Chapter V: ‒in the Waste

It was Wednesday, a half-holiday at the village school of High Tor, and the work of learning and the yet harder toil of teaching were for that day over. Ethel Gray had seen the last of her released pupils scamper joyously off homewards, and was busied in putting away books and maps, when the clatter of heavy shoes caused her to turn her eyes towards the doorway, wherein stood a tall slip of a girl, looking absurdly big and bony for the clothes which she had outgrown. Ethel knew the freckled face, and smiled pleasantly in answer to its owner’s grin of recognition.

‘If you please, miss,’ said the new-comer, sidling towards the school-mistress‒‘if you please, mother sent I down from the moor to say how ’twas my little brother didn’t ’tend here nouther Monday, nor yetterer Tuesday, nor now. Little Lenny be down in the fever; that’s why he ben’t here, please.’

‘What fever?’ asked Ethel. She had not been long enough at High Tor to become thoroughly familiar with the diction of the country folks.

‘_The_ fever, to be sure!’ reiterated the tall girl, who might have been some fourteen years of age, amazed that so learned a personage as she took Miss Gray to be should boggle over so patent a physiological fact. ‘It do be going about most at fall-time; but Lenny’s only a wishy one, ye know, so he’s took with the shiver fits in June, getting wet at the hayfield; and so, mother bein’ main fond o’ he, as we ’m all, when he begs her to “let Miss Gray, to school, know ’twarn’t his fault,” why mother says: “Betty, get thee down to village and do the child’s arrand.” That be all.’

The quick tears rose glistening to Ethel’s eyes. There was something pathetic in the idea of this tiny sufferer tossing on his bed of pain beneath the rotting thatch of the cottage among the moorlands, and anxious to excuse his involuntary default to the kind teacher whom he had already learned to love. He was a pet pupil of Ethel’s, this wee boy Lenny, or Leonard Mudge by name, as being one of those rare learners who seem to thirst after the fountains of knowledge towards which others have to be cajoled or driven. Day after day had the new school-mistress seen Lenny in class, the readiest to come, the least eager to leave, his bright large eyes intent upon the face of his instructress.

The parents had been proud of the little fellow’s cleverness, and with an unselfishness not universal in the poor and struggling class to which they belonged, had contrived not merely to save the school-pence that supplemented the government grant, but to send the boy down under such escort as could be found for him, day after day. Now it was a carter, who would perch Lenny on the shaft of his rough chariot; now a stalwart lass, bent on earning her ninepence for a day’s hard work at the washing-tub, and who allowed the little scholar to trot by her side; sometimes a mushroom-gatherer or gleaner of whortleberries from the waste, and who was not unwilling to take temporary charge of Lenny. Sometimes, as a great concession, Sister Betty would be spared from weeding or cow-tending, to convoy Leonard, too young to go alone, to High Tor. As for Betty herself, she had been relegated, long ago in the bygone days of her own short schooling, into the category of unteachables. She was a good girl; but two successive mistresses had given her up as a hopeless dunce, long before Betty began to earn two-thirds of her own living, and Ethel Gray to be mistress of High Tor school.

‘I’ll go and see Lenny. It is a half-holiday for me, you know, as well as for the children. How far is it, Betty? But I’m sure it is not too far, for I am a tolerable walker, if you will shew me the way,’ said Ethel impulsively. Now this, as Betty knew, was the very consummation which her mother, whose perceptions had been for the time sharpened by the stimulus of maternal love, desired to bring about. The moorland lass was not much of a diplomatist, but she was quite well aware that to exaggerate the difficulties of an enterprise is often to damp the spirits of those who undertake it.

‘It’s not fur,’ said Betty argumentatively; ‘that’s to say,’ she added, as her conscience smote her, ‘not to call fur, but a goodish walk. But ’tis mortal fine to-day. And Lenny he’d be so glad!’

Ethel hesitated no longer, but merely mentioning her errand to the decent old village dame who was her housekeeper and factotum, threw her rain-cloak over her arm‒no bad precaution in that moist climate‒and under Betty’s guidance set forth. As to the beauty of the day, Betty was speaking within bounds when she described it as ‘mortal fine.’ The sparkling sky was as blue as a sapphire, and the breeze balmy enough to have blown over the orange groves and geranium hedges of Bermuda. It was, in short, one of those so-called ‘gaudy’ mornings which rarely, in the uncertain climate of our latitudes, finish as they have begun; least of all among the wilds of savage Dartmoor, the very cradle and nesting-place of bad weather.

