My thoughts also hindered my hands. Very likely I should never marry John; I would not heed that; he would be mine all the same! but to promise that I would not marry him, because it suited such a mother's plans to marry him to some one else—that I would not do to save my life! I would have done it to save my uncle's, but our exile would render it unnecessary!
At last I was ready, and went to find my uncle, reproaching myself that I had been so long away from him. Besides, I ought to have been helping him to pack, for neither he nor his arm was quite strong yet. With a heartful of apology, I sought his room. He was not there. Neither was he in the study. I went all over the house, and then to the stable; but he was nowhere, neither had anyone seen him. And Death was gone too!
The truth burst upon me: I was to see him no more while that terrible woman lived! No one was to know whither he had gone! He had given himself for my happiness! Vain intention! I should never be happy! To be in Paradise without him, would not be to be in Heaven!
John was in London; I could do nothing! I threw myself on my uncle's bed, and lay lost in despair! Even if John were with me, and we found him, what could we do? I knew it now as impossible for him to separate us that he might be unmolested, as it was for us to accept the sacrifice of his life that we might be happy. I knew that John's way would be to leave everything and go with me and my uncle, only we could not live upon nothing—least of all in a strange land! Martha, to be sure, could manage well enough with the bailiff, but John could not burden my uncle, and could not lay his hands on his own! In the mean time my uncle was gone we knew not whither! I was like one lost on the dark mountains.—If only John would come to take part in my despair!
With a sudden agony, I reproached myself that I had made no attempt to overtake my uncle. It was true I did not know, for nobody could tell me, in what direction he had gone; but Zoe's instinct might have sufficed where mine was useless! Zoe might have followed and found Thanatos! It was hopeless now!
But I could no longer be still. I got Zoe, and fled to the moor. All the rest of the day I rode hither and thither, nor saw a single soul on its wide expanse. The very life seemed to have gone out of it. When most we take comfort in loneliness, it is because there is some one behind it.
The sun was set and the twilight deepening toward night when I turned to ride home. I had eaten nothing since breakfast, and though not hungry, was thoroughly tired. Through the great dark hush, where was no sound of water, though here and there, like lurking live thing, it lay about me, I rode slowly back. My fasting and the dusk made everything in turn take a shape that was not its own. I seemed to be haunted by things unknown. I have sometimes thought whether the spirits that love solitary places, may not delight in appropriating, for embodiment momentary and partial, such a present shape as may happen to fit one of their passing moods; whether it is always the mere gnarled, crone-like hawthorn, or misshapen rock, that, between the wanderer and the pale sky, suddenly appals him with the sense of another. The hawthorn, the rock, the dead pine, is indeed there, but is it alone there?
Some such thought was, I remember, in my mind, when, about halfway from home, I grew aware of something a little way in front that rose between me and a dark part of the sky. It seemed a figure on a huge horse. My first thought, very naturally, was of my uncle; the next, of the great gray horse and his rider that John and I had both seen on the moor. I confess to a little awe at the thought of the latter; but I am somehow made so as to be capable of awe without terror, and of the latter I felt nothing. The composite figure drew nearer: it was a woman on horseback. Immediately I recalled the adventure of my childhood; and then remembered that John had said his mother always rode the biggest horse she could find: could that shape, towering in the half-dark before me, be indeed my deadly enemy—she who, my uncle had warned me, would kill me if she had the chance? A fear far other than ghostly invaded me, and for a moment I hesitated whether to ride on, or turn and make for some covert, until she should have passed from between me and my home. I hope it was something better than pride that made me hold on my way. If the wicked, I thought, flee when no man pursueth, it ill becomes the righteous to flee before the wicked. By this time it was all but dark night, and I had a vague hope of passing unquestioned: there had been a good deal of rain, and we were in a very marshy part of the heath, so that I did not care to leave the track. But, just ere we met, the lady turned her great animal right across the way, and there made him stand.
“Ah,” thought I, “what could Zoe do in a race with that terrible horse!”
He seemed made of the darkness, and rose like the figurehead of a frigate above a yacht.