CHAPTER XI
_At Treff Loyne Farm_
Let it be remembered, again and again, that, all the while that theterror lasted, there was no common stock of information as to thedreadful things that were being done. The press had not said one wordupon it, there was no criterion by which the mass of the people couldseparate fact from mere vague rumor, no test by which ordinarymisadventure or disaster could be distinguished from the achievements ofthe secret and awful force that was at work.
And so with every event of the passing day. A harmless commercialtraveler might show himself in the course of his business in thetumbledown main street of Meiros and find himself regarded with looks offear and suspicion as a possible worker of murder, while it is likelyenough that the true agents of the terror went quite unnoticed. Andsince the real nature of all this mystery of death was unknown, itfollowed easily that the signs and warnings and omens of it were all themore unknown. Here was horror, there was horror; but there was no linksto join one horror with another; no common basis of knowledge from whichthe connection between this horror and that horror might be inferred.
So there was no one who suspected at all that this dismal and hollowsound that was now heard of nights in the region to the north of Porth,had any relation at all to the case of the little girl who went out oneafternoon to pick purple flowers and never returned, or to the case ofthe man whose body was taken out of the peaty slime of the marsh, or tothe case of Cradock, dead in his fields, with a strange glimmering oflight about his body, as his wife reported. And it is a question as tohow far the rumor of this melancholy, nocturnal summons got abroad atall. Lewis heard of it, as a country doctor hears of most things,driving up and down the lanes, but he heard of it without much interest,with no sense that it was in any sort of relation to the terror. Remnanthad been given the story of the hollow and echoing voice of the darknessin a colored and picturesque form; he employed a Tredonoc man to work inhis garden once a week. The gardener had not heard the summons himself,but he knew a man who had done so.
"Thomas Jenkins, Pentoppin, he did put his head out late last night tosee what the weather was like, as he was cutting a field of corn thenext day, and he did tell me that when he was with the Methodists inCardigan he did never hear no singing eloquence in the chapels that waslike to it. He did declare it was like a wailing of Judgment Day."
Remnant considered the matter, and was inclined to think that the soundmust be caused by a subterranean inlet of the sea; there might be, hesupposed, an imperfect or half-opened or tortuous blow-hole in theTredonoc woods, and the noise of the tide, surging up below, might verywell produce that effect of a hollow wailing, far away. But neither henor any one else paid much attention to the matter; save the few whoheard the call at dead of night, as it echoed awfully over the blackhills.
The sound had been heard for three or perhaps four nights, when thepeople coming out of Tredonoc church after morning service on Sundaynoticed that there was a big yellow sheepdog in the churchyard. The dog,it appeared, had been waiting for the congregation; for it at onceattached itself to them, at first to the whole body, and then to a groupof half a dozen who took the turning to the right. Two of thesepresently went off over the fields to their respective houses, and fourstrolled on in the leisurely Sunday-morning manner of the country, andthese the dog followed, keeping to heel all the time. The men weretalking hay, corn and markets and paid no attention to the animal, andso they strolled along the autumn lane till they came to a gate in thehedge, whence a roughly made farm road went through the fields, anddipped down into the woods and to Treff Loyne farm.
Then the dog became like a possessed creature. He barked furiously. Heran up to one of the men and looked up at him, "as if he were beggingfor his life," as the man said, and then rushed to the gate and stood byit, wagging his tail and barking at intervals. The men stared andlaughed.
"Whose dog will that be?" said one of them.
"It will be Thomas Griffith's, Treff Loyne," said another.
"Well, then, why doesn't he go home? Go home then!" He went through thegesture of picking up a stone from the road and throwing it at the dog."Go home, then! Over the gate with you."
But the dog never stirred. He barked and whined and ran up to the menand then back to the gate. At last he came to one of them, and crawledand abased himself on the ground and then took hold of the man's coatand tried to pull him in the direction of the gate. The farmer shook thedog off, and the four went on their way; and the dog stood in the roadand watched them and then put up its head and uttered a long and dismalhowl that was despair.
The four farmers thought nothing of it; sheepdogs in the country aredogs to look after sheep, and their whims and fancies are not studied.But the yellow dog--he was a kind of degenerate collie--haunted theTredonoc lanes from that day. He came to a cottage door one night andscratched at it, and when it was opened lay down, and then, barking, ranto the garden gate and waited, entreating, as it seemed, the cottagerto follow him. They drove him away and again he gave that long howl ofanguish. It was almost as bad, they said, as the noise that they hadheard a few nights before. And then it occurred to somebody, so far as Ican make out with no particular reference to the odd conduct of theTreff Loyne sheepdog, that Thomas Griffith had not been seen for sometime past. He had missed market day at Porth, he had not been atTredonoc church, where he was a pretty regular attendant on Sunday; andthen, as heads were put together, it appeared that nobody had seen anyof the Griffith family for days and days.
Now in a town, even in a small town, this process of putting headstogether is a pretty quick business. In the country, especially in acountryside of wild lands and scattered and lonely farms and cottages,the affair takes time. Harvest was going on, everybody was busy in hisown fields, and after the long day's hard work neither the farmer norhis men felt inclined to stroll about in search of news or gossip. Aharvester at the day's end is ready for supper and sleep and for nothingelse.