A long walk it was, over rough and smooth, over wet and dry, by road and track of very various quality, to the cluster of moorland cottages, far off in an upland valley, where dwelt the Mudge family. Betty knew the mileage pretty well, but she kept the information to herself, lest, as she said in her own heart, ‘school-mistress’ should be ‘scared.’ She had a very poor opinion personally of the physical powers of book-learned fellow-creatures; but when she found how well her companion kept pace with her on the steep hill-side, she paused once to say, with shy approval: ‘’Tis yarely well ye walk, miss. We’ll be there before long.’

A curiously contrasted pair would these two have appeared, had any competent observer been there to note the difference between them, as they scaled the edges of the lofty table-land, gashed by ravines and dotted by crags, which constitutes Dartmoor. Betty’s personal appearance has been mentioned. To say that a young female looks lanky and gawky, may, however frequently such adjectives are upon feminine lips, be thought to imply some irreverence towards the sex. But it would be impossible to conceive an accurate idea of Betty Mudge without constructing an ideal portrait of her that should depict her as gawky and lanky, a large-boned, freckled, well-meaning young creature, willingly accepting the responsibilities of a life of hard work and contented ignorance.

Ethel Gray, on the other hand, was a very beautiful girl. Beauty, as we know, is independent of its surroundings, and there is no reason why a village schoolmistress should not possess that dangerous gift. Her plain dress, her plain little hat, could not hide the fact that her figure was faultless, and that she possessed a lovely face and hair that in its dark luxuriance deserved to be called magnificent. What was more remarkable was the sweet dignity of her manner, frank and unpretending as it was. No one could be gentler than Ethel. Children were at home with her at once. But she seemed to be one of those who are born to be respected, without advancing any especial claim to consideration.

Lenny Mudge’s sister ought to have known better than to have entered, with the rash confidence of youth, on what was really five miles of rough walking, on that most treacherous of days, locally denominated as ‘spoiled,’ when a sunny morning is succeeded by the oncoming of a mist as dense as if it had boiled up from the sullen shores of Cocytus or Acheron. The fog fell, as Dartmoor fogs did fall before Britain saw the Roman eagles, with the rapidity of a theatrical drop-scene cutting off the mimic presentment from the clapping hands and levelled opera-glasses of the spectators. Only in this case it was stern reality.

‘Doan’t you be afeard, miss,’ said Betty sturdily; ‘I be moorland born and bred, and I’ll hammer it out somehow.’

But this boast was more easy to make than to fulfil, for everywhere hung, poised in air, something like a silvery veil, shutting out from sight all familiar landmarks, and rendering it impossible to distinguish any object two paces distant. The mist had fallen so abruptly from the huge Tors, as it seemed, that rose here and there like watch-towers of the waste, that a fanciful imagination might have conceived the seething vapour to represent a semi-transparent drapery, suddenly cast from a giant hand over land and sea.

But a minute or two before, Ethel had allowed her eyes to rest admiringly on the many-coloured surface of the vast moor, here robed in purple of imperial splendour, there of tenderest green, and anon brown or crimson or bluish gray, as shrub and berry and weed and wild-flower dappled the rolling ocean of heather. Then below was the cultured plain, furrowed by thickly wooded clefts, through which the Dartmoor streams ran brawling to the sea, that lay calm and blue and flecked with white sails, so plainly within the range of vision. And now all was changed, and it was fog, fog, and fog only, girdling in the wayfarers on every hand, and there was no knowing whither to turn.

Betty Mudge did her best; but her zeal outran her discretion; and indeed the task of pilot in that rolling mist was no easy one. Had there but been a hard road, though never so narrow, beneath her feet, the girl would have gone on cheerfully enough. But there was no real road for about half the distance between High Tor and Shaws, as that solitary spot where stood the abode of the Mudges was called, merely a congeries of winding cart-ruts, among which, in moderately clear weather, it was facile for one who knew the country to make short-cuts at pleasure.

‘If we were to go back?’ suggested Ethel, after a while; but Betty Mudge by no means accepted the proposition.

‘It be just as easy, miss, to go forrard as to go backarder,’ returned Lenny’s sister doggedly; ‘but what’s main hard in the thick is to know which is which.’

They went on for some time without speaking.

‘I was listening,’ at last said the young guide abruptly, ‘for a sheep-bell. If I could but hear that, shepherd would put us right.’

But though Ethel hearkened also, in hopes of catching the far-off tinkle of a bell from some folded flock, the silence remained as unbroken as though man, with all his works and ways, had been banished from the island. Nothing but blinding mist to greet the eye, nothing but heather and peat and stones beneath the feet, as the two stumbled and groped forward, going deeper and deeper, for aught they knew, into the heart of the wilderness. The misty vapour heaved and rolled like a billowy sea, taking fantastic shapes, here of a threatening giant, there of a winding-sheet spread by no mortal hand, there again of a battlemented castle rearing its towers aloft.

