The homestead, which stands quite alone, for all the labourers employed about the place live a mile or more away in the valley, is large, commodious, and massively built of grey stone robbed from the ruins of Ramborough. When the Lacons, Joan’s ancestors on the mother’s side, who once had owned the place, went bankrupt, their land was bought by Samuel Rock’s grandfather, an eccentric man, but one who was very successful in his business as a contractor for the supply of hay to His Majesty’s troops. After he had been the possessor of Moor Farm for little more than a year, this James Rock went suddenly mad; and although his insanity was of a dangerous character, for reasons that were never known his wife would not consent to his removal to an asylum, but preferred to confine him in the house, some of the windows of which are still secured by iron bars. The end of the tale was tragic, for one night the maniac, having first stunned his keeper, succeeded in murdering his wife while she was visiting him. This event took place some seventy years before the date of the present story, but the lapse of two generations has not sufficed to dispel the evil associations connected with the spot, and that portion of the house where the murder was committed has remained uninhabited from that day to this.
Mrs. Gillingwater was not a person much troubled by imaginative fears, but the aspect of Moor House as she approached it on that November evening affected her nerves, rudimentary as they were. The day had been very stormy, and angry rays from the setting sun shone through gaps in the line of naked firs behind the house, and were reflected from the broken sky above on to the surface of the meres and of the sea beyond them. The air was full of the voices of wind and storm, the gale groaned and shrieked among the branches of the ancient trees; from the beach a mile away came the sound of the hiss of the surge and of the dull boom of breakers, while overhead a flock of curlews appeared and disappeared as they passed from sunbeam into shadow and from shadow into sunbeam, till they faded among the uncertain lights of the distance, whence the echo of their unhappy cries still floated to the listener’s ear. The front of the house was sunk in gloom, but there was still light enough to enable Mrs. Gillingwater, standing by the gate of what in other times had been a little pleasure garden, but was now a wilderness overrun with sea grasses, to note its desolate aspect, and even the iron bars that secured the windows of the rooms where once the madman was confined. Nobody could be seen moving about the place, and she observed no lamp in the sitting-room.
“I hope those brutes of dogs are tied up, for I expect he’s out,” Mrs. Gillingwater said to herself; “he’s fond of sneaking about alone in weather like this.”
As the thought passed through her mind, she chanced to glance to her left, where some twenty paces from her, and beyond the intercepting bulk of the building, a red sunbeam pierced the shadows like a sword. There in the centre of this sunbeam stood Samuel Rock himself. He was wrapped in his long dark cloak that fell to the knees, but his hat lay on the ground beside him, and his upturned face was set towards the dying sun in such a fashion that the vivid light struck full upon it, showing every line of his clear-cut features, every hair of the long beard that hung from the square protruding chin, and even the motion of his thin lips, and of the white hands that he moved ceaselessly, as though he were washing them in the blood-red light.
There was something so curious about his aspect that Mrs. Gillingwater started.
“Now what’s he a-doing there?” she wondered: “bless me if I know, unless he’s saying prayers to his master the devil. I never did see a man go on like that before, drunk or sober; he gives me the creeps, the beast. Look, there he goes sneaking along the wall of the house, for all the world like a great black snake wriggling to its hole. Well, he’s in now, so here’s after him, for his money is as good as anybody else’s, and I must have it.”
In another half-minute she was knocking at the door, which was opened by Samuel.
“Who’s that?” he said. “I don’t want no visitors at this time of day.”
“It’s me, Mr. Rock—Mrs. Gillingwater.”
“Then I want you least of all, you foul-mouthed, lying woman. Get you gone, or I’ll loose the dogs on you.”