Into the Highways and Hedges

by F. F. Montrésor

Meg was not on the high road at all; she had turned sharp to the left from the hut, and struck into a short cut to the farm. She fancied she knew her way across these familiar marshes, even in the dark.

Indeed, she kept on quite steadily at first, only stooping now and then to make sure with her hands that her feet were still on the track, or to shut her eyes, that were nearly blinded by the lightning. How small she felt among the immense resistless powers that were at play round her!—One tiny atom in the midst of the great plan of nature that whirls on through the ages, taking no count of the individual births, and deaths, and pains and joys! She kept on quite steadily till the sluice gates opened and the water descended with a force that made her stagger, taking her breath away, pelting her, drenching her through and through in a minute. Meg was swept half round by it, driven backwards a few steps in her surprise up against a tree, to which she clung instinctively. Both her arms were round the trunk, and she felt it sway and creak. Already her feet were in a puddle, nearly ankle-deep.

"If this goes on much longer, it will be a second deluge," thought she. "Were any of the people who were drowned in the Flood rather glad to be swept away, I wonder?"

But it did not last. The storm ceased almost as suddenly as it had begun. The birds lifted their heads again, and began to chirp a feeble sleepy thanksgiving. The worst was over. Meg loosened her hold of the willow, and wandered on.

She was as soaked as if she had fallen into the stream; her clothes were very heavy, and her steps were more uncertain than they had been. The track was lost in water; everywhere there seemed nothing but shallow glistening pools, which reflected the deep dark sky and the stars, when the clouds parted and rolled off.

Presently Meg found herself on the verge of a salt-water spring that was deeper than the others. She discovered that she was going the wrong way when she got to the "Pixie's Pool". She had all but walked into it, but had been stopped by the black post with a supposed depth, marked in rough white figures, put up by one of the Thorpes.

Meg leaned against the post to rest, and looked down into the black depths; and, thus looking, a temptation seemed to rise from them, and lay hold of her soul and body.

She had so nearly fallen in! Suppose she let herself drop; a step would do it, and no one would ever know that it had not been an accident!

Barnabas would be unhappy—for a time; but his work was his real love, and he never looked on death as a misfortune, and it would set him free. Tom would be rather sorry, Mr. Thorpe more than "rather"; but, after all, she had always been a strange element at the farm,—never quite one of them, even when they were kindest. They would go on as before she came; there would hardly be a place to fill up; she had never been much good to any one! She slipped on to her knees and stooped lower over the water. It seemed drawing her, with a force that was part of the pitiless power that she had felt in the storm; that she had felt too in her own life. "As we sow, so we must reap;" "must reap," it was running in her head again,—but she could escape the "must" so, and so only.

Terrible relentless law, that she felt she could bow to no more. Should she break through it once and for ever, so that the reaping should be no more for her,—in this world, at any rate?