CHAPTER X
THE WEAVER OF BASKETS
I
Before the storm broke that drove Causleen and Hardcastle into shelter of the foresters’ hut, Long Murgatroyd had been poaching up the moor. He knew all about the uses of a wire looped at both ends and set across the tracks the grouse took to their drinking-places; and he laughed as he gathered his spoils together and turned for home.
“They’re Hardcastle’s birds,” he chuckled, “and they’ll taste sweeter in the pot for that.”
He had got half down the moor when the first of the tempest struck him, and he ran for the lower country as fast as his great legs would take him. He reached the first pasture only to be blinded by the swirl of snow, so that he had to creep forward, feeling his way. His hands touched stone at last, and he worked his way round to the lee side of a bield-wall, built two-sided to shelter ewes from the north wind and the bitter east. In the angle of this he dozed and shivered through the storm; and afterwards, when the moon shone out on thawing snow, he picked and slushed his way downhill to Garsykes.
His way lay past the foresters’ hut, and as he went by he halted, astonished to see its window shining crimson out across the snow. Peering in, he saw Causleen there beside the hearth, and no one else. Drenched to the skin, hungry and shivering, Long Murgatroyd laughed—as he had laughed when he snared Hardcastle’s birds on the moor. There was shelter here, and a log-fire, and a lass to share the warmth with him—a bonny lass, and a prime favourite up at Logie these last days, if all folk said was true.
He opened the door, to find Hardcastle rise in menace, to see Storm bristling at him in rage that seemed gigantic. He banged the door home and fled. By instinct of the hunted he knew they would catch him in this hindering broth of snow and water. So he doubled back into the wood. The snow made silence under his feet. The black firs hid him from the moon. He was lost utterly to Hardcastle and Storm.
Murgatroyd watched the moon pale in the dawning sky, and the sun leap ruddy to the top of old Pengables Hill, before he came in sight of Garsykes. It was a tedious way for one spent with fright and hunger, and he lumbered down into the hollow, and looked about him at the closed doors of the village—especially at the inn-sign, “The Poacher’s Rest,” that swayed cracked and dirty in the breeze.
He went in at last, and a flaunting, big-breasted woman answered his call.
“Oh, ye, Long Murgatroyd!” she said, her arms akimbo. “What d’ye want?”
“A dollop of rum, and summat to eat.”
Widow Mathison pointed to a row of figures on the door. “Nay, you’ll ruin me. I’m for ever chalking up your slate till I’m tired of you and your debts.”
Murgatroyd drew out a brace of grouse from some hidden pockets and slapped them on the table. “Keep ’em awhile, widow, till they’re like to drop to bits. You relish ’em that way.”
“Hardcastle’s birds? Ay, they’ll be toothsome.”
She busied herself now, with entire goodwill, about the fire; and Murgatroyd looked up by and by from a steaming dish of eggs and bacon.
“You’d wipe out your chalks against me, widow, if I told you what I saw in Logie Woods. But, there, I’m not for telling.”
“What did ye see?”
“Nay, another noggin o’ rum wouldn’t draw it from me. There was Hardcastle of Logie in the woodmen’s hut.”
“Was there?” asked the widow, filling his glass afresh.
Murgatroyd took a wide gulp at the measure, and drained it. He was cold and weary.
“Not if you filled it afresh—and thank you, widow, for it does drive the wet out o’ one’s bones.”
“Hardcastle was in the hut,” said the woman.
“Aye, he was, in front of a cosy fire, and the pedlar’s lass with him, sitting on his knee. I saw ’em through the window as I went by.”
Widow Mathison gave a screech of glee. “For a woman-hater, he frames fairish well.”
“Fairish well,” agreed Murgatroyd, with a maudlin leer. “There she was, and there he was. You wouldn’t say aught could alter that—would you, now? I opened the door, and I listened—and dang me if they weren’t cooing like a pair o’ cushats. And she a pedlar’s brat. And him with his mucky pride.”
The door swung open, and a squat fellow entered, sallow-faced and touzled.
“There’s water in plenty hereabouts,” said the widow, after a shrewd glance at him; “but it seems to run to waste. One man could lead Jake Bramber to it, but twenty couldn’t make him wash.”
“I wasn’t thinking of water specially,” growled Jake.
“You wouldn’t be. It’s the itch i’ your throat that bothers you at this time o’ day. And there’s your tally, side by side with Murgatroyd’s. I’m tired of chalking up your owings.”
“That’s easy mended, widow. Stop chalking ’em.”
She bridled at his effrontery, but drew him a measure. Then, “Tell him, Murgatroyd,” she said.
Long Murgatroyd told him what he had seen in the foresters’ hut, and with repetition the tale gathered volume, till all the Garsykes swine had garbage to wallow in for many a day to come.
“Nita Langrish will laugh herself to bits when she hears this,” said Jake.
“I’m not so sure,” broke in the widow. “Nita may fool you men of Garsykes—if you’re men, which I begin to doubt—but Hardcastle escaped her. So she wants him. I’ve known her since she toddled, and that was always her way. Near died o’ crying for the moon, when she was three years old. It’s always the thing she hasn’t Nita longs for.”
