“I want ye,” said his father, “to take it now with—with my assurance of regard and—and gratitude to Mellish of The Peel. He has a craze for such gewgaws, with no small part of his money, they tell me, sunk in their collection. You can say it has the reputation of a charm.”
Young Wanlock posted off on this pleasant mission, with a chuck below the chin for the maid in passing; and his father, walking in the afternoon between the dishevelled shrubberies of his neglected policies, felt at times amid the anguish of his situation a soothing sense of other ills averted and transferred to one whom now he hated worse than ever.
It seemed next day as if the evil genius dwelling in the jewel wrought its purpose with appalling expedition. Something is in the air of our haunted North whose beaked sea promontories cleave the wind and foam, that carries the hint of things impending to all who have boding fears or hateful speculations, and Wanlock knew some blow had fallen on his enemy while yet were no human tidings. The pyots chattered garrulous as women on the walls; the rooks that flew across the grey storm-bitten country were in clanging bands, possessed of rumours which they shared at first with the careering clouds alone, for men are the last of all created things to learn of their own disasters.
He went eagerly out and came on other harbingers. A horseman galloped down the glen—“The Peel! The Peel!” he cried, as he thundered past with his head across his shoulder—“They have broken The Peel!” A running gipsy with a mountain of shining cans a-clatter on his back skulked into the wood as Wanlock came upon him, and harried forth by the dog, stood on the highway wildly protesting innocence.
“Who blamed ye?” queried Wanlock. “What has happened?”
“I declare to my God I know nothing of it!” cried the man in an excess of apprehension, “but The Peel, they say, was broken into through the night.”
“Ha! say ye so!” said Wanlock, kindling. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: ye run gey fast, I think, for innocence,” and he fixed a piercing gaze upon the wretch, who drew his hand across his throat and held it up to heaven.
“But it is none of my affair—begone!” said Wanlock, and the gipsy clattered on his way.
Wanlock leaned upon his cane, with the grey dog at his heels, and let the exultation of the tidings well through all his being. The woods were sombre round about him: silent and sad, bereft of voices, for it was the summer’s end, and birds were grieving their departed children. And yet not wholly still, the forest, for in its dark recesses something unexpressive moved and muttered. His joy ebbed out, his new mistrusts beset him; with a wave of the hand he sent the dog among the undergrowth, and when it disappeared, there rose among the tangle of the wood an eerie call, indefinite, despondent, like a dirge. Had the land itself a voice and memory of a golden age of sunshine and eternal Spring, thus might it be lamenting. But still—but still ’twas not a voice of nature, rather to the ear of Wanlock like the utterance of a creature lost in some strange country looking for home and love. So call the fallen angels in the interspace, remembering joys evanished.
A hand fell on the listener’s shoulder: he flinched and turned to look in the face of his daughter Mirren.