CHAPTER XXXV. ROBBIE'S QUEST ENDED.
It was all over now. The weary chase was done, and Robbie Anderson came late. Ralph had surrendered, and a sadder possibility than Robbie guessed at, a more terrible catastrophe than Rotha Stagg or Willy Ray had feared or looked for, lay in the sequel now to be unfolded.
The soldiers and their prisoner had gone; the crowd had gone with them, and Robbie stood alone in the Market Place. From his station on the steps of the cross he turned and looked after the motley company. They took the way down English Street.
How hot and tired his forehead felt! It had ached before, but now it burned like fire. Robbie pressed it hard against the cold stone of the cross. Then he walked aimlessly away. He had nowhere to go; he had nothing to do; and hour after hour he rambled through the narrow streets of the old town. The snow still hung in heavy flakes from the overhanging eaves and porches of the houses, and toppled at intervals in thick clots on to the streets. The causeways were swept dry.
Up and down, through Blackfriars Street, past the gaol that stood on the ruins of the monastery, along Abbey Street, and past the cathedral, across Head Lane, and into the Market Place again; then along the banks of the Caldew, and over the western wall that looked across the hills that stretched into the south; round Shaddon-gate to the bridge that lay under the shadow of the castle, and up to the river Eden and the wide Scotch-gate to the north. On and on, he knew not where, he cared not wherefore; on and on, till his weary limbs were sinking beneath him, until the long lines of houses, with their whitened timbers standing out from their walls, and their pediments and the windows that were dormered into their roofs seemed to reel about him and dance in fantastic figures before his eyes.
The incident of that morning had created an impression among the townspeople. There was a curious absence of unanimity as to the crime with which the prisoner would stand charged; but Robbie noticed that everybody agreed that it was something terrible, and that nobody seemed to suffer much in good humor by reason of the fate that hung over a fellow-creature. “Very shocking, very. Come, John, let's have a glass together!”
Robbie had turned into a byway that bore the name of King's Arms Lane. He paused without purpose or thought before a narrow recess in which a quaint old house stood back from the street. With its low flat windows deeply recessed into the stone, its curious heads carved long ago into bosses that were now ruined by frost and rain, it might have been a wing of the old abbey that had wandered somehow away. A little man, far in years, pottered about in front, brushing the snow and cleaning the windows.
“Yon man is just in time for the 'sizes,” said a young fellow as he swung by with another, who was pointing to the house and muttering something that was inaudible to Robbie.
“What place is this?” said Robbie, when they had gone, stepping up to the gate and addressing the old man within.
“The judges' lodgings surely,” replied the caretaker, lifting his eyes from his shovel with a look of surprise at the question.
“And the 'sizes, when are they on?”
“Next week; that's when they begin.”
The ancient custodian was evidently not of a communicative temperament, and Robbie, who was in no humor for gossip, turned away.
It was of little use to remain longer. All was over. The worst had come to the worst. He might as well turn towards home. But how hot his forehead felt! Could it have been that ducking his head in the river at Wythburn had caused it to burn like a furnace?
Robbie thought of Sim. Why had he not met him in his long ramble through the town? They might have gone home together.
At the corner of Botcher-gate and English Street there stood two shops, and as Robbie passed them the shopkeepers were engaged in an animated conversation on the event of the morning. “I saw him go by with the little daft man; yes, I did. I was just taking down my shutters, as it might be so,” said one of the two men, imitating the piece of industry in question.
“Deary me! What o'clock might that be?” asked the other.
“Well, as I say, I was just taking down my shutters, as it might be so,” imitating the gesture again. “I'd not sanded my floor, nor yet swept out my shop; so it might have been eight, and it might have been short of eight, and maybe it was somewhere between the three quarters and the hour—that's as I reckon it.”
“Deary me! deary me!” responded the other shopkeeper, whose blood was obviously curdling at the bare recital of these harrowing details.
Robbie walked on. Eight o'clock! Then he had been but two hours late—two poor little hours!
Robbie reflected with vexation and bitterness on the many hours which must have been wasted or ill spent since he left Wythburn on Sunday. He begrudged the time that he had given to rest and sleep.
Well, well, it was all over now; and out of Carlisle, through the Botcher-gate, and down the road up which he came, Robbie turned with weary feet. The snow was thawing fast, and the meadows on every side lay green in the sunshine. How full of grace they were! How cruel in her very gladness Nature still seemed to be!
Never for an instant did Robbie lose the sense of a great calamity hanging above him, but a sort of stupefaction was creeping over him nevertheless. He busied himself with reflections on every minor feature of the road. Had he marked this beech before, or that oak? Had he seen this gate on his way into Carlisle, or passed through that bar? A boy on the road was driving a herd of sheep before him. One drift of the sheep was marked with a red cross, and the other drift with a black patch. Robbie counted the two drifts of sheep one by one, and wondered whose they were and where they were going.
Then he sat down to rest, and let his forehead drop on to the grass to cool it. When he rose again the road seemed to swim around him. A farm servant in a smock was leading two horses, and as he passed he bade the wayfarer, “Good afternoon.” Robbie went on without seeming to hear, but when the man had got beyond the sound of his voice he turned as if by sudden impulse, and, waving his hand with a gesture of cordiality, he returned the salutation.
