The Flight of the Shadow

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Just as my meal was over, the sun shone with sudden brilliance into my
very eyes. The storm was breaking up, and vanishing in the west. I threw
down my spoon, and ran, hatless as usual, from the house. The sun was on
the edge of the hollow; I made straight for him. The bracken was so wet
that my legs almost seemed walking through a brook, and my body through a
thick rain. In a moment I was sopping; but to be wet was of no
consequence to me. Not for many years was I able to believe that damp
could hurt.

When I reached the top, the sun was yet some distance above the horizon,
and I had gone a good way toward him before he went down. As he sank he
sent up a wind, which blew a sense of coming dark. The wind of the sunset
brings me, ever since, a foreboding of tears: it seems to say--"Your day
is done; the hour of your darkness is at hand." It grew cold, and a
feeling of threat filled the air. All about the grave of the buried sun,
the clouds were angry with dusky yellow and splashes of gold. They
lowered tumulous and menacing. Then, lo! they had lost courage; their
bulk melted off in fierce vapour, gold and gray, and the sharp outcry of
their shape was gone. As I recall the airy scene, that horizon looks like
the void between a cataclysm and the moving afresh of the spirit of God
upon the face of the waters. I went on and on, I do not know why.
Something enticed me, or I was plunged in some meditation, then
absorbing, now forgotten, not necessarily worthless. I am jealous of
moods that can be forgotten, but such may leave traces in the character.
I wandered on. What ups and downs there were! how uneven was the surface
of the moor! The feet learned what the eyes had not seen.

All at once I woke to the fact that mountains hemmed me in. They looked
mountains, though they were but hills. What had become of home? where was
it? The light lingering in the west might surely have shown me the
direction of it, but I remember no west--nothing but a deep hollow and
dark hills. I was lost!

I was not exactly frightened at first. I knew no cause of dread. I had
never seen a tramp even; I had no sense of the inimical. I knew nothing
of the danger from cold and exposure. But awe of the fading light and
coming darkness awoke in me. I began to be frightened, and fear is like
other live things: once started, it grows. Then first I thought with
dismay, which became terror, of the slimy bogs and the deep pools in
them. But just as my heart was dying within me, I looked to the
hills--with no hope that from them would come my aid--and there, on the
edge of the sky, lifted against it, in a dip between two of the hills,
was the form of a lady on horseback. I could see the skirt of her habit
flying out against the clouds as she rode. Had she been a few feet lower,
so as to come between me and the side of the hill instead of the sky, I
should not have seen her; neither should I if she had been a few hundred
yards further off. I shrieked at the thought that she did not see me, and
I could not make her hear me. She started, turned, seemed to look whence
the cry could have come, but kept on her way. Then I shrieked in earnest,
and began to run wildly toward her. I think she saw me--that my quicker
change of place detached my shape sufficiently to make it discernible.
She pulled up, and sat like a statue, waiting me. I kept on calling as I
ran, to assure her I was doing my utmost, for I feared she might grow
impatient and leave me. But at last it was slowly indeed I staggered up
to her, spent. My foot caught, and as I fell, I clasped the leg of her
horse: I had no fear of animals more than of human beings. He was
startled, and rearing drew his leg from my arms. But he took care not to
come down on me. I rose to my feet, and stood panting.

What the lady said, or what I answered, I cannot recall. The next thing I
remember is stumbling along by her side, for she made her horse walk that
I might keep up with her. She talked a little, but I do not remember what
she said. It is all a dream now, a far-off one. It must have been like a
dream at the time, I was so exhausted. I remember a voice descending now
and then, as if from the clouds--a cold musical voice, with something in
it that made me not want to hear it. I remember her saying that we were
near her house, and would soon be there. I think she had found out from
me where I lived.

All the time I never saw her face: it was too dark. I do not think she
once spoke kindly to me. She said I had no business to be out alone; she
wondered at my father and mother. I think I was too tired to tell her I
had no father or mother. When I did speak, she indicated neither by sound
nor movement that she heard or heeded what I said. She sat up above me in
the dark, unpleasant, and all but unseen--a riddle which the troubled
child stumbling along by her horse's side did not want solved. Had there
been anything to call light, I should have run away from her. Vague
doubts of witches and ogresses crossed my mind, but I said to myself the
stories about them were not true, and kept on as best I could.

