“O’er the hills, and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim;
Beyond the night, across the day,
Thro’ all the world...”
She was sinking her all in the venture.
Then there came the day of the expedition to Ayclough Pool.
Ugly as Wareborough was, both in itself and its situation, there were yet to be found, as there are in the neighbourhood of most small towns, some fairly pretty walks a mile or two beyond its suburbs. The Woldshire side was the most attractive, for on this side one got out of the dead level so depressing to pedestrians in search of “a view,” and the undulating ground encouraged one to hope that in time, provided, of course, one walked far enough, one might come to something in the shape of a hill. Nor were such hopes deceptive. There really was a hill, or a very respectable attempt at one, which went by the name of Ayclough Brow, and half-way up which, one came upon the tiny little lake known as Ayclough Pool. There was rather a nice old farmhouse, perched up there too, not far from the Pool, and a chatty old farmer’s wife who was fond of entertaining visitors with her reminiscences of “the old days,” days when sheep could browse on the Brow without getting to look like animated soot-bags; when it was possible to gather a posy without smearing one’s hands with the smuts on the leaves; when Wareborough was a little market town, where the mail-coach to London from Bridgenorth used to stop twice a week, and rattle out again in grand style, horn and all, along the Ayclough Road. Many an accident to this same Royal Mail could the old body tell of, for her husband’s forbears had lived on the same ground for generations, and the smashes of various kinds that had taken place at a sharp bend of the road just below the Brow had been the great excitement in the lives of the dwellers in the lonely farmhouse, and the records thereof had been handed down religiously from father to son. More than one unfortunate traveller had been carried up to the farm, as the nearest dwelling-house, there to remain till the fractured limb was sound again, or till the bruised body and shaken nerves had recovered their equilibrium, or, in one or two yet sadder cases, under the roof-tree of the old house, far from home and friends, to end indeed the journey.
There was one story which Eugenia since childhood had listened to with intense sympathy—a really tragic story—notwithstanding the exaggerated ghastliness of detail with which, like all local legends of the kind, in process of time it had become embellished. It was that of a bride and bridegroom, married “the self-same morn,” who had been among the victims of one of those terrible overturns. The bride had escaped unhurt, the husband was killed on the spot. They had carried him up to the farm, and then, for the day or two that elapsed before her friends could be communicated with, the poor girl had knelt in frantic agony beside the body, refusing to be comforted, at times wildly persisting he was not, could not be dead. By the next morning, the old farmer’s wife used to add in a solemnly impressive tone, “she had heard tell, th’ young leddy’s hair were that grey she moight ’a been sixty.” She had been taken away at last a raging lunatic, said the legend (probably in violent and very excusable hysterics), and of course never recovered her reason. There was no record of her name, the accident had occurred more than a hundred years ago, yet the story still clung to Ayclough Farm, and some people were not over and above fond of passing the bend in the road of a dark night. “’Twas lonesome, that bit of the way, very,” said the old woman, and the wind among the trees—there was a good deal of wind up Ayclough way sometimes—made queer sounds like a coach galloping furiously in the distance, and there were people that said still queerer sights were to be seen now and again on the fatal spot.
Altogether there was a good deal of fascination about Ayclough, fascination felt all the more strongly by the Laurence girls, on account of the unusual dearth of the picturesque or of any material food for romance in their dull Wareborough home. A walk to the old farm had always been one of their recognised childish “treats,” though Eugenia used to get dreadfully frightened, and hide herself well under the bedclothes when they were left alone by their nurse at night, after one of these expeditions. Sydney used to feel her way across the room in the dark, and climb into Eugenia’s cot, and try to reason her into calmness.
“How could the ghost of the young lady be so silly as to come back to the place where her husband had been killed, when it was more than a hundred years ago, and they must be both happy in heaven now, like the lovers on the willow pattern plates.”
“They were turned into birds,” Eugenia would remonstrate, but Sydney could not see that that signified; “they were happy any way, and people in heaven must be even happier than birds. She couldn’t think what they should ever want to come back for, or suppose they did, why any one should be afraid of them.”
Then Eugenia would shift her ground, and defend her terrors by a new argument.
“Suppose ghosts weren’t really people’s souls, but evil spirits who looked like them? She had read something so horrible like that in one of papa’s books the other day. It was a poem—she couldn’t remember the name—but it was ‘from the German.’ If it was only light, she would tell it to Sydney.”