And just as she clambered within them, the clouds
sweeping along the fell-side lifted and parted for
the last time, and she caught a glimpse of a wide,
featureless world, the desolate top of the fells, void
of shelter or landmark, save that straight across
it, from gloom to gloom, there ran a straight white
thing—a ghostly and forsaken track.
The Roman road, no doubt, of which the shepherd had
spoken. And a vision sprang into her mind of
Roman soldiers tramping along it, helmeted and speared,
their heads bent against these northern storms—shivering
like herself. She gazed and gazed, fascinated,
till her bewildered eyes seemed to perceive shadows
upon it, moving—moving—toward
her.
A panic fear seized her.
“I must get home!—I must!—”
And sobbing, with the sudden word “mother!”
on her lips, she ran out of the shelter she had found,
taking, as she supposed, the path toward the valley.
But blinded with snow and mist, she lost it almost
at once. She stumbled on over broken and rocky
ground, wishing to descend, yet keeping instinctively
upward, and hearing on her right from time to time,
as though from depths of chaos, the wild voices of
the valley, the wind tearing the cliffs, the rushing
of the stream. Soon all was darkness; she knew
that she had lost herself; and was alone with rock
and storm. Still she moved; but nerve and strength
ebbed; and at last there came a step into infinity—a
sharp pain—and the flame of consciousness
went out.
The February afternoon in Long Whindale, shortened
by the first heavy snowstorm of the winter, passed
quickly into darkness. Down through all the windings
of the valley the snow showers swept from the north,
becoming, as the wind dropped a little toward night,
a steady continuous fall, which in four or five hours
had already formed drifts of some depth in exposed
places.
Toward six o’clock, the small farmer living
across the lane from Burwood became anxious about
some sheep which had been left in a high “intak”
on the fell. He was a thriftless, procrastinating
fellow, and when the storm came on about four o’clock
had been taking his tea in a warm ingle-nook by his
wife’s fire. He was then convinced that
the storm would “hod off,” at least till
morning, that the sheep would get shelter enough from
the stone walls of the “intak,” and that
all was well. But a couple of hours later the
persistence of the snowfall, together with his wife’s
reproaches, goaded him into action. He went out
with his son and lanterns, intending to ask the old
shepherd at the Bridge Farm to help them in their
expedition to find and fold the sheep.
