Storm

by Halliwell Sutcliffe

THE GABBLE-RATCHET

Causleen was restless about the house of Logie. Her father dozed and roused himself by turns. Always in his waking moments he glanced at the pike that had gone to Flodden Field and back, and was eager to leave the roof that sheltered him. She watched the same pitiful struggle to rise and get his helpless limbs to ground, the same falling into stupor.

Near sunset of the day that followed the ewe-gathering, she drifted into Rebecca’s kitchen, pride and weariness waging a private feud within her.

“It is always the same tale, Rebecca,” she said. “My father is not well enough to go just yet, and we overstay our leave.”

“Who told you that?” asked the other dryly, as she gimped the edge of an apple-pasty before she set it in the oven. “Not me for one.”

“Nobody told me—in so many words.”

Rebecca glanced up. The harsh face that was worth a couple of watch-dogs to the house—as Hardcastle’s jest had it—was softened now.

“We’re a stiff folk here, the Master and me. It’s old habit to snap at foreigners—but once in a while the snap doesn’t mean so much. You’re very welcome to stay on.”

“If you’ll let us pay,” said Causleen, fire smouldering in her eyes. “We’re not beggar-folk, but pedlars—giving for what we get.”

“All in a fine tantrum, are you? As if Logie couldn’t give a lodging to a couple of far-spent wanderers.”

“We haven’t money, but I could help you—to wash up in the kitchen, and clean the upstairs rooms—”

“You could,” broke in Rebecca, “if I’d let you. You seem not to know that it’s joy and pride to me to serve the Master. He’s worth the while.”

“So we must go?”

“So you must stay, seeing how it is with Donald. You’ve enough to do, and so have I; and that should keep us two from worriting.”

“Why is the Master so hard?” asked Causleen, watching Rebecca stand away from the hiss of the opened oven-door before she put the pasty in.

“He met a fool-lass once, and thought her all made up of what never could be in this world. Women aren’t shaped out of rainbow-dreams, as the Master fancied. So he took a fall—and a long, steep fall it was.”

Tired as she was, Causleen’s interest was roused. Woman-like, she saw Hardcastle’s gruffness softened a little now that romance was its excuse.

“Was she bonnie, Rebecca?”

“Aye, like a bird you’d like to ’tice from its twig. The devil uses that sort sometimes. And now there’ll be no heir to Logie.”

“He’ll never marry?”

“Not he, unless the time of miracles came back. I’ve no patience with life, I tell you. Here’s a man as likely-set-up as one here and there—might pick as he chose—and he lets himself go bachelor all his days because a lass fooled him once.”

“He never thinks of the men before him? Seven hundred years the Hardcastles have been settled here, he told us.”

“Aye, he thinks of them, I fancy. They nag at him, and small wonder. It’s a shame and a crying pity that he should let the race die out, for sake of such as Nita Langrish.”

“What was she like?”

“Like nothing honest—a face that put even women in mind of flowers and such trash—and great, grey eyes—and a heart as dry as Ghyll Beck after a droughty summer. But she did one good turn to Logie. I’ll own to that.”

Rebecca had not paused in her work. Like a mill-wheel, she could chatter without hindrance to the day’s labour.

“They go far back, the Hardcastles,” she went on, spreading dough on the baking-board and rolling it with quiet, unhurried hands. “Yeomen, they, and content with yeoman’s pride. Then they bought a croft here, a farmhouse there, till they got to be big in the land.”

Causleen began to understand many things about Hardcastle, now she held the key. His grim hostility to women was explained. So, too, was the rugged, inborn dignity that could meet all men frankly, yet hold them at a little distance. In days gone by, she had known Highland lairds who had shown just this will-proud front to clansmen of the misty homeland.

“And then?” she added, like a child impatient for the end of a nursery-tale.

“There come breaks in a line as long as Hardcastle’s—a spendthrift, a drunkard, one silly in his wits—there must be breaks. The Lord Almighty favours none, and long-settled folk must take their chances with the rest.”

Rebecca was of the homeland, too, to Donald’s girl. The Lord Almighty favoured none, as all men knew who had lived with mountains and the storm.

“She did a good turn to Logie, this Nita Langrish?” asked Causleen.

“She did. The Master was all for guns and fishing, and letting a farm go here and there while he played at life. If the likes of her had married him, she’d have pushed him down to dear-knows-what of mortgages and ruin. But they quarrelled, thanks be, and the Master went hard as a flint. I watched him close and proper, I promise you, those first months after they parted. It bit deep, and might have taken him into any sort of devilment; but instead it stiffened him.”

