Part 24

‘It’s too much. You can’t carry her all that way.’

He laughed at her and, in the end, persuaded her. By this time Morgan, awake and refreshed, was again clamouring for food. In the post-office at Redlake they bought him a packet of acid-drops and some biscuits.

‘Now that’s got to last you, my son,’ Mary told him, and for the present he was satisfied.

They set out slowly on their journey home. For a mile or more the road ran along the side of the little river, but soon the valley fell away beneath them, a deep trough clogged with brushwood, and the road degenerated into a stony track. It seemed that they had now penetrated a country that was untouched by the excitements of Bron Fair, for whenever they came near to a farm, and these grew fewer and fewer, being hidden for the most part in folds of the hills and lost in sheltering trees, they found men moving slowly about the fields or calling cattle to the byre for the evening’s milking.

Soon the distances of the landscape had faded from them altogether. They came to an upland scarred with stony lanes where they could see nothing on either side of them but thistle pastures, poor and unkindly, huge fields where many sheep were feeding in the mist. Morgan enjoyed himself, running up the banks to a gap in the broken wall and scaring them as he stood there like a phantom himself, waving his arms. At last, when it seemed that they could climb no farther into the clouds, the road began to fall.

Abner was glad of this, for, strong as he was, the weight of Gladys, made more awkward by her long splint, was telling on him. The road gave him no rest: it went on inflexibly between its walls of stone, and when his breath failed him there was no clean air with which he might fill his lungs: only this thin, clammy whiteness. They jolted down into a valley, where they found a village of stone houses, so cold and mountainous in character that it seemed to have been scoured with snow.

Above the door of the post-office Abner spelt out the word, _Newchurch_.

‘New church?’ said Mary, with a sinking heart. ‘But Newchurch is miles and miles away from us! I drove here once with father. Are you sure it’s the right road?’

‘It’s right by what I heard at the Pound House, when Mick talked of walking over to Bron. It’s right enough . . . only the hills make it seem longer.’

A little later she asked him anxiously what the time was.

‘Don’t you know my watch is gone?’ he replied irritably. ‘By what it was in Newchurch I reckon we’ve a good four hour before dark. And then there’s a moon.’

They crossed another ridge of hills. Half-way up the slope Morgan said that he was tired, and asked his mother to carry him. She took him up in her arms without a word and dragged along behind Abner. He looked back at her, questioning, for the slowness of her pace impeded him. She knew what he was thinking.

‘I can’t go faster,’ she said, trying to smile; but at the next brow she had to stop to fetch her breath, putting Morgan down on the bank beside her under a bush of green broom.

‘I want to walk again now, mam,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Are we nearly there?’

He had pestered her so often with this question that for a moment her strained temper gave way.

‘Don’t worry, Morgan!’ she said sharply. ‘I’ll tell you when we’re there.’

Abner laughed, and she turned on him with annoyance. She thought he was laughing at her irritability, but found that his eyes were kindly.

‘Lucky for them they don’t know,’ he said, shaming her with a smile.

She tried to cover her annoyance by asking if they were anywhere near the top of the hills.

He knew no more than she did. Certainly by the time that they had rested and moved on again the fog had thickened. The stone walls and the clumps of hawthorn and furze with which the fields were scattered looked misty, wild, gigantic.

‘Time we quickened up a bit,’ he said.

‘How can you be sure it’s the right road?’

‘Because there bain’t no other, missus,’ he replied. ‘Up you come, my pretty!’ And he hoisted Gladys into his arms again.

They could no longer guess at the time of day. Mary supposed that it was now getting on for six o’clock, but the sky that drooped upon them was of a uniform, milky whiteness, and they could not guess the level of the sun. The air, indeed, grew colder, but that was a relief in itself after the oppression of the valleys.

They walked on, maybe for another hour. Mary’s arms ached with the burden of Morgan, who told her from time to time that his legs hurt him or that he wanted to go to bye-bye, and vexed her to the point of anger with his cry of, ‘Are we nearly there?’ She herself was utterly fagged and hungry. Her anxiety for Gladys had made it impossible for her even to think of food in the earlier part of the day. Now her stomach ached with emptiness, and the cold, moist air that she drew into her labouring lungs did nothing to quench the drought in her throat. Morgan suddenly began to whine for a drink of water. The sweets had made him thirsty.

