Between Marshcotes and Cranshaw the highroad runs for a mile and a half. From Cranshaw to Ludworth in Lancashire is a very good six. The hill rises sharp after you pass Cranshaw Church and the wild, wind-swept burial ground; and well towards the top, soon as you gain the open moor, a grim line of "stoups" guards the right hand of the way. It is an eerie road to travel, especially if night has fallen and brought you no company. The stoups, huge blocks of millstone-grit, white-washed at the base, blackened at the top, seem to stand out from the darkness, to move towards you almost. Year after year they have stood there, pointing the way to travellers: if snow be thick on the highway, their black crowns show clear against the white; if the moor lie black, their white bodies point the way of safety. Year after year, with frost and rain and snow, the rough moor weather has made sport of the stoups; they are workers of charity, and buffets are their fit reward. It is vain to call them senseless stone, and pass them by, and think no more of it; they stop you, willy-nilly, with their rough-hewn, tragic faces; they have lived in the silent places, and the mystery of a long loneliness is theirs. A true man done to death by the cold was the cause of their being, and many a true man killed by harsher foes has gone to swell the tale since then. More than once, or twice, or thrice, has murder walked beside those silent, ghostly stoups, and the bogs to right of them could tell some fearsome stories if they chose.
It was then some five and twenty years since Joshua Lomax, Griff's father, tried to cross from Ludworth one bitter winter's night; they found him a mile from the highroad, dead from exposure, and his widow, as soon as she could bring herself to read other people's welfare through the crystal of her own trouble, made haste to build the sentinel line of stoups, lest more good lives should be sacrificed. Griff could not bear to walk that road for many a long day after the tragedy, and even now he shuddered as he gained the outposts.
Tinker's Pool glooms down in the hollow, just beyond the last of the stoups, and the gamekeeper's house stands at the top of the road; between the two lies Sorrowstones Spring—a two-roomed, crumbling cottage that gets its name from the well-spring at the door. Rachel Strangeways, the quarrymaster's grandmother, had lived here time out of mind, and she would have found it hard to chance on a dwelling more to her liking. Rachel was reputed a witch throughout the countryside; maidens came to her, in fear and trembling, to have their fortunes told, and burly farmers sought her aid whenever the Evil Eye was working havoc among their cattle. She dealt in drugs, too, and great virtue was attached to an infusion she prepared of a certain bitter herb which only grew on the marsh that hugged her door. Her eighty-five years had bowed her body to the proportions of a hunchback's, and there was an evil light in her blue-green eyes that did not fit ill with her reputation. Whenever Joe found himself in straits he repaired to the maternal roof-tree, for Mistress Strangeways could show good common sense on occasion.
Joe walked over to the cottage on the night following Griff's stay at Peewit House. He entered the living-room without knocking, and found Mistress Strangeways huddled over the embers of a poverty-stricken fire.
"Well, mother," said he, "I'm i' a queer way."
Rachel gibbered over her ashes awhile, then looked up. Her blue-green eyes grew almost soft as they rested on this scrubby-bearded clown, who was yet bone of her bone. For there had been a time when the old witch's hand was not against the world, nor the world's hand against her; that was in the days when she and her man had a spruce little cottage at the edge of the moor, and a strip of garden where the peonies and the sweet marjoram and the ladslove grew, and one little lass to fend for. The little lass had grown up into a slim, well-favoured maid, and the mother had loved her after the profligate fashion of these rough-speeched, tender-hearted women of the uplands. And Mother Strangeways' heart was broken, once for all, when the girl died in bringing Joe to a shameful birth; she did not rail against her daughter, but against the world that had wronged her, as the way of her class is; and she hardened herself against all men living, and buried her husband in due course, and came to this battered, wind-swept cottage to live out her days. And Joe Strangeways, who had inherited neither his mother's fearlessness nor his father's breeding, was all she had left in the world to cherish and frame plans for.
"So tha'rt come to me?" she muttered, still with her eyes on Joe's face. "So tha'rt come to me? Ay, it brings men to their women-folk, does trouble; year in an' year out, I niver see thy black face, Joe, without there's trouble agate. Sit thee dahn, lad; sit thee dahn, and let's know what's toward."
"Just this—my wife's gone wrang wi' a gentleman. I could ha' borne it better if he'd hed rough talk an' a rough pair o' hands."
Rachel stiffened her dwarfed old body.
"An' who may it be, Joe?"