CHAPTER XI
Nita Langrish, later in the day of Hardcastle’s home-coming with the pedlar’s girl, took her way up to Logie between the melting drifts. Straight and slim she went, and an old tinker who met her on the road stood and gaped at her.
“Begosh, I wish I was younger,” he chuckled. “I’d go a-courting.”
Nita laughed at him, as if her heart were light as his, and turned once—in vanity—to be sure that he was watching her go down the hill. Then she thought of Hardcastle, of what she had heard just now in Garsykes; and an evil mood got into her blood.
She came to Logie Brigg and looked down at Wharfe River, swirling in high flood between the slender arches. Half-frozen packs of snow were riding here and there above the peat-brown waves. Under her feet the fierce waters roared and sang their Viking call of kill and spare not.
It was all in tune with her heart, as she climbed the steep rise to Logie. The trees were so thick about the house that she could not see yet whether its walls gaped wide and blackened. The man she had sent to fire it had not returned with news. He had perished in the storm likely—after he’d done his work, she hoped.
When she topped the rise, and came to Logie’s gate, blue wood-smoke was curling up from peaceful chimneys, and Rebecca stood there talking with Brant the shepherd.
“There’s a friend of yours in the Long Pasture yonder.” Rebecca’s voice was grimly bantering. “The snow has cleaned his face for him, but I’d have known he came from Garsykes all the same. It couldn’t take the rabbity smell o’ the man away.”
Again a little wind of dread stirred at Nita’s heart, as it had chilled her when Long Murgatroyd had spoken of death for one or other of them.
“What friend of mine should be in any Logie field?” she asked.
“Aye, deny your own. It’s like you, Nita. Won’t you go and have a look at the man?”
“Why should I go?”
“He’s not much to look at, I own—but he died running an errand of yours. He sent a queer sort of cry up when the snow took him—cursed Nita Langrish for sending him to Logie—so that you must have heard it out to Garsykes, I’d have fancied.”
Nita faced her ancient adversary with cool devilry.
“I’m sorry he died before he fired Logie. He was always a fool, and clumsy.”
“You dare own to it?” snapped Rebecca.
The girl was uncanny in her self-assurance, her eager beauty. “Yes,” she said. “What has Nita the basket-weaver to fear, when all the men go daft about her?”
Rebecca reached a lean hand out across the gate—swift as Jonah the cat might have flicked a paw—but Nita was too quick for her. She drew back from all life’s onsets, with soft, elusive speed.
“All the men but one,” laughed Nita, from the middle of the roadway.
“Aye, all but the Master. You’ll never fool him twice.”
“The pedlar’s brat is doing that for me. Have they come home, the pair of them?”
“They have, thanks be.”
“Thanks be?”
Rebecca answered the girl’s scorn with tart assurance. “Why, yes. I sent that bairn of the pedlar’s out to get a breath o’ fresh air—the dear knows she needed it—and it would have lain on my conscience if she’d foundered in the snow. The Master happened on her, luckily.”
“Garsykes has learned as much. From all we hear, they made themselves snug enough for the night—blessed the snow for coming, I fancy.”
“The devil knotted thy whipcord of a tongue, Nita, but its lash doesn’t hurt us Logie Folk. We keep clean houses hereabout—and cleanish minds. What else was to be done, save shelter from such an audacious storm?”
“Well, they sheltered to some purpose. Murgatroyd saw them sitting by the hearth—she on his knee.”
“I’ve known Murgatroyd all his life,” broke in Rebecca, “and all his life he never spoke a true word unless he fell into it by accident. Get ye back to Garsykes, and feed your pigs on such-like trash.”
Shepherd Brant had been tugging at his beard, wroth kindling slowly till its fire was bright and steady.
“There’s another man o’ Logie doesn’t heed your snares, Nita.”
“You’re old, shepherd. I’d mistake you for a grey rock if I didn’t see you move from time to time. Have you shot Storm the sheep-slayer yet?”
“Not yet. When I do, it’s a sign that Garsykes ends.”
Then once again some little breeze of fear played about Nita, but she would not heed it.
“A gypsy woman came to our village, Brant, not so long since. She had the Sight.”
“Oh, aye,” growled the shepherd.
“She told us of Hardcastle and his fight against Garsykes.”
“Gleaned that sort o’ news from any man or child about the country-side. I’m acquainted with all the tricks of Romany—especially sheep-stealing.”
“She said an ancient shepherd was seeking a dog named Storm, to kill him.”
“It’s true.”
“That the shepherd would do his best to ruin Logie, by killing Logie’s luck.”
“She lied, like all the Romaneys.”
“I tell you what she told me, shepherd,” said Nita, her grey eyes quiet and candid. “And I told the gypsy woman that Garsykes would see to Logie’s ruin.”
She turned to go down the road again and halted with fearless insolence.
“When I’m selling my baskets up dale and down—how they’ll laugh at the tale of how they shared the hut together—Hardcastle and she.”
