittering with beetles—bronzy, golden things, that hung like beads to the fronds. In the distance they saw Barbara; near at hand Jan Straw was weeding a little patch of cultivated ground with slow, slow fingers.
Silence held the inside of the house as well as the outside. Lucy was baking scones on the griddle, but the curtains of her great-grandmother's bed had not yet been withdrawn.
The old woman kept Midsummer's Day like a fast. In the annals of her life it was marked as a day of doom, a day when her spirit came into touch with the supernatural, when her heart wept tears, though her eyes were dry. Its return each year brought the past back to her, the wild past when adventure came riding to the door, and no one need go out to seek it. Sometimes she could reach back through the dusty years, and feel her flesh grow young and warm, and know that she, and the Annas Lynn of twenty, were one. But at other times, the eyes that she fixed upon those ancient scenes were old and cold, and she failed to make the dry bones live.
One Midsummer's Day in her youth she had stood on the fells and seen a phantom army pass. This happened three years before the rebellion of 1745. Some of the village folk saw the apparition also, but none of them recognised the leader of it, mounted on a black horse. A year later she again saw the phantom army. It seemed to move along the top of the fells—a train of marching men, gun-carriages and baggage. Then the mists came down and hid it.
Next year, Joel Hart—the Jacobite Joel Hart—had led a little company over the hills into Scotland to welcome Prince Charles Edward back to his rightful inheritance. Though another man's wife, Annas Lynn had wept for the handsome cavalier. Months of disaster followed; the haughty lady of Forest Hall had given birth to a son; but Culloden had been fought, and there was no hope for the rebels. It was then that the lady came a suppliant to Annas Lynn, whom she had scorned in the past, guessing that more than a kindly feeling lay between her husband and her. But the house was full of soldiers, and Joel had ventured home to see his child before fleeing to France. She prayed that Annas would hide him till the search was over.
For a day and a night he lay hidden in the wool-barn, undetected by even the keen eyes of David Lynn. Then on Midsummer's Eve the Northern Lights had played for an hour above Thundergay as they had played before Lord Derwentwatter was beheaded thirty years previously. "Derwentwatter's Leets," the fell-folk had called the aurora since that night. Annas watched the great bars shoot and fade with despair in her heart, for she felt sure that Joel was doomed, and he was shot by soldiers on the lookout for him the following evening.
Upon these scenes the old woman dwelt every Midsummer's Day.