Woodfell

“ The bright light died down swiftly, as if the fire had been snuffed out; and there was only a gray cloud of incense eddying slowly in the moonlight.
I gasped; and Woodfell's voice rose loud and hoarse in furious, incoherent imprecations, then grew clear, crying, "The swine—the cowardly swine! They've spoilt it! They've spoilt it! May they rot on earth and shrivel in hell!" ”

“ But at the time of your vision, or as you call it exactly your impression, of this beast in the garden of No. 19, he wanted to get rid of you. Your terror was so utter that, had you been the average man, he would have succeeded. Now, as you must have observed, Woodfell has acquired an extraordinary power of imposing his mind on the minds of others. No really open-minded man of science nowadays denies the existence of that power. I tell you that Woodfell could have sat in his study and imposed the impression of that beast on your mind. A human mind playing a trick on a human mind. ”

“ Some of Woodfell's associates were manifestly not such men. But if we are approached by students of the occult—and we shall be, since Woodfell's work must be known to many of them—Pamela wishes to give them the ritual of the Abyss; but I think it would be better to sell it to them at a good price, to insure that it does not fall into the hands of trifling dilettanti but into the hands of serious workers, who will really take up Woodfell's work in earnest. ”

“ Fourteen miles beyond, an hour and a half's ride if the pony was as keen as the man, was Woodfell, a one-horse, one-man homestead of drab, slat-built house, splintering, zig-zag fence, rickety corral, and a brown, hopeless blotch of illy tilled fields. ”

“ My feeling that the Abyss is surging against a very frail barrier grows stronger and stronger; and I'm afraid, very much afraid for Miss Woodfell."
"Yes; yes; it's natural. I'll try my best. Where there is a process there is always a counter-process. And even if the counter-process should in itself be ineffectual, it will give you and Miss Woodfell more confidence; and that is always a gain." ”

“ Those are the mysteries worth knowing."
"And Woodfell knows them?"
"I do not know," said Marks.
We were silent awhile, and as he puffed at his pipe, the serene content, which the name of Pumber had vanished, settled down again on his face.
Presently I said: "Isn't it dangerous to tamper with these things —with the occult?"
"Really to tamper with them seems to be one of the most dangerous things in the world—for those who have not passed through the training."
"Is that why you don't like the idea of Miss Woodfell's living at No. 19?" I said. ”

“ A quarter of a mile along its edge we found Woodfell House, such a house as I had dreamed of dwelling in only in my most extravagant dreams, an old, roomy, red brick house in a walled garden.
An old woman, in her Sunday best, opened the door to us, and when she learned who Pamela was, welcomed her joyfully, and called George Hind her husband, an upright, square-shouldered soldierly man, from the kitchen. Pamela recognized him, and he her; he was the man who years ago had brought her from her home to No. 19. ”

“ Of course it's just possible that in the strength of frenzy Murthwaite and Woodfell carried it into the house from the garden; but you felt its weight yourself."
Marks had awakened from his absorption, and was giving me his full attention, but with a very uneasy air:
"It's possible—it's possible," he said slowly. "A madman's strength is said to be sometimes superhuman. But on the other hand the statue may have been in Woodfell's study for two or three days. Miss Woodfell has not been into it for some time ”

“ Pamela and I read and re-read this record, and we have discussed it many times. In the end we have made up our minds that some day I shall write out of the earlier volumes, the story of Woodfell's wanderings and discoveries—at any rate in ethnology, folk-lore, and comparative religion. But about the fourth volume we differ. We are agreed, indeed, that it would be wrong that such an admirable monument of human endeavor should be wasted; we are agreed that nothing will ever induce us to essay the forbidden things our selves ”

“ I said.
"It's quite likely; but there's no hurry. I have enough to live on. I'm a very good house-keeper," she said.
I looked at her a while; then I said, "I fancy that you were born lucky—one of those whom the gods love."
"Don't say that, or I shall die young," she said laughing.
"All the same, I think that the country, not London is your proper place."
"You're quite right," she said. "I was thinking of spending all the summer in the country. I love it. But it seems now that I may have to be in London."
I wondered if Woodfell had anything to do with her change of plan. ”

