THE WATCHER IN THE QUARRY.

No place could be more peaceful than the old quarry just beyond the grounds of Redcot on a still, grey winter afternoon. The quarry had been abandoned by the masons who had once worked in it for at least a score of years. The men who had wielded mallet and chisel there, and caused the air to resound with the din of labour, or of rough-voiced talk and laughter at meal-time, had betaken themselves to other quarries, or had lain down to a long rest from mortal toil. Kind Nature’s healing processes had gone on for so many changing seasons that, what in the days of its full activity and value in a commercial light, had been a raw ugly scar on the side of a sandstone rock, at the edge of a hanging wood, was now mellowed by time and weather. It stood veiled and garlanded by luxuriant drapery of bramble and briar, with bushes of elder and thorn springing from odd niches, and tufts of gorse and bracken clinging for bare life to the merest crannies, until the old quarry had become a positive object of beauty in the landscape. Indeed, its attractions in this respect were sometimes fatal to its seclusion. Lovers of wild roses and of blackberries in their prime, seekers after birds’ nests, hunters after certain kinds of butterflies, adventurous spirits with nothing else to do, were apt to invade the steep, broken recesses of the disused quarry, not without danger to the ignorant stranger. Tramps had been known to sleep there in passing, tinkers to squat there for a time. But that was in the height of summer. In November, when the vegetation was sere and russet, the very bramble leaves, with their hectic dyes, shrivelling up or rotting under the sharp frost or the heavy dew, which the sun, when it did break forth, had not strength to lick up; when the birds, except in the morning, were nearly all silent, and only the white tail of a rabbit scudding to its hole, flashed a little light on the dim cheerlessness of the scene, few persons were to be met with for weeks together near Redcot Quarry. For, as it happened, no by-road or right-of-way from village to village, no path frequented by school children, led past the place. The old road, which the masons had trodden when the quarry was in full operation, had long been as overgrown and as much left to a not ungraceful neglect as everything else.

But during the darkening days of the last autumn and winter, one man had been, unknown to his little world, a daily frequenter of the miniature precipices and yawning holes beneath the Redcot Quarry. He came there regularly at certain hours, and lingered for long intervals at points of vantage among the scattered hillocks. He tramped up doggedly, like a man unaccustomed to be challenged; yet there was an element of stealthiness in the tramp. He had the air of a man who had stolen away from his neighbours to indulge a craving, who did not wish to be observed in the indulgence. He was always careful in choosing a station among the rocks and underwood from which his figure could not be detected at the distance his eye could command, since the upper portion of the quarry afforded a tolerably wide view of the adjoining country, including the meadows of Ladslove as well as the woods of Redcot.

The watcher was on the spot on the afternoon referred to. He was standing quite erect but partially sheltered from notice by a projecting mass of ancient _débris_ which did not prevent him from looking steadily down across an uninterrupted flat space below, a good many acres in extent. He stood stock still. He had not moved for the last half-hour. It seemed as if the very muscles of the face, healthily coloured and tanned by an open-air life, were frozen into rigidity.

The fields to which the gazer’s attention was directed were stripped bare with the swept-out emptiness of late autumn. Some of them had been already turned up by the plough and lay in heavy dark clods of earth. Others were pasture fields, but the cattle which had fed there had been housed for the winter, and the grass had the whitey-green sodden look which it assumes under a sunless haze and unformed frost, or under wet, pure and simple. A turnip field in which sheep had been penned presented yellowing, half-cropped leaves, and rooted up gnawed bulbs, in the middle of a waste of mire, but the sheep, too, having done their duty, were gone, and only the hurdles, falling down, and with many gaps, were left to tell the tale of the former occupants. Nothing was stirring even on the little stretch of high road which intersected the meadow-land; no vehicle of any description; neither pink-coat, nor horse, nor dog to suggest a meet far on in the day. No prospect could have been more blank than that which seemed to fascinate the watcher.