With that she went her way, singing the little eerie ballad she had sung to Widow Mathison’s boy when Hardcastle met her in the road not long ago.
Now grow you big, and grow you tall,Lad o’ the Wilderness,You’ll give the Logie Folk a call,When nights are dark and drear and all,Lad o’ the Wilderness.
Now grow you big, and grow you tall,Lad o’ the Wilderness,You’ll give the Logie Folk a call,When nights are dark and drear and all,Lad o’ the Wilderness.
Now grow you big, and grow you tall,Lad o’ the Wilderness,You’ll give the Logie Folk a call,When nights are dark and drear and all,Lad o’ the Wilderness.
Now grow you big, and grow you tall,
Lad o’ the Wilderness,
You’ll give the Logie Folk a call,
When nights are dark and drear and all,
Lad o’ the Wilderness.
Rebecca watched her go, and all her strength to endure grew tough and sinewy. They were few and lonely, here at Logie, now the feud was up; and Nita Langrish was a dismaying power about the land, with her beauty that put men in leading strings.
“That’s meant for Logie’s funeral song,” she muttered, as they watched the retreating figure. “Well, shepherd, we’re neither killed nor buried yet.”
Nita, half down the steep bend of the road that led to Logie Brigg, saw Causleen come through the wicket-gate and out into the highway.
“Looking for the Master?” she asked gently.
Causleen knew little of the basket-weaver, except that she was an old love of Hardcastle’s, and read no guile in the question, in the innocent, soft eyes.
“Yes. He has ridden for the doctor. My father is—is worse.”
“It’s as well, maybe.” Nita’s jealousy noted the quiver in the other’s voice, but did not spare her sorrow. “He may never need hear about the woodmen’s hut.”
Causleen stood very still for a moment, looking at Nita Langrish. The blow was so sudden, the pain of it so like a knife-thrust driven home, that she was dizzy and bewildered. Then the quick, Highland fire leaped to her face, showing a wild beauty that angered Nita all afresh.
“He knows and understands,” she said—“as you could not.”
All that was said and left unsaid in those few words stung Nita like a lash. This peddling castaway could hold her own, and more than her own.
“Maybe not. But I can set the whole Dale rocking with the tale Long Murgatroyd brought home.”
With that she laughed in Causleen’s face and went her way. Half down the road, where it wound sheer and stark to Logie Brigg, she met Hardcastle, urging a hard-driven horse.
“Your light o’ love is waiting for you,” she said, curtseying in sheer mockery.
“One in a lifetime is enough for me, Nita,” he answered grimly, and rode on. He and his horse had travelled many a hilly mile in pursuit of a hard-worked doctor, and had not found him; and he was sorry, because Causleen was tired enough already, after last night’s storm, without this added trouble of the father who was near to death.
He came in sight of the wicket-gate, and slipped from saddle, and let his horse find its own way to stable. Causleen was at the gate, her back turned to the roadway, and Hardcastle was afraid, somehow, to listen to the girl’s wild sobbing. It startled and unmanned him. He longed to get away, yet could not leave her in this plight.
“I’ve done my best to find the doctor,” he said, putting a kindly hand on her shoulder, “but he’s away up Amerdale. Is Donald worse?”
She drew away, as if his touch scorched her. “He is better—just for awhile—and I ran out to see if you had brought the doctor. And a woman came instead—so pretty, and with so foul a tongue.”
Hardcastle remembered Nita’s mocking curtsey—recalled Long Murgatroyd’s intrusion into the foresters’ hut last night—and the riddle of it all grew plain. Nita’s tongue had been busy with the pedlar’s girl and he knew what it could do even to rough men. Something stirred at his heart—the heart frozen long since, so that it had forgotten how to suffer, joy or grief.
“Nobody cares what Nita says. She says, and goes on saying—and folk laugh.”
“Yes. Folk often laugh, when they should cry instead. It is not your fault that we had to shelter from the storm—yet how I loathe you for it, Hardcastle of Logie.”
She was on fire with pride, with contempt of Nita Langrish and her power to wound. And, dimly as yet, Hardcastle understood her passion. “What else was there to do but shelter?”
“Nothing; but that does not help us. It was not your fault that we came to your gate, father and I, and became your pensioners.”
“My guests,” said Hardcastle, with gruff kindliness.
“Threadbare guests, forced on you. And what can I do, with father as he is?”
“Stay on.”
Causleen remembered Nita’s words, her laughter as she went down the road; and the poison festered, as if a snake had bitten her. How could she stay on, with all the country-side passing Nita’s gossip to and fro? How could she leave, while her father lay between life and death, babbling of far Inverness and pipes that skirled about the moorland glens?
“I thank and loathe you,” she said, and left him there—muddled, not for the first time in his life, by the ways of a maid with a man.
