In which Old Tamar Lifts up Her Voice in Prophecy.

Certainly Stanley Lake was right about Redman’s Dell. Once the sun had gone down behind the distant hills, it was the darkest, the most silent, and the most solitary of nooks.

It was not, indeed, quite dark yet. The upper sky had still a faint gray twilight halo, and the stars looked wan and faint. But the narrow walk that turned from Redman’s Dell was always dark in Stanley’s memory; and Sadducees, although they believe neither in the resurrection nor the judgment, are no more proof than other men against the resurrections of memory and the penalties of association and of fear.

Captain Lake had many things to think of. Some pleasant enough as he measured pleasure, others troublesome. But as he mounted the stone steps that conducted the passenger up the steep acclivity to the upper level of the dark and narrow walk he was pursuing, one black sorrow met him and blotted out all the rest.

Captain Lake knew very well and gracefully practised the art of not seeing inconvenient acquaintances in the street. But here in this narrow way there met him full a hated shadow whom he would fain have ‘cut,’ by looking to right or left, or up or down, but which was not to be evaded — would not only have his salutation but his arm, and walked — a horror of great darkness, by his side — through this solitude.

Committed to a dreadful game, in which the stakes had come to exceed anything his wildest fears could have anticipated, from which he could not, according to his own canons, by any imaginable means recede — here was the spot where the dreadful battle had been joined, and his covenant with futurity sealed.

The young captain stood for a moment still on reaching the upper platform. A tiny brook that makes its way among briars and shingle to the more considerable mill-stream of Redman’s Dell, sent up a hoarse babbling from the darkness beneath. Why exactly he halted there he could not have said. He glanced over his shoulder down the steps he had just scaled. Had there been light his pale face would have shown just then a malign anxiety, such as the face of an ill-conditioned man might wear, who apprehends danger of treading on a snake.

He walked on, however, without quickening his pace, waving very slightly from side to side his ebony walking-cane — thin as a pencil — as if it were a wand to beckon away the unseen things that haunt the darkness; and now he came upon the wider plateau, from which, the close copse receding, admitted something more of the light, faint as it was, that lingered in the heavens.

A tall gray stone stands in the centre of this space. There had once been a boundary and a stile there. Stanley knew it very well, and was not startled as the attorney was the other night when he saw it. As he approached this, some one said close in his ear,

‘I beg your pardon, Master Stanley.’

He cowered down with a spring, as I can fancy a man ducking under a round-shot, and glanced speechlessly, and still in his attitude of recoil, upon the speaker.

‘It’s only me, Master Stanley — your poor old Tamar. Don’t be afraid, dear.’

‘I’m not afraid — woman. Tamar to be sure — why, of course, I know you; but what the devil brings you here?’ he said.

Tamar was dressed just as she used to be when sitting in the open air at her knitting, except that over her shoulders she had a thin gray shawl. On her head was the same close linen nightcap, borderless and skull-like, and she laid her shrivelled, freckled hand upon his arm, and looking with an earnest and fearful gaze in his face she said —

‘It has been on my mind this many a day to speak to you, Master Stanley; but whenever I meant to, summat came over me, and I couldn’t.’

‘Well, well, well,’ said Lake, uneasily; ‘I mean to call to-morrow, or next day, or some day soon, at Redman’s Farm. I’ll hear it then; this is no place, you know, Tamar, to talk in; besides I’m pressed for time, and can’t stay now to listen.’

‘There’s no place like this, Master Stanley; it’s so awful secret,’ she said, with her hand still upon his arm.

‘Secret! Why one place is as well as another; and what the devil have I to do with secrets? I tell you, Tamar, I’m in haste and can’t stay. I won’t stay. There!’

‘Master Stanley, for the love of Heaven — you know what I’m going to speak of; my old bones have carried me here —’tis years since I walked so far. I’d walk till I dropped to reach you — but I’d say what’s on my mind, ’tis like a message from heaven — and I must speak — aye, dear, I must.’

‘But I say I can’t stay. Who made you a prophet? You used not to be a fool, Tamar; when I tell you I can’t, that’s enough.’

Tamar did not move her fingers from the sleeve of his coat, on which they rested, and that thin pressure mysteriously detained him.

‘See, Master Stanley, if I don’t say it to you, I must to another,’ she said.

‘You mean to threaten me, woman,’ said he with a pale, malevolent look.

‘I’m threatening nothing but the wrath of God, who hears us.’

‘Unless you mean to do me an injury, Tamar, I don’t know what else you mean,’ he answered, in a changed tone.

‘Old Tamar will soon be in her coffin, and this night far in the past, like many another, and ’twill be everything to you, one day, for weal............