WHEN young Lord Stanton left his own house with Wild Bampfylde there was a tingle of excitement in the young man’s veins. Very few youths of his age are to be found so entirely home-bred as Geoff. He had never been in the way of mischief, and he had no natural tendency to lead him thitherward, so that he had passed these first twenty years of his existence without an adventure, without anything occurring to him that might not have been known to all the world. To leave your own house when other people are thinking of going to bed, for an expedition you know not where, under the guidance of you know not whom, is a sufficiently striking beginning to the path of mystery and adventure; and there was a touch of personal peril in it which gave Geoff a little tingle in his veins. His brother had been killed by some one with whom this wild fellow was closely connected; it was a secret of blood which the young man had set himself to solve one way or other; and this no doubt affected his imagination, and for a short time the consciousness of danger was strong in him, quickening his pulses and making his heart beat. This was increased by a sense of wrong-doing, in so far as Geoff felt that he might be exposing the tranquil household he had left behind to agonies of apprehension about him, did he not return sufficiently early to escape being found out. Finally, on the top of this consciousness of conditional fault came a feeling, perhaps the most strong of all, of the possible absurdity of his position. Romantic adventure, if it never ceases to be attractive to the young, is looked upon with different eyes at different periods, and the nineteenth century has agreed to make a joke of melodrama. Instead of being moved by a fine romantic situation, the modern youth laughs; and the idea of finding himself in such picturesque and dramatic circumstances strikes him as the most curious and laughable, if not ridiculous, idea. To recognize himself as setting out, like the hero of a novel or a play (of the old school), to search out a mystery—into the haunts of a law-defying and probably law-breaking class, under the guidance of a theatrical vagrant, tramp, or gipsy, to ask counsel of the weird old woman, bright-eyed and solemn, who held all the threads of the story in her hands, filled Geoff with mingled confusion and amusement. He had almost laughed to himself as he realized it; but with the laugh a flush came over his face—what would other people think? He felt that he would be laughed at as romantic, jibed at as being able to believe that any real or authentic information could be obtained in this ridiculous way. ’Lizabeth Bampfylde in the witness-box would no doubt be valuable, but the romances she might tell in her own house, to a young man evidently so credulous and of such a theatrical temperament—these two things were entirely different, and he would be thoroughly laughed at for his foolishness.
This consciousness of something ridiculous in the whole business reassured him, however; and better feelings rose as he went on with a half-pleased, half-excited, exhilaration and curiosity. The night was fine, warm, and genial, but dark; a few stars shone large and lambent in the veiled sky, but there was as yet no moon, so that all the light there was was concentrated above in the sky, and the landscape underneath was wrapped in darkness, a soft, cool, incense-breathing obscurity—for night is as full of odours as the morning. It is full of sounds too, all the more mysterious for having no kind of connection with the visible; and no country is so full of sounds as the North country, where the road will now thread the edge of a dark, unseen, heathery, thymy moor, and now cross, at a hundred links and folds, the course of some invisible stream, or some dozens of little runlets tinkling on their way to a bigger home of waters. Now dark hedgerows would close in the path; now it would open up and widen into that world of space, the odorous, dewy moorland; now lead by the little street, the bridge, the straggling outskirts of a village. Generally all was quiet in the hamlets, the houses closed, the inhabitants in bed, but sometimes there would be a sudden gleam of lightness into the night, a dazzle from an open door or unshuttered window. The first of these rural places was Stanton, the village close to the great House, where Geoff unconsciously stole closer into the shadow, afraid to be seen. Here it was the smithy that was still open, a dazzling centre of light in the gloom. The smith came forward to his door as they passed, roused by the steady tread of their footsteps, and looked curiously out upon them, his figure relieved against the red background of light. “What, Dick! is’t you, lad?” he said, peering out. “Got off again? that’s right, that’s right; and who’s that along with you this fine night?” Bampfylde did not stop to reply, to Geoff’s great relief. He went on with long swinging steps, taking no notice. “If anybody asks you, say you don’t know,” he said as he went on, throwing back a sort of challenge into the gloom. He did not talk to his companion. Sometimes he whistled low, but as clearly as a bird, imitating indeed the notes of the birds, the mournful cry of the lapwing, the grating call of the corn-crake; sometimes he would sing to himself low crooning songs. In this way they made rapid progress to the foot of the hills.
