They went on for some time without speaking.
‘I was listening,’ at last said the young guide abruptly, ‘for a sheep-bell. If I could but hear that, shepherd would put us right.’
But though Ethel hearkened also, in hopes of catching the far-off tinkle of a bell from some folded flock, the silence remained as unbroken as though man, with all his works and ways, had been banished from the island. Nothing but blinding mist to greet the eye, nothing but heather and peat and stones beneath the feet, as the two stumbled and groped forward, going deeper and deeper, for aught they knew, into the heart of the wilderness. The misty vapour heaved and rolled like a billowy sea, taking fantastic shapes, here of a threatening giant, there of a winding-sheet spread by no mortal hand, there again of a battlemented castle rearing its towers aloft.
There are landscape painters–even aspiring young Associates, newly elected, of the Royal Academy–whom it would have greatly gratified to have been on the moor that day, and to have seen the fluctuating hues of the mist, here fleecy snow, there translucent silver, elsewhere such pearly grays as the colour-box fails to render, while sunwards a faint pale shimmering streak of tender opal stretched, like Jacob’s ladder, almost from heaven to earth. It was a study worthy of an artist’s heed too, the manner in which the bare bleak Tors, red, brown, gray, according to the nature of the stone, cropped up from the moor, each crag rising out of the peaty soil like the bones of a buried Titan. But poor Ethel became very tired as she wandered on under the aimless guidance of Betty Mudge, who was herself tired, and who could but guess, and that wildly, in which direction home might lie.
‘Ware!’ she cried, as Ethel was about to plant her foot unsuspectingly on an inviting patch of emerald turf. ‘Yon’s bog, yon is, deep enow to suck down a horse to the saddle-laps. Never trust the green, and the greener the softer, miss. Send, we moun’t a strayed to Heronsmere or the Blackpool, for there be swamps there would swallow bigger nor we. Gran’father, they tell, smouthered in Blackpool, but ’twere in winter-time.’
Then there came creeping like insidious enemies into Ethel’s mind all the weird legends which since her stay at High Tor she had heard regarding the waste. There were tales of belated horsemen and lonely foot-travellers overwhelmed by snow-storms in winter, and lying dead among the drifts, the prey of the hill-fox and the carrion crow. There were tales too of those who had been lost in the blinding mist, and had either perished in some quagmire, or died miserably of hardship and exhaustion, after many hours of walking on the moor.
‘It ben’t of no manner o’ good!’ said Betty, after another long spell of silence. ‘We may walk till we drop. I’m main tired myself. And what’s the use? For oughter we know, we may be going round and round.’
Ethel too was weary, so weary that it was with difficulty she could raise her voice to urge on her now desponding companion the expediency of a renewed effort. ‘Surely, surely,’ she said, ‘we shall, if we persevere, come upon some road or see the lights–for it must be getting late–in some farm or cottage.’
‘One Tor be terrible like another,’ returned Betty with a sob. ‘I got no more notion whirrabouts we be, nor if I were fresh dropped out of the moon. I’m no use here, and can hardly drag. And what’ll mother say!’
And the girl sat down on a fragment of rock which jutted from a bluff stony Tor rising overhead, and began to weep. And then there forced itself on Ethel’s mind the dreadful thought that they had perhaps really been walking in a circle until their forces were spent, and might die of fatigue, cold, and even hunger before they should be discovered. Who could tell when the fog would disperse! The mist might overhang the lofty table-land of the moor for whole days, possibly for weeks, cutting the lost ones as completely off from succour as some shipwrecked mariner on his desolate isle. No sound floated to Ethel’s ears as she listened long and eagerly.