Again up high above! Susan put down her lantern, and
shouted loud in return; it was an instinct, for if the creature were
not human, which she had doubted but a moment before, what good could
her responding cry do? And her cry was seized on by the tyrannous
wind, and borne farther away in the opposite direction to that from
which the call of agony had proceeded. Again she listened; no sound:
then again it rang through space; and this time she was sure it was
human. She turned into the house, and heaped turf and wood on the
fire, which, careless of her own sensations, she had allowed to fade
and almost die out. She put a new candle in her lantern; she changed
her shawl for a maud, and leaving the door on latch, she sallied out.
Just at the moment when her ear first encountered the weird noises of
the storm, on issuing forth into the open air, she thought she heard
the words, "O God! O help!" They were a guide to her, if words they
were, for they came straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile from
Yew Nook, but only to be reached, on account of its precipitous
character, by a round-about path. Thither she steered, defying wind
and snow; guided by here a thorn-tree, there an old, doddered oak,
which had not quite lest their identity under the whelming mask of
snow.
Pages:
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84