Geoff had been glad of the silence at first; it served to deliver him from those uncomfortable thoughts which had filled his mind, the vagabond’s carelessness reassuring and calming his excitement; for neither the uneasy sense of danger he had started with, nor the equally uneasy sense of the ludicrous which had possessed him, were consistent with the presence of this easy, unexcited companion, who conducted himself as if he were alone, and would stop and listen to the whirr and flutter of wild creatures in the hedgerows or on the edge of the moor, as if he had forgotten Geoff’s very presence. All became simple as they went on, the very continuance of the walk settling down and calming the agitation of the outset. By and by, however, Geoff began to be impatient of the silence, and of the interest his companion showed in everything except himself. Could he be, perhaps, one of the “naturals” who are so common in the North, a little less imbecile than usual, but still incapable of continuous attention? Thus, after his first half-alarmed, half-curious sense of the solemnity of the enterprise, Geoff came back to an everyday boyish impatience of its unusual features and a disposition to return to the lighter intercourse of ordinary life.
“How far have we to go now?” he asked. They had come to the end of the level, and were just about to ascend the lower slopes of hilly country which shut in the valley. The fells rising before them made the landscape still more dark and mysterious, and seemed to thrust themselves between the wayfarers’ eyes and that light which seemed to retire more and more into the clear pale shining of the sky.
“Tired already?” said the man, with a shrug of his shoulders. He had stopped to investigate a hollow under a great gorse-bush, just below the level of the road, from which came rustlings and scratchings indistinguishable. Bampfylde raised himself with a half-laugh, and came back to Geoff’s side. “These small creatures is never tired,” he said; “they scuds about all day, and sleep that light at night that a breath wakes them; and yet they’re but small, not so big as my hand; and knows their way, they does, wherever they’ve got to go.”
“I allow they are cleverer than I am,” said Geoff, good-humouredly, “but then they cannot speak to ask their way. Men have a little advantage. And even I am not so ignorant as you think. I have been on the fells in a mist, and knew my way, or guessed it. At all events, I got home again, and that is something.”
“There will be no mist to-night,” said Bampfylde, looking up at the sky.
“No; but it is dark enough for anything. Look here, I trust you, and you might trust me. You know why I am going.”
“How do you trust me, my young lord?”
“Well,” said Geoff; “supposing I am a match for you, one man against another, how can I tell you have not got comrades about? My brother lost his life—by some one connected with you. Did you know my brother?”
The suddenness of this question took his companion by surprise. He wavered for a moment, and fell backward with an involuntary movement of alarm.
“What’s that for, lad, bringing up a dead man’s name out here in the dark, and near midnight? Do you want to fley me? I never meddled with him. He would be safe in his bed this night, and married to his bonnie lady, and bairns in his house to heir his title and take your lordship from you, if there had been nobody but me.”
“I believe that,” said Geoff, softened. “They say you never harmed man.”
“No, nor beast—except varmint, or the like of a hare or so—when the old wife wanted a bit o’ meat. Never man. For man’s blood is precious,” said the wild fellow with a shudder. “There’s something in it that’s not in a brute. If I were to kill you or you me in this lonesome place, police and that sort might never find it out; but all the same, the place would tell—there would be something there different; they say man’s blood never rubs out.”
Geoff felt a little thrill run through his own veins as he saw his companion shiver and tremble; but it was not fear. The words somehow established perfect confidence between himself and his guide; and he had all the simplicity of mind of a youth whose faith had never been tampered with, and who believed with the unshaken sincerity of childhood. “The stain on the mind never wears out,” he said, thoughtfully. “I knew a boy once who had shot his brother without knowing it. How horrible it was! he never forgot it; and yet it was not his fault.”
“Ah! I wish as I had been that lucky—to shoot my brother by accident,” said Wild Bampfylde, with a long sigh, shaking into its place a pouch or game-bag which he wore across his shoulder. “It would have been the best thing for him,” he added, in answer to Geoff’s cry of protest; “then he wouldn’t have lived—for worse—— ”
“Have you a brother so unfortunate?”
“Unfortunate! I don’t know if that is what you call it. Yes, unfortunate. He never meant bad. I don’t credit it.”
“You are not speaking,” said Geoff, in a very low voice, overpowered at once with curiosity and interest, “of John Musgrave?”
“The young Squire? No, I don’t mean him; he’s bad, and bad enough, but not so bad. You’ve got a deal to learn, my young lord. And what’s your concern with all that old business? If another man’s miserable, that don’t take bit or sup from you—nor a night’s rest, unless you let it. You’ve got everything that heart could desire. Why can’t you be content, and let other folks be?”