Hardcastle watched her till she was hidden by a shower of red, fast-falling leaves. He was impatient of some feeling that the girl had roused, some stirring at the heart he had hardened against intrusion. The Wilderness had put a slight on her, as it had striven to slight Logie. She was going in fear of the open, as he went sometimes where there was nothing doing and he had leisure to remember how strong and merciless was the hornets’ nest he had roused at Garsykes.
Then suddenly he understood the bond between them. She was proud and weary. So was he.
CHAPTER XII
For a week the days went at Logie as if Garsykes had no feud with it. That was the way of the Wilderness Folk, and the nameless dreads that came at such waiting times began to patter up and down the house. Storm, after staying for a night and a day, had heard the wolf-call once again, and was gone. The Master rode much abroad, and would tire two horses out between dawn and gloaming. That was his way of stifling suspense. Rebecca’s was to quarrel with the brindled cat who was her shadow and familiar.
Donald was neither better nor worse, though both by turns; and Causleen, whenever she met Hardcastle, baffled him by her chill aloofness. It seemed to him that she would rather have died in the snow than owe her life to him.
Near the end of the week, Brant the shepherd came at nightfall, and knocked at the kitchen door, and came stamping in, a gun under his arm and quiet good humour in his face.
“Draw me a mug of ale, Rebecca,” he said, “for I’ve earned it.”
“Aye, all men fancy that, at any hour o’ day or night. What have you done, Stephen?”
“I’ve shot Storm at last. A son of Belial, I call him, and he skulked to the last—got away into the brackens, but his hind legs were trailing. I’d like to have found his carcase.”
Something hidden in Rebecca leaped into fury: Storm was dear to her, as to Hardcastle, whatever his backslidings. Jonah and he had been comrades in old days, the cat sitting on his back and playing pranks with him. She had fed him by stealth, when the Master brought him home to the cupboard under the stair, had rated him for the life he was leading these days—finishing with a “there, you can’t help it, like, and get sleep and victuals while you can.”
“There’s no ale for you to-night, Stephen,” she said, gaunt and truculent.
“And why, if I might ask?”
“Because you come boasting you’ve shot the dog that saved you all at Garsykes. There were few of Logie’s Men, and many of theirs; and he scattered them for you, to some purpose.”
“But, woman, he kills sheep.”
“And saves men, it seems. The Master mightn’t be here—or you either—if it hadn’t been for Storm.”
The shepherd was nonplussed for a moment. “That’s true enough,” he muttered, plucking at his thin, wiry beard. “They were in a mind to kill us that day, with their women egging them on.”
“Yet you come here, snug as a toad in its hole, and tell me you’ve killed Storm. A queer way of showing thankfulness for what life there’s left in your old bones.”
“You don’t understand. You never could, not being a shepherd.”
“Without a heart in his body.”
“With a heart for ravished ewes. There’s a law among us, fixed as old Pengables. A dog turned wolf is hunted till he’s shot.”
“Well, there’s a law in my kitchen, too. No ale for the man that murdered Storm. I was talking to Jonah here about the uses of a besom when you stepped in—but I’m minded to thwack you instead.”
“I’m fairish dry, Rebecca,” said the shepherd, with sudden wistfulness.
“I hope as much. The drier you get, the better I’ll like it.”
They stood at bay, regarding each other with dour enmity, till Rebecca thought of Hardcastle, riding home from Norbrigg market and late to come.
“The Garsykes sort lie quiet,” she said, “and it’s getting hard to bear. I wish the Master would listen to sense, and not go taking his journeys as if naught had happened at the pinfold.”
“He’s made that way. An earthquake wouldn’t alter him.”
“Obstinate, like his father before him.”
“A rare plucked ’un, like his father. After all, if he’s got to be killed, he’s wise to seek it in the open. When my time comes, says I, give me God’s sky to turn my toes to, and curlews singing me to sleep.”
“Now that’s all nonsense, Brant. You live too lonely on the heights yonder, and your fancies breed like maggots. When my time comes, give me a cosy hearth and the taste of a treacle-posset in my throat. That’s how I’d say my last good-bye to Logie. And here we stand chattering, while the Master lies murdered, like Storm, somewhere ’twixt here and Norbrigg.”
“Nay, now, you’re running to meet trouble before it comes. And as for Storm, he wasn’t murdered, I’d have you know. Justice was what he got, and if I’d my way, they’d tar such-like and hang ’em in chains at the cross-roads, same as human footpads.”
“Oh, hold your whisht, Stephen. Cannot you see that I’m sick with wondering why the Master’s late?”
“So will the pedlar’s girl be, if all they say be true.”
“When all they say is true, all the geese in the world will be dead—not one of ’em left to cackle. I was out in that blizzard, and ran fairish quick for shelter.”
“So did I, and was near over-blown at that.”
“And so did Master and Donald’s girl. They were prisoned for the night; but it’s only Garsykes way they think worse of them for that.”
