"I want to get to Wildwater; some one is waiting for me there, and we have far to go, and I cannot find the way," she said, drawing near to the shepherd, yet keeping a watchful eye on him, and ready, like some wild thing of the moor, to take flight at the first hint of danger.
The shepherd eyed her queerly. "Ye want Wildwater, Mistress? Well, 'tis a fairish step fro' here to there—though yond bridle-track will land ye straight to th' door-stun, if ye follow it far enough. Are ye forced to wend thither, if I mud axe a plain question?"
"Oh, yes, I have a friend there who waits my coming. He'll be angry if I fail him."
"'Tis no good house to visit," said the shepherd, scratching his head in dire perplexity. "Have a thowt, Mistress, o' them that live theer."
"My lover dwells there. Is not that enough?" she answered gravely, and went her way.
Up and up, till she gained the wildest of the moor, where eagles nested and the goshawk soared. Up and up, until she stood beside Wildwater Pool, and looked across its stagnant waters, and saw the long house of the Ratcliffes frown beetle-browed upon her from amid the waste of ling. And half she feared; and half she gladdened, thinking what welcome her lover held in store for her; but when she neared the gate and felt the swart defiance of the house, she halted.
Between Ling Crag and Bouldsworth Hill it stood, this house of the Wildwater Ratcliffes. Above it were the wind-swept wastes of heath; below, the lean acres which bygone Ratcliffes had wrested from the clutches of the moor. Yet the dip of the hills sheltered it a little and the garden was trim-kept adding, if need were, the last touch of desolation to the homestead. A rambling house, shouldering roughly at the one end a group of laithes and mistals; above the narrow latticed windows the eaves hung sullenly, and the stone porch without the door offered at the best a cold welcome, and at the worst defiance. Over the porch was a motto, deep chiselled in the blackened stone.
"We hate, we strike," said the house to the outside world, and the motto, though it matched well the temper of each generation of the Waynes, suited none of the stock so well as old Nicholas Ratcliffe, known through the moorside as the Lean Man of Wildwater.
Below the wan strip of intake, an upland tarn showed its sullen, unreflecting face to the sky. Nor curlew nor moor-fowl was ever known to haunt the rushes that fringed Wildwater Pool, no fish ever rose from its waters; and men said that God had cursed the pool, since a winter's night, nigh on a hundred years agone, when a Ratcliffe had tempted a Wayne to sup with him in amity and had thereafter thrown his body to the waters. But Nicholas Ratcliffe loved the tarn, as he loved the storms that broke over the naked hills and the wild deeds that had made his fathers a terror and a scourge; and the sons and grandsons who grew up about him he trained to the rough logic of tradition. Brave the Lean Man was, and crafty as a stoat; wiry of body, lank-jawed of face; and the hair stood up from his crown a rusty grey, like stubble when the first frost has nipped it.
Old Nicholas sat in the hall this morning, in the carved oaken chair that stood over against the lang-settle. Robert, his eldest-born, sat opposite, and three other of the grandsons were at table still, finishing a breakfast of mutton-pasty and ham and oaten-bread, washed down with nut-brown ale. For the hall, running a quarter the length of the house and all its width, was the chief living chamber, where the indoors business of the day was gone through; a cool and pleasant chamber in summer heat, but in winter the winds piped through and through it, driving the women-folk for warmth to the more cosy parlour. The Lean Man had been cradled in cold winds, and it pleased him to see as little as might be of the women; for women were rather a cumbrous necessity than a joy to Nicholas Ratcliffe. "Thy son should be safe off with Mistress Wayne by now," said Nicholas to his eldest-born.