II
Will o’ Wisp, lurking beside the track that Hardcastle would take from Broken Firs, wearied of his job. It had been well enough, with Nita beside him, to do her bidding; but the silence and the night-time sobered him. What grudge had he, after all, against the Master of Logie? The man had taken a random shot at him, long ago, when he tried to rob the post-boy. That was all in the day’s work of chance and mischance. But what of this lying in wait, cold-blooded, for a shot that could not miss its mark?
Will was a rogue by nature—and from choice because life offered more frolic along unlicensed roads. Yet decency, of his own sort, travelled all roads with him, like a faithful comrade, and the longer Hardcastle tarried in his coming, the chillier grew this enterprise of waiting to shoot a man as if he were a sitting rabbit.
What had he heard in the Garsykes tavern? That Nita played with men as cats play with mice—that the way of her with them all was one and the same—and the end a long sliding down the slope to hell. They did not mince matters in their talk, the Garsykes Folk, and Will o’ Wisp thought of these things now.
Still Hardcastle did not come down the moor. Nita had pretended to know the way he would take to-night, the hour of his return. She was wrong, it seemed, and the rogue felt a stealthy gladness. The breeze sobbed and fluted through the naked spinney where he crouched. His gun lay chilly in half-frozen hands. Were they right when they spoke of the little basket-weaver as of a thing accursed?
He was too far on the Logie-side of the moor to hear the cries that had drawn Hardcastle from his home-track past the spinney; and at length he gave up the errand that had brought him here.
“Nita has hanged enough men in her garter,” he muttered, stretching his cramped limbs.
Then he went down and across the pastures, leaping a wall nimbly here and there, till he came near Garsykes and its tumult. He saw lanterns flitting like his namesake Will o’ Wisps about the pastures, heard Widow Mathison swing her tongue like a flail, and noisy voices answer to the lash.
It was all a mystery to him as he pressed forward, halting only when the clouds raced over from Pengables, hiding one step from the next. Through the stormy murk, as he listened, came a thunder-din of oaths, a pig-like screeching from men not used to bear pain silently.
The moon ran free again, and in the sharp, cold light he saw Hardcastle standing in the angle of two limestone walls, with half Garsykes yammering to be at him.
Will o’ Wisp had no liking for the village he had blundered into weeks ago. There were degrees of rascaldom, and his own feet went merrily on the margin of such deeps as Garsykes knew. Something in Hardcastle’s dour silence as he faced the rabble with uplifted cudgel—some liking, inborn in him, for a man meeting heavy odds, brought music into Will’s heart. Moreover, he was in mood to take sides with any man that Nita hated.
“What’s this, you Garsykes louts?” he asked.
They turned on him, ready to tear him to pieces instead of Hardcastle.
“Here’s Nita’s last favourite, Lord help him,” laughed Long Murgatroyd.
“He carries a fowling-piece, as it happens—and it’s loaded—and you’re a timid folk in Garsykes, unless all the luck’s in front of you. No, Murgatroyd, I wouldn’t stir a foot, if I was you. You’d find it a queer thing to be dead, with a charge of shot inside you instead of ale.”
Will o’ Wisp was himself. Free of Nita, free of cold-blooded murder up the moor, it tickled his fancy to be master of these folk—master too, of what would happen soon to Hardcastle.
He took his stand on a moonlit hillock, letting the polished barrel of his gun glint from one to another of the mob.
“I’m judge among you,” he said, with his heedless laugh.
“Are you, now?” growled Murgatroyd. “A likely man, you, to be judge of any folk.”
“I know ’em all so well, knowing myself,” chuckled Will. “There’s my loaded gun, too—and that helps a man to be a judge. What’s all this moil about, widow?”
Widow Mathison told him, instead, her mind about all Garsykes Men, born or unborn—with gusto, now that Hardcastle was safe. That made Will little the wiser till the lad broke from his mother’s grasp and then ran back again, afraid of what he had suffered on the fells.
“I fell into cold water, I did,” he whimpered, “and couldn’t get myself out. And a big man came and tugged at me, and brought me to my mammy.”
Will o’ Wisp understood now; and wrath kindled in his lazy mind.
“You’d kill Hardcastle for that?”
“Aye,” said Long Murgatroyd. “What do we care for the widow’s brat?”
Will o’ Wisp let his gun roam quietly from one to another of the company. And then he spoke.
“In all my days I never happened on as foul a stye as Garsykes. Hardcastle o’ Logie saved one of yours—and there’s something you never learned, it seems.”
“Oh, aye?” sneered Murgatroyd.
“There’s fairation. Be dummocked, there’s fairation.”
Still facing them, he made his way to Hardcastle and nodded cheerily. “I’m going Logie way myself,” he said, “so we might as well step up together. Three’s company sometimes, and I’m taking the gun as a parting gift from Garsykes.”
Hardcastle fell into step beside him, swinging his cudgel. A pluckier mob would have rushed the pair of them, knowing that Will’s fowling-piece could speak only once before they were trodden down. But each man thought of his own skin, and stood cursing stupidly, and watched them dip over and down the hill-crest.
The Master and Will o’ Wisp went in silence through the blue-grey, misty night, till Hardcastle turned suddenly.
“There’s no return to Garsykes for you, after this. I’m in your debt.”
“Nay. I’d meant to go. I’m not their sort of rogue, and never was.”
“There’s supper and a bed at Logie.”
