CHAPTER XIV
NITA
I
Garsykes was stirred to grim and crafty mirth during the next weeks. November had brought its little spell of summer between fall of the leaves and winter’s onset. Primroses bloomed here and there in favoured nooks. The sun was constant, from dawn till nightfall, in a blue and happy sky, and birds began to think of courtship.
So did Will o’ Wisp. In all his careless, vagabond life he had found none like Nita; and she smiled at him whenever they met by stream or coppice.
“Our men are rough and savage,” she would say. “They frighten me.”
Then Will o’ Wisp would yield to the slender helplessness of this girl who showed him open favour. And all Garsykes laughed, to watch the stranger going the way of many men before him.
“She has him in her lap,” growled Long Murgatroyd, sitting in the inn one afternoon among his cronies, “and the Lord knows which o’ them I’d like to throttle first.”
“Choose Nita,” they answered, in snarling chorus.
“Happen I will,” said Murgatroyd, and fell back into the sullen brooding that shadowed his every thought these days.
Will o’ Wisp cared nothing at all for what they said of him in Garsykes. He cared only to be with Nita Langrish, to grow wilder each day for her elusive beauty.
On one of these windless, moist afternoons, near dusk, he came from the benty lands and found her at the bridge that spanned Crooning Water.
“That’s a fine hare you’re dangling in your hand,” she said, with a welcoming smile.
“I was thinking to leave it at your door as I went by.”
“I’d best come with you, then, as soon as I’ve finished my basket. Hares left at Garsykes doors don’t stay there long.”
“They wouldn’t,” agreed Will o’ Wisp, with a random laugh. “I should have thought of that.”
“You’d best keep it, after all. What do I know of the way to skin it?”
“I should have thought of that, too. I’ll bring it dressed for cooking—and don’t blame me if it looks like a plump, naked cat.”
She seemed to invite him to sit on the parapet beside her; but when he tried to put an arm about her, it grasped only empty space. Nita was on the far side of the bridge, as if by magic, threading her withies.
“They used to cut the willows for me,” she said by and by, her voice soft as the breeze that fluted down the stream. “And now I have to cut them myself. See how rough my hands are.”
They were held out to him—slim, shapely hands—and he was mad to take them. But Nita was already standing in the roadway, and laughed as she dangled the finished basket to and fro.
“This is for little Tabitha, up dale. Seventy odd and a spinster, she. The last I made was for a bride. I wonder what drollery will come to them both, when they take their baskets over-arm?”
Will o’ Wisp’s crisp good-humour failed him. The girl stood there, all of her but the grey eyes young as June about these winter highlands; but the eyes were old, unfathomable.
“What drollery should come?” he asked.
“You would not understand. I cannot help it, but I’ve a trick of weaving spells into my baskets. Whoever I make one for, I get a picture of her in my mind, and ply the willows in and out with a sort of prayer, you might say, that my basket will teach her just the daft contrary-wise of what she thought she was. And it comes true, Will o’ Wisp.”
Then suddenly the grey eyes were young again, and smiling into his. “Was I seeing far? It comes of foregathering with gypsies. One of them talked to me just now of Logie and its Master.”
“The man who tried to stop me with a bullet?”
“Do you bear no malice, Will o’ Wisp?”
“I should do,” he chuckled, “but, thanks be, I harbour none o’ that. I’ve seen too much of it in my time—eating into men like a plague.”
“You’d have had the post-boy’s money in your pocket, but for Hardcastle. And what cause had he to interfere?”
“His bullet only flicked me. Next time I’ll flick him, maybe, and settle that little account between us. But, as for malice, I wouldn’t sour myself with it.”
“You’re not like the Garsykes sort. They’d gnaw at what Hardcastle did to you, as a dog gnaws at a bone, never letting it rest.”
“More fools they. I’m a rogue by nature and choice—a light-hearted one—and fancied they’d be all like that in Garsykes.”
“You fancied wrong, Will o’ Wisp. Honour among thieves—Robin Hood and his merry men—you looked to find all that in Garsykes? You’re young.”
“And you’re young,” he broke in heedlessly. “You were talking of spells you wove into your baskets, Nita—as if baskets mattered. You’ve woven them round a man.”
“Or half a man?” she mocked. “One who lets Hardcastle pistol him and daren’t answer.”
Will o’ Wisp grew taut as a bow-string on the sudden. “Dare not never shadowed me since I was breeked. I’ve little to boast about except that.”
They went together up the road, and turned into the track that led between lean, benty lands to Garsykes.
“If Hardcastle had done a wrong to me?” she asked.
He gripped her shoulder till she winced. “I’d kill him,” he said simply.
“A man, are you, after all?”
“I was born one, as it happened.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad as to ask murder,” said Nita, her voice gentle as a dove’s. “Hardcastle slighted me—no more than that—took the heart out of my body and threw it away for frolic.”
“Did he?” said Will o’ Wisp.
“Not murder,” she pleaded, her hand like velvet on his arm.
“That’s as maybe.”
So then she cried, and he fell to comforting her; and afterwards she set the width of the roadway between them as they went through Garsykes village.
Prying eyes looked out on them from Widow Mathison’s inn, and Long Murgatroyd fetched a great laugh as he stood looking out of the window.
“There’s another o’ Nita’s goes by. To-morrow he’ll be where most of us have been in our time.”
Murgatroyd spoke truth. On the next day Will o’ Wisp was busy in the swampy hollow where Nita’s willows grew. The Garsykes Men, when they got late abroad, did not pause for banter as they passed. They let the newcomer hang himself in Nita’s silken toils, and so much for him.
So it went for many days, till Will o’ Wisp began to lose his content with life as he found it. There were times when he came into the inn and sat silent on the settle, till at last the widow rallied him.
“You’re getting heavy as Murgatroyd. What’s amiss with your easy-go-lucky handling of things as they come?”
“How should I know? Draw me a quart of ale, and maybe that will cure me.”
“Maybe it will—and likely it willun’t. But Nita’s good for my trade, and always was.”
“I said naught about Nita.”
“No. But you were thinking of her. Will o’ Wisp, my lad, I’ve a liking for you, and I’m old enough to be your mother. Quit Nita Langrish, before she binds her spell too fast.”
The rough sympathy was too much for him. He had gone through evil days—through beguilement that promised all, and gave nothing but the slant flight of a snipe as it raced down-wind.
“The spell’s over me, fast and hard,” he said, and laughed—but not with the old relish.