Brant fidgetted about the kitchen, warming himself at the fire one moment, then going to the door as if he listened for some cry of trouble out of doors. “I’m not easy in mind myself,” he said at last. “Maybe I’ll step out Norbrigg way and see what’s happening to him. This gun of mine may come in useful.”
“That’s the man I thought you,” snapped Rebecca. “Bide till you’ve had a pull at the ale, then get your best foot forward.”
Hardcastle himself, an hour before, had ridden up from Norbrigg through the dusk that showed no more than a glimpse of the track ahead. It was only when he came through Weathersett village, perched high on top of the rise, that he rode into keen frosty moonlight. His glance roved over the broken lands, the grey roads that wound across them. The waiting time at Logie, for what Garsykes spite could do to him, seemed far-off. He was not between house-walls now, but in the open.
Tang of the frosty wind, smell of the uplands, got into his blood. He plucked his horse to a canter, then checked him as they went by the pinfold where he had answered three men’s call for tribute. Again he looked out across the moonlit wastes, and down at the hollow where Garsykes village lurked. If the Lost Folk needed him, he was here, and glad of any onset after the quiet of these last days.
No onset came. The moonlight showed him only a grey-blue land of sleeping pastures, a glint of white where snow-drifts, still unmelted, hugged the walls. He felt thwarted of his due, somehow, and it seemed hard to get safe home again and wait for whatever devilry Garsykes had in mind. Then his mind yielded to the night’s persuasion as his horse trotted forward soberly between the heather and the pines.
Moist, wayward spurts of wind rustled the fallen leaves. The undergrowth was stealthy with the feet of things that fled, of bigger things that hunted. A night-jar cried harshly in the thickest of the wood. From the slopes beyond came the rough call of a buck to his mate, telling her to get behind him while he met some peril threatening both.
The streams had their own eerie music, too. Fed by swift-melting snow, they sobbed and crooned and wailed as they raced to Wharfe River far below. And the wind would not be still.
Hardcastle rode through the haunted land with a song at his heart, such as nothing brought to him these days except night-time on the Logie roads. They said he would never marry, and he knew they said it. They lied, as usual, for he had wived these grim and tender lands handed down to him by generations whose voices lived about the house of Logie.
The dusk of the forest kept him company till he rode into the open, and saw the free, spacious road wind up to Logie under the scudding moonlight. It was good to be alive, with such a heritage.
Then suddenly his horse blundered. Before he had time to try to break his fall, he was thrown across the road and into the dark hollow bordering the wood. One half of him lay soft and wet; the other jarred on something lean and bony—something that rapped out stifled curses, and turned under him with writhing fury, and strove to get a grip about his throat.
They fought together in the hollow, he and his unseen adversary, till their hands grew slippery with mud and it was hard to get any sort of hold.
“From Garsykes, you?” gasped Hardcastle, feeling for the grip that should settle all. “Swine love the ditches.”
No answer came. His enemy was striving, too, for the strangle-hold that constantly eluded him. The stealthy fight went on. The whole world was narrowed to this dark corner by the roadway, and the slime sucked and gurgled under the weight of their striving bodies.
Then Hardcastle found his chance, and took it. He got one arm under the man’s thighs, the other round his shoulders, lifted him with savage strength, and pitched him clear into the roadway.
When he clambered after him, the moonlight, clear and blue, showed him a lank figure getting up from the wet, grey road.
“So it’s you, Long Murgatroyd,” he said.
“Aye, it’s me.”
“Be damned to you, why did you hide in a muddy ditch if you wanted another fight?”
Murgatroyd, white-faced and spent, glanced at the rope swinging gently across the road, and the Master saw it for the first time.
“You’ve come as low as that?” The Master was shaken by passionate loathing. “As low as that, Murgatroyd?”
“Well, your blamed luck won’t last for ever. Any but you would have been pitched on his head when his horse got into the rope—and I’d have finished you, need being. So now your going to finish me instead.”
Hardcastle’s riding-whip was lifted to cut the man across the face; but Murgatroyd was laughing at him in the moonlight—a wan laugh enough, yet full of dogged will to endure whatever came.
“Nita sent you on the errand?” he asked sharply.
“She did, in a way. We know what her tongue is—me and you, we know it. She said you were my master any day if it came to a fight. So I stepped up to kill you.” Again he laughed. “I should have told her naught of the rope, you understand. There’d have been you ligging dead in the road, and happen she’d have given me a kiss or two for my pains. That’s how it was. And I’m here, and want to be rid o’ my life.”
Hardcastle could make nothing of it. Wrath died in him. The man was rough as a savage, simple beyond belief. He had come up to kill, and, failing, expected no mercy from his enemy.
“Oh, damn you all ways, Murgatroyd,” he said, and went to where his horse stood trembling, and felt its knees.
Murgatroyd looked on, with dazed wonder. “Broken are they?”
“Sound as a bell,” growled Hardcastle, as he swung into the saddle.
