CHAPTER XVI
A ROPE-END AND A TREE
I
Hardcastle fretted during the next days, because the hurt to his knee yielded slowly even to Rebecca’s skill with peat and simples and the right way of handling bandages. The fear was on him constantly that Garsykes would hear of his infirmity and rush to the attack before his strength returned to face it.
There was the pedlar, trusting to the shelter he had promised him—and Rebecca, old in service—and Causleen.
There was Causleen. She was aloof and chill whenever they met about the house. He could make nothing of her whims. Was it his fault that he had been asked to save her life, and was powerless to rescue her from the whip of Nita’s tongue, except by marriage? And marriage she disdained. He tried to reason it all out, not understanding that reason was the last thing concerned with what had happened to Causleen and himself.
Always the worst of his fretting returned to her. If those louts from Garsykes came and he had only one knee to serve him, what would chance? His mind ran out to the unthinkable—for Causleen.
“Now, it’s not a bit of good,” said Rebecca on one of these afternoons, as she was bandaging his knee afresh, “not a bit of good to go about like a man that thinks the roof will fall because he’s got a pain in his knee. Men are all alike, Lord help ’em—’specially when they’re mending nicely, and ought to be giving a thanks-be, instead of glowering like a thunderstorm. It nags a bit, what I’m rubbing into the raw o’ your wound? Well, there’s healing goes with nags sometimes.”
“You don’t know,” grumbled the Master. “I fall lame just when Logie needs me. There’s you and Donald——”
“Aye, and there’s Donald’s lass. That’s where your shoe pinches. Times were different when I was young.”
She tied the bandage, sewed its edges up and bit the thread off with her strong, ancient teeth.
“Different?” asked Hardcastle, impatient of her ministry and all things.
“Aye. We never doubted Logie’s roof was safe. My lad doesn’t doubt it to this day. You’re young, Master, and I’m of the elder days, and I tell you what I know.”
Rebecca had no more to do with bandages and healing. She was wrapt into another world—grey and gaunt, a prophetess.
“War comes to Logie-side. The youngsters fight, and the old see far. D’ye think I go every night and morning to tryst my lad at the gate and get nothing for it? He died for Logie once—and it was forty years ago.”
Jonah the brindled cat, crept into the room and leaped to Rebecca’s shoulder. He was no hearthside lover now, but wild and bridling.
“Even Jonah seems to know there’s trouble coming,” went on Rebecca. “Well, let it come, and we’ll outface it as we’ve always done.”
“There were fewer men in Garyskes then,” said the Master gloomily—“and more who were staunch for Logie.”
Rebecca glanced at him, and even her free speech was checked. She read his heart, as he could not. The odds against him had not brought this black mood, but fear for Causleen had. Awhile since she had been jealous of the girl, resentful of the gaining fear that her own reign at Logie might be ended soon. Now she feared lest Causleen’s playing with the Master should ruin all. It was no time “for furbelows and cantrips,” and how could a man fight his best with half of him wondering if his lass cared?
“You’ve been fretting to give that knee o’ yours a taste of the fresh air,” she said grudgingly. “Have your way, then, for it’s mending fast. And, of course, you’ll go a mile if I tell you the half is enough and to spare.”
Hardcastle went more than the mile. He was unused to the prison of four walls for days on end, and the wine of the crisp November afternoon got into his blood with every step he took. In all the years behind he had seldom seen Logie-land in its full breadth and splendour as he saw it now. The striding acres, wind-blown and lonely—the last sunset glow on old Pengables—the sombre forest getting to its sleep—all were like ancient friends who brought a new, swift welcome. They might be in the losing, but they were his as yet, and wonderfully dear.
One moorland track lured him on to another, till he reached the beech-wood that stepped down to Scawgill Water. Life had done this and that for him, but had not killed the boy’s romance that would linger always in this silent place of mystery, with its grave, round-boled trees, its red-russet drift of leaves that crinkled to the tread. Squirrels had their tree-top nests here, and badgers lived in the “earths” beside the stream. A great dreamer, in spite of his hardness, the Master still peopled the glen with all that country legend had to tell of water-nixies, trolls and goblins. It was so hushed a place, so instinct with underfret of the primeval life, that no man could linger here and fail to know its witchcraft.