“ I observed that the tongues changed, that each celebrant performed his rite in a new tongue, and I was very quick to ob serve the change from the formal and perfunctory celebration of the rite to a growing fervor and intensity. The change came when Woodfell left the general invocation and began to perform the special rite of Pan in a very barbarous Latin.
It was the first of the rites of a particular lord of the Abyss. At the end of it Marks became the chief celebrant, performing the rite of Adonis in an unknown tongue. ”

“ He only said, twice, "Pan is not dead."
Then we went into the study. The alienist looked at the statue of Pan which still lay along the floor; for it would have needed four or five men to set it up; and I had been too busy to see to it. He asked if he might see its face. I uncovered it; and when he had come to the end of expressing his admiration of it, he talked to me about Woodfell. He told me that I must entertain no hope whatever of his recovery; that it was only possible that his mind would return just before he died; that it was improbable that he would live very long. ”

“ The neighbourhood of Woodhall combines lands of a wild unreclaimed nature, such as the Ostler Ground and other moorlands, in the parishes of Thornton, Martin, Roughton, Kirkby and Tattershall, and closely contiguous, and even mixed up with these, lands which are in an advanced state of cultivation. I have already mentioned a tract of waste, boggy ground, lying between the Tower on the Moor and Bracken Wood, formerly the haunt of wild fowl, and still called “The Bogs Neuk.” ”

“ We can picture to ourselves the bandy legs bearing the unwieldly body up a steep brae side; stumbling over loose stones, struggling through the tall heather, till breathless he would pause, while the agile gillies would, chuckling, leave him behind; pause and ponder with the conclusion not slowly arrived at, “What a fool I was to leave Woodhall for work like this.” ”

“ When laws, and creeds, and people, all are lost.
The name Woodhall implies the existence, at one time, of a hall in a wood, and that of sufficient importance to give its name to the whole demesne. [126a] Of such a building we have the traces.
The reader of these pages will have learnt that Woodhall Spa is but a modern creation, in what was, not long ago, an outlying corner of the parish from which it gets its name. The original village of Woodhall, comprising a few scattered farmhouses and cottages near the church, is distant some four miles from the Spa. ”

“ In the case of Woodhall Spa, the money thrown away on one purpose has brought health and wealth to others, from a source then undreamt of in man’s philosophy. We cannot leave the Kimeridge clay without noting that its presence at Woodhall, in the position where it is, as the first geological formation below the surface drift, opens to us a vista—reveals to us a yawning hiatus—which embraces a vast expanse of time. ”

“ The violent death of so strong and active a man as Mr. Trant Drury, in passing that quiet ferry, never before stained by any human blood or witness to any human crime, on one of the loveliest evenings of summer, in brightest sunshine, and within a few hundred yards of Woodburn village. It would be equally impossible to express the great distress which existed within Woodburn Grange—the still more agonising and horrified affliction of the wife and daughter of the deceased. ”

“ Woodford clapped his hand on his knee, and broke out into a jeering chuckle. "Why!" he said, "it's little Quiller. I thought it must be some bold, bad robber."
The jeer of the enemy helped me a little, but not enough. The reply went in a stammer. "You are all out of breath," said Cynthia; "a hill is no place to run. The horse might have fallen."
I gathered my jarred wits and answered. "Our horses don't fall." It was the justification of the horse first. Woodford stroked his clean-cut jaw, tanned like leather. "Your brother," he said, "tumbled out of the saddle some days ago. ”

“ The Woodhill is a romantic, green little mount, situated at the west side of the Manor, which washes its base on the east, and separates it from Langhaugh heights, part of a lofty, rocky, and heathery mountain range, and on the west is the ruin of the ancient peel-house of old Posso, long the residence of the Nasmyth family. ”

