THE MAN WHO MET HATE.
It was drawing on towards midnight, and the world seemed very lonely.
There was a huge, round harvest moon in the sky, and the hills were bathed in a kind of spectral splendour—a faint and filmy shimmer of silver that left the outlines of objects blurred and elusive, though the scene as a whole emerged clearly for the eye. The wind was sighing drowsily across the moors, while high on the rugged cairns on the hill-tops it was wuthering mournfully beneath the wan grey sky.
And 'Lijah, staring sleeplessly through his blindless bedroom-window, felt a growing unrest in the very marrow of his bones.
He could see down below, in the little lonesome cove, the cottage where Dorcas had now made her nest with that "darned gayte long-legged 'Miah" for her husband, and in the sudden heat and bitterness of his wrath his heart became like a live coal within him. "I'll have my revenge on un, ef I haang for it!" growled he.
And then he remembered that up on yonder moors—whose ferns and granite boulders he could see plainly in the moonlight—there was a "gashly owld fogou,"[N] where, if a man went at midnight prepared to boldly summon Hate and to "turn a stone"[O] in her honour, his hatred would be accomplished for him "as sure as death."
"An' I'll go there, ef I die for it!" said he grimly to himself.
The village was asleep, and all its cottages were smokeless. There was no one stirring anywhere in the cove. But far out in the moonlit bay he could see the fishing-boats dotting the vast grey plain, and he knew that in one of them 'Miah Laity was fishing, and was no doubt thinking of Dorcas as he fished.
"I'll spoil 'es thinkin' for un 'fore long," said 'Lijah, "ayven ef I have to sill me saul to do the job!"