Drolls From Shadowland Part 7

On the moor he had only the breeze for company, and its long, vague wail, as it rustled across the ferns, merely deepened the moody irritation in his mind. He felt as sour as a fanatic and as gloomy as a thief.

To find the fogou, among the bewildering growth of ferns, was by no means the easiest task in the world: for the rude cave-dwelling was literally buried in the hill-side; its entrance being hidden by the rank vegetation that here reached almost to Elijah's arm-pits.

As he ploughed his way through the trackless tangle, giving vent the while to a superfluity of oaths, he presently stumbled on the entrance to the fogou, almost precipitating himself into its darkness, so suddenly had he stumbled on it, wading through the ferns.

The low and narrow tunnel in the hill-side, with its walls and roof lined with slabs of rock, was as uncanny a spot as a man could set foot in, and Elijah shook like one with the ague, as he thrust aside the ferns and peered into the blackness.

He turned round, half inclined to retreat; but, as he turned, his eyes chanced to travel to the sea, where he could still discern the fis.h.i.+ng-boats riding at their nets; and the idea of 'Miah out there thinking of Dorcas made him clench his teeth grimly, as if he had received a blow.

He swung round on his heels sharply and determinedly, savagely trampling the ferns beneath his feet, and strode forward into the pitch-black mirk.

Groping his way in, with hands extended, he presently found the block of granite called the altar, and "turning the stone" in the hollow on its surface, he shaped the while in his heart his rancorous prayer to Hate.

Suddenly he was aware of a face staring at him: a mere face vaguely limned on the darkness, as if a bodiless head were held before him by the hair.

And in that same instant, without a word being uttered, he felt that he had looked in the face of Hate.

He reeled out of the fogou like a drunken man.

The vision was one it would be impossible to forget. He must bear with him this memory, as a man who has committed a murder must bear with him the memory of his victim's ghastly face.

"I'll wait an' see what comes of it," said 'Lijah to himself, as he ran and stumbled down the hill-side in the moonlight, the thick hair stiffening under his cap.

The months slipped by, and the years dragged on sluggishly, and 'Miah and Dorcas were as happy as ever. They had a couple of bairns to toddle about their cottage, and 'Miah had been fairly fortunate on the fishery, so that their lives were generally sunny and enviable to an extent that made Elijah's blood turn to gall.

"Thee'st forgotten me, thou darned owld liar that thou art!" said he, shaking his fist savagely at the fern-clad hill-side, where Hate presumably was watching from her lair.

On which he heard a chilling whisper at his elbow: "You shall have your wish, as sure as death!"

Elijah heard the loud thump, thump of his heart. But an instant after, his pulse danced buoyantly, and he went about his work chuckling grimly to himself.

But while 'Miah's life was harvesting happiness, as his nets gathered abundantly the harvest of the sea, Elijah's life on his farm on the hill-side appeared to be stifling among the stones and thistles, and a sour and acid leanness seemed eating up his heart.

It was as if Hate had shot her arrows blindly, and they had struck and rankled in the wrong breast.

With Elijah Trevorrow nothing seemed to prosper. He might rise early and go to bed late, he might pinch and pare as relentlessly as he pleased, every year of his life he grew leaner and poorer, till the scowl on his features deepened permanently among its lines, and in the end transformed his features as completely as a mask.

He was no more like the clear-eyed, whistling young farmer who had gone a-wooing Dorcas among the rustling wheat-fields, than the wrinkled tree, with its heart rotted out of it, is like the green young sapling in the bravery of its spring.

Ever watching hungrily to see Misfortune seize his rival and set her teeth thirstily in the very pulse of his life, Elijah held aloof from commerce with his neighbours, sour and discontented, and wis.h.i.+ng each day to end, in the hope that on the morrow he might see the evil he desired.

Presently there went a whisper through the tiny hamlet that Elijah Trevorrow was a bit touched _here_--the villagers tapping their brows significantly as they spoke.

"He do talk as ef Hate es a woman, an' he've seed her. Up in that owld fogou he've mit her, he do say. An' he's all'ys sayin' she ha'nt keeped her word to un. Whatever do 'a mayne, weth 'es gashly owld tales?"

'Miah, whose name had got mixed up in the tale, one day called at the lonely farmhouse, in order to see Elijah and reason with him if he could.