“Soured and roughened him,” flashed Causleen, remembering how Donald and she had come to Logie first.

“Maybe. I own that I’d like to hear him laugh about the house again—just once in the week, say—but then you can’t have everything in this world. Instead of squandering farms, he’s buying them.”

Rebecca, rolling the dough out as she talked, remembered suddenly the pasty already in the oven, and darted to its rescue.

“There, now,” she scolded, “it would have been burned in another minute. That comes of your gossip, when you know I like a quiet kitchen. Take those white cheeks of yours out of doors, girl. You’ve been cluttered up too long between four walls. Take ’em out, and leave me to my baking.”

Causleen was learning the difference between the bark and bite of those at Logie, and Rebecca’s glance was kindly. “There is father,” she said, glancing wistfully through the open door at the sunlit warmth outside.

“And me to see to him till you come back. I’m not old enough yet to make a song about tending my kitchen and one ailing man. Take jobs by turns, and one’s a rest from t’ other.”

So Causleen, with a sob of sheer relief, stepped out into the afternoon. She died by inches in such imprisonment as she had known at Logie, but her feet seemed shod with fairy-boskins now that she was free to roam a land that reminded her at every turn of her lost Highlands. Through the russet sun-glow she went, up into the moors that knew no walls except the sky’s. The heather was not as tall as in her own country, where she had waded knee deep through it; but the scent and the friendliness were the same. When a cock-grouse got up and whirred over rise and hollow of the untamed lands, she knew his challenge of go-back, go-back, for a note as cheery as Rebecca’s when she had bidden her find an hour of freedom.

She left the moor at last, tempted by the lure of Logie Woods below, with their burnished colours glowing in the heat-haze; and once more, as she stepped into their cool shelter, the sense of home was with her. Underfoot the pale gold of fallen larch-leaves shimmered softly in the silver light that filtered through—a thick carpet, soft to tread. Ripe, nutty odours were abroad, and peace was sounding her elfin-trumpets through every brake and hollow. The wise big-hearted autumn was here, as in far Inverness—a northern autumn, that had fought for this tranquillity.

Causleen, in sheer content, followed the winding track, till it led her to a little, brawling stream, brown with moor-peat and ferned in every crevice of its banks with greenery for the water-pixies and their kind. She forgot every footsore step she had taken on the Pedlar’s Road. Here was the twin-hollow to one in the homeland, where she had grown from child to woman, dreaming of Highland feuds, and Highland loves, and the glamour that would come one day when a man’s eyes were steady and honest with her own, asking all she had to give.

She stood there, so quiet that a squirrel ran about her feet before he saw her and raced up a neighbouring fir-bole, pausing to wash fear away from his face before he glimpsed down on this intruder. As on Logie Brigg, no longer than two weeks ago, Causleen was aware now of the voice that spoke without any sort of speech—the little voice within that never lied. Not in the Highlands, but here in Logie-land, the man of her dreams would come.

So by and by she went down the rough bank of the stream, singing a Gaelic song that was in tune with the water’s voice, and came at last to the brink of Wharfe River, where it flowed in dappled, sunlit quiet—a great-bosomed stream, wide between its banks. And now she lost remembrance of the Highlands. They had rivers there in plenty, but none like this water that said so little and so much as it swirled by—lonely, majestic, unafraid.

She, who had learned in babyhood the language of many waters, big and little, could make nothing of Wharfe’s speech. Soft as its murmur was, there were undernotes that baffled her—eerie cries below the flood, and now and then a roaming whine, as if a fox pursued its prey by night.

A breeze was stealing now across the warm shelter of the woods—a moaning breeze, gentle and very cold. The rock-doves, crooning overhead, grew silent. Chatter of beast and bird ceased in Logie Woods. They knew what was coming to them from the north and something of their trepidation began to settle on Causleen. Such dreams as she had been weaving a moment since seemed empty, foolish, and their warmth had gone with the woodland glow.

Wharfe River, as she followed it, lost its breadth of flow; its tranquil temper. The under-cries grew louder as it swept through the narrows under grey-brown scuds of foam; and ever as the waters hurried down, the rocks on either bank set closer teeth on them.