If he was a poacher he carried no gun. He might be a gamekeeper from his shabby shooting coat and leggings, but the ungloved hands--long, with well-shaped nails--were not those of an ordinary gamekeeper, and the soft felt hat shaded a lean lined face, which was not that of the typical yeoman. It betrayed traces of breeding and culture, running down through more than one generation. True, a king may look like a clown, but it was not so with John Prior, the squire of Redcot. He was as shabby in his outward man as squire could be. He was in the state of irritability, apprehension, and hopelessness, which is calculated to make a man careless in his dress, unless he happens to be a martinet of the matter. He had never been handsome, though he was not without a certain air of distinction to begin with. He was tall and well made in figure, but in face his features were harsh and irregular, culminating in a heavy forehead. Yet the breadth of brow was striking, and the carriage of the head had been good. The eyes with the somewhat shaggy eyebrows were honest, intelligent eyes, which in their day could return a quick response to the more than half-suppressed smile, full of dry humour, of the large expressive mouth.

But smiles had become strange to John Prior. His hair was almost white, though he was not sixty. He was acquiring a fleshless, dried-up look which rendered his natural disadvantages--the bullet shape of his forehead, the size of his jaw--more conspicuous. A perfect net-work of wrinkles was being lodged at the corners of his eyes and right across his forehead. The lines from the wide nose to the mouth, unshaded by moustache or beard, had become deepened and accentuated till a double prominence was given to the long upper lip. The large mouth would have been coarse but for its original humour and kindliness, and for what had replaced these qualities--a tumult of pain and trouble which for the most part compressed the lips and only occasionally sent a rueful quiver through them, the result being a trifle tragic but not vulgar. Altogether, John Prior’s face was rapidly becoming ugly enough to have figured in stone on a gargoyle, and aroused speculations in the much exercised nineteenth century critic as to whether it partook most of the absurd or the piteous, and what its sculptor could have meant by that grotesque, pathetic face.

Poor John Prior’s personality, both moral and physical, had been wrenched and gnarled. He had started in life with a strong side and a weak side--both stronger and weaker than is the experience of the generality of his fellows--and the weak element was, as is perhaps not uncommon, bred of the strong--part and parcel of its passionate earnestness, vehemence, unreasonableness. He had been disappointed again and again in almost everything he had put his hand to or set his heart upon--very often as much by his own fault, by the temper which had made him hope or dream without measure or balance, as by the fault of another. But that did not render the disappointment less bitter, and he was a man who took disappointment as he had taken everything else, keenly and persistently, supping upon sorrow, without any effort or capacity to change the harsh diet. At first he fed on it in silence with a proud isolation; latterly, as both pride and strength were fretted beyond endurance, he grew surly with the surliness at times broken by such a savage growl of suffering as a gentleman--not in look and descent alone, but at the core of his heart--could permit himself.

John Prior was standing there in the dank, gloomy November afternoon, chilled to the marrow, for his blood ran more slowly with his loss of heart. He was keeping a forlorn guard on circumstances which at the same time he knew himself powerless to control. He was anticipating fate by a kind of fascination, as he would have gone out to brave and defy it in his hot youth. He was telling himself it was well to know the best or the worst of his misfortunes at once, without the loss of an hour, and he was sensible that at any moment while he lurked there in Redcot Quarry, as if he were an evil-doer, the committer of an act of which he should be everlastingly ashamed, his doom and the doom of his wife and children might descend upon him. It would not fall from the skies, but it might rise with its irresistible secret out of the insensate earth, after it had been probed and pierced.

John Prior had not been guilty of murder. No victim of brute violence or moral cupidity had been, under an extraordinary temptation of the Devil, slain by him and hidden from sight in these low-lying, dull, innocent-looking meadows. Neither had he stolen some tempting wedge of gold and goodly Babylonish garment, and stowed them away in that obscure corner. For that matter the fields did not belong to him, and were not likely to have been selected by him as the spot where he was free to deposit his prey or his spoil, unless he entertained the base design of directing suspicion away from his guilty self to his guiltless neighbour. The meadows at John Prior’s feet were part of a little farm called Ladslove, and had nothing to do with the estate of Redcot; worse luck to the squire.