But Elijah, as 'Miah approached, set the dogs on him savagely, and the fisherman was obliged precipitately to beat a retreat.

At last, one day in the depth of winter, when the hills were white with whirling snowdrifts, Elijah Trevorrow disappeared.

They searched everywhere for him, but could find no trace of him, and the search was finally abandoned in despair.

Elijah had made his way to the fogou, determined to front Hate and to compel her to keep faith with him, even if he squeezed her life out through her throat.

Some eight months after--in the time of blackberries--some youngsters, questing among the ferns on the hillside, stumbled across the fogou and crept in to explore it.

They rushed down the hillside screaming with terror; and, when safe among the cottages, began to babble incoherently that there was a ghost up yonder in the "owld hunted fogou," they had seen its face--and it was white--so white!

The villagers began to have an inkling of the truth, and went toiling up through the ferns in a body.

"As like as not 'tes _he_, poor saul," they whispered awesomely as they clambered up the windy ridges of the hill.

True enough, it was Elijah, dead in the fogou. But whether or not he had again met Hate there, is one of the questions the gossips have still to solve.

FOOTNOTES:

[N] A subterranean storehouse or place of shelter.

[O] A portion of the rites practised in connection with "cursing stones."

THE HAUNTED HOUSE.

IT was only an old deserted house, perched half-way up the hillside and overlooking the village. But it was none the less the village theatre: the peep-hole through which the villagers obtained a glimpse of many mysteries, and the stage and drop-scene of half the legends of the thorp.

It was an old stone building which evidently had once been a dwelling of importance, but for quite a century it had been tenantless and almost entirely dismantled: the home of the owl and the lizard, of the spectre and the bat.

When the sunrise splashed across the fragmentary panes of gla.s.s that here and there remained in their frames, the farmer would stand still at his ploughing on the hill-slope and glance up at the great Argus-eyed building--that had now, however, more sockets than eyes--and a world of memories, of legends and superst.i.tions, would buzz, with strange bewilderment, through his brain.

The old house reminded him of his mother and of his grandfather, and of those who had been the village historians for his childhood, and a musing gravity seemed to deepen in his mind. He was aware of the brevity of life, and of the lapse of the personality; of the tragedies of pa.s.sion, with their gravity and poignancy, and of the mystery that broods at the back of all our thoughts. But most of all he was aware that the building standing fronting him was the very kernel of his individuality projected into visibility: the one knot into which all his memories were tied.

He would hold his children spell-bound by the hour as he told them the ordinary folk-tales of the hamlet, with that ruin on the hillside as the stage for the majority of them; till his daughter Ruth, who was young and sentimental, though with a streak of pa.s.sion running through her nature, learned to contemplate the ruin with an awe akin to his, and stared up wonderingly at it, so long and so often, that at last it had become for her a necessary part of life.

While Ruth was still a child, the haunted ruin chiefly attracted her thoughts as the scene and locality of uncanny occurrences that were fanciful and unusual rather than sombre or suggestive. It was the great haunted cheese in which the piskies burrowed, and out of which they hopped with amusing unexpectedness: it was the building to pa.s.s which you must always turn your stocking, if you wished to escape being _pisky-ledden_, or misguided: it was the place to which the "Little Folks"[P] conveyed stolen children: above all, it was the place of dark and cobwebbed corners, where naughty children were put to live with snails and spiders and with great big goggle-eyed buccaboos!

As she stood on her doorstep with her bit of knitting in her hand--a tiny doll's stocking, or a garter for herself--little Ruth would stare up at the great black building, with the scarlet splendour of the sunset at its back, until she almost fancied she could see the little winking piskies grinning through the window-holes and clambering across the roofs.

And by-and-by, when the rich yellow sky began to darken and the flocks of rooks flew cawing overhead, Ruth would s.h.i.+ver with a delicious sense of security as she stood beneath the porch in the gathering twilight and heard the wind begin to moan and sigh mysteriously, as if it trembled at the thought of spending the night on the hillside with no other company than that "whisht[Q] owld house."

As she grew older and became aware of the drift of her wishes, feeling stirrings and promptings at the roots of her life, her imagination seized now on the pa.s.sionate human tragedies which, according to the legends, had been enacted in the building. She had a sweetheart of her own, and she could understand lovers; and something of the glamour and mystery of a great heady pa.s.sion she believed she could interpret out of her own ripened life.