the genial justice of the peace—now, alas, no more—who made himself responsible for the facts of this story, used to begin in the good old-fashioned way with a bright moonlight night and a mysterious figure, an excellent stroke for an opening, even to this day, if well followed up.
the christmas moon (he would say) was showing her cold face to the upland, the upland reflecting the radiance in frost-sparkles so minute as only to be discernible by an eye near at hand. this eye, he said, was the eye of a shepherd lad, young for his occupation, who stood within a wheeled hut of the kind commonly in use among sheep-keepers during the early lambing season, and was abstractedly looking through the loophole at the scene without.
the spot was called lambing corner, and it was a sheltered portion of that wide expanse of rough pastureland known as the marlbury downs, which you directly traverse when following the turnpike-road across mid-wessex from london, through aldbrickham, in the direction of bath and bristol. here, where the hut stood, the land was high and dry, open, except to the north, and commanding an undulating view for miles. on the north side grew a tall belt of coarse furze, with enormous stalks, a clump of the same standing detached in front of the general mass. the clump was hollow, and the interior had been ingeniously taken advantage of as a position for the before-mentioned hut, which was thus completely screened from winds, and almost invisible, except through the narrow approach. but the furze twigs had been cut away from the two little windows of the hut, that the occupier might keep his eye on his sheep.
in the rear, the shelter afforded by the belt of furze bushes was artificially improved by an inclosure of upright stakes, interwoven with boughs of the same prickly vegetation, and within the inclosure lay a renowned marlbury-down breeding flock of eight hundred ewes.
to the south, in the direction of the young shepherd’s idle gaze, there rose one conspicuous object above the uniform moonlit plateau, and only one. it was a druidical trilithon, consisting of three oblong stones in the form of a doorway, two on end, and one across as a lintel. each stone had been worn, scratched, washed, nibbled, split, and otherwise attacked by ten thousand different weathers; but now the blocks looked shapely and little the worse for wear, so beautifully were they silvered over by the light of the moon. the ruin was locally called the devil’s door.
an old shepherd presently entered the hut from the direction of the ewes, and looked around in the gloom. ‘be ye sleepy?’ he asked in cross accents of the boy.
the lad replied rather timidly in the negative.
‘then,’ said the shepherd, ‘i’ll get me home-along, and rest for a few hours. there’s nothing to be done here now as i can see. the ewes can want no more tending till daybreak—’tis beyond the bounds of reason that they can. but as the order is that one of us must bide, i’ll leave ’ee, d’ye hear. you can sleep by day, and i can’t. and you can be down to my house in ten minutes if anything should happen. i can’t afford ’ee candle; but, as ’tis christmas week, and the time that folks have hollerdays, you can enjoy yerself by falling asleep a bit in the chair instead of biding awake all the time. but mind, not longer at once than while the shade of the devil’s door moves a couple of spans, for you must keep an eye upon the ewes.’
the boy made no definite reply, and the old man, stirring the fire in the stove with his crook-stem, closed the door upon his companion and vanished.
as this had been more or less the course of events every night since the season’s lambing had set in, the boy was not at all surprised at the charge, and amused himself for some time by lighting straws at the stove. he then went out to the ewes and new-born lambs, re-entered, sat down, and finally fell asleep. this was his customary manner of performing his watch, for though special permission for naps had this week been accorded, he had, as a matter of fact, done the same thing on every preceding night, sleeping often till awakened by a smack on the shoulder at three or four in the morning from the crook-stem of the old man.
it might have been about eleven o’clock when he awoke. he was so surprised at awaking without, apparently, being called or struck, that on second thoughts he assumed that somebody must have called him in spite of appearances, and looked out of the hut window towards the sheep. they all lay as quiet as when he had visited them, very little bleating being audible, and no human soul disturbing the scene. he next looked from the opposite window, and here the case was different. the frost-facets glistened under the moon as before; an occasional furze bush showed as a dark spot on the same; and in the foreground stood the ghostly form of the trilithon. but in front of the trilithon stood a man.
that he was not the shepherd or any one of the farm labourers was apparent in a moment’s observation,—his dress being a dark suit, and his figure of slender build and graceful carriage. he walked backwards and forwards in front of the trilithon.
the shepherd lad had hardly done speculating on the strangeness of the unknown’s presence here at such an hour, when he saw a second figure crossing the open sward towards the locality of the trilithon and furze-clump that screened the hut. this second personage was a woman; and immediately on sight of her the male stranger hastened forward, meeting her just in front of the hut window. before she seemed to be aware of his intention he clasped her in his arms.
the lady released herself and drew back with some dignity.
‘you have come, harriet—bless you for it!’ he exclaimed, fervently.
‘but not for this,’ she answered, in offended accents. and then, more good-naturedly, ‘i have come, fred, because you entreated me so! what can have been the object of your writing such a letter? i feared i might be doing you grievous ill by staying away. how did you come here?’
‘i walked all the way from my father’s.’
‘well, what is it? how have you lived since we last met?’
‘but roughly; you might have known that without asking. i have seen many lands and many faces since i last walked these downs, but i have only thought of you.’
‘is it only to tell me this that you have summoned me so strangely?’
a passing breeze blew away the murmur of the reply and several succeeding sentences, till the man’s voice again became audible in the words, ‘harriet—truth between us two! i have heard that the duke does not treat you too well.’