Long Murgatroyd watched him out of sight. The Master of Logie was a fool, no doubt, to leave him ripe for further mischief; but in some queer way he found a liking for him. He dealt fair with all about the country-side; and fairness appealed to this chastened mood of his.
“If only Nita would let him alone, he’d rather see Hardcastle live than die.If only Nita would let him alone.”
The words got into his muddled wits as he looked from the forest to the misty fells where Garsykes slept in the flooding moonlight. Some uncouth purpose stirred him. He went and unfastened the rope he had tied from tree to tree across the road. The knots were tight and his fingers clumsy; but at last he coiled it into a neat bundle, climbed the wall on his right, and lopped like a hare down the grey-blue pastures.
When he neared the little brig that crossed Crooning Water, a clear, sweet voice drifted up the breeze, singing a song.
There came a man to my house,Love me well, said he;There came a man to my house,Nay, said I, I’m free.
There came a man to my house,Love me well, said he;There came a man to my house,Nay, said I, I’m free.
There came a man to my house,Love me well, said he;There came a man to my house,Nay, said I, I’m free.
There came a man to my house,
Love me well, said he;
There came a man to my house,
Nay, said I, I’m free.
Murgatroyd halted, swayed between longing and loathing. Then murder got into his heart again, as he turned the bend of the road.
Nita Langrish was sitting on the bridge-wall, threading her willows in and out.
“Making baskets by moonlight?” he asked.
“Finishing one for a lass up Dale that’s courting. So it’s only right to weave moonshine in between the withers.”
“We’re courting, Nita, you and me.”
“It takes two for that,” she said, and went on with her work as if she were alone.
A great madness came on Murgatroyd. She sat there in the moonlight so mocking and aloof, yet so enticing, that the helpless rage of years found tongue. He cursed the day she came into Garsykes first, cursed every meeting with her since, till his hoarse voice seemed like a flail about her. For a moment Nita was afraid—of him, and of the stark truth he spoke. Then she gathered her old dominion round her, her old self-will and vanity.
“You’ve been at the drinking again,” she said, with gentle insolence.
“I have—drinking the dregs, like many another that’s come your way. You draw your skirts away fro’ Widow Mathison at the inn, same as if she was dirt. But she’s got what you’ve not—a heart in her feckless body.”
Nita had finished her basket and stood, slim and straight, looking into the man’s face with grey, childlike eyes as she waited for what he had to say.
“She has a lad of her own—dotes on him, and naught too much to do, mending and fending for him.Youdote on yourself, Nita.”
The man’s voice had grown quiet, and Nita thought his madness ended, till he took the rope from under his arm and began to uncoil it with a leisurely sort of haste.
“To be sure,” she said, “Garsykes will be smoked out soon, like a hornet’s nest. Time was when it bred men, not windle-straws. And you’re for trying how the noose will feel about your neck—when Logie gets you?”
“No,” said Murgatroyd, “I’m for fitting it about yours, Nita, and hanging you to a branch of yond big sycamore.”
She saw now the steady light of madness in his eyes, the purpose sure and downright. Fear unsteadied her again, but she remembered bygone years of blandishment. She came to him, and laid a hand on his sleeve.
“Could you hurt me? I’m such a little thing, and you’re so big. You couldn’t hurt me.”
“Aye, but I could.” The man’s voice was low and harsh as he put her away from him and fingered the rope with restless fingers. “I could hurt you to some purpose. Sometimes I fancy there’s naught I want any more.”
She put both hands on his shoulders now. Her lips were close to his, and her breath was warm and soft.
“Naught else?” she asked.
The old, daft longing stole about him. Little, baffling webs were spun across his sullen will to make an end of Nita and her devilries. He reached out his arms to gather her to him—but she had stepped back and stood smiling at him in the moonlight.
“To-morrow, maybe, or the next day after,” she said—“when you’ve forgotten about ropes and sycamores.”
He watched her go. He was too heartsick even to curse her, or to follow.
“It’s always to-morrow with her,” he muttered, shivering in the breeze that whimpered down from Drumly Ghyll.
Then he leaned over the bridge, listening to the stream as it swirled in the deep pool below. The water called him. Every sob and gurgle enticed him to a death found easily. The plunge would be cold, into broth of melted snow, but after that—well, they said it was a quiet way of going out.
Yet he could not take the plunge. For ever Nita’s voice was in his ear, with its promise of “to-morrow, maybe.” She drew him from the waters. It was a lying promise, but she drew him. Reluctantly he turned his face towards Garsykes, and down the fell Nita’s song came with the breeze.
There came a man to my house,Love me well, said he;There came a man to my house,Nay, said I, I’m free.
There came a man to my house,Love me well, said he;There came a man to my house,Nay, said I, I’m free.
There came a man to my house,Love me well, said he;There came a man to my house,Nay, said I, I’m free.
There came a man to my house,
Love me well, said he;
There came a man to my house,
Nay, said I, I’m free.
