He went eagerly out and came on other harbingers. A horseman galloped down the glen—“The Peel! The Peel!” he cried, as he thundered past with his head across his shoulder—“They have broken The Peel!” A running gipsy with a mountain of shining cans a-clatter on his back skulked into the wood as Wanlock came upon him, and harried forth by the dog, stood on the highway wildly protesting innocence.
“Who blamed ye?” queried Wanlock. “What has happened?”
“I declare to my God I know nothing of it!” cried the man in an excess of apprehension, “but The Peel, they say, was broken into through the night.”
“Ha! say ye so!” said Wanlock, kindling. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: ye run gey fast, I think, for innocence,” and he fixed a piercing gaze upon the wretch, who drew his hand across his throat and held it up to heaven.
“But it is none of my affair—begone!” said Wanlock, and the gipsy clattered on his way.
Wanlock leaned upon his cane, with the grey dog at his heels, and let the exultation of the tidings well through all his being. The woods were sombre round about him: silent and sad, bereft of voices, for it was the summer’s end, and birds were grieving their departed children. And yet not wholly still, the forest, for in its dark recesses something unexpressive moved and muttered. His joy ebbed out, his new mistrusts beset him; with a wave of the hand he sent the dog among the undergrowth, and when it disappeared, there rose among the tangle of the wood an eerie call, indefinite, despondent, like a dirge. Had the land itself a voice and memory of a golden age of sunshine and eternal Spring, thus might it be lamenting. But still—but still ’twas not a voice of nature, rather to the ear of Wanlock like the utterance of a creature lost in some strange country looking for home and love. So call the fallen angels in the interspace, remembering joys evanished.
A hand fell on the listener’s shoulder: he flinched and turned to look in the face of his daughter Mirren.
“Have you heard the news?” she asked him, breathing deeply, with a wan and troubled aspect.
He held up an arresting hand, and “Hush!” he said, “there is something curious in the wood. . . . Did ye not hear it? Something curious in the wood. . . . In the wood. . . . Did ye not . . . did ye not hear it?” and his head sank down upon his shoulders; his eyes went questing through the columns of the trees.