THE PLAGUE
Hardcastle had sent his challenge to Garsykes by the tramping man who met them on the Norbrigg road, and was quick to follow the new venture. The next day he rode with Causleen from farm to farm, and found his tenantry alert for battle. A changed mood had come to them. They knew how nearly these two had been lost for ever to Logie-side. They warmed to the hardihood of their escape from the Garsykes cavern, to their bridal-gallop over to Skipton and back and the keen, young mating look they carried. And shame was on them to remember how they had paid tribute to the skulking folk out yonder.
The last farm they came to was Michael Draycott’s, and they found him in the patch of garden fronting the house. He was leaning on a stick—a sick man and an old, till Hardcastle rallied him.
“Dying again, Michael?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say as much as that—though I fancied last night the end had come. My innards were that wambly you’d scarce believe till I settled them with a dose of barley-brew. And now I’m getting about again.”
“Suppose all Logie was for marching straight through Garsykes street? How long should we have to wait till you got well, Michael?”
“A matter of three minutes—or maybe two.”
“You’re always the same, Michael.”
“Well, I couldn’t be different, so long as I’m inside my body—like a bird in a cage, as you might say. Do we bring guns with us, Master?”
The other’s face hardened. “We do—and we fire Garsykes from end to end. There’s to be no quarter.”
“That’s well thought out,” said Michael. “Their thatched roofs will be like tinder in this heat that’s come to the moor. Years out of mind I’ve wanted that sort of clearance, and I hope we start to-morrow.”
“Would God we could,” said Hardcastle, with stormy recollection of the cave—“but we’ve to make our preparations.”
“Well, there’s no harm in giving them a taste of what they put on us. You sent Garsykes the token. Now they can wait, asking each other what’s to come. And naught will come, till they fair get the dithers.”
Michael’s words stayed with Hardcastle, while he conquered his own impatience during the next days. Nothing was overlooked in his preparations for attack. He would have less than fifty to lead against a village that swarmed with men entrenched in their own walls. The more need, he told himself, to see that each of his had his weapons in good order and knew how to use them.
It was tedious work, but he remembered Causleen’s appeal. “Break them outright, Dick,” she had said. “For my sake, break them.” And he had checked his first impulse, to attack at once. There must be no mistake, no hot-headed leaping against odds that might smother them. The Lost Folk should be broken, as she asked.
He drilled his men, mapped out each detail of the coming fight. Aloof from any care except to make an end of Garsykes—pitiless, save for the women and children harbouring there—he lived for the one purpose.
While they drilled, the men growing restless to be into Garsykes street, the sun blazed each day from a sky that showed nowhere any cloud of mercy.
“It’s drying their thatches nicely,” Michael Draycott would growl, with a glance across the valley. “Let’s pray that no rain comes before the Master lets us loose.”
And now a rumour spread through the Logie country. First it was whispered that a stranger had come into Garsykes and died there of the plague. That was sinister enough, but soon news followed of further deaths, till dread took hold of all folk—a colder and a stealthier dread than ever Garsykes brought on Logie until now.
Hardcastle drilled his men relentlessly, to keep their minds from brooding. The thicker the rumours spread, the less he credited them. The Lost Folk, learning somehow of the coming onslaught, had spread the news themselves, and under its cover were preparing an attack in force. This was what he told his people, and by night they doubled the number of their scouts about the hills.
None was eager now, except the Master, to press through Garsykes street; for the very name of plague set each looking at another for the tell-tale blotches to appear.
Then a morning came when Hardcastle, looking across the valley, saw a black shape hovering in the molten sky. It was joined presently by another, and yet another, and suddenly he understood.
“We can ease our drilling, Michael,” he said. “Garsykes has not lied this once—for the corbie-crows are waiting.”
Garsykes—those still alive in it—saw the same three crows poised above its sweltering street. Rumour at its wildest could have pictured no scene more stark with horror; for the stranger who had brought Hardcastle’s challenge had brought gaol-fever, too, and it had spread like flame throughout a village ready to receive it.
The sun beat down from the shelterless fells till the cobbles of the street were hot to tread. Each festering refuse heap bred flies beyond number, and in the roadway lay the body of a man that none dared touch. Gaol-fever, quick to strike, had taken him as he neared home, and he had found no strength to journey further. It was for him the corbies watched.
As though havoc were not doing enough with them, the Lost Folk let in another adversary—cringing and abject fear—fear that slackened the muscles and slew their will to live. Every other house was tenanted by dead or dying, and those free of the plague as yet were journeying up the fells with bundles slung over-shoulder. It was better to go anywhere than stay in Garsykes, where plague stalked silent through the buzzing flies.
The last fugitive to seek the hills was Widow Mathison, and Nita was at her cottage-door as she came past with her boy.
“Afraid, like the rest?” mocked the basket-weaver.
“Not for myself. I’d have stood by my tavern to the last, but there’s the little lad to think of. Hardcastle o’ Logie saved him from the bog, and ’twould be a shame to let him die of Garsykes fever. You don’t like Hardcastle’s name, I notice. He’s had the laugh of us at the end of all.”
