CHAPTER XV
Michael Draycott was waiting for him at the gate when Hardcastle came over the moor to Broken Firs the next afternoon, and he nodded a cheery greeting.
“You’re on the very stroke of the time you promised, Master.”
“I have to be, Michael. You’re so often near dying that a minute beyond might be too late.”
“Now, I willun’t have that old joke thrown at me,” chuckled the farmer. “Maybe I have my fancies, like one here and there; but I do get up from my death-bed wonderful regular.”
“And then you want to dip into my pockets for repairs. It would pay me to keep you ill in bed.”
“Not in the long run, when roofs began to gape and gates dropped all to bits. There’d be a tidier penny to pay then than now.”
“Have it your own way, Michael, but remember I’m a poor man.”
The ancient ritual went its way, as they moved from one corner to another of the trim farmstead—Hardcastle with shrewd reluctance, Michael with deep resolve to get all he wanted, and a little more.
The little more was broached as Hardcastle was leaving, after a wide-spread meal in the farmstead’s parlour.
“Talking of mistals——” said Michael.
“We didn’t happen to be.”
“No, but we were thinking o’ them. That one yonder would be all the better if it was doubled in size. The farm’s prospering so, I’ve scarcely room for my beasts to turn about in.”
“But, Michael, you’re bound to die soon, in one of those bad turns of yours. You’d better be thinking of your latter end, instead of farm-buildings.”
The man’s weather-red face grew plump with laughter. “I’m not on such nodding-terms with death as I used to be, Master. There’s summat in this durned feud with Garsykes that makes me want to live to a hundred and three.”
“Six of us feel like that,” said Hardcastle, glancing down to where Garsykes caught the last of the crimson sun-glow.
“Aye, and six o’ that sort can be fifty or two-score when need asks. I couldn’t have thought it—the way old bones grow young in these good times.”
All they had shared of peril lay silent between them, but confessed, as they watched the last glow redden and die out across the Garsykes hollow, leaving it to a grey, disastrous sleep.
“I’ll go agateards with you, Master,” said Draycott by and by—“lest young blood gets the better of you, and you run single-handed into yond foul stye.”
“There’s no likelihood, Michael. I’m ready for them if they come to Logie, and it stands at that.”
“Ah, but you’re young. And youth can’t bide to wait sometimes.”
Michael went with him as far as the turn of the track, where the heather ran down to the pastures; and then he bade him a hale good-night and God-speed.
“I’ve a sick heifer needing me, Master—and, forgive me, I was thinking of the feud instead.”
Hardcastle swung down the track. The sun had westered now about these higher slopes, and dusk overtook him as he reached the top of the sheep-track that wound to Logie. Across the frost-haze of the valley, lights twinkled out from Garsykes one by one, and he laughed grimly as he stood and watched them. Tired wayfarers might mistake them for stars of hope, might blunder out of the hill-top wastes into such welcome as waited for them there.
A harsh joy in feud came to him. The end of Logie was sure as anything could be in this world, but he would hold his good house to the last. There would be no surrender, and with a quick flash of humour he pictured Rebecca playing a besom heftily amid the flaming havoc of her kitchen. And Storm, maybe, after much red sheep-slaying, would kill a man or two of the Wilderness, and so die an honest dog.
The old days of peace and money-getting were remote as a dream remembered on waking to full life. Out there, behind the twinkling lamp-gleams, were men and women plotting now, no doubt, some crafty lighter blow before they came in force against the house.
Death had seemed, in those old days, an end to life, a sorrowful laying away of folk under green turf that stopped their ears for ever to the wheeling cries of moor-birds—closed their nostrils to savour of wind and sun and rain across the striding lands—ended all things and all joy.
Now, as he stood looking over the wandering valley mists, he seemed, for one bewildering moment, to see with clearer vision. For Logie’s honour he had grappled with the three gaunt men who met him at the pinfold—was it weeks or years ago?—and since then death had shadowed him. Aye, but was death more than a stride from one life to another? What if, for men who had loved the homeland, there were wider moors beyond, and sweeter winds and lustier joy in strength?
The thought stayed with him. New horizons widened over widening hill-spaces. What if death were no wormy end of life, but a beginning of new days?
No breeze ruffled these upland wastes. Little frets of night-time life stirred among the gnarled heather and the bents. The land’s soul was in a mood as deep and still as Hardcastle’s, and a fine communion held between the Master who was a lover to his acres, the acres that loved him.
He roused himself at last, with another laugh at Garsykes and himself, and was turning to swing down the sheep-track when a cry broke sharp as a pistol-shot across the moor. It sounded close at hand. Then a second cry came—far-off, it seemed—and another. Hardcastle peered through the dark that had scarcely served to show him a yard of the track ahead. He could see nothing, but the cries rose to a shriek of terror, and he ran forward, this way and that, forgetting that the moor was thick with ambush. Twice he sucked a foot out from the bog, and once he blundered against a rock that cut deep.
Still the cries sounded, weaker now. The darkness baffled hearing, as well as sight, after a fashion of its own. Someone was dying, near at hand, and Hardcastle could not find him. The failing cries maddened his will to save—the will that would have gone through six-foot drifts to save sheep over-blown.
Then the grey haze lifted. A brave, young moon shone over Logie-land—over the misty hollow, and across to Garsykes—and, not twenty paces off, Hardcastle saw a little lad, half of him buried in green slime. In his haste to get to him, the Master was all but lost himself; for his heavier weight crashed through the ooze that was less firm even than true bogland. He sank to his knees before touching firm ground on the sloping brink of the marsh, then reached forward and gripped the lad’s upstretched arms; and never afterwards, in trying to recall what followed, could he remember anything but a struggle that seemed endless. Each tug, to drag the boy towards him, unsteadied his own foothold; and, when he had him in his arms, the fight to regain dry land again brought every muscle thick-standing and near to breaking-point.
They came to firm ground at last, and the boy clung about him with piteous cries.
“I want my mammy—oh, I want my mammy.”
