“Tod! It is a woman.”
“Gently, lad! Don’t be in a hurry. We’ll soon see.”
The figure raised itself as we approached, and stood confronting us. The last pull of wind that went brushing by might have brushed me down, in my surprise. It was Mrs. Francis Radcliffe.
She drew her grey cloak closer round her and put her hand upon Tod’s arm. He went back half a step: I’m not sure but he thought it might be her ghost.
“Do not think me quite out of my mind,” she said—and her voice and manner were both collected. “I have come here every evening for nearly a week past to listen to the cries. They have never been so plain as they are to-night. I suppose the wind helps them.”
“But—you—were lying on the grass, Mrs. Francis,” said Tod; not knowing yet what to make of it all.
“I had put my ear on the ground, wondering whether I might not hear it plainer,” she replied. “Listen!”
The cry again! The same painful wailing sound that we heard that other night, making one think of I know not what woe and despair. When it had died away, she spoke further, her voice very low.
“People are talking so much about the cries that I strolled on here some evenings ago to hear them for myself. In my mind’s tumult I can hardly rest quiet, once my day’s work is done: what does it matter which way I stroll?—all ways are the same to me. Some people said the sounds came from the birds, some said from witches, some from the ghost of the man on the gibbet: but the very first night I came here I found out what they were really like—my husband’s cries.”