Causleen, glancing across this place of tumbled strife, saw a man’s figure come down the wood on the far bank; and a smile of self-derision played about her lips. How bravely she had dreamed of a lover—and what a wakening, to find Hardcastle of Logie—Hardcastle the churl, who grudged Donald and herself each hour they spent under his roof. But at least he was on the other bank, and there was no bridge for him to cross. She was glad of that.

Then she saw him gather himself together, and run a little way, and leap; and he was on her side now of Wharfe River, laughing up at her astonished face.

“It saves the long way round by Logie Brigg,” he said—“but it’s no short cut for fools to take.”

She came close to the bank and glanced down, curious to learn how one leap could bridge a river; and under her she saw the whole tumult of the upper stream caged into a yard’s span, with Wharfe going silent, fast and deep between its prison walls. She saw, too, that Hardcastle had jumped from the low to the higher bank, and that the rock he leaped from was wet with spray.

“You took a mad risk,” she said, shivering as she watched the strong, remorseless flood go by.

“I said it was no short cut for fools. But Wharfe couldn’t drown me if she tried. There’s too long caring goes between us.”

“Wharfe River. The name sings to me since I heard it first.”

“And Wharfe sings—many songs. I’ve known her for thirty years, and never stale of listening. Soft as a girl one day, and the next a beldame, riving all her banks to pieces. A woman, all of her.”

“Why—a woman?” asked Causleen, with quiet mockery.

“She changes her mind so lightly—croons to you, like the gentlest stream that ever lapped quiet banks—and you’re half believing it when the storm-waters come, roaring to pluck you down.”

“Was it only Wharfe taught you what you know of women?”

Malice prompted the gibe, but Causleen was bewildered by the answering fury. She had driven a needle-point into some deep-hidden nerve, and for a moment she fancied Hardcastle would strike her. He was alive with rage. She seemed to stand shelterless under a mountain tempest that was soon to break about her. She did not care. Better to flout him in the open here than be a tongue-tied and unwelcome guest at Logie.

As she had watched him gather himself for the slippery leap across the Strith, she watched him now. He got temper into hand, as if it were a mettled horse he rode. He conquered the pain of an old wound she had pricked to life. The face he turned to her at last was grey and quiet.

“Not only Wharfe,” he said.

The breeze came sobbing, cold and comfortless, through the woods of Logie, and the red leaves blew about them in their fall. Again old griefs came to Hardcastle, and again he laughed, as of old, to drive them off.

“Wharfe’s a woman, as I said. She drowned the heir of all these lands once—a stripling, and his greyhound checked him at the leap. And then his mother reared the Priory below; and Wharfe slips by the ruins to this day, gentle as a dove—penitent, you’d think, for what she did up here.”

Causleen’s interest was stirred, in spite of herself, by the boldness of his fancy, the sure, straightforward hold he had on the lore of other days. At their first coming, when Donald resented the pike hung on the wall at Logie, the Master spoke of Flodden as if he had shared the battle lately. Now he talked of what happened in the elder years, before the shock of Flodden came, as if they, too, were recent. To-day seemed one with all the yesterdays to this man who loved his country-side and knew its inner secrets.

The breeze blew shriller now. Raw and wet, it fluted through the glory of the woods, plucking a red leaf here and there in passing.

“Brant was right,” said Hardcastle, “though I fancied his weather-wisdom had gone astray this once.”

As he spoke, and while Causleen was thinking bitterly that the prophet of ill-weather was always on the safe side of life, a great crying sounded overhead—a harsh, tortured crying, as of human things in anguish.

“What is it?” she asked sharply.

“Rebecca would say it was The Gabble-Ratchet.”

The first crying overhead had passed into silence, but now another came, louder and more anguished.

“Brant was right,” Hardcastle repeated—“and it’s time we both got up to Logie.”

She found herself going with him up the steep rise of the woods—found herself yielding a hand to his when he reached down to help her across some slippery rock-face—and had no time to wonder that she let her pride be quiet. There was something in the wet, rising breeze, something in the Gabble-Ratchet uproar overhead not long since, that made for awe and need of a man’s hand, whether he was rich or poor in courtesy.

They went past Ghyll House, where a dog barked at them from behind a stable-door, and up into the pastures.

Brant was right, no doubt, as Hardcastle had said. On one side of them, Pengables thrust his big rock shoulders up into the red sundown and the warmth; on the other a grey mist came running, like the ewes that Storm had chased into the Wilderness a few days since.

