WHAT THE SHEPHERD SAW: A TALE OF FOUR MOONLIGHT NIGHTS
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.