“ The morning was bright and smiling when Ralph Woodhall set out upon his journey. All nature appeared to rejoice; the fresh green trees, the sparkling river, even the dark brown moor seemed to revel in the sunshine; the light air waved the branches, and carried now and then a small floating shadow from a hardly-seen cloud over the bosom of the landscape, bringing out the brightness with stronger effect. ”

“ I began to see that this Woodford, under some lights, might be a very sensible and a very pleasant man. He got down from his saddle, held up the lantern and looked me over. Then he set the light on the ground and put his hands behind his back. "Quiller," he began, as one speaks into a sympathetic ear, "there is no cement that will hold a man to you unless it is blood wetted. You can buy men by the acre, but they are eye servants to the last one. A brother sticks, right or wrong, and perhaps a son sticks, but the devil take the others. ”

“ We had talked of peril merrily together, as men loitering in a tavern talk easily of the wars. But now in the night, under the spell of the booming water, the atmosphere of responsibility returned.
Ward was depending upon me and the two beside me. Woodford's men moved back yonder in the Hills, and maybe they moved out there beyond the water, and we could see nothing and hear nothing but the sand grinding under the iron of a horse's shoe. In the night the face of the Valley River was not a pleasant thing to see. ”

“ Singularly beautiful, however, as this sylvan glen unquestionably is, it is only one of the many features for which Woodlands is pre-eminently distinguished. Its finely undulating surface—its sheets of water, though artificially formed—its noble forest timber—but above all, its woodland walks, commanding vistas of the exquisite valley of the Liffey, with the more remote scenery bounded by the Dublin and Wicklow mountains—all are equally striking, and present a combination of varied and impressive features but rarely found within the bounds of even a princely demesne. ”

“ Straight in front of us woods on woods band and bar the prospect, relieved by the spires of Old Woodhall and Horsington. To the right, the horizon is crowned by the almost pyramidal shape of Lincoln Minster, the seeing eye also detecting the lesser pyramid of the Chapter House, other spires, with the factory chimneys of the now busy city, more than its old prosperity being revived. ”

“ Woodburn might be seen daily riding on a good sturdy horse about his farm, and in harvest time he did not hesitate to take a hand at raking or forking in the hay-field, or binding after his reapers in the corn-field; and on such occasions his children would turn out for a frolic, rather than for serious work. His harvest done, Leonard Woodburn shot over his own land, accompanied by his son George, now just come of age, and who was treading in his father’s steps, being fond of both agricultural pursuits and of the gun. ”

“ The monks found an innocent recreation in gardening, but they are gone, and even their plants have followed them.
In this same parish, and within two miles of this old Wood Hall, are the traces of another similar ancient establishment, viz., High-hall. We have already stated that Brito, son of Eudo, the Norman Baron of Tattershall, gave to the Abbots of Kirkstead two portions of the parish of Woodhall, which would seem to imply that he retained the third portion for himself. ”

“ We remount the hill, which we descended on leaving Thimbleby for Horncastle, but by a different road, viz., one running due west. Half way up the ascent of this, the westernmost spur of the chalky Wolds, we have two roads, either of which would bring us to Woodhall Spa, almost equi-distant by either; but that is not, as yet, our destination. We continue the ascent, due westward. The summit reached, we have a wide prospect before us. To the left, on a clear day, Boston Stump is visible, the Tower on the Moor rises above the woods, beyond that Tattershall castle and church ”

“ There are some good historic names among the older residents of the Woodhall Spa district. Howard is one, a name, which still stands high in the peerage of England. Gaunt is another frequent name; some of the members of the family, in the fine build of their bodily frame and their dark hair and complexion, seeming to indicate descent from ancient Norman blood. Fynes, or more properly Fiennes, is another; implying a connection with the Ducal House of Newcastle; the father of the present generation (a former tenant of the writer) having been named Charles Pelham Fynes. ”