And now again there sounded the crying from above, shrill and terrible, and Causleen looked up to see what seemed a ship go overhead with the speed of a hurricane behind. It was a long, slender ship, its slenderer prow driving into the sunlit warmth ahead, and it was chased by the breeze that was a wind by now, hurrying the grey mists in front of it. Then Causleen came out of the eeriness that Logie Woods had laid on her.

“It’s the wild-geese flighting south,” she said, shaking herself free of omens.

“It is,” said Hardcastle; “and so many of them come that we’ve time to get to Logie and no more. Lord Harry only knows what sort of storm is skelping down.”

They two knew what sort of storm it was, when they reached the long pasture that raked up into the Logie highroad. The wind came, and the snow, and biting hail—came ravening on the track of the wild-geese fleeing south—and soon there were no landmarks.

There was a foresters’ hut, he remembered, at his left hand, where the field ran into the pinewoods. They could find shelter there, if anything could find it.

Hardcastle had known the pasture from childhood, but it was lost to him as if he trod foreign country. In the blackest night he could have found his way across it, but not through this scudding snow that swirled till it dizzied brain and sight—through the wind that bit and the hail that stung.

He was not making now for Logie. There was a foresters’ hut at the far end of the pasture where it met the pinewoods. Once he could find it they could shelter till the snow had ended; for tempests as quick to come as this, out of a warm October’s quiet, seldom lasted.

He could not find the hut—could find nothing but snow that was balling already under his feet—snow that would not let the sky come through. It was as if he tried to make way through a thicket, not of brambles, but of cotton-wool. Then a cry reached him. Whether it came from front or rear, he could not tell, but it was Causleen’s voice.

“Where are you, child?” he snapped, impatient at his own failure.

A little sob ran in between one wind-gust and the next. It hurt him strangely. “Lost. I was tired—I could not keep pace.”

She was lost indeed, though no more than ten paces from him. For the wind got up with a screech, and there seemed no space between the snowflakes. And over the din of it all there sounded, far overhead, the crying of belated wild-geese, hurrying south.

Even in that moment of harsh peril, Hardcastle laughed quietly. It was odd that he, of all men, should be asked to go seeking about for a woman lost in the snow. These five years past he had been striving to lose all women, except Rebecca.

Voice answering voice, they strove to find each other. Sometimes they came near, and again they called through the sundering distance. And then at last Hardcastle touched the rough pedlar’s cloak she wore, and reached down, and got her hand into his.

“No more straying,” he said roughly, “till we get out of this damned weather.”

Her hand lay close in his. He did not know that his own gripped it till she winced. He knew only that he must get her free of this pasture that would put the snow-sleep on them if they stayed much longer.

Causleen’s hand seemed in some strange way to guide him. He moved quickly, like one who knew his way at last, and presently his knees came hard against a fence of stone. He had not guessed till now that bruised knees could be a joy.

“Keep your hand in mine,” he said, “while I feel my way by the wall.”

It was a weary enterprise, this feeling the way. The wind was a gale now, and Hardcastle’s hand followed the wall as a blind man’s might, with slow caution.

Together they trudged through the thickening snow till Hardcastle’s numbed fingers touched something that was not stone. He had found the rough trunk of the oak-tree that stood this side of the foresters’ hut.

“Wait,” he said, and clambered up the wall.

In this whiteness that was worse than midnight, he could not see where to plant his feet. And, as is the way of dry-built walls, the stones went under him with a roar like the wind’s note overhead.

“You are hurt?” came Causleen’s voice—tattered to bits by the wind as she tried to repeat the frightened question.

One foot was bruised by a coping-stone of the wall. He could attend to that later on.

“No,” he said. “I’ve made a gap for you to come through. That is all.”

He reached out both hands to draw her up the half-fallen wall; and, as she climbed the opening, the gale drove her full into Hardcastle’s arms. He held her fast, and so they came, he carrying her, along one side of the hut, and round the corner of it, and into shelter of its lee-wall.

Snow lay thick on either hand. Overhead the wind was yelping. But there was a clear space in front of them, and the relief from battering of the tempest was instant, as if they had stepped from winter into June.

“Now you will free me,” said Causleen, with quiet laughter.

Hardcastle had forgotten that he still held her in his arms. He was thinking how nearly they had tasted death while they tramped up and down a pasture known to him from boyhood. If he had not found the wall in time to guide himself by it, there would have been rejoicing out at Garsykes; but the Lost Folk had not done with him as yet.