Before we reached the house, we had left the heath, and were moving along
lanes. The horse seemed to walk with more confidence, and it was harder
for me to keep up with him. I was so tired that I could not feel my legs.
I stumbled often, and once the horse trod on my foot. I fell; he went on;
I had to run limping after him. At last we stopped. I could see nothing.
The lady gave a musical cry. A voice and footsteps made answer; and
presently came the sound of a gate on its hinges. A long dark piece of
road followed. I knew we were among trees, for I heard the wind in them
over our heads. Then I saw lights in windows, and presently we stopped at
the door of a great house. I remember nothing more of that night.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MIRROR.

I woke the next morning in a strange bed, and for a long time could not
think how I came to be there. A maid appeared, and told me it was time to
get up. Greatly to my dislike, she would insist on dressing me. My
clothes looked very miserable, I remember, in consequence of what they
had gone through the night before. She was kind to me, and asked me a
great many questions, but paid no heed to my answers--a treatment to
which I had not been used: I think she must have been the lady's maid.
When I was ready, she took me to the housekeeper's room, where I had
bread and milk for breakfast. Several servants, men and women, came and
went, and I thought they all looked at me strangely. I concluded they had
no little girls in that house. Assuredly there was small favour for
children in it. In some houses the child is as a stranger; in others he
rules: neither such house is in the kingdom of heaven. I must have looked
a forlorn creature as I sat, or perched rather, on the old horsehair-sofa
in that dingy room. Nobody said more than a word or so to me. I wondered
what was going to be done with me, but I had long been able to wait for
what would come. At length, after, as it seemed, hours of weary waiting,
during which my heart grew sick with longing after my uncle, I was,
without a word of explanation, led through long passages into a room
which appeared enormous. There I was again left a long while--this time
alone. It was all white and gold, and had its walls nearly covered with
great mirrors from floor to ceiling, which, while it was indeed of great
size, was the cause of its looking so immeasurably large. But it was some
time before I discovered this, for I was not accustomed to mirrors.
Except the small one on my little dressing-table, and one still less on
Martha's, I had scarcely seen a mirror, and was not prepared for those
sheets of glass in narrow gold frames.

I went about, looking at one thing and another, but handling nothing: my
late secret had cured me of that. Weary at last, I dropped upon a low
chair, and would probably have soon fallen asleep, had not the door
opened, and some one come in. I could not see the door without turning,
and was too tired and sleepy to move. I sat still, staring, hardly
conscious, into the mirror in front of me. All at once I descried in it
my uncle--but only to see him grow white as death, and turn away, reeling
as if he would fall. The sight so bewildered me that, instead of rushing
to embrace him, I sat frozen. He clapped his hands to his eyes, steadied
himself, stood for a moment rigid, then came straight toward me. But, to
my added astonishment, he gave me no greeting, or showed any sign of joy
at having found me. Never before had he seen me for the first time any
day, without giving me a kiss; never before, it seemed to me, had he
spoken to me without a smile: I had been lost and was found, and he was
not glad! The strange reception fell on me like a numbing spell. I had
nothing to say, no impulse to move, no part in the present world. He
caught me up in his arms, hid his face upon me, knocked his shoulder
heavily against the door-post as he went from the room, walked straight
through the hall, and out of the house. I think no one saw us as we went;
I am sure neither of us saw any one. With long strides he walked down the
avenue, never turning his head. Not until we were on the moor, out of
sight of the house, did he stop. Then he set me down; and then first we
discovered that he had left his hat behind. For all his carrying of me,
and going so fast--and I must have been rather heavy--his face had no
colour in it.

"Shall I run and get it, uncle?" I said, as I saw him raise his hand to
his head and find no hat there to be taken off. "I should be back in a
minute!"

It was the first word spoken between us. "No, my little one," he
answered, wiping his forehead: his voice sounded far away, like that of
one speaking in a dream; "I can't let you out of my sight. I've been
wandering the moor all night looking for you!"

With that he caught me up again, and pressing his face to mine, walked
with me thus, for a long quarter of a mile, I should think. Oh how safe I
felt!--and how happy!--happy beyond smiling! I loved him before, but I
never knew before what it was to lose him and find him again.

