Robert Elsmere
neighbours with whom the girl could fraternise, and Whinborough was too
far off to provide any adequate food for her vague hunger after emotion
and excitement.
In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse
attractions of a young farmer in the neighbouring valley of Shanmoor. He
was a brute with a handsome face, and a nature in which whatever grains
of heart and conscience might have been interfused with the original
composition had been long since swamped. Mary, who had recklessly flung
herself into his power on one or two occasions, from a mixture of
motives, partly passion, partly jealousy, partly _ennui_, awoke one day
to find herself ruined, and a grim future hung before her. She had
realised her doom for the first time in its entirety on the Midsummer
Day preceding that we are now describing. On that day she had walked
over to Shanmoor in a fever of dumb rage and despair, to claim from her
betrayer the fulfilment of his promise of marriage. He had laughed at
her, and she had fled home in the warm rainy dusk, a prey to all those
torturing terrors which only a woman _in extremis_ can know. And on her
way back she had seen the ghost or 'bogle' of Deep Crag; the ghost had
spoken to her, and she had reached home more dead than alive, having
received what she at once recognised as her death sentence.
What had she seen? An effect of moonlit mist--a shepherd boy bent on a
practical joke--a gleam of white waterfall among the darkening rocks?
What had she heard? The evening greeting of a passer-by, wafted down to
her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm
enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain,
those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who
can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend
of the ghost--of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the
tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end
of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor
every Midsummer Night, with her moaning child upon her arm--had flashed
into Mary's mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind
her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists. To
see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by
the phantom voice was death. No one so addressed could hope to survive
the following Midsummer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along
with the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen
her vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom.
A week later she had disappeared from home and from the neighbourhood.
The darkest stories were afloat. She had taken some money with her, and
all trace of her was lost. The father had a period of gloomy
taciturnity, during which his principal relief was got out of jeering
and girding at his elder brother, the noodle's eyes wandered and
glittered more; his shrunken frame seemed more shrunken as he sat
dangling his spindle legs from the shaft of the carrier's cart; his
absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused with less
buoyancy and inventiveness than usual. But otherwise all went on as
before. John Backhouse took no step, and for nine months nothing was
heard of his daughter.
At last one cheerless March afternoon, Jim, coming back first from the
Wednesday round with the cart, entered the farm kitchen, while John
Backhouse was still wrangling at one of the other farmhouses of the
hamlet about some disputed payment. The old man came in cold and weary,
and the sight of the half-tended kitchen and neglected fire--they paid a
neighbour to do the housework, as far as the care of her own seven
children would let her--suddenly revived in his slippery mind the memory
of his niece, who, with all her faults, had had the makings of a
housewife, and for whom, in spite of her flouts and jeers, he had always
cherished a secret admiration. As he came in he noticed that the door to
the left hand, leading into what Westmoreland folk call the 'house' or
sitting-room of the farm, was open. The room had hardly been used since
Mary's flight, and the few pieces of black oak and shining mahogany
which adorned it had long ago fallen from their pristine polish. The
geraniums and fuchsias with which she had filled the window all the
summer before had died into dry blackened stalks; and the dust lay heavy
on the room, in spite of the well-meant but wholly ineffective efforts
of the charwoman next door. The two old men had avoided the place for
months past by common consent, and the door into it was hardly ever
opened.
Now, however, it stood ajar, and old Jim going up to shut it, and
looking in, was struck dumb with astonishment. For there on a wooden
rocking-chair, which had been her mother's favourite seat, sat Mary
Backhouse, her feet on the curved brass fender, her eyes staring into
the parlour grate. Her clothes, her face, her attitude of cowering chill
and mortal fatigue, produced an impression which struck through the old
man's dull senses, and made him tremble so that his hand dropped from
the handle of the door. The slight sound roused Mary, and she turned
towards him. She said nothing for a few seconds, her hollow black eyes
fixed upon him; then with a ghastly smile, and a voice so hoarse as to
be scarcely audible--
'Weel, aa've coom back. Ye'd maybe not expect me?'
There was a sound behind on the cobbles outside the kitchen door.
'Yur feyther!' cried Jim between his teeth. 'Gang upstairs wi' ye.' And
he pointed to a door in the wall concealing a staircase to the upper
storey.
She sprang up, looked at the door and at him irresolutely, and then
stayed where she was, gaunt, pale, fever-eyed, the wreck and ghost of
her old self.
The steps neared. There was a rough voice in the kitchen, a surprised
exclamation, and her father had pushed past his brother into the room.
John Backhouse no sooner saw his daughter than his dull weather-beaten
face flamed into violence. With an oath he raised the heavy whip he held
in his hand, and flung himself towards her.