Murgatroyd recalled the Master’s farewell to him awhile since. Hardcastle’s words had a way of sticking, he’d noticed.
“Damn you all ways, Nita Langrish,” he said, and laughed heavily, and took the field-track up to Garsykes.
Hardcastle rode slowly home to Logie, after his encounter in the wayside ditch. For a week he had been restless, wondering what Garsykes meant to do with him. Now they had shot their bolt, and he survived. Never in his life had he known this keen, hard joy that was growing with the feud. Once they had tried to take him at the pinfold—and once a man had come to fire his house and been over-blown by snow. Now they had stretched a rope across the road to hinder him, and he was up in saddle again. Whatever the future had in store, he had given no tribute to Garsykes, and would give none.
At a bend of the road he met Shepherd Brant, who greeted him with taciturn relief.
“It’s better to be quick than dead, Master.”
“It is, Stephen,” said Hardcastle, answering dryness with dryness.
“Rebecca was in such a rare taking about you—thinking you were murdered on the Norbrigg road—that I set off in search. Has it been raining in those parts?”
“Raining? No.”
“I only wondered, seeing you dripping-wet.”
“There was one from Garsykes in a ditch, and I had to get him out of it—by the scruff of his neck.
“Oh,” said Brant, lighting his pipe. “And which of ’em was he like to look at, if I might ask?”
“He was very like Long Murgatroyd.”
“And you maimed him for life, and so put him out o’ harm’s way?”
“The last I saw of him, he was standing like a dazed fool in the roadway—too soft for a man to hit.”
“It was like you, Master,” growled Brant, and touched his cap with chill respect as he turned for home.
Hardcastle only laughed as he rode forward. He knew Brant as he knew himself. If Stephen had seen Long Murgatroyd in the roadway, grey-faced and quavering, the shepherd would have understood.
They came by High Ghyll Wood, with the merry breeze in their faces, and the Master’s horse was thinking only of oats in the near-by stable when he halted in his stride and shied at nothing, so far as Hardcastle could tell. His head was turned toward the wood, and a shiver ran down his sturdy flanks.
Then Hardcastle drew rein, and listened. There might be another ambush waiting for him before he got to Logie. A horse had quicker hearing than a man. And now he heard a far-off crying in the wood—the yelping cry of a beast in pain—and thought a fox had got into one of the foresters’ many traps.
As he listened, he knew it was no fox in trouble, but a dog; and he had a soft heart for all that breed. Riding forward till he came to the gate near ahead, he tethered his horse to the trunk of a gnarled thorn-bush, and plunged into the wood.
The yelping cries were mingled now with fierce, tortured howls that guided him, step by step, to a clump of brackens where something lay and writhed, beating down the shelter it had sought in need. The moon shone clear through the leafless branches of the silver-birches overhead—shone on a dog’s bloodshot eyes and hairy face.
“Why, Storm, what ails you?” asked Hardcastle.
For a moment the sheep-slayer knew him and strove to wriggle to his hand; then his wounds were rawed again by the wind. He yelped and growled by turns when Hardcastle approached and felt down his body to find what limbs were broken; and suddenly a madness seized him. He bit at the hands that touched his wounds. All of him that was unmaimed was quick for attack. Hardcastle, to him, was Shepherd Brant, who had pursued him with a hate that would not let him rest—Brant, who had put gunshot into him at last.
Hardcastle had found the second ambush, after all, and one hard to meet. He strove with Storm, his hands bitten to the bone. This sheep-killer had come in time of need, when he scattered the Garsykes Men awhile since. There was a big debt owing by the house of Logie.
Then Storm’s strength was spent. He let the Master shoulder him, a dead-weight of weariness, and carry him to the horse tethered to the thorn-tree. The horse neighed and fidgetted as Hardcastle lifted Storm to the saddle, and held him there.
“Get up to Logie,” he said. “There are all jobs in a day, even for a thoroughbred.”
Causleen, wandering restlessly about Logie House, heard Shepherd Brant come into the kitchen with news that he had shot Storm at last. She heard, too, Rebecca’s talk of danger to the Master on his way from Norbrigg; and her restlessness increased.
Storm had found no more than his due, perhaps; but she had made a comrade of the shaggy culprit, and it seemed a cruel death for any dog. So little friendship came her way. She would miss his stealthy coming to the cupboard under the stair, her own stealthy journeys to the larder in search of a bone for him.
Then, struggle with the feeling as she might, she began to share Rebecca’s fears for Hardcastle. Suppose, in sober fact, he was lying somewhere on the Norbrigg road? Suppose his big, hale body would never ride the hill-crests again, or taste the savour of keen moorland weather? She felt the pity of it, and with pity came remembrance of the tempest they had shared. But for him, she would have died in the snow. That would have mattered little, for herself; to her father it would have meant an end of the last consolation left him.
The pedlar was calling her now. His eyes were bright and eager when she knelt beside him and took his cold hands into hers.