‘They don’t lay on the water up here, my son,’ said Abner cheerfully.

‘But I _want_ some,’ Morgan insisted. ‘_Or_ tea,’ he added, as a slight concession.

Mary quietened him as well as she could with promises. They had not passed a farm or a shepherd’s cabin for miles. She could see no hope of any building ahead short of the Wolfpits valley, not even as much as would shelter them for the night if they lost their way or if the strength of the weakest failed. They were wandering on and on, blindly, as it seemed, into a desert of high, poor pastures. Now they no longer saw large flocks of sheep. Those that they startled were solitary creatures that sprang up in alarm from the wayside tangles of furze and brier, horned mountain sheep, with shaggy fleeces and black faces.

She felt that the light was failing. Perhaps the sun had set. Surely it had set, for they had walked endlessly. At sunset the birds began their song in the thickets about Wolfpits, but here there was no shelter for birds. Only the wheat-ears bobbed their white rumps in front of them and the meadow-pipits flew before them in their endless game of waiting and of flight, so tame that Morgan ran to catch one with his hands. Out of the whiteness above them they heard the lost bubbling voices of curlews, or the harsh cawing of the carrion crow.

She dragged on behind, and Abner walked ahead, never tiring. She would have died rather than have complained, as long as he made no complaint. A stone cottage rose up out of the mist.

‘Now you shall have your drink,’ she cried encouragingly to Morgan. The sight brightened her, for she was parched dry herself. But the cottage was only a ruin with a broken gate on either side of it that had made a walled enclosure for sheep. Not very long ago sheep had been penned there, for torn fleece had stuck to the splinters of the gates and the road was strewn with dry dung. Abner went up to the door to see if by any chance they were mistaken; but the place was quite deserted.

‘Let’s sit down a bit,’ he said, and lit his pipe. She sat down wearily beside him. Morgan, smelling round the garden like a puppy, came back with a bunch of wallflowers and gave them to her. Their scent was a poor substitute for food, but she kissed his cold face.

‘I want a drink of water, mam,’ he said again.

She looked desperately at Abner.

‘Wait till we come on a bottle of pop, son,’ he said. Morgan stared at him with big eyes. ‘Real pop?’ he asked.

‘You wait and see,’ said Abner cheerfully.

Gladys, who had just begun to cry quietly in his arms, said that she was cold.

‘We’ll keep you warm, my pretty!’ he said, gathering her to his breast.

‘Are we nearly there, mam?’ came the voice of Morgan.

‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ She turned to Abner: ‘It can’t be much farther, the time we’ve been walking.’

He did not answer. ‘Up she comes!’ he said, kissing Gladys and lifting her gently.

‘Your ‘stache is all over water, Abner,’ the child whispered.

They passed through the second gate, but here a new perplexity faced them. They had come to open moorland. The road that had hitherto been enclosed by stone walls was now no more than outlined by wheel-ruts bitten deep into the peaty soil. Mile upon mile of misty heather rolled away before them. Then the track faded altogether, splitting into three narrow lanes between the masses of ling. Abner stopped, and this, his first hesitation, filled Mary with dread.

‘Which way is it?’ she called.

He could not answer. ‘We must be somewhere near the top,’ he said at last. ‘Somewhere on the far side of the Ditches. If it wasn’t for this stuff we could see all right.’

‘But you can’t see,’ she said. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know any more than I do. We’re lost.’

‘Don’t you go on so quickly,’ he said. ‘If we keep to the middle we can’t be far out.’

He pushed on a little. A hen grouse rose with a frightening flutter from under his feet. She went whirring away low over the heather with a harsh stuttering cry.

‘Where’s the cattypult, Morgan?’ Abner cried.

And then they found water.

