CHAPTER XV
THE HINDERED VENTURE
I
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?