“I’m seeing all the Highlands, child—not just Ben Crummock here, or Ben Ore there—but the good, wild sweep o’ them all.”
His voice was clear again, vibrant and youthful as when he went a-Maying.
“It’s as if I was standing on a high mountain—seeing it all spread out below me—hearing the pipes sob up from Glencoe, and over Culloden Muir, and out from the Western Isles.”
“Never heed their sobbing,” she pleaded.
“I will, for it heartens me. Where I stand now—”
A tremor shook him, a dry, harsh coughing; but he was so nearly rid of his body that his high spirit stormed and conquered it afresh.
“Where I stand now the after-music sounds. The pipers come, leading our Highland dead—there’s still a plaining and a sorrow, but the strathspey sounds.”
Through blinding tears Causleen saw this courageous father, stalwart to the end, his vision clear as a boy’s, his faith indomitable. She was losing him, and soon. Whenever one of her race neared the threshold of beyond, the pipers summoned them.
“They sorrowed here. They’ll come by and by into all they fought for in the narrow glens, and up the braes—cannot you see them, girl?”
The pedlar strove to rise, because his vision was so urgent, and fell back, and moaned awhile in helplessness. Then he glanced at Causleen with quiet humour.
“Standing on a high hill, was I?” he muttered. “It was a good dream while it lasted.”
Then his eyes clouded, and he slept; and Causleen, roaming the winding passages again, encountered Rebecca.
“He’ll only come the one way home to Logie,” muttered the woman. “He’ll only come the one way now—stretched on a gate, with four men carrying him. It was so they brought my man home, forty odd years since, afterhehad said nay to the Garsykes sort.”
Causleen, awed by the loneliness of corridors and stairs that seemed peopled with ghosts, followed Rebecca as she went to the door, and opened it, and stood listening.
“All’s quiet as yet,” said Rebecca, turning by and by; “but it’ll not be quiet for long. It’s a queer sort o’ shuffling noise they make—four men carrying a gate and something heavy stretched on it. Forty years since I heard it last! It seems like yesterday.”
The girl yielded to the other’s hard, quiet certainty that Hardcastle was dead—yielded to the wind’s sobbing in among the half-stripped branches of the sycamores outside. Again pity touched her—a deeper pity now. If the Master’s welcome at their first coming had been chilly, he had bettered it with every day that followed. She and her father had been nothing but a burden to him from the start, yet he had made them guests of honour in his own gruff fashion. There was the night, too, at the woodmen’s hut. She had railed at him for saving her; but now she understood. And it was too late.
Rebecca’s lean body grew intent on the sudden. She stepped out into the moonlight, and presently Causleen heard, too, the pit-a-pat of hoofs sound up the road.
“They’re bringing him on horseback, instead of a gate,” said Rebecca, in the same hard, quiet tone; “but it’s a dead man rides, and that I know.”
Causleen could think no less. The slow clink of hoofs suggested no living master, riding home to his own roof-tree and its cheer. Somewhere—in her heart or mind, she knew not which—there was a sense of bitter loss. Already, without guessing it, she had grown to lean on Hardcastle in these days of grief and home-sickness for the Highlands. And he was gone, all but the husk of him.
The hoof-beats sounded nearer now, and Rebecca’s stillness broke like thunder-weather. Forty years was cancelled. It was her own man coming, so she fancied. In a flash she went through the anguish of that far-off time—the dead lips making no answer to her kisses, the limp arms that would never again shield her from life’s tumults.
She dashed the tears away with a rough, skinny hand, and saw Causleen there.
“It’s not your fault, or the pedlar’s,” she snapped, old days and new mingling, with no gap between them—“but how dare he unfasten his pack and show me baby-wear?”
Causleen, young but tried by many footsore journeys, had learned insight into such moods as this. She understood the other’s wild clinging to past grief, as to a better thing than present joy.
“He did not know,” she pleaded softly.
“To be sure. He didn’t know. But he might as well have put a skewer through my heart.”
Then Rebecca forgot the girl. Standing straight to her lean height, she reached out her arms, and stood there calling to the man killed long since by the Lost Folk. She bade him come quickly, for she had wakened from a dream that he was dead—bade him step up and tarry no more—pretended he was here beside her, and closed her arms about the emptiness, crooning a girl’s love-welcome.
The slow pit-a-pat of hoofs had rounded the corner now, and Rebecca woke as from a trance.
“Get indoors, lass,” she said. “Dead men are no good sight for young eyes to see.”
Causleen answered nothing. She waited, sick with fear. Step by step the horse brought its burden nearer. There was no pride in her heart now, no memory of Hardcastle’s curt welcome—was it a few weeks ago, or years? She did not know—knew only that she would miss something that had come into her life to stay.
“The pity of it—oh, the pity,” she cried.
“I’d rather he died that fashion,” snapped Rebecca, peering out into the moonlight, “than in a bed he’d bought by giving tribute Garsykes way.”