"Tell me," he said at length.

I told him all, and he did not speak a word until my tale was finished.

"Were you very frightened," he then asked, "when you found you had lost
your way, and darkness was coming?"

"I was frightened, or I would not have gone to the lady. But I wish I had
staid on the moor for you to find me. I knew you would soon be out
looking for me. Until she came I comforted myself with thinking that
perhaps even then you were on the moor, and I might see you any moment."

"What else did you think of?"

"I thought that God was out on the moor, and if you were not there, he
would keep me company."

"Ah!" said my uncle, as if thinking to himself; "she but needs him the
more when I am with her!"

"Yes, of course!" I answered; "I need him then for you as well as for
myself."

"That is very true, my child!--Shall I tell you one thing I thought of
while looking for you?"

"Please, uncle."

"I thought how Jesus' father and mother must have felt when they were
looking for him."

"And they needn't have been so unhappy if they had thought who he
was--need they?"

"Certainly not. And I needn't have been so unhappy if I had thought who
you were. But I was terribly frightened, and there I was wrong."

"Who am I, uncle?"

"Another little one of the same father as he."

"Why were you frightened, uncle?"

"I was afraid of your being frightened."

"I hardly had time to be frightened before the lady came."

"Yes; you see I needn't have been so unhappy!"

My uncle always treated me as if I could understand him perfectly. This
came, I see now, from the essential childlikeness of his nature, and from
no educational theory.

"Sometimes," he went on, "I look all around me to see if Jesus is out
anywhere, but I have never seen him yet!"

"We shall see him one day, shan't we?" I said, craning round to look into
his eyes, which were my earthly paradise. Nor are they a whit less dear
to me, nay, they are dearer, that he has been in God's somewhere, that
is, the heavenly paradise, for many a year.

"I think so," he answered, with a sigh that seemed to swell like a
sea-wave against me, as I sat on his arm; "--I hope so. I live but for
that--and for one thing more."

There are some, I fancy, who would blame him for not being sure, and
bring text after text to prove that he ought to have been sure. But oh
those text-people! They look to me, not like the clay-sparrows that Jesus
made fly, but like bird-skins in a glass-case, stuffed with texts. The
doubt of a man like my uncle must be a far better thing than their
assurance!

"Would you have been frightened if you had met him on the moor last
night, little one?" he asked, after a pause.

"Oh, no, uncle!" I returned. "I should have thought it was you till I
came nearer, and then I should have known who it was! He wouldn't like a
big girl like me to be frightened at him--would he?"

"Indeed not!'" answered my uncle fervently; but again his words brought
with them a great sigh, and he said no more.

When we reached home, he gave me up to Martha, and went out again--nor
returned before I was in bed. But he came to my room, and waked me with a
kiss, which sent me faster asleep than before.

CHAPTER VIII.

THANATOS AND ZOE

I think it must have been soon after this that my uncle bought himself a
horse. I know something of horses now--that is, if much riding and much
love suffice to give a knowledge of them--and the horse which was a glory
and a wonder to me then, is a glory and a wonder to me still. He was
large, big-boned, and powerful, with less beauty but more grandeur than a
thoroughbred, and full of a fiery gentleness. He was the very horse for
sir Philip Sidney!

One day, after he had had him for several months, and had let no one
saddle him but himself, therefore knew him perfectly, and knew that the
horse knew his master, I happened to be in the yard as he mounted. The
moment he was in the saddle, he bent down to me, and held out his hand.

"Come with me, little one," he said.

Almost ere I knew, I was in the saddle before him. I grasped his hand,
instinctively caught with my foot at his, and was astride the pommel. I
will not say I sat very comfortably, but the memory of that day's delight
will never leave me--not "through all the secular to be." There must be a
God to the world that could give any such delight as fell then to the
share of one little girl! I think my uncle must soon after have got
another saddle, for I have no recollection of any more discomfort; I
remember only the delight of the motion of the horse under me.

