She had always had a peculiar awareness of the bitterness of that last cry from the cross. Her ardent imagination, with little to nourish it save what fragments of folklore were allowed to cross Amos’s guarded threshold, had seized avidly upon all the Bible stories. Jericho, with Rahab the harlot’s marked house, was quite as real to her as Baildon, a few miles away, but never visited; and Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Nazareth and Bethesda, where the waters were troubled and miraculous cures effected, were all far more part of her mental landscape than the six parishes familiar to her ear and eye. She knew Golgotha, the Place of the Skull; in Nettleton Chapel she had sat and watched the drama there, seen the nails and the blood and the darkening sky, the torn veil of the temple, and heard that last despairing cry. And always she had been sorry for Jesus___
And she had been right. Blind and ignorant, but right. God always failed you–-
Without surprise, as without intention, she found herself walking not in the direction of Muchanger but towards the Stone Bridge. Some time had passed, the moon was now rising, a wide bronze disc in the blue-black sky. Time no longer mattered. She was not going back to Muchanger; never again was she going to be industrious, punctual, patient, virtuous. What she would be instead and where she would be it she had, as yet, no notion. She walked towards the Stone Bridge like a sleepwalker and presently stood in one of its embrasures, staring down at the water upon whose late-summer, smoothly running surface the moon presently cast a lacquering of gold. At some such immense distance that it only just made contact with her consciousness was the certainty that presently something would happen. But even that seemed unimportant. Nothing mattered any more, nothing would ever matter again.
She was not startled when a voice from behind her, a voice unmistakably human and real, said, ‘Poor child, are you from the Poor Farm?’
She turned slowly, almost unwillingly, and faced the questioner. A strange figure in the moonlight, an old woman, very tall, of skeletal thinness, with a wild mass of white hair framing a face like a death’s-head, a bone-white jutting nose, eyes that seemed only dark hollows and a mouth which was a changing shape of blackness as it asked again, ‘Are you from the Poor Farm?’ ‘No,’ Damask said.
‘If you are,’ the old woman said, quite briskly, ‘there’s no need to be ashamed. Not with me. A good strong girl who had run away from the Poor Farm would be more welcome to my sight than Solomon in all his glory. That is a Poor Farm dress, surely. And the way they do their hair. It always made me so sorry. Charity suffereth long and is kind, according to the Bible, so why the girls should be made to look so very ugly … Oh no, no, you’re not
ugly, I don’t mean that; just the dress–-‘ She advanced
another soundless step and laid a hand on Damask’s sleeve.
‘Umm …’ She made a little satisfied sound. ‘You are from the Poor Farm. Just what I wanted. For months and months I’ve said to myself … I mean anyone who could come to full growth in such circumstances would be strong and resilient and used to standing up for herself, and that is just what I need. I do need help so very badly because, you see …’ She broke off, edged into the embrasure beside Damask and said ‘Shush’ in a whisper. Damask listened, sorting out the sounds which made up the silence of the late summer night, the small muted sound of the water under the bridge, a bird’s cry, a dog barking at the other end of the village, and nearer at hand the sound of a creaking gate.
‘I’ve run away myself, you see,’ the old woman whispered. ‘I will not be treated as though I were mad. I am not mad. Occasionally—very occasionally—I forget things. Sometimes I even forget what I have come out for; but tonight I remember quite clearly. I came out to find somebody to help me. And I have found you. You will come home with me and help me to turn those people out, won’t you?’ ‘What people?’
‘Saunders and his wife. All the rest have gone. Mr Turnbull insists that I should count myself fortunate to have them. He little knows! On several occasions the woman has struck me. Imagine that! But if you will come home with me and support me everything will be all right. The thing to be careful about is not to take her shilling; that commits you quite as deeply as taking the King’s shilling. Time and again somebody has come back with me and she says ‘Thank you very much’ and gives them a shilling and then I am all undone again. You don’t need her shilling; if you stay with me I will give you all you wish. I’m no longer well-to-do, but I’m not so poor as they would have me believe. I know where my money goes. Mr Turnbull, of course, is scrupulously honest himself; but, as I tell him, to connive at other people’s dishonesty is to assume a share of their guilt.’
She had forgotten whatever it was that had made her whisper and her voice had regained its brisk and vibrant tone. Damask listened to the flood of garrulity and gave it some part of her attention while another part of her mind considered her earlier feeling that she had come to this place for some purpose which was now becoming plain.
‘… so you will come back with me, won’t you? And refuse her shilling and stay by me. I swear you shall never regret it.’
‘I’ll come back with you,’ Damask said, thinking of Muchanger and the dinner-party for twelve that was planned for the next day and the extra work her absence would throw on the cook who had so often sneered at her for being ‘Methody’. ‘Where do you live?’ There was a sudden, ominous silence. Perhaps the old woman was mad after all and the whole story a fandango of nonsense.
Then, on a note of profound triumph, came the answer.
‘I live at the Dower House. There! Just for a moment I thought I had forgotten again. But, you see, you waited; you had patience and didn’t begin to shout at me, and so I remembered. I’m quite sure that if you would only stay with me and be my friend and get rid of those awful people everything would be all right. Of course it was very ill-advised of me to tell you that she had struck me— I did tell you that, didn’t I? Does that intimidate you? I hoped that being from the Poor Farm …’
‘I am not from the Poor Farm and I am not scared by anything you have said. Shall we go to your house?’
‘I can’t walk very quickly, I’m afraid. You see, I have to watch my opportunity and came out wearing my slippers, which are inclined to fall off.’ She laid her thin hand on Damask’s arm. ‘Oh, horrible material,’ she said as they began to walk. ‘You shall have such pretty dresses, my dear. I have dozens of such pretty dresses which would fit you with a little alteration. She’s so stout, you see; cloaks and muffs and tippets she has made very free with, but the dresses were useless to her. You shall have them all….’
The gate creaked as they pushed it open—this was the gate whose creaking had made the old woman say ‘Shush’ and drop her voice to a whisper. The drive between the overgrown trees and shrubs was a dark tunnel, and the moss underfoot deadened any sound of their feet; at the end of the tunnel the big, unlighted house stood in the moonlight, immensely sinister. Only yesterday, Damask thought, this would all have seemed frightening–-
The front door opened upon a high wide hall lighted by a solitary candle upon a side table and what light emerged from a half-open doorway at the back, beyond the curving stairs. As soon as they entered a voice called, ‘Is that you, Jem? Did you find the old …’ and the figure of a stout, square-shouldered female was outlined against the oblong of light.
‘Now don’t be frightened; you stick by me and I’ll stick by you,’ said Miss Parsons as she released her hold on Damask’s arm; but in the second before her hand fell away Damask felt the tremor which ran through it.
The woman advanced, saying in a changed voice, ‘Oh, ma’am, you had us that worried; going off like that in your slippers and all! There’s Saunders out hunting for you, and me nigh distracted. And you fell in with somebody good-hearted again, thank God.’ As she reached the table where the candle stood she paused and fumbled and within a few seconds three or four other candles were alight. Now she could see who had brought home the wanderer; a female, young, harmless. Her manner changed