Andrew King, coming back, found her there at it, alone. His eyes swept the room. "Mabilla! Bessie Prawle, where is Mabilla?" The girl huddled and prayed on. He took her by the shoulder and shook her to and fro. "You foul wench, you piece, this is your doing." Bessie sobbed her denials, but he would not hear her. Snatching up a staff, he turned, threw her down in his fury. He left the house and followed the wind.
The wind caught him the moment he was outside, and swept him onward whether he would or not. He ran down the bank of the beck which seemed to be racing him for a prize, leaping and thundering level with its banks; before he had time to wonder whether the bridge still stood he was up with it, over it and on the edge of the brae. Up the moorland road he went, carried rather than running, and where it loses itself in the first enclosure, being hard up against the wall, over he vaulted, across the field and over the further wall. Out then upon the open fell, where the heather makes great cushions, and between all of them are bogs or stones, he was swept by the wind. It shrieked about him and carried him up and over as if he were a leaf of autumn. Beyond that was dangerous ground, but there was no stopping; he was caught in the flood of the gale. He knew very well, however, whither it was carrying him: to Knapp, that place of dread, whither he was now sure Mabilla had been carried, resumed by her own people. There was no drawing back, there was no time for prayer. All he could do was to keep his feet.
He was carried down the Dryhope fell, he said, into the next valley, swept somehow over the roaring beck in the bottom, and up the rugged side of Knapp, where the peat-hags are as high as rocks, and presently knew without the help of his eyes that he was nearing the forest. He heard the swishing of the trees, the cracking of the boughs, the sharp crack and crash which told of some limb torn off and sent to ruin; and he knew also by some hush not far off that the wind, great and furious as it was, was to be quieted within that awful place. It was so. He stood panting upon the edge of the wood, out of the wind, which roared away overhead. He twittered with his foolish lips, not knowing what on earth to do, nor daring to do anything had he known it; but all the prayers he had ever learned were driven clean out of his head.
He could dimly make out the tree-trunks immediately before him, low bushes, shelves of bracken-fern; he could pierce somewhat into the gloom beyond and see the solemn trees ranked in their order, and above them a great soft blackness rent here and there to show the sky. The volleying of the storm sounded like the sea heard afar off: it was so remote and steady a noise that lesser sounds were discernible—the rustlings, squeakings, and snappings of small creatures moving over small undergrowth. Every one of these sent his heart leaping to his mouth; but all his fears were to be swallowed up in amazement, for as he stood there distracted, without warning, without shock, there stood one by him, within touching distance, a child, as he judged it, with loose hair and bright eyes, prying into his face, smiling at him and inviting him to come on.
"Who in God's name—?" cried Andrew King; but the child plucked him by the coat and tried to draw him into the wood.
I understand that he did not hesitate. If he had forgotten his gods he had not forgotten his fairy-wife. I suppose, too, that he knew where to look for her; he may have supposed that she had been resumed into her first state. At any rate, he made his way into the forest by guess-work, aided by reminiscence. I believe he was accustomed to aver that he "knew where she was very well," and that he took a straight line to her. I have seen Knapp Forest and doubt it. He did, however, find himself in the dark spaces of the wood and there, sure enough, he did also see the women with whom his Mabilla had once been co-mate. They came about him, he said, like angry cats, hissing and shooting out their lips. They did not touch him; but if eyes and white hateful faces could have killed him, dead he had been then and there.
He called upon God and Christ and made a way through them. His senses had told him where Mabilla was. He found her pale and trembling in an aisle of the trees. She leaned against a tall tree, perfectly rigid, "as cold as a stone," staring across him with frozen eyes, her mouth open like a round O. He took her in his arms and holding her close turned and defied the "witches"—so he called them in his wrath. He dared them in the name of God to touch him or his wife, and as he did so he says that he felt the chill grow upon him. It took him, he said, in the legs and ran up his body. It stiffened his arms till they felt as if they must snap under the strain; it caught him in the neck and fixed it. He felt his eyes grow stiff and hard; he felt himself sway. "Then," he said, "the dark swam over me, the dark and the bitter cold, and I knew nothing more." Questioned as he was by Mr. Robson and his friends, he declared that it was at the name of God the cold got him first. He saw the women hushed and scared, and at the same time one of them looked over her shoulder, as if somebody was coming. Had he called in the King of the Wood? That is what he himself thought. It was the King of the Wood who had come in quest of Mabilla, had pulled her out of the cottage in Dryhope and frozen her in the forest. It was he, no doubt, said Andrew King, who had come to defy the Christian and his God. I detect here the inspiration of his mother Miranda, the strange sea-woman who knew Mabilla without mortal knowledge and spoke to her in no mortal speech. But the sequel to the tale is a strange one.
Andrew King awoke to find himself in Mabilla's arms, to hear for the first time in his life Mabilla call him softly by his name. "Andrew, my husband," she called him, and when he opened his eyes in wonder to hear her she said, "Andrew, take me home now. It is all over," or words to that effect. They went along the forest and up and down the fells together. The wind had dropped, the stars shone. And together they took up their life where they had dropped it, with one significant omission in its circumstance. Bessie Prawle had disappeared from Dryhope. She had followed him up the fell on the night of the storm, but she came not back. And they say that she never did. Nothing was found of her body, though search was made; but a comb she used to wear was picked up, they say, by the tarn on Limmer Fell, an imitation tortoise-shell comb which used to hold up her hair. Miranda King, who knew more than she would ever tell, had a shrewd suspicion of the truth of the case. But Andrew King knew nothing, and I daresay cared very little. He had his wood-wife, and she had her voice; and between them, I believe, they had a child within the year.
I ought to add that I have, with these eyes, seen Mabilla By-the-Wood who became Mabilla King. When I went from Dryhopedale to Knapp Forest she stood at the farmhouse door with a child in her arms. Two others were tumbling about in the croft. She was a pretty, serious girl—for she looked quite a girl—with a round face and large greyish-blue eyes. She had a pink cotton dress on, and a good figure beneath it. She was pale, but looked healthy and strong. Not a tall girl. I asked her the best way to Knapp Forest and she came out to the gate to point it to me. She talked simply, with a northern accent, and might have been the child of generations of borderers. She pointed me the very track by which Andrew King must have brought her home, by which the King of the Wood swept her out on the wings of his wrath; she named the tarn where once she dwelt as the spirit of a tree. All this without a flush, a tremor or a sign in her blue eyes that she had ever known the place. But these people are close, and seldom betray all that they know or think.