For, after this, I rode with him often, and he taught me to ride as
surely not many have been taught. When he saw me so at home in my seat as
to require no support, he made me change my position, and go behind him.
There I sat sideways on a cloth, like a lady of old time on a pillion.
When I had got used to this, my uncle made me stand on the horse's broad
back, holding on by his shoulders; and it was wonderful how soon, and how
unconsciously, I accommodated myself to every motion of the strength that
bore me, learning to keep my place by pure balance like a rope-dancer. I
had soon quite forgotten to hold by my uncle, and without the least
support rode as comfortably, and with as much confidence, as any rider in
a circus, though with a far less easy pace under me. When my uncle found
me capable of this, he was much pleased, though a little nervous at
times.

Able now to ride his big horse any way, he brought me one afternoon the
loveliest of Shetland ponies, not very small. With the ordinary human
distrust in good, I could hardly believe she was meant for me. She was a
dappled gray--like the twilight of a morning after rain, my uncle said.
He called her Zoe, which means Life. His own horse he called Thanatos,
which means Death. Such as understood it, thought it a terrible name to
give a horse. For most people are so afraid of Death that they regard his
very name with awe.

My uncle had a riding-habit made for me, and after a week found I could
give him no more trouble with my horsewomanship. At once I was at home on
my new friend's back, with vistas of delight innumerable opening around
me, and from that day my uncle seldom rode without me. When he went
wandering, it was almost always on foot, and then, as before, he was
always alone. The idea of offering to accompany him on such an occasion,
had never occurred to me.

But one stormy autumn afternoon--most of my memories seem of the
autumn--my uncle looked worse than usual when he went out, and I felt, I
think for the first time, a vague uneasiness about him. Perhaps I had
been thinking of him more; perhaps I had begun to wonder what the secret
could be that made him so often seem unhappy. Anyhow this evening the
desire awoke to be with him in his trouble whatever it was. There was no
curiosity in the feeling, I think, only the desire to serve him as I had
never served him yet. I had been, as long as I could remember, always at
his beck or lightest call; now I wanted to come when needed without being
called. Was it impossible a girl should do anything for a man in his
trouble? He, a great man, had helped a little girl out of the deepest
despair; could the little girl do nothing for the great man? That the big
people should do everything, did not seem fair! He had told me once that
the world was held together by what every one could do that the others
could not do: there must be something I could do that he could not do!

The rain was coming down on the roof like the steady tramp of distant
squadrons. I was in the study, therefore near the tiles, and that was how
the rain always sounded upon them. Tramp, tramp, tramp, came the whole
army of things, riding, riding, to befall my uncle and me. Tramp, tramp,
came the troops of the future, to take the citadel of the present! I was
not afraid of them, neither sought to imagine myself afraid! I had no
picture in my mind of any evil that could assail me. A little grove of
black poplars under the gable-window, kept swaying their expostulations,
and moaning their entreaties. The great rushing blasts of the wind
through their rooted resistance, made the music of the band that
accompanied the march of the unknown. I sat and listened, with the vague
conviction that something was being done somewhere. It could not be that
only the wind and the trees and the rain were in all that wailing and
marching! The Powers of life and death must somewhere be at work! Then
rose before me the face of my uncle, as he walked from the room, haloed
in a sorrowful stillness. If only I could be with him! If only I knew
where to seek him! Wishing, wishing, I sat and listened to the rain and
the wind.

Suddenly I found myself on my feet, making for the door. I would not have
ventured alone upon the moor in such a night, but I should have Zoe with
me, who knew all the ways of it--had doubtless been used to bogs in her
own country, and her mother before her! Like a small elephant, she would
put out her little foot, and tap, and sound, to see if the surface would
bear her--if the questionable spot was what it looked to her mistress, or
what she herself doubted it. When she had once made up her mind in the
negative, no foolish attempt of mine could overpersuade her--could make
her trust our weight on it a hair's-breadth. In a bog the greenest spots
are the most dangerous, and Zoe knew it: the matted roots might be afloat
on a fathomless depth of water. Backed by my uncle, she soon taught me to
be as much afraid of those green spots as she was herself. I had learned
to trust her thoroughly.

I took my way to the stable, with a hug and a kiss to Martha as I passed
her in the kitchen, I got the cowboy to saddle Zoe, fearing I might not
persuade one of the big men on such a night, and I was not quite able
myself to tighten the girths properly. She had not been out all day, and
when I mounted, she danced at the prospect of a gallop.

