Silence crept shadowy from the corners of the room—the silence, compact of rustling undersounds, that seems full of tragedies half lost yet unforgotten. The little sounds grew big, the big ones thunderous. The eight-day clock on the right hand of the chimney-piece ticked weightily, with grave disregard of everything save Time's slow passing. Nanny's harsh breathing crossed her goodman's softer snore. And now a rat floundered in the rafters overhead; and now the spiders in the walls began their clear and eerie ticking—tick-tick, tick-tick, like the swinging of an elfin pendulum. Once in a while an owl hooted, or the long-drawn wailing of a peewit sounded from the moor without. The night, in this cottage-kitchen, was endless, ghoulish and unrestful; and the slumbering folk on chair and settle served but to heighten the unrestfulness.
Witherlee turned in his sleep, and lifted his eyelids for a moment, and heard the spiders ticking in the wall. "Yond is th' death-tick," he muttered drowsily. "Lord save us, there'll be blows afore th' moon wears old."
Again the fret of little sounds fell over the cottage—over the living-room, and over the bed-chamber above where Mistress Wayne was tricking a brief spell of sleep from fate. But her sleep was neither so lasting nor so light as Nanny Witherlee had named it, and dawn was scarce greying over the moor-reaches when she waked.
Full of a sense of disaster, confused and rudderless, she rose and went to the window and looked out across the graves. And the dawn was a pitiful thing, that came to touch her sorrows into life. Where was she? And why should the grave stones, set toward the brightening East, show red as blood? She could not tell—only, that some one was waiting to carry her far from these dreadful places of the moor. Someone was waiting for her—that was the one surety she had. But where?
She smiled on the sudden, and clapped her slender, blue-veined hands together. "Why, yes," she lisped, "'tis Dick Ratcliffe who waits for me—strange that I cannot see him in the graveyard. We should have met there, he and I." She stopped and knit her little brows. "Dick lives at Wildwater," she went on slowly. "How if I seek him out, and reproach him that he did not wait? Yes, yes, I'll go to Wildwater—we have far to go to-day, and I must hurry."
She picked up her wearing-gear and eyed it questioningly; then donned it quickly, stole down the stair, and stood, finger on lip, regarding the Sexton and his wife.
"If they should waken, they would never let me go," she murmured. "I must tread softly—very softly."
"'Tis th' death-tick, an' there'll be fight afore th' new moon's in her cradle," muttered the Sexton in his sleep.
Mistress Wayne, startled by his voice, ran fast across the floor, and lifted the latch, and went out into the gathering dawn. A moment only she halted in the lane, then turned to her right hand and went up toward the moor with hurried steps. She must reach Wildwater—and Wildwater, she knew lay somewhere up among the moors.
Up and up she went, past naked pasture-land and lank, rough-furrowed fields. She passed a shepherd tending the ewes which had lambed in the inclement weather—one of the Marsh shepherds, who wondered sorely to see his late master's wife come up the moors in such guise and at such an hour.