There are landscape painters‒even aspiring young Associates, newly elected, of the Royal Academy‒whom it would have greatly gratified to have been on the moor that day, and to have seen the fluctuating hues of the mist, here fleecy snow, there translucent silver, elsewhere such pearly grays as the colour-box fails to render, while sunwards a faint pale shimmering streak of tender opal stretched, like Jacob’s ladder, almost from heaven to earth. It was a study worthy of an artist’s heed too, the manner in which the bare bleak Tors, red, brown, gray, according to the nature of the stone, cropped up from the moor, each crag rising out of the peaty soil like the bones of a buried Titan. But poor Ethel became very tired as she wandered on under the aimless guidance of Betty Mudge, who was herself tired, and who could but guess, and that wildly, in which direction home might lie.

‘Ware!’ she cried, as Ethel was about to plant her foot unsuspectingly on an inviting patch of emerald turf. ‘Yon’s bog, yon is, deep enow to suck down a horse to the saddle-laps. Never trust the green, and the greener the softer, miss. Send, we moun’t a strayed to Heronsmere or the Blackpool, for there be swamps there would swallow bigger nor we. Gran’father, they tell, smouthered in Blackpool, but ’twere in winter-time.’

Then there came creeping like insidious enemies into Ethel’s mind all the weird legends which since her stay at High Tor she had heard regarding the waste. There were tales of belated horsemen and lonely foot-travellers overwhelmed by snow-storms in winter, and lying dead among the drifts, the prey of the hill-fox and the carrion crow. There were tales too of those who had been lost in the blinding mist, and had either perished in some quagmire, or died miserably of hardship and exhaustion, after many hours of walking on the moor.

‘It ben’t of no manner o’ good!’ said Betty, after another long spell of silence. ‘We may walk till we drop. I’m main tired myself. And what’s the use? For oughter we know, we may be going round and round.’

Ethel too was weary, so weary that it was with difficulty she could raise her voice to urge on her now desponding companion the expediency of a renewed effort. ‘Surely, surely,’ she said, ‘we shall, if we persevere, come upon some road or see the lights‒for it must be getting late‒in some farm or cottage.’

‘One Tor be terrible like another,’ returned Betty with a sob. ‘I got no more notion whirrabouts we be, nor if I were fresh dropped out of the moon. I’m no use here, and can hardly drag. And what’ll mother say!’

And the girl sat down on a fragment of rock which jutted from a bluff stony Tor rising overhead, and began to weep. And then there forced itself on Ethel’s mind the dreadful thought that they had perhaps really been walking in a circle until their forces were spent, and might die of fatigue, cold, and even hunger before they should be discovered. Who could tell when the fog would disperse! The mist might overhang the lofty table-land of the moor for whole days, possibly for weeks, cutting the lost ones as completely off from succour as some shipwrecked mariner on his desolate isle. No sound floated to Ethel’s ears as she listened long and eagerly.

‘Don’t cry, Betty; don’t cry. Something‒I know not what‒tells me that we shall get through this safely yet,’ said Ethel, as she too took her seat upon the rock, and laid her hand kindly on that of her young companion. But Betty only blubbered the more furiously.

‘’Tain’t so much for me, miss!’ she said. ‘It be my fault, every bit on’t. I brought you here. And Lenny‒and mother’‒‒ The train of ideas thus conjured up acted so strongly on the untutored imagination of Betty Mudge, that she wept so loudly and dolefully that her wails re-echoed through the solitary waste.

What was that? Surely a human voice calling aloud at some distance through the fog, as if in answer to Betty’s inarticulate plaint. Yes, there was no mistake this time. It was the hearty halloo of a deep voice, and the words were: ‘Ho! I say, there! What ails you? Anything wrong?’

‘We be lost in fog!’ called out the girl by way of answer.

‘It’s a woman or a child,’ exclaimed another voice from the mist. ‘Push on, Bates! The cry came from this direction to the left.’ And presently, bursting through the floating wreaths of vapour, appeared the figures of two men, the shorter and sturdier of whom, a gamekeeper by his velveteen coat and leathern gaiters, and the metal dog-whistle at his button-hole, led a pony with a creel strapped to the saddle-bow.

‘Here they are, my Lord!’ ejaculated this functionary, as he caught sight of the forlorn two upon the rock. The gentleman to whom he spoke came hurrying up across the stony ground, a fishing-rod in his hand.

