“I’ll not leave you! I’ll not stir without you! You’re sitting here snug and asleep, putting your trust in your one-eyed Lancasters, and you’ll drown in your trust like rats in a trapped hole! But it’s up to me to see you don’t. I’ll hike you out, with or without your will. I’ll get a move on you in spite of you!”
He seized the old man by the shoulder, but Wolf shook him off, striking at him furiously with his heavy stick. Then he turned to the woman, stammering, hysterical, almost weeping, his voice rising in desperate appeal.
“You know what’s coming! I guess I needn’t tell you! You know what the tide’s bringing, ’way out on the dark sand! You hear it, same as I do, what it’s seeking, what it sure means to have. It’s all in for the Lugg to-night, and yet you’ll set your life and his to foot the account, just to make good on a Lancaster’s word, a Lancaster’s honour going plum to hell for ever and ever and ever——”
He stuttered into silence before the smiling dreadfulness of her eyes on his working face, and, when he stopped, she turned them again with complete and horrible definiteness to the fire. Wolf staggered to his feet, the dogs close at his knee, half-crouched to spring. Across Brack’s hand where he had struck him the blood showed in a vivid streak.
“You’ll say nowt agen the Lancasters under this roof, Bracken Holliday! We all ken the trouble you’ve made on the marsh, and the tales you’ve set agog about the Lugg and the old master; an’ I tell you now, if it’s with the last breath God Almighty puts into my mouth, that they’re every one on ’em lies! The Lugg’ll last many a long year after us as saw it built, an’ many a year after such as you an’ all; just as the Lancasters’ honour will stand, an’ their word an’ their righteous judgment, long after the likes o’ you is mouldered away an’ forgot.”
He tottered across to his wife and held out his hand for hers.
“Wilta bide wimma, Martha?” he asked in a dropped voice, and she looked up at him, resting her gray head against his sleeve.
“Ay, lad, I will that!” she answered, in the same tone of rarest intimacy, and he remembered in a lightning-flash how she had spoken those very words, in just that way, to his rough courting of long ago.
Cursing and sobbing, Brack tore out into the night, calling to Francey to follow, and after a last look of pity and pain she obeyed, the tears rolling down her cheeks. In that moment all her theories and doubts and surface convictions went by the board. Before her eyes she saw made manifest the one thing that holds human life safe and unafraid against all the unknown terrors of the dark, and knew that to end it thus with Lup, her hand in his, her cheek against his arm, was to have for ever all of the very best that God could offer.
The car went back as rooks go home on a slanting gale. More than once Brack felt her slide up and off the bank, on the other side of which lay the waiting sands. And, as they fled, with the tempest-roar in their ears, above it and behind them they heard the voice of the coming tide.