‘Come along, here’s the pop-shop!’ he said. The child ran forward and knelt above a tiny cup of peat fringed with yellow stars of butterwort. He lapped up the precious stuff eagerly like a dog, so greedily that he choked, spluttered, and soused his white lace collar. Mary wiped his face for him. ‘Go on!’ said Abner, and she too stooped her aching back and drank. Abner drank last, having laid Gladys down in the yielding heather and scooped up water for her in his hands.

Now they were refreshed, almost joyful; but Mary could not help looking anxiously at the hills in front of them, for every moment it seemed to her that the heather grew blacker and the distance fainter in the mist.

A crest that had once seemed unattainable fell behind them. Reaching it they had expected to find themselves looking down into the Wolfpits valley. Instead of this they saw more broken walls and the outlines of two huge trees. It puzzled them. It seemed that they had come to the edge of a shallow basin scooped in the top of the hills. Perhaps they might find a farm. The idea encouraged them.

They walked forward more quickly, for here the turf was smooth and the heather no longer impeded them. The trees came up out of the mist, not only two of them but a whole avenue of beeches planted by the hands of men, stretching away before them in the line that they had followed.

‘There must be a house,’ said Mary. ‘They wouldn’t plant trees like this for nothing.’

Abner nodded. In spite of his air of gaiety he had been anxious and was now relieved. It was a noble avenue of more than a hundred trees. They walked on midway between the two lines of them, expecting at every moment to see the shadow of the house. But the avenue ended suddenly as it had begun, and instead of a house they saw nothing but two gateposts of stone, ancient and weathered, surmounted by immense round balls. The man who had built them two hundred years before had planned a stately approach to his mansion. It was easy to imagine the gates of wrought iron that would have swung there. But of the house that he had dreamed there remained not as much as a ghost.

‘There must be a house!’ Mary cried.

Abner shook his head. Nothing could now be seen but the desolate line of the beech avenue stretching away behind them. A light wind rose on their right, driving the mist in front of it. They seemed to hear the endless volumes of it hurrying by, but it was only the long sighing of a waste of heather. This sound made Mary really aware of the threatening silence that surrounded them. Even the presence of Abner standing there as stolid and unmoved as ever could not steady her.

‘We can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘It’s an awful place. It’s like a churchyard. Do let us go on.’

She left the desolate gateposts with a shiver. She hurried, taxing her strength to the last, to put them behind her. The wind rose; the mist was whirled along the slopes before them in torn fleeces. She crossed another ridge and then sank down in the heather, ready to cry herself. The buffetings of the wind were fit to break her heart.

Then a miracle happened. A gust of wind tore an opening in the mist and the vision of a heaped mountainous landscape grew before their eyes. Southward the indented bow of Radnor Forest rose blue-black, the summit of Black Mixen hugely threatening. Westward in molten clouds the sun went down over Wales and fifty miles of thin air and solid mountain were mingled in a fiery haze. The sky was a furnace in which the mountains melted away. But Abner and Mary had no desire to see these splendours. Their eyes were fixed, peering into the trough of the valley beneath them. They saw green woods, blue in the evening light, the squares of barns, the rich mosaic of fields, the gleam of a river. And their hearts fell, for each was certain that the valley beneath them was not that of the Folly Brook. It was far wilder and more strange. They looked at each other.

‘Do you know where it is?’ he asked.

‘I can’t think, unless it’s somewhere near Clun.’

‘Better get down while the light lasts. There’s farms there,’ he said. As he spoke the sun dipped down. White clouds swept across their window. Only the memory of what they had seen told them that they were not utterly lost.

They descended the slope carefully, for the grass was slippery and the only tracks were scattered with stones. Abner could not help her; she knew that he was far too busy saving Gladys from unnecessary jars. She fell, and Morgan cried out that she had hurt his arm. She pulled her strength together and tried to carry him. Somehow she must struggle on, for the darkness was falling. Even with their sudden vision in her mind she could not now feel certain that their direction was right. For a time they followed a wheel-track skirting the mountain, but it ended by turning upwards, and they knew that this could not help them. Downward it was difficult to go, for the fields were small and irregular, and the hedges often impassable, yet downward, somehow, they must go.

