It was Polly Marsden—Swithin’s granddaughter who had been there all the time, disappointed of the company she had expected.
“It wasn’t my fault if I heard ’em,” she said to herself, perhaps to quieten the too rapid beating of her heart. “What are ears for if not to hear with?”
CHAPTER XIII
IN WHICH INMAN PROVES HIMSELF COMPETENT
NANCY’S mood alternated between a strange sense of peacefulness and extreme depression all that evening. Cold as it was she shut herself up in the parlour, away from Baldwin’s snappy ill-temper and Keturah’s tearful peevishness, and busied herself with that kind of sewing which raises in the breast of most young wives a tumult of hopes and fears. At intervals she let the little garment fall to her knee, and gazed long and steadily at the window, as if in the pale light that was upon the hills she would find healing for her soul’s sores. How often she had climbed old Cawden by moonlight in Jagger’s company! She had never doubted that they would one day marry and live happily together; it had seemed as inevitable as that Gordale beck should merge its waters with the stream that flowed from the Cove, and when memory reproduced the vivid pictures of the past, flooding the shadows with excess of light, her spirits became tranquillised and she would smile.
But an anodyne is not a cure; and when her eyes fell to her lap and her fingers took up again the work on which she was engaged, bitterness returned to her heart, and the weary way that stretched its interminable length before her was sunless as the Psalmist’s shadowed valley. Yet—Jagger loved her still, and she——!
Nancy merely skirted the borders of that forbidden ground, but to peep into a paradise that is closed to us is to invite a vision of hell, and the periods of depression grew longer and more painful, until she could endure the parlour no longer, and attributing to her head the ache that was at her heart, went early and supperless to bed.
It was not yet dark, and through her window she could see a couple of curlews wheeling in the air; their wild cries rang pleasantly in her ears; their free, erratic movements interested and amused her, now that sleep refused its office. She felt a sense of oneness with them and with the wild, untameable moor on which they rested, and she gave fancy its fling and let it sweep or hover where it would! She cherished no hopes, dreamed no false dreams; but between sleeping and waking dropped a curtain on the sombre present and walked in the sunlit past.
She was still dozing, still ruminating, when the clock downstairs struck one, and the sound had hardly died away when a handful of gravel was thrown against the window. Instantly she was out of bed. It was by this time very dark but she went confidently forward and put out her hand, conscious as she did so that one of her bare feet had been cut by a sharp fragment of spar. A voice from below that she recognised as her husband’s bade her steal down silently and open the door.
“Don’t bring a light,” he whispered. “They mustn’t see me; and take care how you draw back the bolts.”