“Bless you, I want no thanks. If there was danger to-night I’d come and gladly. But they’ll let you alone for awhile. I know ’em.”
Nothing Hardcastle could say persuaded the vagabond to change his mind, when they came to the hill that swept with a break-neck fall to Logie Brigg.
“I’m getting as far as I can from Nita Langrish,” laughed Will. “She’d be weaving her spells about me to-morrow if I stayed as near as this.”
With that he borrowed a fill of ’baccy for his pipe, bade Hardcastle a rollicking farewell, and went his ways into the everywhere that lay within the night-time forest and beyond.
Hardcastle chuckled quietly. After all, few strangers had come into Garsykes, and fared out the better in this world’s gear. Will o’ Wisp could boast of a good fowling-piece that was his by right of conquest.
Then the Master turned for home; and the steep of the road brought anguish to the knee that had blundered against a rock while he was rescuing the widow’s lad. There had been no time to think of it till now.
For very pain he was forced to rest on Logie Brigg, and at these times life lies in wait for every man. Pride to keep Garsykes at bay was well enough. So was joy in the lusty strength that had cracked a crown or two to-night. Now these were gone. He halted on the bridge, as the pedlar and Causleen had done, before the trees were bare—weary, heartsick and body-sick, no flame alight on any beacon-hill ahead. It was as if he was a child again, seeking the mother who had slept these twenty years where the churchyard listened to the lap of waters round its graves.
Under him swirled Wharfe River, playmate and comrade and lover through the peaceful days; and now her voice stole kindly to his ear, talking of brave days to come. When all seemed in the losing, the river told him, it was time for the hale-souled sort to gather courage.
He limped up the hill to Logie with gaining hope, and found it easier for a lame man to climb than it had been to make the sharp descent that jarred every step. For all that, he was spent and tired when he came to his own gate—till he saw Causleen waiting for him there. The moon showed him a face pale and eager, framed by dark hair that was loose about it like a glory.
“You were in danger somewhere, and I could not help you.” The Highland voice was low and troubled. “There was a crying up the waste lands—your feet blundered into marshes——”
“How should you know?” he broke in.
“The vision came,” she went on, with great simplicity. “I did not ask for it. It came.”
Hardcastle’s heart beat faster, for no reason that he knew of. Since Causleen’s first coming there had been recurring enmity between them broken by little rifts that let the sunlight through. He had not known till lately how he had begun to need and seek her comradeship. To-night he gained a deeper knowledge. Her welcome at the gate was the one thing he had craved, all the long way from Garsykes, and it was his.
“You’re glad I’m home again?”
She grew still and cold. “Glad? Yes. You have been kind to us—two pedlars tramping to your gate. The vision came, and I spent myself in sending help to you across the waste—help of the spirit—and, of course you’ll laugh at fancies—I spent myself, not for your sake, but because you’d shown us kindness—of your own rough sort. I wished to pay a debt.”
Logie’s Master had known mixed weather on the uplands, but never such a March-tide change from sun to bitter, east-wind spite. The pedlar’s girl was remote from him as the top of old Pengables Hill, with its head among the driving sleet.
“Is it Nita,” he asked clumsily, “and her chatter of the night we spent down yonder?”
“It is Nita.”
The man’s big, simple heart found room at last. Through these last weeks he had been groping forward to the light.
“Best marry me,” he said. “I’ve wanted it, Causleen.”
She answered nothing for awhile. Then sleet came stinging at his face again.
“I do not care for pity. Oh, you are clumsy in your kindness! Gossip has touched us, and you stoop to offer marriage to the beggar-maid. You are generous.”
“I want it,” he repeated doggedly.
“I’ve shame enough to bear as it is. Would I add to it? To sit each day at table, and look across at you, and know that I owed it all to pity—would that be happiness?”
She turned to go, then glanced at his knee as if she had not seen till now that it was bleeding through the torn cloth of his riding-breeches.
“You crashed against a rock,” she said softly. “The vision showed me that, too. Can I wash and bind it for you?”
“It is of no account.”
“You mean that Rebecca the paragon would have more skill? She is so wonderful.”
Hardcastle could only wonder at her moods. She had seemed to care that he had taken a hurt, and now she was jealous of Rebecca. And again she had turned and was looking at him with wide, questioning eyes.
“You asked if it was Nita. It was—but not her gossip. Why do you lie to me, Hardcastle of Logie?”
With that she was gone in earnest, and Hardcastle limped slowly up the dappled moon-dusk of the road. Near home as he was, a late-found instinct prompted him to hold his cudgel in readiness for whatever the swaying shadows of the firs might hide. His left hand swung idly at his side, till suddenly a wet snout pushed against it and a friendly smell stole up in greeting.
“Back again, are you, Storm?” said the Master, with gruff banter. “Red from the feast, as usual?”
But the dog’s grey muzzle was innocent of stains. For three days he had ravened, then had slept off the after-sickness, had lapped greedily at every stream he passed. No guile showed in the brown, humid eyes. He knew nothing of repentance, or need of it. It was just that his wander-lust was over, and somewhere deep in his being was the knowledge that danger threatened Logie. He was home again, and at his post.
“It was time you came,” said Hardcastle. “Dogs I know, and horses I know—but women are beyond me.”
Storm had the better of him; for a half-hour later Causleen found him in the cupboard under the stair, and brought him food, and made much of him before she bent above his tousled head.
“Oh, Storm,” she said, and cried her heart out.