Part 29

He flung himself on the dust of his wife, and Rhoda went out of the room.

*CHAPTER XV*

*NIGHT TENEBRIOUS*

Aimless, almost mindless, Rhoda Bowden dragged herself away from the valley under Black Tor. She knew not where to turn. But there awakened no desire to escape from the tyranny of existence; she suffered rather from a mental palsy that blocked and barred every channel of thought or outlook on action.

She moved through the night-hidden valley of Meavy, and found herself presently at Sheepstor village. The place slept and she drifted among the darkened cottages, forgetting all else but the problems that now cried vainly to be solved before the coming of another day. By instinct her weary body obeyed the call of least resistance, and she sank down the hill instead of climbing upward. Mechanically she descended, as water seeks its own level, and by a footpath presently reached the bottom of the valley and stood at Marchant’s bridge, a mile under Ringmoor Down. Across that wilderness lay her nearest way home; and now it seemed to her, as she became conscious again of her vicinity and physical condition, that her goal must indeed be Ditsworthy. She was far spent and the time now approached midnight.

The hour was dark, mild, very still under a clouded moon; and for a moment, thinking upon the length of the way, Rhoda doubted her strength to reach the warrens. She drank of the river and bathed her face. Then she began the long climb upward to the Moor. Where her path left the main road and ascended easterly, through furze-brakes beside a wood, a tall grey shape, full eight feet high, stood silent by the way. It was Marchant’s Cross that appeared there on her right hand underneath an ash tree; and the monument’s high, squat shoulders and dim suggestion of alert and watchful humanity startled her. Then she remembered what it was, and climbed on.

At the edge of the woods reigned sleep universal, and not one of the common voices of night broke in upon it. The firs had ceased for a moment their eternal whisper; the bare boughs of oak and larch were still. The hour was breathless and so silent that the world seemed dead rather than asleep. Once only a small creature hurried from Rhoda’s path and rustled in the leaves beside her; but for the rest no cry of night bird, no bay of hound, no whinny of roaming horse broke the great peace. Only the river lifted its voice like a sigh in the dimness, but other murmur there was none. Diffused light scarcely defined a way amid the black hillocks of the gorse. Earth under these conditions quite changed its contours and withheld its tones. Such colour as persisted was transformed and only the palest things--tree trunks and boulders streaked and splashed with quartz--still stood forth in the vague blur of darkness. Such obscurity and obliteration, with its hint of unseen dangers and obvious doubts, had been sinister, if not terrific, to many women; night’s black hand upon the extinguished world had driven most feminine spirits even from grievous thoughts to present dread; but for Rhoda darkness was only less familiar than noonday. There existed nothing in this immanent concealment to distract her torments, and all the formless earth was distinct, clear, explicit as contrasted with the chaos of her soul.

Upon Ringmoor she came at last, and there some faint breath of air seemed to be stirring by contrast with the stagnation beneath. It touched her forehead and she sucked it in thirstily. Here the mighty spaces of the waste were faintly lighted within a little radius of the wanderer, but beyond, the naked earth rolled away into utter darkness at every side. The sky, while luminous in contrast with the world beneath it, was entirely overcast. A complete and featureless cloud, without rift or rent to break its midnight monotony, spread upon the firmament. Even the place of the moon might not be perceived. Below, Ringmoor soaked up the illumination to almost total extinction; above, the sombrous air hung heavy and clear, permeated evenly by lustre of the hidden moon. Only at the horizon might one perceive the immense difference between the light of earth and sky, and the large illumination spread by the one and swallowed by the other.

Ringmoor’s black bosom opened for Rhoda, then shut behind her and engulfed her. Along the path, from darkness into darkness, she proceeded and bore her weight of agony through the insensible waste, as a raindrop passes over a leaf and leaves no sign. Futile shadow of a shade, she crept across the darkness and vanished beneath it; broken with the greatest suffering her spirit was built to bear, she put forth upon the void and tottered forward to the shuffle of her footsteps and the muffled drumming of her own pulse.

She rested presently where a great stone thrust up out of night beside her way. She knew it for a friend and sank upon it now, and put her forehead against it. Here reigned such a peace as only the deaf and the desert sentinel can know--a peace beyond all experience of gregarious man---a peace impossible within any hand-wrought dwelling but the grave. There was no wind to strike sound from dry heath, or rush, or solitary stone; no water flowed near enough to send its voices hither; no rain fell to utter its whisper on earth. The silence was consummate.

Light had long since been extinguished in the few dwellings visible from Ringmoor. Trowlesworthy and Brisworthy and Ditsworthy--all were dim. No ray penetrated the sky or glowed upon the land; and night’s self now began to darken, as the moon sank to her setting.

And then from afar, out of the gloom of the south, a distant beacon flashed even to this uplifted solitude; and a beam that blinked for the ships now reached one life-foundered creature, where she sat in a silence as deep, in a loneliness as vast, as the silence and the loneliness of the sea. The light was familiar to Rhoda; through wanderings and vigils in high places she had seen it many times; and she knew that it spoke of danger to the vessels and guarded them upon their ways.

Time rolled on; the earth rolled on; only this conscious fragment of life stranded here between time and earth lay still, chained down with her load of grief and horror. Long she remained, until there stole over Ringmoor the unspeakable stupor and lifelessness of the hour before dawn. Now even creatures of night had made an end of their labours and were sleeping in holt or den; and through this trance and absolute desistance, the woman’s soul still battled with its burdens and cried out to her oblivious environment.

She walked onward again and forced herself and her pangs upon the earth’s suspended animation. She outraged inert Ringmoor by thus moving and suffering within its bosom, when the rule of the time was cessation and dreamless peace. She rolled unsteadily in her going, where all else was stable and motionless; she throbbed in her body and in her soul, where all else was unconscious; her dust endured the tortures of hunger and profound physical exhaustion, where nearly all other living things were filled and sleeping; her mind rose, racked to a new and higher anguish at the thought of the future, where all else was mindless and without care or grief. She considered what must follow the rising of another sun, and she longed that she might wander and suffer here, through a moonless night, for evermore.

Again she sank to earth for a space, and again she rose and breasted the last slope which separated her from her home. Then another life made vocal utterance and complaint of fate. A dog-fox barked out of darkness, and the lonely ululation struck very loud upon the silence. To the fellow-being who heard him, his forlorn protest spoke of a creature to be envied; for he was only hungry and time would ease his want.

Among the burrows of the warren she threaded her way until, black against the night, towered Ditsworthy. And she opened the outer gate, reached the door, struck upon it and cried two words. Mournful they rose, and deep, and heavy with the weight of her torments.

"Father! Mother!"

They came down to her out of broken sleep. They found her collapsed and carried her in and roused the smouldering peat upon the hearth. Then to their questions as they crowded round her--men, women, boys, candle-lit, grotesque, hastily robed from bed--she answered slowly--

"Margaret is drowned--driven to it by me--and David have cast me out."

THE END

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