He did not dare reverse the direction she was following, knowing by experience that such interference with a person’s obscure desires is apt to cause any sort of outbreak or collapse. As a philosopher he let the whole thing take what course it would. As a clergyman he automatically assumed a kind of professional responsibility that remained on the alert for each new crisis as it might happen to arise.
They were soon outside the limits of the town. The deepening of the twilight about the solitary roadway, bordered by forlorn allotment patches and broken wooden palings, seemed rather to intensify than to diminish the dilemma of the exploited misanthrope.
It was Netta herself, as it happened, who was the first to bring them back to practical urgencies. The effect of whatever it was that she had been drinking began to wear off in the effort of physical movement and in the impact of the chilliness of approaching night.
“Where are we going?” she said suddenly, bringing him to a pause by a field gate through which they could see the dim shapes of a hurdled flock and catch the smell of turnips and damp straw and sheep’s excrement.
“Do ’ee ask the dear gentleman where he be taking of ’ee?” came a startling voice out of the hedge.
Netta pressed instinctively closer to the clergyman’s side; for the figure that followed the voice, from what seemed the very depths of a watery ditch, was strange enough to scare the most preoccupied mind.
It was that of a woman so old as to be almost beyond human recognition. Her face was not so much the colour of ashes as the colour of the inside of a white eggshell that has been exposed on the top of a rubbish heap for many weeks. Out of this face looked forth a pair of ghastly sunken eyes, colourless now in the darkness, but possessed of some kind of demonic vitality that made both Hastings and Netta shrink and draw back, as if from the presence of something malignant and dangerous.
“Betsy must have known ’ee was coming, dearie! What else was I nursing my old bones for on way home from town? ’Twas so when the gentleman from London brought his sweetheart this way fifteen years agone. These things be writ in the stars, sweet lady; they be writ in the stars. What else was it that made old Betsy bide in ditch for best of an hour, and her with her partners waiting for she at home? Well! Well! Ye’ve a-come, ye’ve a-come; and since this be so and partners be waiting, I reckon Betsy’ll be getting home-along before ’tis dark.”
She pulled out of the ditch as she spoke a heavy pedlar’s basket upon which apparently she had been sitting. Netta still clung with obvious dismay to Hastings’s arm and this seemed to arrest the crone’s attention. Her sunken eyes, like those of a hundred-year-old weasel, examined every detail in the appearance of the two intruders. There was nothing in any casual inspection of William Hastings to suggest his profession. He was wearing a dark overcoat and a black cloth cap drawn low over his forehead. He might have been a land agent or a doctor or a well-to-do commercial traveller.
“Be the gentleman nice to ’ee, dearie?” said the woman, moving a little nearer.
Conscious of Netta’s discomposure Hastings waved her off.
“Where do you live, granny?” he asked.
The question evidently put a new idea into the old trot’s head.
“Me partners be waiting for I,” she murmured; and then in a shrill eager voice, “But you mid come and see where old Betsy do bide. You mid come and see! Betsy’ll tell the sweet lady’s fortune and bring down wagonloads o’ luck on both your pretty heads. So come along wi’ I, young folk; and me and my partners will show you Cimmery Land in the girt wold crystal stone!”
Hastings and Netta looked at each other in the darkness. He could see she was expecting him to make a curt refusal to this apparition’s suggestion. It was on his lips to do so and lead her away, but then he imaged to himself the long dreary road they had followed, the hopelessness of hunting for shelter in a district of the town completely unknown to him, and the possibility that even if he did find a lodging of some sort Netta would not settle down in it. The old woman’s words suggested that the escape from their present uncertainty which she offered was not far to seek.
He cast his eyes round them. All was silent. All was obscure and dark. His philosophy was authentic enough to make it easy for him to be led, at a moment like this, by any chance-blown straw. It did not really matter! He was tired and hungry. His companion was near the end of her tether. Why not just resign themselves and see what happened?
He looked at Netta with a little shrug of his shoulders. She, too, was beginning to feel her powers of volition ebbing and sinking.
“Very well, Mother,” he said to the old woman. “Let’s see where you live.”
The issue was more propitious than he could have hoped. Their guide led them forward not more than a few hundred paces, and while they were still, both of them, in a sort of exhausted daze, they found themselves clambering up the steps of a stationary caravan; and in an incredibly short while after that it seemed almost a natural thing in their bewilderment that they should be drinking better tea out of better cups and saucers than any that Hastings, at any rate, was accustomed to enjoy under his Nell’s housekeeping!
The interior of the caravan was spotlessly clean and the old woman herself under the yellow lamplight presented a much less sinister appearance than when she had first materialized, like an evil spirit, at the gate by the sheepfold.
There was one moment when Netta began nervously looking round, as she stirred her tea, as if desirous of something else, that might have had an unfortunate issue; for Hastings, catching the look, enquired of their entertainer if she could give the girl a taste of brandy.
“Not if she askit me till Judgment Day!” cried the woman. “I bain’t a soft-heart and I bain’t one for blunt knives or silver bullets, but I be afeard of liquor as if it were a burning lake of adder’s gall.”
Netta had coloured with pitiful shamefacedness under the exposure of her companion’s remark, but she exchanged a quick glance with him now.
“Why are you afraid of liquor, Granny?” said William Hastings.
“Because of they in there! Because of me partners!” answered the old woman.
Her repeated references to “partners” had already disturbed Netta’s mind and she now looked with much uneasiness at a large Paisley shawl which hung down from an extended rope, concealing a corner of the caravan from view.
No more was said, however, until the gipsy’s guests had finished their meal and the table had been dragged aside against the bed leaving a space in the centre of this curious interior empty and clear.
Then the old woman, with a furtive look at her visitors and a queer sort of inarticulate caressing murmur, such as a person might make to soothe the fears of some species of wild animal, drew aside a piece of the shawl and stood there, holding the fabric in her hand and clicking with her tongue. At first there was no response except a feeble scuffling in the darkness. Then to the horror of Netta and to the amazement of her companion there issued forth, holding each other’s hands, a pair of creatures that it was difficult to regard as the progeny of the human race.
They were of the masculine sex and wore extravagant clothes; the sort of clothes that one sees on the bodies of dwarfs and midgets in circuses, but it was impossible for either Netta or Hastings to look at anything but their faces, which were more horrible to human sight than if they had been creatures of a monstrous nightmare.
It was only after a second or two that the full ghastliness of the deformity that dehumanized these beings entered the consciousness of the two spectators, but when it did so Netta clapped her hands over her own face and sprang to her feet.
“I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” she screamed. “Take them away! Let me go from here!”