She lifted her head suddenly, and it was strange to mark how once again the Lean Man's hardiness showed plainly in her face.
"Nay, but it needs two for any bargain," she cried, and cold steel, even in a maid's hand, can always right a quarrel.
Yet she was full of dread for Shameless Wayne. What chance had he, with the Lean Man's craft and all the strength of Wildwater against him? He would not budge from Marsh, folk said, and he had but four weak lads to help him there. And she could do nothing. Instinctively she looked to the moor for help—the moor, that had been friend and playmate to her through her score years of life. Flat to the cloud-streaked sky it stretched, and the bending heather-tops seemed moving toward her with kindly invitation. Reaching down her cloak from behind the door, she hurried out and turned her back on Wildwater, with its surly stretch of intake, its blackened, frowning gables, its guardian pool. Little by little her step grew firmer; the sky and the wind were close about her, and the fret begotten of house walls slackened with each mile that took her further away from men.
At Marsh there were hills above and sloping fields below; but here the dingle-furrowed flat of bog and peat and heather ended only with the sky—the sky, whose grey and amber cloudlets seemed but an added acreage to the great moor's vastness. Far off the Craven Hills—Sharpas, and Rombald's Moor, and the dark stretch of Rylstone Fell—showed flat as the cloudland and the heath, and the valleys in between were levelled by the mist that filled them up. Only the kirk-stone near at hand, and further the round breast of Bouldsworth Hill, stood naked out of the wilderness, and served, like pigmies at a giant's knee, to show the majesty against which they upreared their littleness. A lark soared mote-like in the middle blue, but his song came frail and reedy through the silence; the noise of many waters rose muffled from their jagged streamways, aping a thousand voices of the Heath-Brown Folk who lived beneath the marshes and the heather. The toil of goblin hammers, working day-long at the gold hid underground was to be heard, the tinkle of the Brown Folk's laughter when they danced, the sobbing fury of their cries as a human foot pressed over-heavily above their peat-roofed dwellings. And sometimes, too, a drear baying came with the wind across the moor, and told that Barguest was speeding on his death-errand.
All this the girl understood, as she did not understand the ways of men and their crabbed round of life. The world-old loneliness, the tragic stillness that was half a sob, were full of intimate speech for her; when the storm-winds whistled, they piped a welcome measure; there was no hour of dark or day out here on the heath that showed her aught but homelike linkliness. The little people of the moor she knew, too, as she knew her own face reflected in a wayside pool—the plump-bodied spiders, the starveling moor-tits, the haunt of snipe and curlew, eagle and hawk and moor-fowl. Scarce a day passed but she read some well-thumbed page of this Book of Life, till now she had learned by heart the two lessons which the wide hill-spaces teach their children—superstition and a rare singleness of passion. The Ratcliffe men-folk lusted after the feud, and their hate was single-minded; Janet, with a man's vigour in her blood and only a maid's way of outlet, had never learned of sun or wind or tempest, that the plain force of passion was created only to be checked. Shame, and halting by the way, were her woman's birthright; but these had lacked a foster-mother, and the resistless teaching of the solitude had made her love for Wayne of Marsh a swift, and terrible, and god-like thing.
Yet her clear outlook upon life had been dulled of late. The moor had still the same unalterable counsel for her, but at Wildwater there had been such constant talk of feud, such a quiet surety on the Lean Man's part that no Ratcliffe could ever stoop to friendship with a Wayne, that insensibly the girl had faltered a little in her purpose. Had Shameless Wayne been of her mind, she would have cared naught for what her folk said; but he, too, had been against her, and, while he angered and perplexed her, he forced her to believe that the blood spilt between the houses would leave its stain forever.
But that was changed now: the bargain made by the Lean Man that morning had killed, once for all, the narrower love of kin; the danger that was coming so near to Wayne of Marsh made her free to be as she would with him—for with it all she knew that, spite of Wayne's would-be coldness, his heart was very surely hers.
She moved to the kirk-stone, and lifted her hands against its weather-wrinkled face, and bared her heart to this living bulk of stone which had learned, century in and century out, the changeless fashion of men's impulses. She had no wild passion now for Shameless Wayne; that was subdued by a fierce and over-mastering mother-love—a love that saw his danger and yearned to snatch him from it at any cost, a love that knew neither pride nor shade of doubt.
"Thank God, I have no father to Wildwater, nor brother," she murmured, "for I would have taken against them, too, for his sake.—They are so sure of me, grandfather, and Red Ratcliffe, and all of them; I will trick them to tell me all their plans; and each time they come back with empty saddles I will be glad." Her voice deepened. "Ay, I will be glad!" she cried.
Little by little her heaviness slipped off from her. It had been hard to wait idly, expecting each hour to bring her news of Wayne's discomfiture; but now there was work for her to do, and she would strive at every turn to cross her kinsfolk's plans. With a lighter heart than she had known for many a day, she took her farewell of the kirk-stone and swung out across the moor until she reached the lane, soft now with budding thorn-bushes, which led past Wynyates.