'Naw, ye'll not du'at!' cried Jim, throwing himself with all his feeble
strength on to his brother's arm. John swore and struggled, but the old
man stuck like a limpet.
'You let 'un aleann,' said Mary, drawing her tattered shawl over her
breast. 'If he aims to kill me, _aa_'ll not say naa. But he needn't
moider hisself! There's them abuve as ha' taken care o' that!'
She sank again into her chair, as though her limbs could not support
her, and her eyes closed in the utter indifference of a fatigue which
had made even fear impossible.
The father's arm dropped; he stood there sullenly looking at her. Jim,
thinking she had fainted, went up to her, took a glass of water out of
which she had already been drinking from the mahogany table, and held it
to her lips. She drank a little, and then with a desperate effort raised
herself, and clutching the arm of the chair, faced her father.
'Ye'll not hev to wait lang. Doan't ye fash yersel. Maybe it ull comfort
ye to knaw summat! Lasst Midsummer Day aa was on t' Shanmoor road, i' t'
gloaming. An' aa saw theer t' bogle--thee knaws, t' bogle o' Bleacliff
Tarn; an' she turned hersel, an' she spoak to me!'
She uttered the last words with a grim emphasis, dwelling on each, the
whole life of the wasted face concentrated in the terrible black eyes,
which gazed past the two figures within their immediate range into a
vacancy peopled with horror. Then a film came over them, the grip
relaxed, and she fell back with a lurch of the rocking-chair in a dead
swoon.
With the help of the neighbour from next door, Jim got her upstairs into
the room that had been hers. She awoke from her swoon only to fall into
the torpid sleep of exhaustion, which lasted for twelve hours.
'Keep her oot o' ma way,' said the father with an oath to Jim, 'or aa'll
not answer nayther for her nor me!'
She needed no telling. She soon crept downstairs again, and went to the
task of house-cleaning. The two men lived in the kitchen as before; when
they were at home she ate and sat in the parlour alone. Jim watched her
as far as his dull brain was capable of watching, and he dimly
understood that she was dying. Both men, indeed, felt a sort of
superstitious awe of her, she was so changed, so unearthly. As for the
story of the ghost, the old popular superstitions are almost dead in the
Cumbrian mountains, and the shrewd north-country peasant is in many
places quite as scornfully ready to sacrifice his ghosts to the Time
Spirit as any 'bold bad' haunter of scientific associations could wish
him to be. But in a few of the remoter valleys they still linger, though
beneath the surface. Either of the Backhouses, or Mary in her days of
health, would have suffered many things rather than allow a stranger to
suppose they placed the smallest credence in the story of Bleacliff
Tarn. But, all the same, the story which each had heard in childhood, on
stormy nights perhaps, when the mountain side was awful with the sounds
of tempest, had grown up with them, had entered deep into the tissue of
consciousness. In Mary's imagination the ideas and images connected with
it had now, under the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct with a
living pursuing terror. But they were present, though in a duller,
blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle; and as the weeks
passed on, and the days lengthened towards midsummer, a sort of brooding
horror seemed to settle on the house.
Mary grew weaker and weaker; her cough kept Jim awake at nights; once or
twice when he went to help her with a piece of work which not even her
extraordinary will could carry her through, her hand burnt him like a
hot cinder. But she kept all other women out of the house by her mad,
strange ways; and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state,
she turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its former
stormy grace, and had become ghastly by the contrast it brought out
between the tempestuous vindictive soul and the shaken weakness of
frame.
A doctor would have discovered at once that what was wrong with her was
phthisis, complicated with insanity; and the insanity, instead of taking
the hopeful optimistic tinge which is characteristic of the insanity of
consumption, had rather assumed the colour of the events from which the
disease itself had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind
and body--the madness intertwined with an illness which had such roots
as these was naturally a madness of despair. One of its principal signs
was the fixed idea as to Midsummer Day. It never occurred to her as
possible that her life should be prolonged beyond that limit. Every
night, as she dragged herself up the steep little staircase to her room,
she checked off the day which had just passed from the days she had
still to live. She had made all her arrangements; she had even sewed
with her own hands, and that without any sense of special horror, but
rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in which she was to be
carried to her grave.
At last one day, her father, coming unexpectedly into the yard, saw her
carrying a heavy pail of water from the pump. Something stirred within
him, and he went up to her and forcibly took it from her. Their looks
met, and her poor mad eyes gazed intensely into his. As he moved forward
towards the house she crept after him, passing him into the parlour,
where she sank down breathless on the settle where she had been sleeping
for the last few nights, rather than face climbing the stairs. For the
first time he followed her, watching her gasping struggle for breath, in
spite of her impatient motion to him to go. After a few seconds he left