I took with me the little lantern I went about the place with when
there was no moon, and with this alight in my hand, we darted off at a
tight-reined gallop into the wet blowing night. What I was going for I
did not know, beyond being with my uncle. So far was I from any fear,
that, but for my shadowy uneasiness about him, I should have been filled
full of the wild joy of battle with the elements. The first part of the
way, I had to cling to the saddle: not otherwise could I keep my seat
against the wind, which blew so fiercely on me sideways, that it
threatened to blow me out of it.

I had not gone far before the saddle began to turn round with me; I was
slipping to the ground. I pulled up, dismounted, undid the girths with
difficulty, set the saddle straight, then pulled at every strap with all
my might. It was to no purpose: I could not get another hole out of one
of them. I mounted and set off again; but the moment a stronger blast
came, the saddle began to turn. Then I thought of something to try:
dismounting once more, I got up on the off side. The wind now pushed me
on to the saddle, freeing it from my leverage, while I had, besides, the
use of my legs against the wind, so that we got on bravely, my Zoe and I.
But, alas! my lantern was out, and it was impossible to light it again,
so that I had now no arrow to shoot at random for my uncle's eye. Before
long we reached a tolerable cart-track, which led across the waste to a
village, and the wind being now behind us, I resumed the more comfortable
seat in the saddle.

We were going at a good speed, and had ridden, as I judged, about three
miles, when there came a great flash of lightning--not like any flash I
had ever seen before. It was neither the reflection of lightning below
the horizon, nor the sudden zigzagged blade, the very idea of force
without weight; it was the burst of a ball-headed torrent of fire from a
dark cloud, like water sudden from a mountain's heart, which went rushing
down a rugged channel, as if the cloud were indeed a mountain, and the
fire one of its cataracts. Its endurance was momentary, but its moments
might have been counted, for it lasted appreciably longer than an
ordinary flash, revealing to my eyes what remains on my mind clear as the
picture of some neighbouring tree on the skin of one slain by lightning.
The torrent tumbled down the cloud and vanished, but left with me the
vision of a man, plainly my uncle, a few hundred yards from me, on a
gigantic gray horse, which reared high with fright. But for its size I
could have testified before a magistrate, that I had not only seen that
horse in the stable as my pony was being saddled, but had stroked and
kissed him on the nose. I conceived at once that his apparent size was an
illusion caused by the suddenness and keenness of the light, and that my
uncle had come home before I had well reached the moor, and had ridden
out after me. With a wild cry of delight, I turned at once to leave the
road and join him. But the thunder that moment burst with a terrific
bellow, and swallowed my cry. The same instant, however, came through it
from the other side the voice of my uncle only a few yards away.

"Stay, little one," he shouted; "stay where you are. I will be with you
in a moment."

I obeyed, as ever and always without a thought I obeyed the slightest
word of my uncle: Zoe and I stood as if never yet parted from chaos and
the dark, for Zoe too loved his voice. The wind rose suddenly from a lull
to a great roar, emptying a huge cloudful of rain upon us, so that I
heard no sound of my uncle's approach; but presently out of the dark an
arm was around me, and my head was lying on my uncle's bosom. Then the
dark and the rain seemed the natural elements for love and confidence.

"But, uncle," I murmured, full of wonder which had had no time to take
shape, "how is it?"

He answered in a whisper that seemed to dread the ear of the wind, lest
it should hear him--

"You saw, did you?"

"I saw you upon Death away there in the middle of the lightning. I was
going to you. I don't know what to think."

My uncle and I often called the horse by his English name.

"Neither do I," he returned, with a strange half voice, as if he were
choking. "It must have been--I don't know what. There is a deep bog away
just there. It must be a lake by now!"

"Yes, uncle; I might have remembered! But how was I to think of that when
I saw you there--on dear old Death too! He's the last of horses to get
into a bog: he knows his own weight too well!"

"But why did you come out on such a night? What possessed you, little
one--in such a storm? I begin to be afraid what next you may do."

"I never do anything--now--that I think you would mind me doing," I
answered. "But if you will write out a little book of _mays_ and
_maynots_, I will learn it by heart."

"No, no," he returned; "we are not going back to the tables of the law!
You have a better law written in your heart, my child; I will trust to
that.--But tell me why you came out on such a night--and as dark as
pitch."

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