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Updated: June 12, 2025
The heart of the dead animal, stuck all over with pins, was burnt in the fire; the windows, doors, and every other aperture of the house being first carefully stopped. After the heart, thus prepared with suitable incantations, is consumed in the fire, the first person who comes to the door or passes by it is the offending magician. Mother Carke completed these lonely rites at dead of night.
The sick woman seized the moment of his absence to say in the ear of Mall Carke: "If ye had not been at ill work tonight, he could not hev fetched ye. Tak no more now than your rightful fee, or he'll keep ye here." At this moment he returned with a bag of gold and silver coins, which he emptied on the table, and told her to help herself.
"Why, it's every word true!" cries the girl vehemently, starting to her feet, for she had seated herself on the great oak chest. "True, lass? Come, say what ye mean," demanded Mall Carke, with a dark and searching gaze. "Last night I was coming heyam from the wake, wi' auld farmer Dykes and his wife and his daughter Nell, and when we came to the stile, I bid them good-night, and we parted."
She has renounced practice, however, for some years; and now, under the rose, she dabbles, it is thought, in the black art, in which she has always been secretly skilled, tells fortunes, practises charms, and in popular esteem is little better than a witch. Mother Carke has been away to the town of Willarden, to sell knit stockings, and is returning to her rude dwelling by Dardale Moss.
"And ye came by the path alone in the night-time, did ye?" exclaimed old Mall Carke sternly. "I wasna afeared, I don't know why; the path heyam leads down by the wa'as o' auld Hawarth Castle." "I knaa it weel, and a dowly path it is; ye'll keep indoors o' nights for a while, or ye'll rue it. What saw ye?" "No freetin, mother; nowt I was feared on." "Ye heard a voice callin' yer neyame?"
A lady some seventeen years before had come down and paid Farmer Lew for two rooms in his house. She told him that her husband would follow her in a fortnight, and that he was in the mean time delayed by business in Liverpool. In ten days after her arrival her baby was born, Mall Carke acting as sage femme on the occasion; and on the evening of that day the poor young mother died.
The dark looks of Mother Carke were always before her eyes, and a secret dread prevented her passing the threshold of her home again that night. Next day it was different. She had got rid of the awe with which Mother Carke had inspired her. She could not get the tall dark-featured lord, in the black velvet dress, out of her head. He had "taken her fancy"; she was growing to love him.
No towering mountains surround it, but here and there you have a rocky knoll rising among the trees, and many a wooded promontory of the same pretty, because utterly wild, forest, running out into its dark level. Habitations are thinly scattered in this barren territory, and a full mile away from the meanest was the stone cottage of Mother Carke.
About three o'clock next afternoon, Mother Carke was sitting knitting, with her glasses on, outside her door on the stone bench, when she saw the pretty girl mount lightly to the top of the stile at her left under the birch, against the silver stem of which she leaned her slender hand, and called, "Mall, Mall! Mother Carke, are ye alane all by yersel'?"
Old Mall Carke, by some caprice for which no one could account, cherished an affection for the girl, who saw her often, and paid her many a small fee in exchange for the secret indications of the future. It was too late when Mother Carke reached her home to look for a visit from Laura Silver Bell that day.
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