They beat through a zone of these entanglements in wood and stone. Night was falling fast. Since the revealing moment of the last summit they had sunk so deep that they must now surely be near the bottom of the valley, whatever valley it might be. But when the barrier of irregular fields lay behind them they found themselves on open, sloping ground again. Abner stalked on ahead without pausing. She, at the end of her tether, called out after him to stop for a moment, but he did not hear her. His shape went on into the dusk, and she knew that if she did not follow she must be left behind.

Suddenly the white air was full of the screaming of birds . . . a shrill, high, sound that took her back into her childhood. Once, with her father, she had been taken to Swansea on a business trip and had heard gulls calling on the Gower Cliffs. She felt that she must be dreaming. Even on a night of storm no gulls could be blown so far inland as this, and yet she was sure that her childish memory could not have failed. The cries that she heard now were the cries of gulls wheeling and screaming in the mist above her head.

Abner turned and called her. ‘Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he called. ‘I never heard such a chronic row!’

‘They’re gulls,’ she shouted. Her voice was thin in the mist. ‘Seagulls.’

‘That’s where they must have come from. Off of this water,’ he called.

And she saw, peering in front of her, a ghostly wood of pines and before them a lake of dark water fringed with reeds. The wind swept across it, bending the reeds, breaking the glassy surface into ripples, and rolling milky mist before it. The wind came in gusts, roaring through the trees with a noise that was like that of the sea, and the gulls screamed above them, unseen, as they might have screamed over storm-bound cliffs. She stood with her knees trembling at Abner’s side, and Morgan clutched her hand. She herself felt like a child, lonely, frightened. They stood so quietly together that some of the birds swooped down on to the water as though driven by the wind.

‘Yes, they’re gulls,’ she said. ‘Seagulls. We’re more than fifty miles away from the sea. I don’t understand.’

She laughed nervously. It came to her suddenly that she could go no farther. Her legs could not make a single step. The gulls came dropping down in twos and threes, and settled on the lake. They were smaller than those that she remembered, she thought. They dropped down just like pigeons when you scatter grain.

‘Come on,’ said Abner. ‘It’s near dark.’

But she could not move. The child tugged at her skirt. She felt the tugging in a dream.

‘We can’t stand staring here all night,’ Abner was saying. She was aware of him standing beside her in the dusk, holding Gladys to his breast. She saw the child’s white hands clasped about his neck, as quietly as if she were asleep. She heard him, but could not stir. Then Abner touched her upper arm, and the pressure of his fingers went through her body like fire along a fuse exploding some mine of passion that had lain hidden beneath her long silence. It burned her like flame, burned her and rent her. . . . She trembled and turned on him violently. Words of abuse came tumbling out of her mouth. She did not know or care what she was saying. She lashed him, wildly, desperately. It was he who was to blame for all this trouble, he who had persuaded her to take the children to Bron and allowed her to be insulted in the inn at Redlake; he who had entangled them in the crowd where Gladys’s leg was broken; and now he’d lost them, and brought them to a place where they might all die of cold with his damned foolishness. Some devil inside her brain drove her on, delighting in the vile things she said, raking up little grudges of the past and throwing them in his face, revealing, against her will, such petty miseries as her jealousy of Susie Hind. ‘It’s with her you ought to be,’ she cried, ‘instead of troubling us! That’s where you ought to be! You’d better go on and leave us, Gladys and Morgan and me. You don’t know any more than I do where we are, with the night coming on. We can’t go a step farther, neither me nor Morgan, poor little thing! Oh, go! Go! I wish to God I’d never set eyes on you!’ She threw herself down, exhausted, on the wet grass.

He had stood up to it utterly bewildered. He couldn’t protest, for all her ravings were so childish, so disconnected, so passionately illogical. He simply let her go on until she had finished with him. Then he disengaged Gladys’s arms from his neck and laid her down gently.

‘You’re just about done in,’ he said. ‘It’s natural.’

Again he placed his hand on Mary’s arm, hoping to soothe her and to persuade. She gave a strange shudder, as though his fingers had been ice, and burst into tears, covering her face with her hands.