A stifled cry sounded near at hand, and then a groaning, low and long-drawn-out. Hardcastle, startled out of his dreams, glanced sharply round. Long since a wandering tinker had come to a foul end here, and his ghost, they said, was restless time and time.
The pigeons ceased their crooning in the tree-tops. A cold and slender wind, prying to the bone, chilled Hardcastle. Far down Logie Dale a farm-dog yapped and barked, and a roaming fox took up the challenge.
Hardcastle glanced about him, and up a clearing of the wood saw a body swinging from a tree. All the boy in him took fright; but the man bade him go and see what this ghost of a suicide dead fifty years ago was made of.
The gloaming filtered through leafless branches and showed him a gaunt, six-foot body turning and twisting on a rope. The body still groaned, but with lessening vigour; and there was something pitiful in the feet that trod helplessly on air, seeking firm ground.
Hardcastle got out a knife and ripped the cord across. The body tottered and swayed for an instant, and afterwards it needed all his strength to check it in its fall and lower it into the withered brackens, Then he loosed the frowsy shirt and watched the dull purple steal from the man’s face, giving way to a pallor as of death.
The slow return of life was terrible to be alone with, and Hardcastle welcomed the plea for water that came by and by. The stream lay below them, and he had no vessel of any kind; so he shouldered the half-lifeless body, carried it to the bank and ladled water in his palms as best he could.
“That’s better,” gurgled the man, when at last his choking throat contrived to swallow a few drops.
The farm-dog and the yapping fox had roused every house about the fells by now. From Pengables to Crake Beacon, dogs gave tongue, loud across the still night-air. And close at hand, in answer, came a scampering of wild things through the undergrowth. Field voles twittered, and overhead the flitter-mice cried thinly as they vanned to and fro.
In the midst of this stealthy terror of the woodland folk, the man propped against the stream’s bank began to drink greedily and to good purpose, till Hardcastle denied him more. Then they two looked at each other, in the light of a moon that shone wanly through the naked tree-tops.
“It’s you, Hardcastle o’ Logie?”
“Yes, Long Murgatroyd—and the devil of a time you’ve given me.”
“That’s good news.” The man’s slow-witted hatred, nursed in health, leaped out in this hour of weakness and release from death; “but it’s naught to what’s waiting for you up at Logie.”
A madness came on Hardcastle. The sweat of trouble he had given this lout, dangling between earth and sky awhile since, asked for a word or two in another key. His hands were itching for the throat that he had saved.
“You were minded to spare the hangman trouble later on,” he said at last, “and so am I. But I’ll leave you to it.”
Murgatroyd began to laugh, and could not check himself for awhile. Then he put a hand to his throat, and laughed again, as a dotard might.
“I came near to hanging myself in Nita’s garter, as that terrible pranksome fellow, Will o’ Wisp, would say. And so did you, Hardcastle. What could I do but laugh? We might have been swinging together—me on one tree, and Logie’s high-almighty on its neighbour. We’d have made a bonnie picture—with Nita coming to look on.”
The farm-dogs yelped and barked across the wastes. Fear gained on the little people of the wood. The breeze sobbed and whimpered, and would not be still. And Hardcastle feared greatly, too—lest he could keep his hands no longer from Long Murgatroyd.
“Are you fit to be left, if I take your rope home with me?” he snapped.
Murgatroyd was recovering fast. “You needn’t take it. She maddened me so with her come-and-kiss, and her stand you off, and all the sick damnation of it, that I fancied a rope’s end more than Nita. That’s gone.”
“Gone, has it?” asked Hardcastle, with a sick kind of wonder.
“Aye. I’ll get my arms about her, soon or late. I promised her no less. So you run home to Logie, if there’s any Logie standing.”
“It’s stood against the Garsykes swine for years out of mind. I’m not for hurrying, Murgatroyd.”
Deep, sullen hatred showed in the man’s face, mottled with returning life. To Hardcastle it was as if he looked down into the pit of hell, seeing a lost man who would not be saved at any cost of trouble from helping hands above.
“Nita wanted me to go with them to-night,” said Murgatroyd; “but I told her I’d rather hang myself in a wood than do her bidding.”
The man fell into cackling laughter again, then shivered as memory of the rope returned.
“We’d have been a bonnie couple, swinging side by side; but ’twas not to be, it seems.”