“Well, I can’t be that—and, be damned to you, you’re a wet sort of lad to father. Where d’ye hail from, laddie?”
“From Garsykes.”
Hardcastle glanced across the narrow valley, and back again to the boy. Tired as he was, exasperated by the simple answer, the humour of it all appealed to him. Apart from peril of other marshes he might blunder into, how could he let this waif go lonely with his fright across the mile that would seem endless leagues to him—the mile that stretched between this and Garsykes?
There was nothing for it but to go—a fool, knowing the way of the Lost Folk and their mercies—into the midst of what they had in store for him. Rebel as he would against suicide of this sort, he could not thrust aside a lad who shivered as he clung to him.
So they two went across the moonlit wilderness, picking their way between the bogs and the broken grounds. It was not easy going. The light was enough to show them a safe way till clouds came over the moon’s face now and then, and they were alone with darkness and the unfenced mines that lurked for heedless feet.
Hardcastle’s temper grew rusty as a file. He was taking all these pains for one of Garsykes brats, and the brat was wet and clinging. He wearied of the lad’s piteous crying for his mother, and cursed himself for inhumanity.
They plodded on, till they came half down the slope on his side of the stream. And now a great hubbub sounded from Garsykes, up above them, and lanterns were bobbing to and fro. A woman’s voice rose shrill into the stillness of the night.
“You’ve got to find my lad, or I’ll know why!”
“Turning us out o’ doors on a wild-goose chase,” came the answer.
Hardcastle knew the voice for Long Murgatroyd’s, and his surly protest was taken up by one and another.
“The lad will be at High Stellings, where you sent him an hour since. They’d never let him run a risk of dark o’er-taking him—open mines and what-all—so they’re keeping him till morn.”
“Aye. They’re keeping him. So let’s all get back to thy inn, widow, and chalk up more riches for thee on thy door.”
“There’ll be neither ale nor chalks till we’ve found Ned. I tell you he’s lost on the moor. I know it in my bones. And, whisht ye, what was that?”
Far-off she had heard the lad’s cry for his mammy, though they were deaf to its meaning.
“A peewit, widow—or a curlew, maybe. One of ours must be poaching up the fells, and started a wild-bird up.”
But soon the oft-repeated cry, as it came nearer, was plain to all, and their lanterns went bobbing up and down, each man thinking he knew where to find the sound, and each baffled constantly by the utter darkness.
Hardcastle made for the nearest light, and found himself face to face with Long Murgatroyd, who gaped at him as at a ghost and turned his lantern from the Master to Ned’s dripping figure. Then he gave a rough, unsteady chuckle.
“Here’s the big and little of it come to Garsykes, neighbours. You’ve got your lad, widow, and we’ve got summat, too, we wanted.”
The rest came crowding about Murgatroyd. The shivering waif had leaped at a bound into his mother’s arms, and Hardcastle found himself alone, confronting half the men of Garsykes. With peril came a sharp, useless sort of vision for all that made up this wild happening. The half-circle of lanterns—the scowling faces, part in light and part in shadow—the dumb, do-nothing darkness of the waste lands—they were part of a scene he looked on at, as if it were no concern of his.
That for a moment. Then he gathered his strength, as a man might pull a bow-string tight. Most of these folk were deep in liquor, and all were scathing with rancour that had grown by what it fed on since the day he paid no tribute.
“We’d best end Logie now,” said Long Murgatroyd—“Logie and its mucky pride.”
A wolfish growl answered him, though still some dread of Hardcastle held them. He had gone like “a ghost-guarded man” through these last weeks of all that Garsykes could bring to his undoing. They were many—but they lived in a country haunted by trolls and mine-goblins, and superstition was in their slackened fibres.
A breeze got up, quick and merry, from the top of swart Pengables Hill. The clouds overhead were riven apart, and the eager moon leaped through. It maddened the Garsykes Men afresh to see Hardcastle standing there straight to his height and waiting silently for what might follow.
Widow Mathison, still clutching her boy as if she feared to let him go again, ran suddenly in front of Hardcastle and loosened her tongue on the rabble.
“Where’s your shame, you hulking wastrels? Do as you like to Hardcastle when you can catch him fair—but not when he’s on this sort of errand. Ned’s all I have, and can’t you see by the drip of him that he’s been saved fro’ drowning?”
“What do we care?” muttered Long Murgatroyd. “Ned’s no bairn of ours.”
“That makes him the likelier lad,” said the widow, tartly. “And now you can all pack home, for I willun’t have you touch the man.”
Appealed to singly, there were men here who would have been pricked by shame; but they were a mob out of hand, beast-like and robbed of what wits they ever had.
“Who’s the widow to come hectoring it over us?” snarled one.
“Quit talking,” shouted another. “Let drive at Hardcastle instead.”
The Master stepped quietly in front of Widow Mathison, and they swayed and jostled, eager to attack, but held for a moment by brutish fear of his unconcern. In that moment the moon was snapped up by a scudding cloud, and Hardcastle took his luck as it came.
His one hope of defence was to attack. Without a pause he ran forward, lifting the stout stick he carried, and smashed the lanterns one by one. Then, in the dark of his own making, he rained blows at random into the midst of the screaming throng.
Luck could not hold for long, he knew. Already the cloud was passing, and with clearer light would come the end for him. But meanwhile it was good to be alive, drawing healthy music from Garsykes skulls.
When the moon raced free again, it shone on a few fallen men, on others who yelped like wolves and came at him headlong. He glanced about him, ran nimbly to a corner where two field-walls protected him from rear attack, and waited for them. A man had to die once and some day. What better end could Logie ask of him?
Will o’ Wisp, lurking beside the track that Hardcastle would take from Broken Firs, wearied of his job. It had been well enough, with Nita beside him, to do her bidding; but the silence and the night-time sobered him. What grudge had he, after all, against the Master of Logie? The man had taken a random shot at him, long ago, when he tried to rob the post-boy. That was all in the day’s work of chance and mischance. But what of this lying in wait, cold-blooded, for a shot that could not miss its mark?
