A GAOL DELIVERY
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’ll have to 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.