The door stood half-open. Sometimes the foresters locked it, but oftener not; and Hardcastle took it for a good omen that it was ajar to-day. There would be no need to set a shoulder to it and break it inward. There was a ready welcome for them here.

So he thought, till he pushed the door wide-open, and was challenged roughly. As he had battled to win free of tempest, it seemed he would have to fight for this shelter of the hut. He put Donald’s girl still further behind him and took a pace or two indoors.

“Down, you brute,” he said. “Down, I tell you.”

Then Hardcastle, to his amazement, heard the savage growling cease, and felt a rough snout pushed into his hand; and presently he came from the dimness of the hut into the grey gloom of the space that had snow overhead, and snow to left and right. He held Storm by the collar, because he knew his ways were sharp with strangers nowadays.

“We’ve the sheep-stealer safe. What shall we do with him?” he asked with grim banter.

Storm strained at his collar—to be at Causleen’s throat, he fancied, until the girl ran forward, and took the great, rough muzzle into her hands, and kissed him with frank abandonment. The dog licked her face, and after that licked Hardcastle’s. And the wind roared overhead; and here, on the lee side of the hut, was sanctuary for these three.

“To kiss a dog with his reputation up and down Logie-side,” said Hardcastle, and laughed.

Causleen had not known that he could laugh in this easy, heart-free way. Till now he had seemed austere as destiny—relentless as the driven snow they sheltered from.

“It’s not for the first time—is it, Storm?” she said.

Hardcastle, when they got indoors, knew his way about the hut—knew where to find the candles, the fuel, the demijohn of rum, hidden snugly under the slab that fronted the rough fireplace built of stone. A great blaze of wood and fir-cones was roaring up the chimney soon, and Causleen thanked him for it. Their journey up the pasture had been short in time, but long in suffering, and she was sick with cold.

She almost cried to him to come back when she saw him open the door and go out, and was glad when he returned. It would have been lonely here without him.

Hardcastle had only gone to fill a kettle from the snowdrift, and soon this was purring on the fire. She loathed the smell of the brew he offered her by and by—rum piping-hot in one of the foresters’ mugs—and turned her head away.

“I do not like it.”

“Maybe not; but physic’s better than your death of cold.”

She loathed the taste of it, too, though presently she was glad of obedience to compulsion. This physic, nauseous enough, had a strange gift of bringing warmth and well-being. She no longer shivered. The strain of that rough journey through the tempest was eased and mellowed, and already half-forgotten.

The three of them took their fill of ease. The gale out of doors grew harsher. It raved and screeched, falling back on itself once every while in whining, baffled spite. And they knew that, outside their four walls, the snow was driving thick from Pengables out to Logie, burying sheep and men, making a jest of landmarks.

Hardcastle and the girl had fought the gale, and won. By no other road could they have found the joy in listening to its fury while they hugged the fireglow. But neither guessed what Storm was making of the respite. Like them, the sheep-stealer had battled through the tempest, and found refuge here; but for him it was only one of many nights, with danger lying in wait at every turn. Here he was safe and warm, and in his sleep he gave little, snoring cries of joy.

“When did you two grow friendly?” asked Hardcastle, stirring the dog lazily with one foot.

“It was the night we came to Logie. They called you into the kitchen, and while you were away the illness came on father. I could do nothing for him except watch beside him while he slept.”

“I remember.”

“Then I heard a dog’s feet patter down the passage, and afterwards a lonely sobbing. And I found Storm in the cupboard under the stair, crying his big heart out. I was lonely, too, and he knew it.”

“You know much of dogs,” said the Master, with grudging praise.

“I should like to know more—and less of my own kind.”

“You’re young, to be so hard.”

A faint smile crossed her face. “And you?”

“Oh, I’m old as the hills. A man needs to be hard, or what’s the use of him?”

As he turned to pile fresh logs on the fire, a lull came in the tempest, and Storm lifted his head sharply from his lazy, stretched-out paws. Some sound had stolen from the snow outside that only he could hear. He got up, whining and growling by turns as he laid his nose to a crack in the door. Then he yapped, and after that he howled; and Hardcastle, who had thought of opening the door to learn who came, thought better of it. He knew what the wolf-cry meant.

“Shame on you, lad,” he said.

The fire went out of Storm. His tail drooped. He cringed about this new master of his choice; and, when no blow came, he settled himself by the hearth again and slept. But now he had muddled dreams for company.