“That’s true,” snarled Jake. “Awhile since she was making her baskets on the Brigg. ‘Jake,’ says she, ‘you’ve a way with dogs.’ ‘I have,’ says I. ‘It’s a birth-gift. They like as they love me, same as if I was one o’ them.’ And then she told me to put hemlock into a ball o’ meat and take it up to Logie. Hardcastle’s dog would be waiting for him at the gate, said Nita. So I went, and friendlied Roy. And I was a sick man, I tell you, coming home. To poison a dog—it doesn’t bide thinking of—but Nita made me do it.”
Long Murgatroyd rose suddenly to his big, shammocky height. He was shaken by a storm of passion.
“She’s the devil and all among us, with her basket-making and her eyes on all four sides at once to fool us. I’ve done with Nita.”
“No,” said the widow. “You’ve never done with such as Nita.”
And now feet began to patter up and down the cobbled street. Garsykes Folk were late to wake, for their work lay mainly with night-time tasks of poaching and robbery.
The woman beckoned Long Murgatroyd out of doors. He followed her with unsteady, shambling feet, and soon they had a company of unwashed folk about them, listening to the widow’s ribald laughter.
“There’s news from Logie,” she said. “Tell ’em, Murgatroyd, as you told it Jake.”
Long Murgatroyd propped himself against the wall, and looked about him with a clown’s solemnity.
“It’s about Hardcastle o’ Logie.”
“Damn him,” snarled a thin, wolfish man. “He goes abroad as if we’d put no token on him.”
“Don’t you worry, my lad,” said Murgatroyd. “We’ll know where to find him nowadays. He’ll not wander far from pedlar’s brat.”
So then he told them what he believed by now that he had seen in the foresters’ hut; and such a storm of applause greeted him that he left the friendly shelter of the wall behind him, and talked at large as he strutted to and fro across the street. No tale such as this had come to Garsykes for many a year, and for the moment they half-liked the Master of Logie, because he was a backslider like themselves.
When the tale was done, and the folk began to get about their ways, Nita Langrish came among them. Used as they were to her young beauty, going among them from day to day, they never ceased to marvel that such as she had grown out of Garsykes mire.
Fresh from her morning bath in a pool she knew of up the fells, gowned in soft grey that clung about her slender body, she stood like a creature from some other world among the tattered women of the village.
“Is there news from Logie?” she asked, in her pleasant voice. “They told me Hardcastle would be up the moor yesterday, so I persuaded one of ours to take an errand for me.”
“There’s not what you might call news from Logie,” laughed Widow Mathison, “but Murgatroyd here has word of Hardcastle.”
Long Murgatroyd faced her, and old hunger, old dismay found sudden vent. “He’s out of your reach, Nita,” he snarled.
“He always was,” said Nita gently, “after I sent him out.”
“Same as you’ve sent all of us, one by one?”
“When you tried to come too close.”
She stood there, soft as this morning that followed a night of grim tempest—a radiant thing, knowing herself mistress of them all.
“Well. Hardcastle’s tied to another apron-string. She’s a bonnie lass, too, as I glimpsed her in the woodmen’s hut. They made a picture, sitting by the fire as if they’d set up housekeeping together.”
A wild-rose flush leaped to Nita’s cheeks. “Who was it?” she asked.
“The pedlar’s lass. He’s chosen dark and trusty this time, as the saying is. None of your yellow-haired women again for him, says Hardcastle—and I don’t wonder.”
Nita took up the challenge. “You saw them in the hut?”
“Aye. I opened the door to creep in for shelter, and Hardcastle was there.”
“And you ran for your life? To be sure, you’d not forget what he did to you at the pinfold. None of your masters of Logie again for you, if you can help it—and I don’t wonder.”
Her mimicry, the quickness of her answer, raised such a storm of laughter against Murgatroyd that he gave up the contest; but presently he followed, as she went by the field-track that led to Logie Brigg, and overtook her.
“Nita, my lass,” he said, “you’ve got to stay and listen.”
“Have I?”
“Aye, like it or no, you have.”
In his face she saw the baffled hunger that she had brought to many men. His voice was rough and harsh, but there was pleading in it—a headstrong pleading that it was her life’s delight to thwart.
“Well?”
“It’s this way. I’m sick and tired o’ my days. Naught matters, save you—you and your devilments.”
“I’ve baskets to weave. All up and down the Dale they’re asking for Nita’s baskets. There’s no time to care for men.”
He put out a savage hand, to draw her to him. She did not seem to spring aside, yet suddenly she stood far away, putting her smiling spells on him afresh.
“Nita,” he said, sombre and hungry-eyed, “I’m not of the fanciful sort; but summat or somebody is whispering at my ear. One of us two is going to die of your devilry—and I don’t care a tinker’s damn which it is, so long as it comes soon.”
Across Nita’s young vigour, her joy in torturing men for pastime, a little, cold wind began to play. Long Murgatroyd was sobered. He was in dead earnest, and his big, uncouth face was lit as with some fire of prophecy.
Then her mood passed. “It will be you to die of it, I think,” she said, and laughed at him as she took her way to Logie.