‘Don’t be frightened, my little maid,’ he called out cheerily to Betty, who wept more unrestrainedly than ever, now that help was near; and then, catching a glimpse of Ethel’s pale beautiful face as she looked up, he exclaimed: ‘Why, this is a lady‒here!’ and instinctively he raised his hat. ‘Stop! It is Miss Gray from the village, if I am not mistaken.‒You must let me see you safely off the moor. I live near, at High Tor; though I daresay you do not know me, Miss Gray. I have seen you at church.’

‘Yes, I know you, Lord Harrogate,’ returned Ethel, trying to rise, but sinking back fainting and giddy on her rocky seat. ‘I am sorry to give you trouble, but’‒‒ Her voice failed her, and her eyes seemed to be darkened. The quick revulsion of feeling, from what was all but sheer despair to the consciousness of being saved, had intensified the effects of great physical fatigue. She heard the young man’s voice addressing herself, but could not distinguish the words because of the low droning sound that filled her ears as she sat passive on the rock. Who he was she quite well knew. It was not possible for the member of a small congregation such as that in High Tor church to be ignorant of the features of so notable an occupant of Lord Wolverhampton’s pew as the Earl’s son and heir. Tall, handsome, and manly, Lord Harrogate was worth looking at for his own sake; but Ethel had never thus looked upon him until she found herself thus confronted with him in the mist, as her rescuer from certain suffering, perhaps from death.

‘If you are able to walk, Miss Gray,’ said Lord Harrogate earnestly, ‘will you take my arm and lean on me? My servant will charge himself with the child here; indeed I do not think he can do better than to set her on the pony, as she seems so tired. We must all of us rely on Bates’s guidance to get clear of the waste. Happily, he is a thorough moorman, and can pick his way where I should be at fault.’

‘Ay, ay, my Lord,’ returned Bates, flattered by the compliment, but honestly unwilling to be pranked in borrowed plumage. ‘But if we were t’ other side o’ Pinkney Ridge or Cranmere way, I’d not be so gey ready to take the lead in a fog like this one. I’ve heard of moormen straying round and round, and lying down to die in a drift within gunshot o’ their own house-door. But we were on the hard path just now, so if we can but strike it again, we’re safe.’

They started, Betty Mudge perched sideways on the pony, which the keeper led; while Ethel, in spite of her protestation that she could walk unaided, was glad to avail herself of the support of Lord Harrogate’s arm. It was not all plain sailing, for so dense was the fog that even the experienced keeper was puzzled for a time, until his sharp ear caught the well-known babble of a brook.

‘’Tis running water!’ cried Bates in triumph. ‘Safest plan on the moor is to follow running water, for that won’t deceive. We’ll win through it.’

And indeed a short half-hour brought the party to the firm high-road, with the gates of High Tor Park, topped by their stone wyverns, within sight. Betty Mudge, who announced herself as having an aunt in the village at whose cottage she could pass the night, was despatched under convoy to that relative’s abode. But Ethel Grey looked so worn and ill, that Lord Harrogate insisted on her retaining his arm up the carriage-drive leading to the house, where she could receive the attention her state required.

‘My mother and sisters will take care of you, I know,’ he said, as he supported her slow steps through the park, where the fog, so dense upon the frowning hills above, only floated in fitful wreaths. The house was reached, and great was the surprise of those within when Lord Harrogate appeared with Ethel, pale, patient, exhausted, but beautiful still, her dark hair and her dress dripping with wet, leaning on his strong arm. The Countess was kind; and her daughters, beautiful golden-haired Lady Gladys, honest-eyed earnest Lady Maud, even Lady Alice, a clever child of twelve, were still more kind. A bright wood-fire was soon blazing in what was called the Yellow Room; and Ethel, seated as near to the crackling logs as her chair could be placed, and propped up with cushions, was able to dry her wet tresses and drenched garments; while Lord Harrogate’s sisters, and Lady Maud in especial, pressed her to partake of tea and other refreshments, and spoke soothingly to her, and were very full of tender womanly sympathy.

Lady Maud, the Earl’s second daughter, knew the new school-mistress better than did the others, and liked her. She was herself a constant visitor at the school-house, and had heard many and many an urchin stammer through his or her lessons there, and could therefore the better appreciate the motive which had led Ethel into her late danger, through a natural wish to comfort little Lenny on his bed of fever. Warmth, and that kindliness of manner which women shew more than we do, did much towards bringing Ethel back from that death-in-life which excessive fatigue and chill tend to produce; and when the carriage was, in spite of her remonstrance, ‘ordered round,’ to convey her home to the school, she had strength enough to walk unaided to the door. Lord Harrogate had disappeared. The Earl had not as yet returned from some meeting of magistrates. ‘I will come down to see you, Miss Gray, to-morrow, if I can,’ said Lady Maud, as the carriage drove off.