And so it was late in that week when it was discovered that ThomasGriffith and all his house had vanished from this world.
I have often been reproached for my curiosity over questions which areapparently of slight importance, or of no importance at all. I love toinquire, for instance, into the question of the visibility of a lightedcandle at a distance. Suppose, that is, a candle lighted on a still,dark night in the country; what is the greatest distance at which youcan see that there is a light at all? And then as to the human voice;what is its carrying distance, under good conditions, as a mere sound,apart from any matter of making out words that may be uttered?
They are trivial questions, no doubt, but they have always interestedme, and the latter point has its application to the strange business ofTreff Loyne. That melancholy and hollow sound, that wailing summons thatappalled the hearts of those who heard it was, indeed, a human voice,produced in a very exceptional manner; and it seems to have been heardat points varying from a mile and a half to two miles from the farm. Ido not know whether this is anything extraordinary; I do not knowwhether the peculiar method of production was calculated to increase orto diminish the carrying power of the sound.
Again and again I have laid emphasis in this story of the terror on thestrange isolation of many of the farms and cottages in Meirion. I havedone so in the effort to convince the townsman of something that he hasnever known. To the Londoner a house a quarter of a mile from theoutlying suburban lamp, with no other dwelling within two hundred yards,is a lonely house, a place to fit with ghosts and mysteries and terrors.How can he understand then, the true loneliness of the white farmhousesof Meirion, dotted here and there, for the most part not even on thelittle lanes and deep winding byways, but set in the very heart of thefields, or alone on huge bastioned headlands facing the sea, and whetheron the high verge of the sea or on the hills or in the hollows of theinner country, hidden from the sight of men, far from the sound of anycommon call. There is Penyrhaul, for example, the farm from which thefoolish Merritt thought he saw signals of lig
ht being made: from seawardit is of course, widely visible; but from landward, owing partly to thecurving and indented configuration of the bay, I doubt whether any otherhabitation views it from a nearer distance than three miles.
And of all these hidden and remote places, I doubt if any is so deeplyburied as Treff Loyne. I have little or no Welsh, I am sorry to say, butI suppose that the name is corrupted from Trellwyn, or Tref-y-llwyn,"the place in the grove," and, indeed, it lies in the very heart ofdark, overhanging woods. A deep, narrow valley runs down from the highlands of the Allt, through these woods, through steep hillsides ofbracken and gorse, right down to the great marsh, whence Merritt saw thedead man being carried. The valley lies away from any road, even fromthat by-road, little better than a bridlepath, where the four farmers,returning from church were perplexed by the strange antics of thesheepdog. One cannot say that the valley is overlooked, even from adistance, for so narrow is it that the ashgroves that rim it on eitherside seem to meet and shut it in. I, at all events, have never found anyhigh place from which Treff Loyne is visible; though, looking down fromthe Allt, I have seen blue wood-smoke rising from its hidden chimneys.
Such was the place, then, to which one September afternoon a party wentup to discover what had happened to Griffith and his family. There werehalf a dozen farmers, a couple of policemen, and four soldiers,carrying their arms; those last had been lent by the officer commandingat the camp. Lewis, too, was of the party; he had heard by chance thatno one knew what had become of Griffith and his family; and he wasanxious about a young fellow, a painter, of his acquaintance, who hadbeen lodging at Treff Loyne all the summer.
They all met by the gate of Tredonoc churchyard, and tramped solemnlyalong the narrow lane; all of them, I think, with some vague discomfortof mind, with a certain shadowy fear, as of men who do not quite knowwhat they may encounter. Lewis heard the corporal and the three soldiersarguing over their orders.
"The Captain says to me," muttered the corporal, "'Don't hesitate toshoot if there's any trouble.' 'Shoot what, sir,' I says. 'The trouble,'says he, and that's all I could get out of him."
The men grumbled in reply; Lewis thought he heard some obscurereference to ratpoison, and wondered what they were talking about.
They came to the gate in the hedge, where the farm road led down toTreff Loyne. They followed this track, roughly made, with grass growingup between its loosely laid stones, down by the hedge from field towood, till at last they came to the sudden walls of the valley, and thesheltering groves of the ash trees. Here the way curved down the steephillside, and bent southward, and followed henceforward the hiddenhollow of the valley, under the shadow of the trees.
Here was the farm enclosure; the outlying walls of the yard and thebarns and sheds and outhouses. One of the farmers threw open the gateand walked into the yard, and forthwith began bellowing at the top ofhis voice:
"Thomas Griffith! Thomas Griffith! Where be you, Thomas Griffith?"
The rest followed him. The corporal snapped out an order over hisshoulder, and there was a rattling metallic noise as the men fixed theirbayonets and became in an instant dreadful dealers out of death, inplace of harmless fellows with a feeling for beer.
"Thomas Griffith!" again bellowed the farmer.
There was no answer to this summons. But they found poor Griffith lyingon his face at the edge of the pond in the middle of the yard. There wasa ghastly wound in his side, as if a sharp stake had been driven intohis body.
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