“When we could help them, Bampfylde?” said Geoff. “Is that the way you would be done by? Left to languish abroad; left with a stain on your name, and no one to hold out a hand for you—nobody to try to get you righted; only thinking of their own comfort, and the bit and the sup and the night’s rest?”
“You’ve never done without neither one nor t’other,” came in a hoarse undertone from Bampfylde’s lips. “It’s fine talking; but it’s little you know.”
“No, I’ve never had the chance,” said Geoff. “I can’t tell what it’s like, that’s true; but if it ever comes my way—— ”
“Ah, ay! it’s fine talking—it’s fine talking!”
Geoff did not know how to reply. He went on impatiently, tossing aloft his young head, as a horse does, excited by his own words like the playing of a trumpet. They proceeded so up a stiff bit of ascent that taxed their strength and their breathing, and made conversation less practicable. The winding mountain road seemed to pierce into the very fastnesses of the hills, and the tall figure of the vagrant a stop in advance of him appeared to Geoff like the shadow of some ghostly pioneer working his way into the darkness. No twinkle of a lamp, no outline of any inhabited place looming against the lighter risings of the manifold slopes, encouraged their progress. The hills, which would have made the very brightness of the morning dark, increased the gloom of the night. Only the tinkle of here and there a little stream, the sound of their own footsteps as they passed on, one in advance of the other, the small noises which came so distinctly through the air—here a rustle, there a jar of movement, something stirring under a stone, something moving amid the heather, were to be heard. Bampfylde himself was stilled by these great shadows. His whistle dropped; and the low croon of song which he had raised from time to time did not take its place. He became almost inaudible, as he was almost invisible; only the sound of a measured step and a large confused outline seen at times against the uncertain openings and bits of darkling sky.
When they came abreast again, however, on a comparatively smooth level, after a stiff piece of climbing, he spoke suddenly. “It’s queer work going like this through the dark. Many a night I have done it with no company, and then a man’s drawn out of himself watching the living things: one will stir at your foot, and one go whirr and strike across your very face, for they put more trust in you in the dark. You see they have the use of their eyesight, and the like of you and me haven’t. So they know their advantage. But put a man down beside another man, and a’s changed. I cannot understand the meaning of it. It puts things in your head, and it puts away the innocent creatures. Men’s seldom innocent: but they’re awful strange,” said the vagrant, with a sigh.
“Do you think they are so strange? I am not sure that I do,” said Geoff, bewildered a little. “They are just like everything else—one is dull, one is clever; but except for that—— ”
“Clever! it’s the creatures that are clever. Did you ever see a bird make a fuss to get you off where her nest was? A woman wouldn’t have sense to do that. She’d run and shriek, and get hold of her bairns; but the bird’s clever. That’s what I calls clever. It’s something stranger than that. When a man’s beside you, all’s different; there’s him thinking and you thinking; and though you’re close, and I can grip you”—here Bampfylde seized upon Geoff with a sudden, startling grasp, which alarmed the young man—“I can’t tell no more than Adam where your mind is. Asking your pardon, my young lord, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he added, dropping his hold. “Now the creatures is all there; you know where you have ’em. Far the contrary with a man.”
Geoff was not given to abstract thoughts, and this sudden entry into the regions of the undiscovered perplexed him. “You like company, then?” he said, doubtfully. He knew a great deal more than his companion did of almost everything that could be suggested, but not of this.
“Like company? it’s confusing, very confusing. But the creatures is simple. You can watch their ways, and they’re never double-minded. They’re at one thing, one thing at a time. Now, a man, there’s notions in his head, and you can never tell how they got there.”
“I suppose,” said young Geoff, perplexed yet reverential, “it is because men are immortal; not like the beasts that perish.”
“Ay, ay—I suppose they perish,” said Bampfylde. “What would they be like us for, and sicken, and pine? They get the good of it all the time; run wild as they like, and do mischief as they like, and never put in gaol for it. You think they’re sleeping now? and so they are, and waking too—as still as the stones and as lively as the stars up yonder. That’s them; but us, if we’re sleeping, it’s for hours long, and dreams with it; one bit of you lying like a log, t’other bit of you off at the ends of the airth. So, if you’re woke sudden, chances are you aren’t there to be woke—and there’s a business; but the creatures, they’re always there.”
“That is true,” said Geoff, who was slightly overawed, and thought this very fine and poetical—finer than anything he had ever realized before. “But sometimes they are ill, I suppose, and suffer too?”