Will was a rogue by nature—and from choice because life offered more frolic along unlicensed roads. Yet decency, of his own sort, travelled all roads with him, like a faithful comrade, and the longer Hardcastle tarried in his coming, the chillier grew this enterprise of waiting to shoot a man as if he were a sitting rabbit.
What had he heard in the Garsykes tavern? That Nita played with men as cats play with mice—that the way of her with them all was one and the same—and the end a long sliding down the slope to hell. They did not mince matters in their talk, the Garsykes Folk, and Will o’ Wisp thought of these things now.
Still Hardcastle did not come down the moor. Nita had pretended to know the way he would take to-night, the hour of his return. She was wrong, it seemed, and the rogue felt a stealthy gladness. The breeze sobbed and fluted through the naked spinney where he crouched. His gun lay chilly in half-frozen hands. Were they right when they spoke of the little basket-weaver as of a thing accursed?
He was too far on the Logie-side of the moor to hear the cries that had drawn Hardcastle from his home-track past the spinney; and at length he gave up the errand that had brought him here.
“Nita has hanged enough men in her garter,” he muttered, stretching his cramped limbs.
Then he went down and across the pastures, leaping a wall nimbly here and there, till he came near Garsykes and its tumult. He saw lanterns flitting like his namesake Will o’ Wisps about the pastures, heard Widow Mathison swing her tongue like a flail, and noisy voices answer to the lash.
It was all a mystery to him as he pressed forward, halting only when the clouds raced over from Pengables, hiding one step from the next. Through the stormy murk, as he listened, came a thunder-din of oaths, a pig-like screeching from men not used to bear pain silently.
The moon ran free again, and in the sharp, cold light he saw Hardcastle standing in the angle of two limestone walls, with half Garsykes yammering to be at him.
Will o’ Wisp had no liking for the village he had blundered into weeks ago. There were degrees of rascaldom, and his own feet went merrily on the margin of such deeps as Garsykes knew. Something in Hardcastle’s dour silence as he faced the rabble with uplifted cudgel—some liking, inborn in him, for a man meeting heavy odds, brought music into Will’s heart. Moreover, he was in mood to take sides with any man that Nita hated.
“What’s this, you Garsykes louts?” he asked.
They turned on him, ready to tear him to pieces instead of Hardcastle.
“Here’s Nita’s last favourite, Lord help him,” laughed Long Murgatroyd.
“He carries a fowling-piece, as it happens—and it’s loaded—and you’re a timid folk in Garsykes, unless all the luck’s in front of you. No, Murgatroyd, I wouldn’t stir a foot, if I was you. You’d find it a queer thing to be dead, with a charge of shot inside you instead of ale.”
Will o’ Wisp was himself. Free of Nita, free of cold-blooded murder up the moor, it tickled his fancy to be master of these folk—master too, of what would happen soon to Hardcastle.
He took his stand on a moonlit hillock, letting the polished barrel of his gun glint from one to another of the mob.
“I’m judge among you,” he said, with his heedless laugh.
“Are you, now?” growled Murgatroyd. “A likely man, you, to be judge of any folk.”
“I know ’em all so well, knowing myself,” chuckled Will. “There’s my loaded gun, too—and that helps a man to be a judge. What’s all this moil about, widow?”
Widow Mathison told him, instead, her mind about all Garsykes Men, born or unborn—with gusto, now that Hardcastle was safe. That made Will little the wiser till the lad broke from his mother’s grasp and then ran back again, afraid of what he had suffered on the fells.
“I fell into cold water, I did,” he whimpered, “and couldn’t get myself out. And a big man came and tugged at me, and brought me to my mammy.”
Will o’ Wisp understood now; and wrath kindled in his lazy mind.
“You’d kill Hardcastle for that?”
“Aye,” said Long Murgatroyd. “What do we care for the widow’s brat?”
Will o’ Wisp let his gun roam quietly from one to another of the company. And then he spoke.
“In all my days I never happened on as foul a stye as Garsykes. Hardcastle o’ Logie saved one of yours—and there’s something you never learned, it seems.”
“Oh, aye?” sneered Murgatroyd.
“There’s fairation. Be dummocked, there’s fairation.”
Still facing them, he made his way to Hardcastle and nodded cheerily. “I’m going Logie way myself,” he said, “so we might as well step up together. Three’s company sometimes, and I’m taking the gun as a parting gift from Garsykes.”
Hardcastle fell into step beside him, swinging his cudgel. A pluckier mob would have rushed the pair of them, knowing that Will’s fowling-piece could speak only once before they were trodden down. But each man thought of his own skin, and stood cursing stupidly, and watched them dip over and down the hill-crest.
The Master and Will o’ Wisp went in silence through the blue-grey, misty night, till Hardcastle turned suddenly.
“There’s no return to Garsykes for you, after this. I’m in your debt.”
“Nay. I’d meant to go. I’m not their sort of rogue, and never was.”
“There’s supper and a bed at Logie.”
“Bless you, I want no thanks. If there was danger to-night I’d come and gladly. But they’ll let you alone for awhile. I know ’em.”
Nothing Hardcastle could say persuaded the vagabond to change his mind, when they came to the hill that swept with a break-neck fall to Logie Brigg.
“I’m getting as far as I can from Nita Langrish,” laughed Will. “She’d be weaving her spells about me to-morrow if I stayed as near as this.”
With that he borrowed a fill of ’baccy for his pipe, bade Hardcastle a rollicking farewell, and went his ways into the everywhere that lay within the night-time forest and beyond.
Hardcastle chuckled quietly. After all, few strangers had come into Garsykes, and fared out the better in this world’s gear. Will o’ Wisp could boast of a good fowling-piece that was his by right of conquest.
Then the Master turned for home; and the steep of the road brought anguish to the knee that had blundered against a rock while he was rescuing the widow’s lad. There had been no time to think of it till now.
For very pain he was forced to rest on Logie Brigg, and at these times life lies in wait for every man. Pride to keep Garsykes at bay was well enough. So was joy in the lusty strength that had cracked a crown or two to-night. Now these were gone. He halted on the bridge, as the pedlar and Causleen had done, before the trees were bare—weary, heartsick and body-sick, no flame alight on any beacon-hill ahead. It was as if he was a child again, seeking the mother who had slept these twenty years where the churchyard listened to the lap of waters round its graves.
Under him swirled Wharfe River, playmate and comrade and lover through the peaceful days; and now her voice stole kindly to his ear, talking of brave days to come. When all seemed in the losing, the river told him, it was time for the hale-souled sort to gather courage.
He limped up the hill to Logie with gaining hope, and found it easier for a lame man to climb than it had been to make the sharp descent that jarred every step. For all that, he was spent and tired when he came to his own gate—till he saw Causleen waiting for him there. The moon showed him a face pale and eager, framed by dark hair that was loose about it like a glory.
“You were in danger somewhere, and I could not help you.” The Highland voice was low and troubled. “There was a crying up the waste lands—your feet blundered into marshes——”
“How should you know?” he broke in.
“The vision came,” she went on, with great simplicity. “I did not ask for it. It came.”
Hardcastle’s heart beat faster, for no reason that he knew of. Since Causleen’s first coming there had been recurring enmity between them broken by little rifts that let the sunlight through. He had not known till lately how he had begun to need and seek her comradeship. To-night he gained a deeper knowledge. Her welcome at the gate was the one thing he had craved, all the long way from Garsykes, and it was his.
“You’re glad I’m home again?”
She grew still and cold. “Glad? Yes. You have been kind to us—two pedlars tramping to your gate. The vision came, and I spent myself in sending help to you across the waste—help of the spirit—and, of course you’ll laugh at fancies—I spent myself, not for your sake, but because you’d shown us kindness—of your own rough sort. I wished to pay a debt.”
Logie’s Master had known mixed weather on the uplands, but never such a March-tide change from sun to bitter, east-wind spite. The pedlar’s girl was remote from him as the top of old Pengables Hill, with its head among the driving sleet.
“Is it Nita,” he asked clumsily, “and her chatter of the night we spent down yonder?”
“It is Nita.”
The man’s big, simple heart found room at last. Through these last weeks he had been groping forward to the light.
“Best marry me,” he said. “I’ve wanted it, Causleen.”
She answered nothing for awhile. Then sleet came stinging at his face again.
“I do not care for pity. Oh, you are clumsy in your kindness! Gossip has touched us, and you stoop to offer marriage to the beggar-maid. You are generous.”
“I want it,” he repeated doggedly.
“I’ve shame enough to bear as it is. Would I add to it? To sit each day at table, and look across at you, and know that I owed it all to pity—would that be happiness?”
She turned to go, then glanced at his knee as if she had not seen till now that it was bleeding through the torn cloth of his riding-breeches.
“You crashed against a rock,” she said softly. “The vision showed me that, too. Can I wash and bind it for you?”
“It is of no account.”
“You mean that Rebecca the paragon would have more skill? She is so wonderful.”
Hardcastle could only wonder at her moods. She had seemed to care that he had taken a hurt, and now she was jealous of Rebecca. And again she had turned and was looking at him with wide, questioning eyes.
“You asked if it was Nita. It was—but not her gossip. Why do you lie to me, Hardcastle of Logie?”
With that she was gone in earnest, and Hardcastle limped slowly up the dappled moon-dusk of the road. Near home as he was, a late-found instinct prompted him to hold his cudgel in readiness for whatever the swaying shadows of the firs might hide. His left hand swung idly at his side, till suddenly a wet snout pushed against it and a friendly smell stole up in greeting.
“Back again, are you, Storm?” said the Master, with gruff banter. “Red from the feast, as usual?”
But the dog’s grey muzzle was innocent of stains. For three days he had ravened, then had slept off the after-sickness, had lapped greedily at every stream he passed. No guile showed in the brown, humid eyes. He knew nothing of repentance, or need of it. It was just that his wander-lust was over, and somewhere deep in his being was the knowledge that danger threatened Logie. He was home again, and at his post.
“It was time you came,” said Hardcastle. “Dogs I know, and horses I know—but women are beyond me.”
Storm had the better of him; for a half-hour later Causleen found him in the cupboard under the stair, and brought him food, and made much of him before she bent above his tousled head.
“Oh, Storm,” she said, and cried her heart out.
CHAPTER XVI
Hardcastle fretted during the next days, because the hurt to his knee yielded slowly even to Rebecca’s skill with peat and simples and the right way of handling bandages. The fear was on him constantly that Garsykes would hear of his infirmity and rush to the attack before his strength returned to face it.
There was the pedlar, trusting to the shelter he had promised him—and Rebecca, old in service—and Causleen.
There was Causleen. She was aloof and chill whenever they met about the house. He could make nothing of her whims. Was it his fault that he had been asked to save her life, and was powerless to rescue her from the whip of Nita’s tongue, except by marriage? And marriage she disdained. He tried to reason it all out, not understanding that reason was the last thing concerned with what had happened to Causleen and himself.
Always the worst of his fretting returned to her. If those louts from Garsykes came and he had only one knee to serve him, what would chance? His mind ran out to the unthinkable—for Causleen.
“Now, it’s not a bit of good,” said Rebecca on one of these afternoons, as she was bandaging his knee afresh, “not a bit of good to go about like a man that thinks the roof will fall because he’s got a pain in his knee. Men are all alike, Lord help ’em—’specially when they’re mending nicely, and ought to be giving a thanks-be, instead of glowering like a thunderstorm. It nags a bit, what I’m rubbing into the raw o’ your wound? Well, there’s healing goes with nags sometimes.”
“You don’t know,” grumbled the Master. “I fall lame just when Logie needs me. There’s you and Donald——”
“Aye, and there’s Donald’s lass. That’s where your shoe pinches. Times were different when I was young.”
She tied the bandage, sewed its edges up and bit the thread off with her strong, ancient teeth.
“Different?” asked Hardcastle, impatient of her ministry and all things.
“Aye. We never doubted Logie’s roof was safe. My lad doesn’t doubt it to this day. You’re young, Master, and I’m of the elder days, and I tell you what I know.”
Rebecca had no more to do with bandages and healing. She was wrapt into another world—grey and gaunt, a prophetess.
“War comes to Logie-side. The youngsters fight, and the old see far. D’ye think I go every night and morning to tryst my lad at the gate and get nothing for it? He died for Logie once—and it was forty years ago.”
Jonah the brindled cat, crept into the room and leaped to Rebecca’s shoulder. He was no hearthside lover now, but wild and bridling.
“Even Jonah seems to know there’s trouble coming,” went on Rebecca. “Well, let it come, and we’ll outface it as we’ve always done.”
“There were fewer men in Garyskes then,” said the Master gloomily—“and more who were staunch for Logie.”
Rebecca glanced at him, and even her free speech was checked. She read his heart, as he could not. The odds against him had not brought this black mood, but fear for Causleen had. Awhile since she had been jealous of the girl, resentful of the gaining fear that her own reign at Logie might be ended soon. Now she feared lest Causleen’s playing with the Master should ruin all. It was no time “for furbelows and cantrips,” and how could a man fight his best with half of him wondering if his lass cared?
“You’ve been fretting to give that knee o’ yours a taste of the fresh air,” she said grudgingly. “Have your way, then, for it’s mending fast. And, of course, you’ll go a mile if I tell you the half is enough and to spare.”
Hardcastle went more than the mile. He was unused to the prison of four walls for days on end, and the wine of the crisp November afternoon got into his blood with every step he took. In all the years behind he had seldom seen Logie-land in its full breadth and splendour as he saw it now. The striding acres, wind-blown and lonely—the last sunset glow on old Pengables—the sombre forest getting to its sleep—all were like ancient friends who brought a new, swift welcome. They might be in the losing, but they were his as yet, and wonderfully dear.
One moorland track lured him on to another, till he reached the beech-wood that stepped down to Scawgill Water. Life had done this and that for him, but had not killed the boy’s romance that would linger always in this silent place of mystery, with its grave, round-boled trees, its red-russet drift of leaves that crinkled to the tread. Squirrels had their tree-top nests here, and badgers lived in the “earths” beside the stream. A great dreamer, in spite of his hardness, the Master still peopled the glen with all that country legend had to tell of water-nixies, trolls and goblins. It was so hushed a place, so instinct with underfret of the primeval life, that no man could linger here and fail to know its witchcraft.
A stifled cry sounded near at hand, and then a groaning, low and long-drawn-out. Hardcastle, startled out of his dreams, glanced sharply round. Long since a wandering tinker had come to a foul end here, and his ghost, they said, was restless time and time.
The pigeons ceased their crooning in the tree-tops. A cold and slender wind, prying to the bone, chilled Hardcastle. Far down Logie Dale a farm-dog yapped and barked, and a roaming fox took up the challenge.
Hardcastle glanced about him, and up a clearing of the wood saw a body swinging from a tree. All the boy in him took fright; but the man bade him go and see what this ghost of a suicide dead fifty years ago was made of.
The gloaming filtered through leafless branches and showed him a gaunt, six-foot body turning and twisting on a rope. The body still groaned, but with lessening vigour; and there was something pitiful in the feet that trod helplessly on air, seeking firm ground.
Hardcastle got out a knife and ripped the cord across. The body tottered and swayed for an instant, and afterwards it needed all his strength to check it in its fall and lower it into the withered brackens, Then he loosed the frowsy shirt and watched the dull purple steal from the man’s face, giving way to a pallor as of death.
The slow return of life was terrible to be alone with, and Hardcastle welcomed the plea for water that came by and by. The stream lay below them, and he had no vessel of any kind; so he shouldered the half-lifeless body, carried it to the bank and ladled water in his palms as best he could.
“That’s better,” gurgled the man, when at last his choking throat contrived to swallow a few drops.
The farm-dog and the yapping fox had roused every house about the fells by now. From Pengables to Crake Beacon, dogs gave tongue, loud across the still night-air. And close at hand, in answer, came a scampering of wild things through the undergrowth. Field voles twittered, and overhead the flitter-mice cried thinly as they vanned to and fro.
In the midst of this stealthy terror of the woodland folk, the man propped against the stream’s bank began to drink greedily and to good purpose, till Hardcastle denied him more. Then they two looked at each other, in the light of a moon that shone wanly through the naked tree-tops.
“It’s you, Hardcastle o’ Logie?”
“Yes, Long Murgatroyd—and the devil of a time you’ve given me.”
“That’s good news.” The man’s slow-witted hatred, nursed in health, leaped out in this hour of weakness and release from death; “but it’s naught to what’s waiting for you up at Logie.”
A madness came on Hardcastle. The sweat of trouble he had given this lout, dangling between earth and sky awhile since, asked for a word or two in another key. His hands were itching for the throat that he had saved.
“You were minded to spare the hangman trouble later on,” he said at last, “and so am I. But I’ll leave you to it.”
Murgatroyd began to laugh, and could not check himself for awhile. Then he put a hand to his throat, and laughed again, as a dotard might.
“I came near to hanging myself in Nita’s garter, as that terrible pranksome fellow, Will o’ Wisp, would say. And so did you, Hardcastle. What could I do but laugh? We might have been swinging together—me on one tree, and Logie’s high-almighty on its neighbour. We’d have made a bonnie picture—with Nita coming to look on.”
The farm-dogs yelped and barked across the wastes. Fear gained on the little people of the wood. The breeze sobbed and whimpered, and would not be still. And Hardcastle feared greatly, too—lest he could keep his hands no longer from Long Murgatroyd.
“Are you fit to be left, if I take your rope home with me?” he snapped.
Murgatroyd was recovering fast. “You needn’t take it. She maddened me so with her come-and-kiss, and her stand you off, and all the sick damnation of it, that I fancied a rope’s end more than Nita. That’s gone.”
“Gone, has it?” asked Hardcastle, with a sick kind of wonder.
“Aye. I’ll get my arms about her, soon or late. I promised her no less. So you run home to Logie, if there’s any Logie standing.”
“It’s stood against the Garsykes swine for years out of mind. I’m not for hurrying, Murgatroyd.”
Deep, sullen hatred showed in the man’s face, mottled with returning life. To Hardcastle it was as if he looked down into the pit of hell, seeing a lost man who would not be saved at any cost of trouble from helping hands above.
“Nita wanted me to go with them to-night,” said Murgatroyd; “but I told her I’d rather hang myself in a wood than do her bidding.”
The man fell into cackling laughter again, then shivered as memory of the rope returned.
“We’d have been a bonnie couple, swinging side by side; but ’twas not to be, it seems.”
Hardcastle left him there, and swung up the fields to Logie. His pace quickened with every stride, for Murgatroyd’s tale of peril to the house had found its mark. If it were true that an attack was planned, he might already be too late; and he thought ceaselessly of his home—and of Causleen.
When he topped the rise that looked down on Logie, he glanced eagerly up-dale. Prepared to see flames leaping high into the dusk, he saw only a steady lamplight glow that shone from the window over the porch—Causleen’s window—and instead of men’s frenzied shouts he heard only a farm-lad’s song as he went about the business of the mistals.
The relief was so quick, so urgent, that a sudden “God be thanked” escaped him. Murgatroyd had lied. He should have known as much, and saved himself the sick suspense of his journey up the fell.
“For why should God specially be thanked?” asked a quiet voice at his elbow.
Brant the shepherd, a silent man in all his ways, had come noiselessly to the Master’s side, and was tugging at his wispy beard.
“Confound you, Stephen, you startled me. They said the Garsykes Men had come to Logie.”
“Well, they haven’t, to all appearance; but they come to my sheepfold as if there was no law in the land. I stepped down to talk about it with you, Master.”
“The ewes must take their chance, as we all do these days.”
“Aye, they mean little to you, and always did. Time was when you sheltered Storm, though he was a red-jawed outlaw dog. Well, I got Storm at last.”
Hardcastle found the grim humour that gave salt and savour to these harsh days. “You got Storm, poor beast,” he said, thinking of the cupboard under the stair at Logie—thinking, too, of Causleen and her way with the backslider.
“He’ll trouble me no more—but durned if these Garsykes Men aren’t worse than a kennel-full of such as Storm. They grow outrageous—fair outrageous.”
The Master was glad of the chance given him to speak his mind. “There are six of us leal to the old house, Stephen. The rest are paying tribute.”
“Damn ’em, yes.”
“Get away before Logie goes. I brought you into this, thinking we’d win through. There’s no need for you to stay.”
“No,” said Brant—“except that we’re twin and marrow in our love o’ Logie. Where you bide, I bide.”
Hardcastle glanced over to the light that shone from Causleen’s window. All was in the losing, and his wits were keen to save her from the last, foul uproar.
“Could we get the pedlar and his girl to your hut on the moor? It’s cold up yonder at this time o’ year, but there are worse things than cold.”
“We could. The bracken-sledge would bump old Donald a bit by the way, but we’d pad him well with hay-trusses.”
“I’ll have the sledge out to-morrow, with the old grey horse to draw it. He’s only eating his head off in the stable.”
“Not so fast, Master,” put in Brant dryly. “That hut o’ mine is well enough for a rough shepherd, but I’ll fettle it up before a maid can pretend to be suited with it.”
“It’s no time to ask whether the maid’s pleased or not,” snapped the other. “You know what may happen any moment if she stays.”
Brant was silent as they crossed the last pasture-field. He knew many things—not least of them the reason that made Hardcastle gloomy and prone to caution nowadays. It would be better for them all if Causleen were out of Garsykes’ reach, and the Master’s mind relieved of the sapping dread lest hurt should come to her.
“I’ll be ready,” he said, opening the back-gate of Logie for Hardcastle to pass through. “Then, after we’re free of what you might call encumbrances, we’ll set about putting the fear of hell into the Lost Folk.”
Hardcastle regained his old self at a bound, for no reason that he guessed. “What’s in that feud-sick mind of yours, Brant?”
“To gather my stolen ewes from Garsykes. Six of us are staunch, and six have dogs to round ’em up and back to Logie. We’ve fowling-pieces, too.”
“But cannot use them, Brant. You should know that I’m a magistrate.”
Humour answered veiled humour. “To be sure we can’t—save for killing vermin. That’s allowed by law.”
A great burden had slipped from the Master’s shoulders. He was free somehow, to carry a careless heart and fight Logie to the last edge of what might come.
“To-morrow, after we’ve got the pedlar safe up-moor?”
“The sooner the better. Who told you they were coming against Logie to-night?”
“Long Murgatroyd.”
“He’d be a liar if he stood on the brink o’ Kingdom Come.”
“That’s where he did stand—dangled, I should say—when I found him.”
“Oh, aye?” asked Brant, with slow curiosity.
“There are things men don’t think of twice, if they can help it. Come indoors, and tell Rebecca that winds are dry and thirsty on the heights.”
“They are,” said the shepherd, with conviction, “and from this to Hawes Water there’s no ale as ripe as Logie’s.”
They parted in the stable-yard, and Hardcastle, coming to the grey, moonlit front of the house, glanced at the room over the porch. The light still shone from it, and Causleen, kneeling on the window-seat, looked down at him. The lamp-glow behind her ran out to meet the silver-gold, soft moonlight. And both were tender with her beauty.
“Oh, I’ve waited for you,” she said, her voice soft as one of her own Highland burns in summer.
A great joy blazed up in Hardcastle, as if boyhood found its spring again. “You’ve waited?” he asked sharply.
“Yes. Rebecca is beyond herself with grief. She sees you lying dead somewhere on the fells, and sits and croons, saying she ought never to have let you out of her sight—with your wounded knee, and all the mad wolves hunting you.”
“Let them hunt,” said Hardcastle, his dreams shattered suddenly by her chill laugh of contempt.
“I will comfort Rebecca, while you go to father. He has been asking for you.”
“Is that mockery, too?”
“None of it is mockery. And Rebecca need not have feared. There’s a mad wolf glaring up at me—bigger than any of the Garsykes breed.”
Hardcastle conquered his gusty rage. She was a woman, and his guest. If the new dreams had to go—well, the old ones had gone, and soon Logie would be ended, too. Nothing mattered.
“Donald asks for me?” he questioned.
“I said it—and we of the Highlands do not lie, as you of Logie do.”
The Master limped into his own house, forgetting the fret of the knee that had broken Rebecca’s bandages by now. A yelp of welcome sounded the moment he set foot indoors, and Storm left his hiding-place and pressed close against him, clamoring for attention.
Hardcastle held up a warning hand. “Kennel, lad. There’s Brant in the house.”
Storm’s tail fell limp. His whole body seemed to shrink and lessen as he crept back to the cupboard. He had learned that Brant was a word of evil meaning.
“Poor devil,” muttered Hardcastle, “there’s not much left for him in life, though he saved three of us. Brant or another will get him soon.”
He went into the room where Donald lay on the settle, his body tethered by weakness, but his eyes bright and eager.
“I wanted you,” said the pedlar. “Sit ye down in the chair here, and I’ll let some of my long thoughts out. They burden me.”
His glance roved from Hardcastle to the pike that hung above the mantel, and back again.
“I’ll not grudge you that any longer,” he went on. “They tell me of your stand against the Lost Folk, and I care for a man who can make music out of odds. I would that, here in Yorkshire, you had the pipes to hearten you.”
His mind wandered to the glens of home, to unforgotten pibrochs and his long fight with poverty—wandered to the gorsy braes that he had roamed with Causleen’s mother. Then he spoke again, smiling gently.
“When one is chained as I am, there is nothing to be done, except grow wise. If a man can fight one sort of honest battle, he can fight all. I wanted you to know that—that your guests have not turned vagabonds for choice, or for lack of struggle.”
Hardcastle, wrenched out of old ruts by war and heartache, found a fine simplicity. He understood all that Donald left unsaid, the grace and manliness of it.
“My guests are very welcome,” he said, diffident and gruff. “They should know as much by this time.”
“We have fought, Causleen and I. There were no pipes with us, no press of foemen waiting for attack. There was only poverty—a dumb enemy, cold and crafty, that lay in wait.”
Again Donald’s glance wandered to the Flodden pike.
“Be gentle with an old man who sees before and after, and must ease his mind. There are cairns in my country, reared to Hielandmen who died with the broadsword in their hands. There’s not one to speak of those who fought poverty, the hardest foe of all.”
Then his restless mind went wandering down the centuries. He told of Macbeth and Duncan—of Glencoe and its narrow shambles—of Prestonpans and Derby Town and red Culloden Moor—as of staunch, forthright matters he had shared. And, whether he lived or died in far-off tumults, there was constantly the joy of well-worth-while, the thud of blows, the heartening wonder of the pipes, playing men up the further hills.
It was only when he came to the tale of his journey from the Highlands that the song went out of his voice, the light from his eyes. Hardcastle grew ashamed of his own wealth and ease, as he listened to the slow recountal of trinkets sold here, to earn a bed for the night—of fortunes told in an alien country to win the price of a wayside meal. The tale was so simply told that he, too, felt footsore and heartsore as he listened. Donald roused himself at last from his journeys down the years. The quiet, beguiling smile crept once more across the grey creases of his face.
“Have I wearied you with my chatter—as I tire you because I’m so long in dying?”
“We shall get you strong again——”
“No,” broke in Donald. “Something tells me the end is even nearer than you think—a tame end to a life that has dreamed so much of ancient battles.”
Hardcastle humoured his mood, garrulous but constantly returning to the one clouded purpose. For pride’s sake he needed to explain how Causleen and he came to be travelling the roads, and presently his mind grew clear.
“We had ever been Stuart men in the old days—losing, and hoping, and fighting—till little was left me when my time came to be laird in the dreadful days of honour and peace. That little went, and Causleen had to make her choice. There was a rich wooer came. A great name he had, and nothing against him but the one thing that damned all.”
“Go on, Donald.”
“You will not understand. How should you? The Stuarts were discrowned and out of mind long since, you’d say; but in the Highlands they can never be discrowned. And the wooer who came was of a clan that had sold the old allegiance for gold—just for guinea-pieces to jangle in a purse.”
The fire of youth kindled in Donald’s voice. Consuming wrath was in his eyes. And Hardcastle understood better than the pedlar guessed; for Logie moorlands knew the way of staunchness to their own allegiance.
“I left the choice to Causleen, though I’d rather have seen the child in her shroud than linked to him. ‘He can save the house for us with his gold,’ I said, to prove her. And, ‘He cannot,’ said she, ‘for there’s Stuart blood on it. A hundred years is not enough to cleanse it.’ So we took the roads together, she and I.”
His eyes closed for awhile. One purpose was achieved; but another clamoured for fulfilment, and he had little time to spare. He was alert again.
“She took the roads as bravely as she took her choice—but soon she will be travelling alone.”
There was question in the pedlar’s glance—a pleading that was command almost. And out of doors a breeze plucked and rattled at the windows, as if to deepen fear of what the lone highways had in store for Causleen.
Hardcastle watched the lamplight flicker in the draught, looked on the old, familiar furnishings with new vision—the bell-mouthed blunder-busses of his father’s time, the pewter polished to dim lustre by what was known to Rebecca as “elbow grease”—the pike that had given every son of Logie pause when he was minded to be less than the men who marched to Flodden long ago.
He knew what Donald hoped for, and with wry humour he recalled the way of Causleen since he saved her from the snow—her avoidance of him, or mockery such as she had showered on him from her window when he came by to-night.
“You would have me guard her? Nothing but marriage could give me that right.”
“I have watched you, and the laid-by folk see much. It seemed that you cared, and hope grew apace. That is why I tell you what her proper station is. My girl would not shame Logie’s pride.”
There was something wistful in the pedlar’s eagerness, his dignity. He longed for Causleen’s safety, but would not cringe for it.
“She will have none of me, Donald—so how can I ease your mind? I’ll ask no woman twice.”
A great joy shone in the pedlar’s face. He had had no inkling, till now, that Hardcastle had forestalled his keen desire.
“Second thoughts are sometimes best—especially a maid’s. She thought you offered marriage out of pity, maybe.”
“Yes. I could not persuade her from it.”
“You will,” said Donald softly, and drew a long breath of thankfulness, and dozed awhile.
When he roused himself, his hold on this world seemed gone. He looked out before him as if no house-walls and no leagues of foreign country hid the wild glens of Inverness. He was home again.
“I had two dreams,” he said, his voice clear and lusty. “One was to know Causleen safe, and that comes true. The other was a sick man’s fancy. I dreamed”—he tried to lift himself, and failed—“dreamed that I died a warrior, instead of Pedlar Donald.”
With that his eyes closed, and Rebecca, coming to see how it went with him, stood beside the settle, her grim face softened.
“Sleeps like a babby, poor soul—and it would be as well if he died in it, instead of living to be bumped on a bracken-sledge to-morrow. Brant sits snug by my hearth, and tells me you’re for turning the old man out o’ doors.”
“The Garsykes Men are coming. He’s safer up the moor.”
“His brat is safer, you mean. Why don’t you want to tuck me, too, on the sledge, if Logie is no place for women? D’ye think that, because I’ve a face like a hatchet, to scare men with, I’ve a heart after the same pattern? Ask the lad that keeps tryst with me at the gate, every night and all.”
She lowered the lamp, took another look at Donald as if he were an ailing first-born of her own, and together they went out into the draughty hall.
Storm yapped and whimpered from his cupboard, and Hardcastle went in to quiet him, thinking only of the dog’s peril, not of Logie’s.
“There’s Brant near by,” he said.
Storm would not be satisfied. He bared his teeth and growled till Hardcastle cuffed him. Then the sheep-slayer shivered and lay down—but not for fear of Brant—and whined, as the rising breeze about the house sobbed from the lost Garsykes lands.
When Hardcastle had fastened him in, with a biscuit or two for company, he went with Rebecca to the kitchen. They found Brant sitting by the hearth, a stoup of ale beside him.
“Getting mellow, Stephen?”
“Mellowish, as you might say.”
“There’s naught else to do these days, while the waiting-time is on.”
“He talks of sleeping here to-night,” said Rebecca, harking back to her grievance, “says he wants to be ready for the sledge-journey you’ve planned. If you want to kill poor Donald outright—well, bump him to his death on the bracken-track.”
Hardcastle, a little afraid of his henchwoman in times of ease, was the master now. “War has come. Will you put that into your mind once for all?”
“I’m not likely to forget it.”
“They’re coming one day to fire Logie. D’ye think we want to be crippled by thought of Donald, lying helpless? If he had his choice, would he be burned in his bed—or risk death on the bracken road, with God’s winds about him?”
“God’s winds blow snell and cruel these days Indoors or out, there’s little to choose, and men like Brant come trapesing in to beg a night’s lodging. He’s killed Storm, he tells us, and should be content with that, without adding murder of poor Donald to his Judgment tally.”
“Killing of Storm won’t worrit me, when my time comes,” chuckled Brant. “There’ll be a few score ewes to back me up—ewes that might have gone into his jaws if it hadn’t been for a lucky shot o’ mine. As for Donald, I’m with the Master. He’s a better chance on the uplands than tied to his bed at Logie.”
“Aye, talk at me, now you’re two to one. Beat an old woman down. But when you’ve killed a lone pedlar—one that’s shared Logie’s salt—don’t run to my apron for comfort. I’ll give you none.”
“We shouldn’t look for it,” said the Master dryly.
Rebecca, taut as a bow-string, was at war with herself and every living thing about her, because peril did not come. The lad who had trysted her at the gate these forty years, had told her yesterday of havoc brewing up. And instead there was a wet breeze sobbing round the house, and Brant with the ale-froth about his stubbly beard and Hardcastle, dour and tall and thinking of Causleen. She knew that he was thinking of her, and heard children, of his getting, shout in play. Forlorn, alone and jealous, she sought for a grievance, and found it speedily.
“Your knee’s dripping, Master, and so much for my bandages. A careless man at all times, you.”
She went to the cupboard near the hearth, and got out a store of lint, and herbs that staunched the bleeding. The Master was hers for a little while, before Causleen stole him from her.
“It hurts, as I rub it in?”
“Like the devil, Rebecca. But have your way.”
A bark sounded down the gusty corridor, and Brant cocked a hairy ear.
“If Storm wasn’t dead, I’d have sworn I heard him.”
“His ghost barked,” said Rebecca. “No wonder he’s haunting you from this to the end of all. Are you sure you killed him?”
“Aye, I’m sure of that. And, as for his ghost, it needn’t trouble me.”
Rebecca finished her task, and gave the bandage a rough, ill-tempered pat. “There! If fire and slaughter’s coming, it’s as well to have two legs to stand on instead of one. Men are feckless, left to themselves.”
And now a silence crept about the house, and into the hearts of these three. They longed for the wind to rattle at the casements; but it, too, had fallen dumb. Logie was a house aware—its every stone and rafter-beam—of a peril sinister and urgent.
The brindled cat, catching the stealthy unrest of the house, had gone to Storm for comfort, only to find his ancient ally prisoned for the night. He wandered back to the kitchen now, and sprang to the table. His eyes were big, his fur stiff and ruffled, as if he waited for rats to come to Logie.
Rebecca glanced at him. “You, Jonah? Drat you for another male that’s stepped into my kitchen, looking warlike—and finding no sort of battle.”
She swept him from the table, with a sudden gust of spite, and the cat, gathering himself up, showed teeth and claws and spat at her.
Then Rebecca laughed and cried, and gathered the great cat into her arms.
“I didn’t mean it, Jonah—but my heart’s just breaking with the trouble of it all.”