Every window of the creeper-hung cottage was shrouded, its gate latched. I struggled to climb the fence, to fling a stone through the casement. The moon shone glassily in the cold skies, but daybreak was in the east; I must wait till morning. With eyes fixed on the motionless head I sat down in the grass by the wayside. Ever and again, after solemnly turning to survey me, the pony dragged the cart on a foot or two under the willows, nibbling the dewy grass.
Roused suddenly from stupor by the howling of a dog, I leapt up. Who called? Where was I? What had I forgotten? In renewed and dreadful recognition I looked vacantly around me. A strangeness had come. His company was mine no longer.
Dawn brightened. The voice of a thrush pealed out of the orchard beyond the stone wall—wild and sweet as in Spring. I crouched on the ground, elbows on knees, and now kept steady watch upon those night-hung upper windows. At last a curtain was drawn aside. An invisible face within must have looked down upon us in the lane. The casement was unlatched and thrust open, and a grey, tousled head pushed out as if in alarm into the keen morning. At sight of it a violent hiccoughing seized me, so that when an old woman appeared at her door and hobbled out to the cart, I could not make myself understood. Her sleep-bleared, faded eyes surveyed me with horror and suspicion—as if in my smallness there I looked scarcely human. She shook her crooked fingers at me, to scare me off; then stooping, put her head into the cart. I cried out, and ran——
Chapter Fifty-Four
The sun had burned for some hours in the heavens, when bleeding with thorns and on fire with nettles and stinking mayweed, I dragged myself out of the undergrowth into a low-lying corner of the desolate garden. Near by lay a pool of water under an old ruinous wall, swept by the foliage of an ash. On a flat, shelving stone at its brink I knelt down, bathed my face, and drank.
All that day I spent in the neighbourhood of the water, overhung with the colourless trumpets of convolvulus. Occasionally I edged on, but only to keep pace with the sunbeams, for I was deathly cold, and as soon as shadow drew over me, fits of shivering returned. For some hours I slept, but so shallowly that I heard my own voice gabbling in dreams.
When I awoke, the western sky was an ocean of saffron and gold. Amidst its haze, stood up the distant clustered chimneys of Wanderslore: and I realized I must be in an outlying hollow of the park—farthest from Beechwood Hill. I sat up, bound back my hair, and, bathing my swollen feet in the dark, ice-cold water, I watched the splendour fade.