With flaunting, half-frightened derision, she gripped her boy’s hand, and together they went up the track of flight that many Garsykes Folk had taken—the track marked here and there, as they sped further up the wilds, by some dying man who raved in anguish, or by a dead woman with a baby crying at her breasts for food.
Nita looked down on the steamy haze of Garsykes. Up here, where her cottage nestled in a dingle of the highlands, the breeze blew clear and free. Death might ride as he would through a village she despised and loathed—but how could he touch little Nita, who wove baskets for the Dale? She glanced far out to Logie, its grey chimneys pushing up above the lush, green woodlands. Hardcastle and his bride were there, and already she was weaving snares for them, supple as the willows that were her stock-in-trade, when a heavy tread sounded close at hand.
She saw Long Murgatroyd lurching and swaying up the road—saw him steady himself as he neared her.
“There were three of us left in Garsykes,” said Murgatroyd. “And now there’s only two.”
“How is that?” asked Nita, humouring a man in liquor.
“I stepped into the widow’s for a drink of ale—hoping she’d forget what she’d chalked on the inside o’ the door against me. And there wasn’t a widow there. So I helped myself.”
“No need to tell me that,” said Nita.
“The widow’s gone up-fell, like the rest of the living folk. And now there’s only you and me—and the still ones down yonder. We’ve got all Garsykes to ourselves, Nita, and the fever couldn’t touch us if it tried.”
Even as he spoke, he fell to shivering, and Nita glanced at him with startled eyes. The widow’s ale had less to do with his wild talk and wilder bearing than she had fancied. Doubt grew into certainty that the plague was on him, and yet she could not stir. She could only watch the dreadful twisting of his body, till the shivering passed.
“Now we’ll set up together, and own all Garsykes,” said Murgatroyd. “It will take us a bit to shift the dead, but they’ll not hinder—and the fever can’t touch us——”
His voice wandered out in senseless mutterings. Then, as he saw her recoil, a false strength came on him. She had played with him, flouted him; but he had known she would be his one day.
Before she knew his purpose, he had crushed her into his arms and kissed her, scarce knowing what he did. Fighting like a wild-cat, tooth and claw, she got away from his fast-waning strength, and fled up the hills, and out to the hidden pool where she was used to bathe o’ mornings.
She stripped with haste and plunged into the peat-brown depths, and scarce dared leave them when her limbs grew chill and cramped. And in her heart, deep down, was a haunting fear that not all the waters, welling sweet from out these pastured uplands, could cleanse that bridal-kiss of plague.
Long Murgatroyd tottered in pursuit, then came near to falling. He forgot Nita, forgot all but the instinct of a wounded beast to seek its lair. Somehow he got to his cottage, and went in, and shut the door. A great sweat broke over him, and afterwards a chill that nipped him to the bone. He raked the grey peats on the hearth into a glow, and fed them with sticks and fir-cones till the chimney roared and bellowed.
Still he could find no warmth, though his brain was hot as a furnace. He piled more wood on, and more, till the blazing heap fell over and down, and licked his clothes, and ran here and there about the coarse matting on the floor.
Rebecca, up at Logie, had found no ease that day. Scrub as she would, bake, or quarrel with the brindled cat, nothing helped to stifle her restlessness. Old griefs tugged at her memory, and would not be still. Jealousy of Logie’s mistress rankled with new bitterness.
She was drawn out of doors at last. The workaday present galled and fretted. Nothing would serve but communion with her lover, such as she found only at the gate down yonder—the lover who could not rest in his grave because his death at Garsykes’ hands went unrequited.
Before ever she reached the gate, a scud of thin, harsh smoke came down the rising breeze. She glanced in question across the valley that hid Wharfe River, flaring under Logie Brigg—glanced up at old Pengables, swarthy against the molten sky, and down again to the hollow where Garsykes lay.
Rebecca caught her breath. Things hoped for, till the heart grows sick, are not to be believed at first. Yet soon she had to credit what was doing yonder. She leaned a shoulder down for Jonah, and the cat leaped nimbly up, spitting and growling at the wisps of smoke.
“D’ye see it, lad?” she asked, pointing a skinny finger.
Where Garsykes lay, a running sheet of fire blazed up into the sun-glare. It stayed for a moment to swallow a cottage, then passed nimbly forward to the next. The thatched roofs, one by one, broke upward in a shower of wind-blown flame. And all about the land there was the startled din of moor-birds, wheeling and crying, afraid for their nestlings on the heights.
“Now God be thanked,” said Rebecca, young, happy vigour in her voice.
Then she fell into a trance. Forty years her man had waited, coming to the gate each night to ask if Garsykes swine still roamed the land. And now she felt a hand steal into hers, content at last. And she woke, as from a marriage-bed, with throstles singing up the new-found dawn.
“I’m coming soon, my lad,”—her voice was soft and girlish—“after I’ve settled two young lovers into Logie. They don’t need Rebecca now.”