What had she seen? An effect of moonlit mist--a shepherd-boy bent on a practical joke--a gleam of white waterfall among the darkening rocks? What had she heard? The evening greeting of a passer by, wafted down to her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain, those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend of the ghost--of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor every Midsummer Night with her moaning child upon her arm--had flashed into Mary's mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists. To see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by the phantom voice was death. No one so addressed could hope to survive the following Midsummer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along with the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen her vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom.
A week later she had disappeared from home and from the neighborhood. The darkest stories were afloat. She had taken some money with her, and all trace of her was lost. The father had a period of gloomy taciturnity, during which his principal relief was got out of jeering and girding at his elder brother; the noodle's eyes wandered and glittered more; his shrunken frame seemed more shrunken as he sat dangling his spindle less from the shaft of the carrier's cart; his absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused with less buoyancy and inventiveness than usual. But otherwise all went on as before. John Backhouse took no step, and for nine months nothing was heard of his daughter.
At last one cheerless March afternoon, Jim, Coming back from the Wednesday round with the cart, entered the farm kitchen, while John Backhouse was still wrangling at one of the other farmhouses of the hamlet about some disputed payment. The old man came in cold and weary, and the sight of the half-tended kitchen and neglected fire--they paid a neighbor to do the housework, as far as the care of her own seven children would let her--suddenly revived in his slippery mind the memory of his niece, who, with all her faults, had had the makings of a housewife, and for whom, in spite of her flouts and jeers, he had always cherished a secret admiration. As he came in he noticed that the door to the left hand, leading into what Westmoreland folk call the 'house' or sitting-room of the farm, was open. The room had hardly been used since Mary's flight, and the few pieces of black oak and shining mahogany which adorned it had long ago fallen from their pristine polish. The geraniums and fuchsias with which she had filled the window all the summer before, had died into dry blackened stalks; and the dust lay heavy on the room, in spite of the well-meant but wholly ineffective efforts of the charwoman next door. The two old men had avoided the place for months past by common consent, and the door into it was hardly ever opened.