All that was said and left unsaid in those few words stung Nita like a lash. This peddling castaway could hold her own, and more than her own.
“Maybe not. But I can set the whole Dale rocking with the tale Long Murgatroyd brought home.”
With that she laughed in Causleen’s face and went her way. Half down the road, where it wound sheer and stark to Logie Brigg, she met Hardcastle, urging a hard-driven horse.
“Your light o’ love is waiting for you,” she said, curtseying in sheer mockery.
“One in a lifetime is enough for me, Nita,” he answered grimly, and rode on. He and his horse had travelled many a hilly mile in pursuit of a hard-worked doctor, and had not found him; and he was sorry, because Causleen was tired enough already, after last night’s storm, without this added trouble of the father who was near to death.
He came in sight of the wicket-gate, and slipped from saddle, and let his horse find its own way to stable. Causleen was at the gate, her back turned to the roadway, and Hardcastle was afraid, somehow, to listen to the girl’s wild sobbing. It startled and unmanned him. He longed to get away, yet could not leave her in this plight.
“I’ve done my best to find the doctor,” he said, putting a kindly hand on her shoulder, “but he’s away up Amerdale. Is Donald worse?”
She drew away, as if his touch scorched her. “He is better—just for awhile—and I ran out to see if you had brought the doctor. And a woman came instead—so pretty, and with so foul a tongue.”
Hardcastle remembered Nita’s mocking curtsey—recalled Long Murgatroyd’s intrusion into the foresters’ hut last night—and the riddle of it all grew plain. Nita’s tongue had been busy with the pedlar’s girl and he knew what it could do even to rough men. Something stirred at his heart—the heart frozen long since, so that it had forgotten how to suffer, joy or grief.
“Nobody cares what Nita says. She says, and goes on saying—and folk laugh.”