‘he is warm-tempered, but he is a good husband.’
‘he speaks roughly to you, and sometimes even threatens to lock you out of doors.’
‘only once, fred! on my honour, only once. the duke is a fairly good husband, i repeat. but you deserve punishment for this night’s trick of drawing me out. what does it mean?’
‘harriet, dearest, is this fair or honest? is it not notorious that your life with him is a sad one—that, in spite of the sweetness of your temper, the sourness of his embitters your days. i have come to know if i can help you. you are a duchess, and i am fred ogbourne; but it is not impossible that i may be able to help you . . . by god! the sweetness of that tongue ought to keep him civil, especially when there is added to it the sweetness of that face!’
‘captain ogbourne!’ she exclaimed, with an emphasis of playful fear. ‘how can such a comrade of my youth behave to me as you do? don’t speak so, and stare at me so! is this really all you have to say? i see i ought not to have come. ’twas thoughtlessly done.’
another breeze broke the thread of discourse for a time.
‘very well. i perceive you are dead and lost to me,’ he could next be heard to say, ‘“captain ogbourne” proves that. as i once loved you i love you now, harriet, without one jot of abatement; but you are not the woman you were—you once were honest towards me; and now you conceal your heart in made-up speeches. let it be: i can never see you again.’
‘you need not say that in such a tragedy tone, you silly. you may see me in an ordinary way—why should you not? but, of course, not in such a way as this. i should not have come now, if it had not happened that the duke is away from home, so that there is nobody to check my erratic impulses.’
‘when does he return?’
‘the day after to-morrow, or the day after that.’
‘then meet me again to-morrow night.’
‘no, fred, i cannot.’
‘if you cannot to-morrow night, you can the night after; one of the two before he comes please bestow on me. now, your hand upon it! to-morrow or next night you will see me to bid me farewell!’ he seized the duchess’s hand.
‘no, but fred—let go my hand! what do you mean by holding me so? if it be love to forget all respect to a woman’s present position in thinking of her past, then yours may be so, frederick. it is not kind and gentle of you to induce me to come to this place for pity of you, and then to hold me tight here.’
‘but see me once more! i have come two thousand miles to ask it.’
‘o, i must not! there will be slanders—heaven knows what! i cannot meet you. for the sake of old times don’t ask it.’
‘then own two things to me; that you did love me once, and that your husband is unkind to you often enough now to make you think of the time when you cared for me.’
‘yes—i own them both,’ she answered faintly. ‘but owning such as that tells against me; and i swear the inference is not true.’
‘don’t say that; for you have come—let me think the reason of your coming what i like to think it. it can do you no harm. come once more!’
he still held her hand and waist. ‘very well, then,’ she said. ‘thus far you shall persuade me. i will meet you to-morrow night or the night after. now, let me go.’
he released her, and they parted. the duchess ran rapidly down the hill towards the outlying mansion of shakeforest towers, and when he had watched her out of sight, he turned and strode off in the opposite direction. all then was silent and empty as before.
yet it was only for a moment. when they had quite departed, another shape appeared upon the scene. he came from behind the trilithon. he was a man of stouter build than the first, and wore the boots and spurs of a horseman. two things were at once obvious from this phenomenon: that he had watched the interview between the captain and the duchess; and that, though he probably had seen every movement of the couple, including the embrace, he had been too remote to hear the reluctant words of the lady’s conversation—or, indeed, any words at all—so that the meeting must have exhibited itself to his eye as the assignation of a pair of well-agreed lovers. but it was necessary that several years should elapse before the shepherd-boy was old enough to reason out this.
the third individual stood still for a moment, as if deep in meditation. he crossed over to where the lady and gentleman had stood, and looked at the ground; then he too turned and went away in a third direction, as widely divergent as possible from those taken by the two interlocutors. his course was towards the highway; and a few minutes afterwards the trot of a horse might have been heard upon its frosty surface, lessening till it died away upon the ear.
the boy remained in the hut, confronting the trilithon as if he expected yet more actors on the scene, but nobody else appeared. how long he stood with his little face against the loophole he hardly knew; but he was rudely awakened from his reverie by a punch in his back, and in the feel of it he familiarly recognized the stem of the old shepherd’s crook.
‘blame thy young eyes and limbs, bill mills—now you have let the fire out, and you know i want it kept in! i thought something would go wrong with ’ee up here, and i couldn’t bide in bed no more than thistledown on the wind, that i could not! well, what’s happened, fie upon ’ee?’
‘nothing.’
‘ewes all as i left ’em?’
‘yes.’
‘any lambs want bringing in?’
‘no.’
the shepherd relit the fire, and went out among the sheep with a lantern, for the moon was getting low. soon he came in again.
‘blame it all—thou’st say that nothing have happened; when one ewe have twinned and is like to go off, and another is dying for want of half an eye of looking to! i told ’ee, bill mills, if anything went wrong to come down and call me; and this is how you have done it.’
‘you said i could go to sleep for a hollerday, and i did.’
‘don’t you speak to your betters like that, young man, or you’ll come to the gallows-tree! you didn’t sleep all the time, or you wouldn’t have been peeping out of that there hole! now you can go home, and be up here again by breakfast-time. i be an old man, and there’s old men that deserve well of the world; but no i—must rest how i can!’
the elder shepherd then lay down inside the hut, and the boy went down the hill to the hamlet where he dwelt.