He comforted her clumsily, talking to her as he would have done to a child, until she no longer shrank from him, being too weak to care. Then she took hold of his coat and clung to him, still sobbing her heart away. She was broken . . . quite broken.

The moment was terrible for Abner. He felt his heart leap so wildly that he knew she must be conscious of its thudding. The movement of her body, shaken with sobs, against his own, filled him not with pity but with exultation. There was no woman like her in the world. He knew it. Hadn’t he known it long enough? If he told himself the truth he must admit that for months he had never wanted any other woman. The desires that had hungered him the night before, walking beneath her window and in the moonlit lane, returned to him in waves of greater force. He laughed to think that, being so near to her, he should ever have given a thought to Susie Hind. Now she was in his arms. His hands caressed her beauty. How should he touch her body without passion? And why? Surely she could feel the blood beating in his fingers, even if she told herself that he was only trying to comfort her. No one could see them there . . . no one except the two children, crying softly together because they heard their mother crying. Why shouldn’t he gather her in his arms, overwhelming her with kisses? He could see nothing but her lips. . . .

But when he strained her to him she stopped sobbing and pushed him away. It was now dark but for the light of the moon hidden above the mist, and he could only see the paleness of her face. Her ghost spoke to him.

‘I’ve lost my handkerchief,’ she said simply.

He gave her his own, and she thanked him.

‘I don’t know what I’ve been saying,’ she whispered. ‘I think I must have been mad, Abner. Please forget it.’

He would have helped her to her feet, but her muscles would not respond to the brain’s message. She gave a weak laugh. Now she did not mind being weak. She looked at him helplessly.

‘I can’t go another step,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t. Perhaps, if you left us here, you might find if there’s a house near. I’ll look after these poor lambs. We can keep warm close together.’

No doubt she spoke wisely. He left them without a word, though Gladys cried out with alarm to see him going. His shoulders loomed up in the cloud, and as he skirted the lake the gulls rose screaming from its surface to be lost in the sky.

Abner continued his course downhill. Relieved of the weight of Gladys he now felt himself master of his limbs. The hedges and the roughness of the road troubled him no longer, and when he had been walking no more than ten minutes he saw in the growing brilliance of the moonlight a gate that gave on to a metalled road. He strained his ears to listen for any sound, and heard, at length, the noise of a dog howling at the hidden moon. That meant a farm, or at least a shepherd’s cottage. A walk of ten minutes in the direction of the sound brought him within sight of a mass of outbuildings that made a courtyard in front of a low-roofed house. Two long windows on the right of a central doorway were lighted. He saw the shadows of geraniums in pots against the blinds. Another dog came at him out of the darkness, snarling and sniffing him from a distance. He knocked at the door and heard a chair pushed back over the stone floor.

‘Come in . . . come in!’ some one cried.

The farm kitchen was bright, with a heavy brass lamp in the centre of the table and a yellow shade that threw a mild radiance over the many hams and sides of bacon that were slung from the smoky ceiling. The table was laid for supper and a shrewish-looking woman was eating bread and cheese. She stared at Abner with a piece of cheese stuck on the end of her knife, looking neither astonished nor frightened.

‘Who is it, please. And what do you want at this time of night?’ she said, without moving.

‘I’m sorry to put you out, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Me and three others, a woman and two children, lost our way coming over the hills from the fair. The little girl’s had an accident and we had to carry her. Proper done in, they are, and I left them about a mile away over there.’ He pointed in the direction of the hills.

‘Well, I don’t see how I can help you,’ said the woman, who went on eating. ‘The master never has no dealings with gipsies. What’s more, he’s gone to the fair himself in the trap and ban’t back yet.’

Abner explained to her that he was not a gipsy. ‘You can’t leave a woman an’ two kids out there at night,’ he said.’

‘Where did you leave them?’ she asked.

‘Up by a pool. There’s a lot of birds on it. Seagulls, she said.’

‘Oh, ay, them’s the sea-crows. They comes here every year. But that’s not ten minutes’ walk from here, that isn’t!’

‘There must be a man about the place as can give me a hand with them,’ said Abner, irritated by her unconcern.