She would not go to meet trouble, and Causleen dared not. So Hardcastle came leading his horse to the door, and was astonished to find two women there who gazed at him as if he came from under some tomb in the churchyard.
“Is it your ghost, Master?” quavered Rebecca.
“No, it’s my body—and damned tired at that.”
Causleen, before she could check the impulse, ran forward and touched his sleeve. Long watching beside her father had weakened her endurance. So had the suspense that brooded over Logie since the feud was up.
“Oh, thank God,” she said with a sudden rush of tears.
Hardcastle glanced at her in frank wonder. It was long since anyone had given him such a welcome home; yet only yesterday she had shunned him as if he had the plague. There was the scent of violets in her hair as it brushed his shoulder—a warm, wet fragrance, born of the night-time breeze—that unsteadied him. He had thought himself past that sort of blandishment, since Nita and he shared courting-days; but his heart found a quicker beat.
She withdrew sharply, ashamed of her weakness and blaming him for it. “Rebecca was so sure that you were killed on the way home,” she said. “I could not comfort her.”
Rebecca herself was in a fine, gusty rage. She had gone through much in the last hour, and the relief from foreboding asked for outlet.
“I will say this, Master, though I let my tongue be still most times. Outrageous folk, men are. They’ll go pleasuring to market, in spite o’ Garsykes being out against ’em. They’ll let their women moil and toil for ’em, and wait their coming—and, like as you might say for frolic, they’ll come an hour late to supper.”
Hardcastle could understand her wrath no better than Causleen’s tears. It seemed to him simply that the two of them were daft. But then most women were.
“I was kept,” he said.
“Aye, you were kept—and the best supper ever cooked is spoiling to a cinder. And you never stopped to think I should be picturing you dead on the roadway all this time.”
The moon was racing through a scud of cloud, and Rebecca peered through the silver dusk.
“What have you got on your saddle?” she asked sharply.
“Storm, poor brute. He fell asleep on the journey, worn out with it all.”
Rebecca’s gusty mood pointed south-west now, instead of shrill nor’-east. “Then I’m glad you’re late. Shepherd Brant was in my kitchen just now, boasting he’d put lead into Storm at last and that he’d die of it among the brackens.”
“He came near it.”
“Maybe; but a miss is as good as a mile. I sent Brant stamping out, with a flea in his big, hairy ear—and, as for Storm, poor lamb, we’ll mend his legs for him.”
The Master had lifted Storm already from saddle. The dog bit feebly at him, and writhed in pain; but his growling ceased when he found himself in the old quarters that had grown to be home and respite to him.
Rebecca ran in search of linen and a cunning ointment she bought from the gypsies who came peddling to her door, and then Causleen, wise with dogs, held the rough head while Hardcastle felt down the maimed hindquarters.
“There’s nothing broken,” he said, glancing up, “but Brant fired at close range, damn him. Storm’s flesh has gaps in it.”
The sheep-slayer had gone through evil days—hunger while they hunted him, and after it the straddling out in search of cover after Brant had left him with two legs to go on instead of four. So he let them do what they would with him, though Rebecca’s ointment galled his wounds as she plied them with no gentle fingers. This was ease after hardship—three folk attentive on him, and a snug lodging for the night.
The cunning ointment, its bite sharp at first, began to soothe, and Storm dozed happily.
“Poor lamb, he’s bettering now,” said Rebecca, wiping her fingers on a scrap of linen.
Hardcastle laughed quietly. “There are lambs that were never born because he slew the ewes. But he’s ours, Rebecca.”
They stood together in the silence. Peril brooded like thunder-weather over the house of Logie. The wind, chattering and plucking at the casements, spoke of stealth, of nameless treacheries closing round about its walls. The pedlar was crying in his sleep for another glimpse of Ben Crummock before he died.
Do as they would, gloom spun its webs about them—little, clinging webs that hindered courage—till Jonah, the brindled cat, stalked down the passage. Storm’s protest when they tended the wounds had roused Jonah from his sleep, and he came to learn what ailed an ancient comrade. His thick, handsome coat was all a-bristle, his eyes green and combative.
Jonah paid no heed to Rebecca, but stepped into the cupboard and glanced at the sheep-slayer, and mewed restlessly. Storm lifted his head drowsily and growled a welcome, and the brindled cat curled himself into the dog’s shaggy neck and looked out on all intruders with defiance. Then they licked each other once or twice and fell into a deep slumber of content.
“Listen to him,” said Rebecca, with a cackle of glee. “Listen to vagabones Jonah. He’s purring as loud as an eight-day clock, Lord bless him.”
Their eerie hour of dread was broken. Causleen glanced at the Master, and for the first time since they shared Logie’s roof they laughed together. Then she grew wide-eyed and grave again.
“But your hands are raw!” she cried.
“Storm did not know me just at first. They’ll heal,” said Hardcastle.