Mrs Wills wiped away her tears with one corner of her apron, while she stopped to consider.
“There’s neither man nor boy about this blessed place to-night, as ill luck would have it,” she said. “I would offer to run myself, and gladly, but I’m not as quick as when I was younger, Miss Mary. But stay—there’s farmer Bartlemoor’s not more than a mile and a quarter away, where there’s sure to be one of the sons at home and plenty of horses. To be sure it’s not exactly on the way to Withenden, but not so far about neither. Do you know it, miss?—Bartle’s farm, I mean? Bartles we calls them mostly for shorter.”
“No,” said Mary, “I don’t. But tell me and I am sure I can find it.”
Mrs Wills’s description recalled the place to Mary’s recollection. The Bartlemoors were not her father’s parishioners, but she remembered noticing the house, a rather picturesque old-fashioned one, in some of the long summer rambles the Rectory children were so fond of.
It was not yet quite dark when again she set out. But had it been the blackest of midnights, little, save for the increased difficulty and delay, would Mary have cared. She hurried on, trying hard not to think, nor to distract herself by picturing what might at that moment be happening at the Rectory. It seemed to her that she had implicitly followed Mrs Wills’s directions, yet the landmarks she was on the look-out for were strangely long of coming. It was all but dark now—the road, hardly indeed worthy of the name, along which she was hastening was perfectly bare of any sign of human habitation; she had met no one since she left the Edge, not a single belated market-cart even had passed her, and now, as Mary stood still in despair, she noticed that the clouds, which all the evening had been gathering ominously together, had joined their phalanxes—there was no longer a break in the sky—the rain began slowly but steadily, in five minutes it was a perfect pour.
Mechanically almost, poor Mary crept under a tree and stood still to think what she should do. Where indeed was the use of hurrying on, when every step, for all she knew, might but be taking her further and further in the wrong direction? It was too evident she had lost her way. What she would have done she often afterwards asked herself, if, at that moment, the sound of wheels approaching rapidly in her direction had not caught her ears. Too rapidly indeed was her next fear—how, amidst the pouring rain and the darkness, could she attract the driver’s attention? She ran forward—yes, to her delight the vehicle, whatever it was, had lamps! Could it possibly, by any blessed chance, be Dr Brandreth himself returning from a country round? Anyway, whoever and whatever it was, she must do her utmost to attract attention. And as Mary said this to herself there flashed across her memory a gruesome legend of the neighbourhood, which many a night, when a child, had made her put her fingers in her ears for terror of what she might hear—a legend of a certain Sir Ingram de Romary who, maddened by wine and some wild quarrel, had driven himself and his horse to destruction over the Chaldron water-fall, a mile or more the other side of Hathercourt. All the way from Romary Dene, an old ruin now long given up to the owls and bats, the mad race had been run, and still on wild, dark, stormy nights “folks said ’twas to be heard again.”
Mary, standing in the road, shivered as the story rushed through her brain—shivered with strange nervous terror, for which, at the same moment, she vigorously despised herself.
“Papa dying,” she said to herself, “and I to be frightened of a ridiculous ghost story! What can I be made of? Have I no heart?”
Afterwards she did herself more justice. A strong excitement may, indeed, override every other sensation, but it may also, by some slightest variation, kindle every perception, every nerve, every feeler, so to speak, of our Briareus-like imagination into abnormal acuteness. Who cannot but recall with astonishing minuteness the trifling outside details of any scene morbidly impressed on our memory—the pattern on the walls above the bed where our best beloved lay dying, the details of the dress of the indifferent messenger who brought us that news we can never forget? Who cannot but remember the wild, even ludicrous, vagaries that flashed through our fancy at some “supreme moment” of our lives?
But, shiver as she might, Mary had already committed herself to action. She stood some little way forward on the road, and, as the gig, dog-cart, whatever it was, came within hail, she called out as loudly as she could the first thing that came into her head to say: