CHAPTER XXIII
The Garsykes Folk had grown tired of guarding the cave mouth. For a night, and half the next day, Nita’s tongue had whipped them into watchfulness; and when they were growing out of hand at last, she made light of what Hardcastle could do to them.
“Get you in first, Long Murgatroyd,” she gibed. “What with the ghosts and the silence, we’ve tamed Hardcastle by this time. You needn’t fear.”
Murgatroyd fetched a laugh up, big as his body. “If you’ll come with me,” he said.
The devil in her warmed to what she would find, somewhere along the track in yonder. To see Hardcastle distraught with fear and hunger—to have him cringe to her for the means of safety—that was the dream she had woven into her baskets for many a month gone by.
She took Murgatroyd’s hand, with a light and eager smile, and together they went into the cavern whose every winding was known to the rabble that followed with shrill, raucous jests.
They had candles in plenty, to scare the ghosts away; but somehow their laughter grew afraid of itself, and died out in eerie echoes, passed on from the wet spear-points of rock that came straight, like arrows, from the roof above. Then the whole cavern was filled with rolling murmurs that passed on their oaths into the everywhere beyond; but Nita kept them trudging forward.
They crossed the torrent. No trace of life showed, no sign of struggle. And now they reached the lake, and Nita paused at its brink, looking down into its unstirred waters. Were Hardcastle and the pedlar’s brat lying there, she wondered? But, if that had chanced, why had two Garsykes Men not returned—the two she had sent with knives to kill Hardcastle and torture Causleen?
One question was answered speedily, as she and Murgatroyd turned the bend of the track and saw two huddled shapes blocking their way. Murgatroyd roared with sudden terror, but Nita, laughing at him, held her candle low above the dismaying sight.
The man shot by Hardcastle at close quarters showed less ghastly than his fellow, for the charge had gone through him like a single bullet; but the other lay face up to the roof, and Storm’s fury was plain about his tortured throat.
“What is it?” growled the men behind, catching panic from Murgatroyd’s bellow of affright.
“Two of ours that could well be spared,” said Nita, and stepped on the fallen, and went forward for a pace or two.
“What is it?” came the uneasy question again as they heard a sharp cry escape her.
“The end of Logie. Come see it.”
They gathered courage from the exultation; and those who could press into the new cavern, formed to the left hand of the track, lifted a score of candles to what had been the end of their rock-fastness. The straight-faced barrier they had known was now a mad confusion of rocks broken into shapes fantastic, terrible.
“That’s their marriage-bed,” said Nita, her voice childest in its gentleness—“Hardcastle’s and his wanton’s. Did I say there’d be an end of Logie?”
“The man was always a bit of a fool,” growled Murgatroyd, recovering from his panic. “I reckon he loosed his fowling-piece on one o’ the two we trod on. A toddling Garsykes kid could have told him what it ’ud do to pent-in walls.”
When Nita, treading on light feet, led her men back through the cave, and out into the sweet upland air of afternoon, she took them straight to Widow Mathison’s inn, and left them there.
“Drink your fill, now Logie’s gone,” she said, and went up into the fells.
Near dusk she returned, and called them out from the ale that had merried them—called them into the cobbled street.
“Is Nita wise?” she asked softly. “Did she promise Logie’s end?”
They roared an answer, and suddenly she fell to dancing for their pleasure. The last crimson of the sunset flared down and over from Pengables Hill, and lit her slender paces and her slender limbs. As her fingers wove dark magic into the baskets she sold down and up the Dale, her whole body now snared and enticed the men she loathed.
Then once more she left them, going fleet-footed as a deer up the darkening fells, and came to her cottage where the little fir-wood rustled in the breeze. She slept as a tired child might, and soon after dawn went to her bath in the pool within the wood. Then she took the fell-track to Logie, and came to the open door of Rebecca’s kitchen, and stood there, darkening the wintry sunlight.
“The Master has not returned?” she asked softly.
Rebecca had looked for some such visit, and glanced up from dusting the china dogs on the chimney-shelf. “Not yet. But what is that to you?”
“He followed the pedlar’s girl into the cave, they tell me, and neither will come back, I fear.”
“Well, there’s still me and the brindled cat left, and we’ll see to Logie. Tell Garsykes from me, you basket-weaving trollop, that I’ll comb ’em with the thick end of a besom if they try their pranks.”
Nita could make nothing of the woman, so hard, so unmoved by the Master’s fate. “Have you no fear?”
“Aye, for such as you, once my fingers get about you. You’d best be gone.”
Nita tarried only for one last shaft before she fled from the other’s truculence. “The Master’s gone. And old Rebecca’s wits have gone. It’s the rarest day that Garsykes ever saw.”
“Maybe,” muttered Rebecca, as she got to her dusting again.
She knew how, after their safe return from the cave, Hardcastle had left Causleen in her care while he went up the moonlit road to join Shepherd Brant in his waiting for the Logie yeomen to return from market. She knew how he had probed under their lazy tribute-giving by plain recital of what had happened in the cave, and had pledged them to guard Logie whenever he himself had need to tide abroad.
And now the Master had ridden over-hill to Skipton, on an errand that she guessed; and Causleen herself lay in the room above, in a dead sleep of weariness that was saving life and reason after the hell she had passed through in the cavern.
“You’re the one spoil-sport among us, my brindled cat,” she snapped, as Jonah mewed about her skirts. “I loved old Storm myself; but he’s gone, and you can’t mew him back.”
For an hour she went about her work, then grew as restless as Jonah himself. It was time the Master was home again, and he tarried. What if, at the end of his rough journey through the cave, his horse had thrown him somewhere between this and Skipton? Life, as she knew it, had that apeish way of letting folk go safe through harsh odds, only to crack thin skulls against a moorland boulder as they rode quietly home.
Keenly as Rebecca listened for the tip-tap of hoofs up the road, Causleen heard it first. She wakened from a sleep befogged by peddling days, and memories of the harsh greeting she had found once at Logie—sleep threaded through and through by flame-red memories of Garsykes and its cavern.
Far down the road she heard the music of her man’s returning—clickety-clack, faint at first as the tread of elfin feet. Where had he been, risking his life in these disastrous days? And was he wounded by a stealthy blow aimed at him by some foul lout from Garsykes lurking in the heather?
Need to know how it fared with him drew her from her bed. She put the frayed cloak about her—the cloak that had been blue as hope once, but now was like a Jacob’s coat, painted by many kinds of weather—and went down the stair, and out to Logie’s gate.
She was in time to open it for Hardcastle, in time to see the light in his eyes as he got from the saddle, and told his horse to find his own way to stable.
“Where have you been?” she asked, fingering his sleeve.
“To Skipton-in-Craven,” said Hardcastle. “I had business there.”
She touched his sleeve no longer. “And left me here—alone, except for Rebecca and a farm-lad? At such a time—after all we’d shared, and with Garsykes near—You went on business?”
“I left a body-guard. Some of our Logie Men are in the woods—and two by Logie Brigg, to let none from Garsykes through—except Nita, if she’s a mind to come.”
She took a further step away. “You might have stayed, for all that—just to be near me, Dick.”
“I went over-hill for the right to keep you near.”
She had known him taciturn and hard, known the laughter that came rarely and was far away from joy; but now he was a riddle, as he took her hands and would not let them go.
“You left me so soon—for what?” asked Causleen wearily.
His heart spoke now. By all he said and left unsaid she knew at last the caring that had come at the end of their uphill, stormy wooing. Garsykes might be broken, once for all, he told her; but the old, stealthy siege of Logie might be renewed by slow degrees. Either way, they’d meet the coming weather as man and wife. The licence would be ready in three days’ time, and it was no far ride to Skipton Kirk.
“That was your business?” she asked, her voice brave and vibrant. “And I chided you—and so, Dick, do what you will with me.”
When his will was made plain, however, that on the fourth day from now they would be married, she was submissive no longer, but pleaded for delay. She had no clothes for her wedding, and would shame him in his own market-town unless he gave her time.
“Wear the old cloak over all,” said Hardcastle, “and I’ll be content enough.”
So there came a day when Rebecca watched them ride out from Logie. The Master had not said what their errand was, but she knew; and she scolded Jonah till he spat at her. And then she gathered him into her arms, and cried, and cried.
“Love of a man sees far, when you’ve mothered his cantrips since he was a babby,” she said by and by, with a smile utterly forlorn. “And jealousy sees far. But it’s hell’s own spite when the two keep company.”
Causleen and Hardcastle guessed nothing of all this, as they rode, in wonder and in silence, over the hill to Skipton. They guessed nothing of it as they rode home again, drawing rein to glance at the pride of that one word,Desormais, carved high above the grey, stubborn castle-gateway.
Long as he had known it—and he rode seldom from Skipton without a glance at the message overhead—Hardcastle had taken it as a symbol of his own grim fight for Logie. Now that was changed. He had a wife beside him, and the feud with Garsykes grew doubly worth the while.
He glanced at the carved challenge, and made English of it for her. “Henceforth, sweetheart,” he said, and laughed quietly as a conqueror might.
In silence they rode past the castle walls and up into the grey, solitary fells. The track twisted this way and that to lessen the steepness of the climb, till they breasted the last of the hill and passed through the rocky gap that was the gateway of the homeland watered by Wharfe River.
They drew rein, and could only marvel at the land stretched wide below them. The winter’s sun shone warm and mellow over the far spaces, grey-blue with haze. Every striding league of heath, each gully where leafless rowans waited for the spring, showed to Hardcastle like the map of his own heart. Pride—big hearted, eager pride—leaped out as he pointed down the slope.
“We own most of it, wife. Is it a good bridal-gift?”
Her eyes filled with tears. He gave all he had, for her to share. And he named her wife. She had not guessed how all-sufficing the name was, how real and warm and safe. And somehow, across the chill upland breeze, a summer fragrance blew, as of clove-pinks and ladslove in a wayside garden.
All they had gone through together returned—the stealthy siege of Logie, the stark, long peril in the cave—and she drew a sharp breath of thanksgiving that this was the end of nightmare.
“Life is sweet to hold, Dick,” she said, smiling through her tears.
They rode in another silence, rich with speech, down the slack of Storner Bank. And now the wood-reek from Logie’s chimneys eddied up, so near that they could smell its savour.
“We’re home,” said Hardcastle, drawing his horse nearer hers.
Then, as they rounded the bend, he pulled up sharply. Nita Langrish, a bundle of withies over her shoulder, was standing in the roadway, her glance fixed on Logie. So intent she was on thoughts of the dead Master who had flouted her—hidden deep with the pedlar’s brat under the rocks in Garsykes cave—that she heard no sound of hoofs behind.
Nita had had her will of them both, and stood there as in a trance. Vengeance was sweet. She was minded to taste it to the full, looking down at masterless Logie. Every curling wisp of smoke rose from a hearth Hardcastle would never know again. No son of his would grow to claim the heritage. Logie and its seven hundred years ended with old Rebecca and a brindled cat; and so much for pride.
A man’s cry of warning roused her, and she turned to see Hardcastle’s cob rearing scarcely a yard away, his fore-feet perilously close.
Nita leaped aside, then stood gazing at these two who were buried in the cave out yonder—these two, who seemed to ride on horseback through the sunlight and the free moorland wind.
Hardcastle glanced once at her. It was not his way to fight with women; but a sullen loathing came.
“We’re dead in Garsykes cavern,” he said. “It’s only our ghosts that ride.”
“Only your ghosts?” asked Nita eagerly, snatching at a straw in this torrent of dread that raced over her.
“And Storm’s,” said Hardcastle. “He died with us, and runs close behind, I fancy.”
With that they rode on, and Hardcastle’s grim smile died out as he glanced at Causleen’s face.
“You’re tired, wife,” he said gently.
“I was not tired at all until—until she stood there—stood on the threshold of our home-coming.”
A shadow crept, too, about Hardcastle and stayed with him as they came indoors, Causleen and he, and found Rebecca waiting for them.
“Step forrard,” said Rebecca. “It was time you married, Hardcastle of Logie.”
“How did you know?” he asked, wondering that there was no need to break the news.
Gaunt and straight, Rebecca stood facing them with a hard, roving glance. “How did I know, asks he, when I’ve given my life to watching his ins-and-outs? How could I help but know?”
On one side of the threshold Nita had met them. On the other stood this henchwoman, grief and jealousy showing in her sombre eyes. Against their will, a sense of doom crept out from Logie’s storied walls, chilling their eager wedlock.
“I kept young for you, Master,” went on Rebecca, “till you found a bride for Logie. And now I’ll let myself grow old.”
“I’d have told you our errand——”
She cut short his troubled words. “You would, but for thinking of old Rebecca. The blow would fall softer, you fancied, if you brought a full-fledged wife, instead of letting me wait all day for a promised one. Men, poor lambs, are not good at breaking news, and never were.”
Her tart humour swept him like a moorland breeze through the gloom she had brought about these two.
“I’ve the bridal-supper ready, and near spoilt. You were always late to your vituals, Master.”
She sat on in the kitchen, after all was served and she had left them to their meal; and she missed Jonah sorely. The cat had been with her till the moment when she went to greet the bridal-pair, and now had vanished like her own joy in serving Hardcastle. All had gone, it seemed, and she yielded to loneliness utter and complete.
She threw her apron over her head, and rocked to and fro. Grief had its way with her. The years behind gathered their hardships to a head, and tears broke through at last.
Then by and by she heard the kettle singing on the hob, and made a hefty brew of tea. And after that she went in search of Jonah.
They heard her tramping forlornly upstairs and down, and Causleen’s hand reached out to Hardcastle’s across their wedding-table.
“She’s old and sorry, Dick—and we’ve so much.”
Hardcastle found a quick new tenderness for this wife of his. She knew, as he did, that Rebecca was bone and fibre of his house—one by this time with its thick-set walls, the people who lived here aforetime—one to be cherished like a heritage.
Together they went in search and found Rebecca standing at the cupboard under the stair. The door was open, and her candle showed the brindled cat spitting and growling from the lair he had shared with Storm on many a day gone by.
The candlelight showed something else to Causleen, her vision sharpened by this wild home-coming—showed her the shape of Storm, the sheep-slayer, with a long, brown-red gash across his filmy hide—Storm, who was dead, returned to Logie and the Master.
Hardcastle had made a bitter jest to Nita of Storm’s following them, a ghost. And Storm was here.
“What d’ye see,” asked Rebecca—“what d’ye see, beyond that dratted cat o’ mine?”
“A leal friend, Rebecca.”
And with that she put a hand in Hardcastle’s, ready for whatever weather came to Logie. The end of the stark battle was not yet.
CHAPTER XXIV
The Wilderness Folk were aghast, in the days that followed, to see dead Hardcastle riding with Causleen, man and wife, across the uplands. Flesh and blood they could not be, for all Garsykes knew that they were buried in the cave. Yet flesh and blood they were, glad of each other and the hills.
Old superstition bred and festered in the Garsykes hovels. It was ill-luck and always had been, to run counter to a Hardcastle, whatever toll they took of those farming under him. Strange tales were bandied to and fro in Widow Mathison’s inn by greybeards of this Lost Village under the hills—tales of the ancient days, when one and another from Garsykes had held up a Master of Logie on the road and brought confusion on the settlement.
“They’ve the luck, these damned Hardcastles,” the tale would finish always. “It’s no use trying to meddle with Logie any more.”
Nita Langrish had shared their gospel for awhile. Then she had rallied from the shock of seeing Hardcastle ride home with the pedlar’s girl—the bridal-look about their faces, and both on horseback instead of lying under piled rocks yonder.
Each time she met them afterwards, her purpose hardened. She lay awake o’ nights no longer, wondering how they had won free of the cavern. It was enough to know that the pedlar’s brat was mistress now at Logie—reigning where she might have taken pride of place, instead of weaving baskets for up-Dale folk to buy. Through the weeks and months she waited, striving to put some sort of courage into her slack-set people, and telling them always that dead men of theirs cried out for vengeance against Logie. Memory of these deaths, and the way of them was too sharp at first; but fear lessened by degrees, and Nita fanned the dull embers of resentment into life.
As winter stepped through March gales to springtime, and the fells were white with lambs newborn, Hardcastle took a lusty hold of life. The lean years had gone out of mind. The only thought he gave Garsykes was a warning to Causleen not to roam abroad without him.
She had little need. On horseback or afoot they were together constantly; and, as he taught her the lore of ancient lands and storied bridle-tracks, she lit his heritage with new, fresh wonder, as of dawn after a long night’s tempest.
Closer they came together, and closer, as the spring advanced and cowslips nodded in the meadow-grass. Sometimes Hardcastle would fall silent, afraid almost of his joy in living; and her hand would slip through his arm.
“What is it, Dick?” she would ask.
“Half of me has come back,” he would answer, smiling down at her—“the half that’s been missing all these years.”
Rebecca, too, was in better heart. Jealousy yielded by degrees to a new, enthralling hope. As she baked, and scrubbed, and churned, a little song would creep into her mind, and stay there. Logie might have an heir at last. And she would dandle him on knees hard-worn in Logie’s service.
When June was well in, and the meadows growing strong for the scything-time, Shepherd Brant stumped into Rebecca’s kitchen one morning and sat him down.
“Well?” she snapped. “What’s wrong this time? I’d as little expect to see thee without thy shadow, Brant, as without a grievance.”
“What’s wrong? Why, Garsykes. It’s humming like a hornets’ nest again, they say.”
“I guessed as much. Jonah gives me less of his company these days, and sits a lot in the under-stairs cupboard. So I know Storm’s there.”
“You and your ghosts, woman. I’ve no patience. Dead men can walk—I’ve seen a few in my time—but it’s a heathen fancy that the four-footed sort have spirits.”
“Some o’ the four-footed have a bigger spirit than some o’ the two-legged, and have a properer right to walk. But, then, you were always against Storm, poor martyr,” she added, re-opening their ancient feud. “It wasn’t enough that he died for the Master.”
“For a sheep-killer he died fairish well. I’ll own to as much as that,” broke in the other, tugging at his scanty beard. “But, as for his ghost coming back to guard the house—I thought you’d better wits than that Rebecca.”
Hardcastle, hearing his shepherd’s voice, had come down the passage; and, standing in the doorway, he laughed suddenly. They were so much a part of Logie, these two, with their friendly enmity and their strife of tongues.
“It’s no time for laughing, if all I hear be true,” said Brant, getting to his feet with a grim salute. “The Wilderness Folk are ripe for any sort of mischief.”
“Aye, but it will get no further than their tongues. I’m glad you’re here, though, Stephen. I’ve to ride over the tops to Norbrigg, and shall go easier in mind.”
“Don’t ye go, Master.”
“That’s what I’ve been dinning at him,” shrilled Rebecca. “When a man takes a wife to himself, he’s no right to go pleasuring abroad, with the Garsykes muck at large.”
“They’re broken men, I tell you. You with a gun, Brant, and Rebecca with her rolling-pin—you’re enough to hold the house.”
“And you’re taking the mistress into it?”
“Taking her to the hill-winds. She’s stifled in these Logie woods.”
With that he went down the corridor, buoyant and heedless. A stable-lad was holding the two horses, and Causleen waited for him.
“Brant’s here,” he said, as he mounted her. “It’s as well, with Rebecca thinking fire and slaughter is brewing up.”
She laughed with him. Laughter was in their hearts, and joy rode pick-a-back behind them down the winding lane. The bird-cherry trees were in blossom, their white tassels dusting the sleepy air with fragrance. From every bush—from the high sycamores whose leaves drowsed in the summer’s heat—birds were wild with song. Thrushes piped high. Blackbirds sent out their mellower note, and all the small fry joined in this wild din of June.
“Causleen,” said Hardcastle, his voice softened by the wonder of their days together, “I was surly when you came at first. Dear God, if I had missed you.”
“That was not meant. Was there ever a wind that blew but brought us closer?”
It was in this mood—sure of each other, with a high pride in wedlock—that they reached the gate opening on the Norbrigg road. On the top bar lay a flint arrow, brown and smooth in the sun-glare, and Hardcastle checked himself as he stooped to unhasp the gate.
His glance sought Causleen’s. Both were thinking of the first token found by Pedlar Donald, of all that followed. They were thinking, too, with sharp revulsion, of the arrow-heads that littered the floor of Garsykes Cave.
For a moment their nightmare journey through the cavern clouded the sunlight, chilled the eager breath of summer. Then Hardcastle put the token into his pocket, as he had put the earlier one, and said not a word as they rode up into the hills. It was only when they drew rein to breathe their horses, and Garsykes showed below them, that he broke the silence.
“We’ll go through no second waiting-time, wife,” he said—“waiting for what the Wilderness is pleased to do.”
“Yes, Dick?”
“Brant would have found the Logie Men ready enough to muster, if we’d been lost that day. They’llhaveto muster now, and we’ll make an end of the swine-styes yonder, once for all.”
From the strength of their great caring, from the very heart of her bridal pride, joy quickened in Causleen. Better war, savage and instant, than to go through another stealthy siege at the hands of Garsykes.
“Break them outright, Dick,” she said. “For my sake, break them.”
They rode up and further up into the wide-flung spaces of the fells. No woodland birds sang here. That lowland litany of joy was out of hearing. Instead, there came the wheeling cries of hawk and plover, red-shank and snipe and hoodie-crow—battle-music, swift as a pibroch, keen as the thin, nipping wind that fought the glaring sun-heat.
Past Lone Rigg Cross they went—which marked the graves of a lad found dead in some far-off winter’s gale—and up raking Skircarl Rise, till they drew rein again to give their sweating nags a rest.
They were on the roof-top of the Dale now, Moorland and gaunt pastures, gashed by wild ravines, raked to the further mountains, grey-blue in the distant, shimmering haze—a haze so drifting that it was hard to know Pen-y-Gent’s long, sloping crest or Ingleborough’s bluff, upstanding bulk.
“A good land, to live or die for,” said Hardcastle, all his love for this far-striding homeland finding voice.
Reluctant to go, they gathered the reins at last and were moving forward at a lagging pace when a traveller came up from the Norbrigg side, over the steep brink of the hill. He was so tall and lean, so quick and yet so stumbling in his stride, that they wondered who he was, and how he came there. The one moving thing on this lone, empty road, he seemed forlorn, and yet gigantic.
The man stopped as he neared them and touched a greasy cap. “D’ye know a place called Garsykes?” he asked. “It should be somewhere near by now.”
“Yes,” said Hardcastle, with grim humour, “I know a place called Garsykes. Do you want to get there?”
“I do, quick as my legs will take me.”
Hardcastle pointed the way for him, where the lazy track curved down to the lowlands and the curling smoke below. Then he took the arrow-head from his pocket and tossed it into the man’s hand.
“Tell them it comes from Logie,” he said, and rode forward with Causleen.
The man stared after them for a moment, then fell again into the lopping stride that carries tired legs far. Between the heather and the benty lands he went, and came to Garsykes’ cobbled street, and dropped heavily on to the stone bench outside the inn.
Long Murgatroyd was sitting there with a quart mug at his elbow, and he glanced curiously at the newcomer.
“And where might you be from?” he asked.
The stranger sat bunched-up, his sombre eyes staring straight in front of him. “From York,” he said. “There’s been a gaol delivery—and I’m one of the delivered.”
“Take a pull at my mug, lad. You’ve walked a tidy bit too far, by the look o’ you. There, that’s better. And what did they gaol you for, if a body might ask?”
A sullen grin wrinkled the man’s face. “They said it was for robbery on the highroad; but I knew better. It was for letting myself be fool enough to be catched at it.”
Murgatroyd nodded with rough friendliness. “Garsykes is just the spot for you. You can do as you like, all up and down the country-side, and nobody dare catch you at it.”
“I heard as much in gaol. So I stepped over and down, and here I am.”
Murgatroyd stirred uneasily as a little snatch of song drifted down the street, and Nita Langrish came picking her way daintily through the garbage and the litter.
She stopped at the sight of the stranger. Hope never died in her that one day a strong man would come from over the hill and help her lead her wastrels up to Logie for the last, big fight.
Murgatroyd watched her trying to weave filmy spells about this new arrival—watched with the old, half-slumbering lust to take her beauty by the throat and end it—with the old, indolent zest, too, in seeing yet another fall into her toils.
The stranger was past blandishment. All that York gaol had done to him, all the road-sores under his feet and the drumming anguish in his brain, seemed doubled now that the need to keep going no longer spurred him on.
He fumbled for his pipe and moleskin pouch, and with them drew from his pocket a flint arrow-head that tinkled on the cobble-stones. He did not heed, but Nita saw it lying there and drew back as from a thing she feared.
“Where did you find it?” she asked, her voice harsh and shrill.
“That?” said the vagabond, glancing down. “I’d forgotten it. It was given me by a big chap, striding a big horse. He told me to carry it to Garsykes.”
He lit his pipe with shaking fingers, pulled fiercely at it for awhile, then threw it down and lay back on the bench. The sweat dripped from him. His lean body was shaken as with palsy, and his face was red and ashen-grey by turns.
“I’m not done yet,” he stammered, groping for the pipe that was his first and last stand-by. “What sort of fool should I be to give in just when I’m free of gaol?”
Long Murgatroyd snarled at Nita, the basket-weaver. “I told you how it would go,” he said, “when you sent three of us to take Hardcastle at the pinfold. And now here’s the token back. He knows he’s weathered the worst of us.”
“No,” said Nita sharply. “There’ll be worse to come—for Logie.”
The lean-limbed stranger roused himself. Fever glowed in his eyes and his voice was hoarse and wolfish. “There’s always worse to come,” he said, and fell back, the sweat pouring down his haggard face.
CHAPTER XXV
Hardcastle had sent his challenge to Garsykes by the tramping man who met them on the Norbrigg road, and was quick to follow the new venture. The next day he rode with Causleen from farm to farm, and found his tenantry alert for battle. A changed mood had come to them. They knew how nearly these two had been lost for ever to Logie-side. They warmed to the hardihood of their escape from the Garsykes cavern, to their bridal-gallop over to Skipton and back and the keen, young mating look they carried. And shame was on them to remember how they had paid tribute to the skulking folk out yonder.
The last farm they came to was Michael Draycott’s, and they found him in the patch of garden fronting the house. He was leaning on a stick—a sick man and an old, till Hardcastle rallied him.
“Dying again, Michael?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say as much as that—though I fancied last night the end had come. My innards were that wambly you’d scarce believe till I settled them with a dose of barley-brew. And now I’m getting about again.”
“Suppose all Logie was for marching straight through Garsykes street? How long should we have to wait till you got well, Michael?”
“A matter of three minutes—or maybe two.”
“You’re always the same, Michael.”
“Well, I couldn’t be different, so long as I’m inside my body—like a bird in a cage, as you might say. Do we bring guns with us, Master?”
The other’s face hardened. “We do—and we fire Garsykes from end to end. There’s to be no quarter.”
“That’s well thought out,” said Michael. “Their thatched roofs will be like tinder in this heat that’s come to the moor. Years out of mind I’ve wanted that sort of clearance, and I hope we start to-morrow.”
“Would God we could,” said Hardcastle, with stormy recollection of the cave—“but we’ve to make our preparations.”
“Well, there’s no harm in giving them a taste of what they put on us. You sent Garsykes the token. Now they can wait, asking each other what’s to come.And naught will come, till they fair get the dithers.”
Michael’s words stayed with Hardcastle, while he conquered his own impatience during the next days. Nothing was overlooked in his preparations for attack. He would have less than fifty to lead against a village that swarmed with men entrenched in their own walls. The more need, he told himself, to see that each of his had his weapons in good order and knew how to use them.
It was tedious work, but he remembered Causleen’s appeal. “Break them outright, Dick,” she had said. “For my sake, break them.” And he had checked his first impulse, to attack at once. There must be no mistake, no hot-headed leaping against odds that might smother them. The Lost Folk should be broken, as she asked.
He drilled his men, mapped out each detail of the coming fight. Aloof from any care except to make an end of Garsykes—pitiless, save for the women and children harbouring there—he lived for the one purpose.
While they drilled, the men growing restless to be into Garsykes street, the sun blazed each day from a sky that showed nowhere any cloud of mercy.
“It’s drying their thatches nicely,” Michael Draycott would growl, with a glance across the valley. “Let’s pray that no rain comes before the Master lets us loose.”
And now a rumour spread through the Logie country. First it was whispered that a stranger had come into Garsykes and died there of the plague. That was sinister enough, but soon news followed of further deaths, till dread took hold of all folk—a colder and a stealthier dread than ever Garsykes brought on Logie until now.
Hardcastle drilled his men relentlessly, to keep their minds from brooding. The thicker the rumours spread, the less he credited them. The Lost Folk, learning somehow of the coming onslaught, had spread the news themselves, and under its cover were preparing an attack in force. This was what he told his people, and by night they doubled the number of their scouts about the hills.
None was eager now, except the Master, to press through Garsykes street; for the very name of plague set each looking at another for the tell-tale blotches to appear.
Then a morning came when Hardcastle, looking across the valley, saw a black shape hovering in the molten sky. It was joined presently by another, and yet another, and suddenly he understood.
“We can ease our drilling, Michael,” he said. “Garsykes has not lied this once—for the corbie-crows are waiting.”
Garsykes—those still alive in it—saw the same three crows poised above its sweltering street. Rumour at its wildest could have pictured no scene more stark with horror; for the stranger who had brought Hardcastle’s challenge had brought gaol-fever, too, and it had spread like flame throughout a village ready to receive it.
The sun beat down from the shelterless fells till the cobbles of the street were hot to tread. Each festering refuse heap bred flies beyond number, and in the roadway lay the body of a man that none dared touch. Gaol-fever, quick to strike, had taken him as he neared home, and he had found no strength to journey further. It was for him the corbies watched.
As though havoc were not doing enough with them, the Lost Folk let in another adversary—cringing and abject fear—fear that slackened the muscles and slew their will to live. Every other house was tenanted by dead or dying, and those free of the plague as yet were journeying up the fells with bundles slung over-shoulder. It was better to go anywhere than stay in Garsykes, where plague stalked silent through the buzzing flies.
The last fugitive to seek the hills was Widow Mathison, and Nita was at her cottage-door as she came past with her boy.
“Afraid, like the rest?” mocked the basket-weaver.
“Not for myself. I’d have stood by my tavern to the last, but there’s the little lad to think of. Hardcastle o’ Logie saved him from the bog, and ’twould be a shame to let him die of Garsykes fever. You don’t like Hardcastle’s name, I notice. He’s had the laugh of us at the end of all.”
With flaunting, half-frightened derision, she gripped her boy’s hand, and together they went up the track of flight that many Garsykes Folk had taken—the track marked here and there, as they sped further up the wilds, by some dying man who raved in anguish, or by a dead woman with a baby crying at her breasts for food.
Nita looked down on the steamy haze of Garsykes. Up here, where her cottage nestled in a dingle of the highlands, the breeze blew clear and free. Death might ride as he would through a village she despised and loathed—but how could he touch little Nita, who wove baskets for the Dale? She glanced far out to Logie, its grey chimneys pushing up above the lush, green woodlands. Hardcastle and his bride were there, and already she was weaving snares for them, supple as the willows that were her stock-in-trade, when a heavy tread sounded close at hand.
She saw Long Murgatroyd lurching and swaying up the road—saw him steady himself as he neared her.
“There were three of us left in Garsykes,” said Murgatroyd. “And now there’s only two.”
“How is that?” asked Nita, humouring a man in liquor.
“I stepped into the widow’s for a drink of ale—hoping she’d forget what she’d chalked on the inside o’ the door against me. And there wasn’t a widow there. So I helped myself.”
“No need to tell me that,” said Nita.
“The widow’s gone up-fell, like the rest of the living folk. And now there’s only you and me—and the still ones down yonder. We’ve got all Garsykes to ourselves, Nita, and the fever couldn’t touch us if it tried.”
Even as he spoke, he fell to shivering, and Nita glanced at him with startled eyes. The widow’s ale had less to do with his wild talk and wilder bearing than she had fancied. Doubt grew into certainty that the plague was on him, and yet she could not stir. She could only watch the dreadful twisting of his body, till the shivering passed.
“Now we’ll set up together, and own all Garsykes,” said Murgatroyd. “It will take us a bit to shift the dead, but they’ll not hinder—and the fever can’t touch us——”
His voice wandered out in senseless mutterings. Then, as he saw her recoil, a false strength came on him. She had played with him, flouted him; but he had known she would be his one day.
Before she knew his purpose, he had crushed her into his arms and kissed her, scarce knowing what he did. Fighting like a wild-cat, tooth and claw, she got away from his fast-waning strength, and fled up the hills, and out to the hidden pool where she was used to bathe o’ mornings.
She stripped with haste and plunged into the peat-brown depths, and scarce dared leave them when her limbs grew chill and cramped. And in her heart, deep down, was a haunting fear that not all the waters, welling sweet from out these pastured uplands, could cleanse that bridal-kiss of plague.
Long Murgatroyd tottered in pursuit, then came near to falling. He forgot Nita, forgot all but the instinct of a wounded beast to seek its lair. Somehow he got to his cottage, and went in, and shut the door. A great sweat broke over him, and afterwards a chill that nipped him to the bone. He raked the grey peats on the hearth into a glow, and fed them with sticks and fir-cones till the chimney roared and bellowed.
Still he could find no warmth, though his brain was hot as a furnace. He piled more wood on, and more, till the blazing heap fell over and down, and licked his clothes, and ran here and there about the coarse matting on the floor.
Rebecca, up at Logie, had found no ease that day. Scrub as she would, bake, or quarrel with the brindled cat, nothing helped to stifle her restlessness. Old griefs tugged at her memory, and would not be still. Jealousy of Logie’s mistress rankled with new bitterness.
She was drawn out of doors at last. The workaday present galled and fretted. Nothing would serve but communion with her lover, such as she found only at the gate down yonder—the lover who could not rest in his grave because his death at Garsykes’ hands went unrequited.
Before ever she reached the gate, a scud of thin, harsh smoke came down the rising breeze. She glanced in question across the valley that hid Wharfe River, flaring under Logie Brigg—glanced up at old Pengables, swarthy against the molten sky, and down again to the hollow where Garsykes lay.
Rebecca caught her breath. Things hoped for, till the heart grows sick, are not to be believed at first. Yet soon she had to credit what was doing yonder. She leaned a shoulder down for Jonah, and the cat leaped nimbly up, spitting and growling at the wisps of smoke.
“D’ye see it, lad?” she asked, pointing a skinny finger.
Where Garsykes lay, a running sheet of fire blazed up into the sun-glare. It stayed for a moment to swallow a cottage, then passed nimbly forward to the next. The thatched roofs, one by one, broke upward in a shower of wind-blown flame. And all about the land there was the startled din of moor-birds, wheeling and crying, afraid for their nestlings on the heights.
“Now God be thanked,” said Rebecca, young, happy vigour in her voice.
Then she fell into a trance. Forty years her man had waited, coming to the gate each night to ask if Garsykes swine still roamed the land. And now she felt a hand steal into hers, content at last. And she woke, as from a marriage-bed, with throstles singing up the new-found dawn.
“I’m coming soon, my lad,”—her voice was soft and girlish—“after I’ve settled two young lovers into Logie. They don’t need Rebecca now.”