“Then them that is merciful puts them out of their pain. The hardest-hearted ones will do that. A bird with a broken wing, or a beast with a broken leg, unless it be one of the gentlefolks’ pets, that’s half mankind, and has to suffer for it because his master’s fond of him (and that’s funny too)—the worst of folks will put them out of their pain. But a man—we canna’ do it,” cried the vagrant; “there’s law again’ it, and more than law. If it was nothing but law, little the likes of me would mind; but there’s something written here,” he said, putting his hand to his breast; “something that hinders you.”
“I hope so indeed,” said Geoff, a little breathless, with a sense of horror; “you would not take away a life?”
“But the creatures, ay; they have the best of it. You point your gun at them, or you wring their necks, and it’s all over. I’m fond of the creatures—creatures of all kinds. I’m fond of being out with them on a heathery moor like this all myself. They know me, and there’s no fear in them. In the morning early, when the air’s all blue with the dawn, the stirring and the moving there is, and the scudding about, setting the house in order! A thing not the size of your hand will come out with two bright eyes, and cock its head and look up at you. A cat may look at a king; a bit of a moor chicken, or a rabbit the size o’ my thumb, up and faces you, and, ‘Who are you, my man?’ That is what they looks like; but you never see them like that after it’s full day.”
“Then is night their happy time?” said Geoff, humouring his strange companion.
“Night, they’re free. There’s none about that wishes them harm; and though I snare varmint, and sometimes take a hare or a bird,—I’ll not deny it, my young lord, though you were to clap me in prison again to-morrow—they’re not afraid o’ me; they know I’ll not harm them. Even the varmint, if they didn’t behave bad and hurt the rest, I’d never have the heart. When you go back, if you do go back—— ”
“I must go back,” said Geoff, very gravely. “Why should not I? You don’t think I could stay up here?”
“I was not thinking one thing or another. The like of you is contrary. I’ve little to do with men; but when you go, if you go, it might be early morning, the blue time, at the dawn. Then’s the time to see; when there’s all the business to be done afore the day, and after the night. Children is curious,” said Bampfylde, with a softening of his voice, which felt in the darkness like a slowly dawning smile; “but creatures is more curious yet. I like to watch them. You’ll see all the life that’s in the moors if it’s that time when you go.”
“I suppose if there is anything to tell me I cannot go sooner,” said Geoff. His tone was grave, and so was his face, though that was invisible. “Then it will be day before I get home, and they will all know—perhaps I was a fool.”
“For coming?” said the man, turning round to peer into his face though it was covered by the darkness; and then he gave a low laugh. “I could have told you that!”
For a moment Geoff’s blood ran colder; he felt a little thrill of dismay. Was this strange creature a “natural” as he had thought, or did what he said imply danger? But no more was said for a long time. Bampfylde sank back again all at once into the silence he had so suddenly broken, or rather into the low crooning of monotonous old songs with which he had beguiled the first part of the journey. There was a kind of slumbrous soothing in them which half-interested, half-stupefied Geoff. They all went to one tune, a tune not like anything he knew—a kind of low chant, recalling several airs that did not vary from verse to verse, but repeated itself, and so lulled the wayfarer that all active sensation seemed to go from him, and the monotonous, mechanical movement of his limbs seemed to beat time to the croon of sound which accompanied the gradual march. There was something weird in it, something like “the woven paces and the waving hands” of the enchantress. Geoff felt his eyes grow heavy, and his head sinking on his breast, as the low, regular tramp and chant went on.
At length, all at once, the hills seemed to clear away from the sky, opening up on either hand; and straight before them, hanging low, like a signal of trouble, a late risen and waning moon that seemed thrust forward out into the air, and hanging from the sky, appeared in the luminous but mournful heaven in front of them. There is always something more or less baleful and troublous in this sudden apparition, so late and out of date, of a waning moon; the oil seems low in the lamp, the light ready to be extinguished, the flame quivering in the socket. Between them and the sky stood a long, low cottage, rambling and extensive, with a rough, grey stone wall built round it, upon which the pale moonlight shone. Long before they reached it, as soon as their steps could be audible, the mingled baying and howling of a dog was heard, rising doleful and ominous in the silence; and from under the roof—which was half rough thatch and half the coarse tiles used for labourers’ cottages—a light strangely red against the radiance of the moon flickered with a livid glare. A strange black silhouette of a house it was, with the low moonlight full upon it, showing here and there in a ghostly full white upon a bit of wall or roof, and contrasting with the red light in the window: it made a mystic sort of conclusion to the journey. Bampfylde directed his steps towards it without a word. He knocked a stroke or two on the door, which seemed to echo over all the country and up to the mountain-tops in their great stillness. “We are at home, now,” he said.