The pedlar strove to rise, because his vision was so urgent, and fell back, and moaned awhile in helplessness. Then he glanced at Causleen with quiet humour.
“Standing on a high hill, was I?” he muttered. “It was a good dream while it lasted.”
Then his eyes clouded, and he slept; and Causleen, roaming the winding passages again, encountered Rebecca.
“He’ll only come the one way home to Logie,” muttered the woman. “He’ll only come the one way now—stretched on a gate, with four men carrying him. It was so they brought my man home, forty odd years since, after he had said nay to the Garsykes sort.”
Causleen, awed by the loneliness of corridors and stairs that seemed peopled with ghosts, followed Rebecca as she went to the door, and opened it, and stood listening.
“All’s quiet as yet,” said Rebecca, turning by and by; “but it’ll not be quiet for long. It’s a queer sort o’ shuffling noise they make—four men carrying a gate and something heavy stretched on it. Forty years since I heard it last! It seems like yesterday.”
The girl yielded to the other’s hard, quiet certainty that Hardcastle was dead—yielded to the wind’s sobbing in among the half-stripped branches of the sycamores outside. Again pity touched her—a deeper pity now. If the Master’s welcome at their first coming had been chilly, he had bettered it with every day that followed. She and her father had been nothing but a burden to him from the start, yet he had made them guests of honour in his own gruff fashion. There was the night, too, at the woodmen’s hut. She had railed at him for saving her; but now she understood. And it was too late.
Rebecca’s lean body grew intent on the sudden. She stepped out into the moonlight, and presently Causleen heard, too, the pit-a-pat of hoofs sound up the road.
“They’re bringing him on horseback, instead of a gate,” said Rebecca, in the same hard, quiet tone; “but it’s a dead man rides, and that I know.”
Causleen could think no less. The slow clink of hoofs suggested no living master, riding home to his own roof-tree and its cheer. Somewhere—in her heart or mind, she knew not which—there was a sense of bitter loss. Already, without guessing it, she had grown to lean on Hardcastle in these days of grief and home-sickness for the Highlands. And he was gone, all but the husk of him.