Then he sat down once more and held his head between his hands. It was beating furiously, and his body, too, from head to foot, was changing rapidly from hot to cold. At length the consciousness took possession of him that he was ill. “I doubt I'm badly,” he thought, and tried to realize his position. Presently he attempted to rise and call back the countryman with the horses. Lifting himself on one trembling knee, he waved a feeble arm spasmodically in the air, and called and called again. The voice startled him; it seemed not to be his own. His strength was spent. He sank back and remembered no more.
The man in the smock was gone, but another countryman was coming down the road at that moment from the direction of Carlisle. This was no other than little blink-eyed Reuben Thwaite. He was sitting muffled up in his farm wagon and singing merry snatches to keep the cold out of his lungs. Reuben had been at Carlisle over night with sundry hanks of thread, which he had sold to the linen weavers. He had found a good market by coming so far, and he was returning to Wythburn in high feckle. When he came (as he would have said) “ebbn fornenst” Robbie lying at the roadside, he jumped down from his seat. “What poor lad's this? Why, what! What say! What!” holding himself back to grasp the situation, “Robbie Anderson!”
Then a knowing smile overspread Reuben's wrinkled features as he stooped to pat and push the prostrate man, in an effort to arouse him to consciousness.
“Tut, Robbie, lad; Robbie, ma lad! This wark will nivver do, Robbie! Brocken loose agen, aye! Come, Robbie, up, lad!”
Robbie lay insensible to all Reuben's appeals, whether of the nature of banter or half-serious menace.
“Weel, weel, the lad has had a fair cargo intil him this voyage, anyway.”
There was obviously no likelihood of awakening Robbie, so with a world of difficulty, with infinite puffing and fuming and perspiring, and the help of a passing laborer, Reuben contrived to get the young fellow lifted bodily into his cart. Lying there at full length, a number of the empty thread sacks were thrown over the insensible man, and then Reuben mounted to his seat and drove off.
“Poor old Martha Anderson!” muttered Reuben to himself. “It's weel she's gone, poor body! It wad nigh have brocken her heart—and it's my belief 'at it did.”
They had not gone far before Reuben himself, with the inconsistency of more pretentious moralists, felt an impulse to indulge in that benign beverage of which he had just deplored the effects. Drawing up with this object at a public house that stood on the road, he called for a glass of hot spirits. He was in the act of taking it from the hands of the landlord, when a stage-coach drove up, and the coachman and two of the outside passengers ordered glasses of brandy.
“From Carlisle, eh?” said one of the latter, eyeing Reuben from where he sat and speaking with an accent which the little dalesman knew to be “foreign to these parts.”
Reuben assented with a satisfied nod and a screwing up of one cheek into a wrinkle about the eyes. He was thinking of the good luck of his visit.
“What's the news there?” asked the other passenger, with an accent which the little dalesman was equally certain was not foreign to these parts.
“Threed's up a gay penny!” said Reuben.
“Any news at the Castle the day?”
“The Castle? No—that's to say, yes. I did hear 'at a man had given hissel' up, but I know nowt aboot it.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No.”
“Be quick in front, my gude man; let's be off; we've lost time enough with the snow already.”
The coachman had mounted to his box, and was wrapping a sheepskin about his knees.
“What's that you have there?” he said to Reuben.
“Him? Why, that's Robbie Anderson, poor fellow. One o' them lads, thoo knows, that have no mair nor one enemy in all the world, and that's theirselves.”
“Out for a spoag, eh?”
“Come, get along, man, and let's have no more botherment,” cried one of the impatient passengers.
Two or three miles farther down the road Reuben was holding in his horse, in order to cross a river, when he thought that, in the comparative silence of his springless wagon, he heard Robbie speaking behind him.
“It's donky weather, this,” Robbie was saying.
“Ey, wet and sladderish,” said Reuben, in an insinuating tone, “baith inside and out, baith under foot and ower head.”
“It was north of the bridge,” Robbie whispered.
“What were—Carlisle?” asked Reuben in his most facetious vein.
“It blows a bit on the Stye Head to-day, Ralph. The way's ower narrow. I can never chain the young horse. Steady, Betsy; steady, lass; steady—”
“Why, the lad's ram'lin',” said Reuben to himself.
“It was fifty strides north of the bridge,” Robbie whispered again; and then lifting his voice he cried, “She's gone; she's gone.”
“He's ram'lin' for sure.”
The truth now dawned on Reuben that on the present occasion at least Robbie was not drunk, but sick. With the illogical perversity of some healthy people, he thought to rally the ailing man out of his ailment, whatever it might be; so he expended all the facetiousness of which he was master on Robbie's unconscious figure.
Reuben's well-meant efforts were of no avail. Robbie alternately whispered, “It was north of the bridge,” and chuckled, “Ah, ah! there's Garth, Garth—but I downed him, the dummel head!”
The little dalesman relinquished as hopeless all further attempt at rational converse, and gave himself the solemn assurance, conveyed to his acute intelligence by many grave shakes of the head, that “summat was ailin' the lad, after all.”
Then they drove for hours in silence. It was dark when they passed through Threlkeld, and turned into the Vale of Wanthwaite on their near approach to Wythburn.
“I scarce know rightly where Robbie bides, now old Martha's dead,” thought Reuben; “I'll just slip up the lonnin to Shoulth'et and ask.”