第19章 THE THREE WOMEN(18)

"The spirit moved them." A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the attention; and an emotional listener's fetichistic mood might have ended in one of more advanced quality.

It was not, after all, that the left-hand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else speaking through each at once.

Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished.The bluffs, and the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same discourse as theirs.Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with them, and with them it flew away.

What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in her mind which had led to her presence here.

There was a spasmodic abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound.the woman's brain had authorized what it could not regulate.

One point was evident in this; that she had been existing in a suppressed state, and not in one of languor, or stagnation.

Far away down the valley the faint shine from the window of the inn still lasted on; and a few additional moments proved that the window, or what was within it, had more to do with the woman's sigh than had either her own actions or the scene immediately around.

She lifted her left hand, which held a closed telescope.

This she rapidly extended, as if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising it to her eye directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.

The handkerchief which had hooded her head was now a little thrown back, her face being somewhat elevated.

A profile was visible against the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs.Siddons had converged upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting both.This, however, was mere superficiality.

In respect of character a face may make certain admissions by its outline; but it fully confesses only in its changes.

So much is this the case that what is called the play of the features often helps more in understanding a man or woman than the earnest labours of all the other members together.

Thus the night revealed little of her whose form it was embracing, for the mobile parts of her countenance could not be seen.

At last she gave up her spying attitude, closed the telescope, and turned to the decaying embers.From these no appreciable beams now radiated, except when a more than usually smart gust brushed over their faces and raised a fitful glow which came and went like the blush of a girl.

She stooped over the silent circle, and selecting from the brands a piece of stick which bore the largest live coal at its end, brought it to where she had been standing before.

She held the brand to the ground, blowing the red coal with her mouth at the same time; till it faintly illuminated the sod, and revealed a small object, which turned out to be an hourglass, though she wore a watch.She blew long enough to show that the sand had all slipped through.

"Ah!" she said, as if surprised.

The light raised by her breath had been very fitful, and a momentary irradiation of flesh was all that it had disclosed of her face.That consisted of two matchless lips and a cheek only, her head being still enveloped.

She threw away the stick, took the glass in her hand, the telescope under her arm, and moved on.

Along the ridge ran a faint foot-track, which the lady followed.Those who knew it well called it a path;and, while a mere visitor would have passed it unnoticed even by day, the regular haunters of the heath were at no loss for it at midnight.The whole secret of following these incipient paths, when there was not light enough in the atmosphere to show a turnpike road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in the feet, which comes with years of night-rambling in little-trodden spots.

To a walker practised in such places a difference between impact on maiden herbage, and on the crippled stalks of a slight footway, is perceptible through the thickest boot or shoe.

The solitary figure who walked this beat took no notice of the windy tune still played on the dead heathbells.

She did not turn her head to look at a group of dark creatures further on, who fled from her presence as she skirted a ravine where they fed.They were about a score of the small wild ponies known as heath-croppers.They roamed at large on the undulations of Egdon, but in numbers too few to detract much from the solitude.

The pedestrian noticed nothing just now, and a clue to her abstraction was afforded by a trivial incident.

A bramble caught hold of her skirt, and checked her progress.

Instead of putting it off and hastening along, she yielded herself up to the pull, and stood passively still.

When she began to extricate herself it was by turning round and round, and so unwinding the prickly switch.

She was in a desponding reverie.

Her course was in the direction of the small undying fire which had drawn the attention of the men on Rainbarrow and of Wildeve in the valley below.A faint illumination from its rays began to glow upon her face, and the fire soon revealed itself to be lit, not on the level ground, but on a salient corner or redan of earth, at the junction of two converging bank fences.Outside was a ditch, dry except immediately under the fire, where there was a large pool, bearded all round by heather and rushes.

In the smooth water of the pool the fire appeared upside down.