“Now, don’t you faint away, or any o’ those maidish cantrips. There’s a time and season for ’em, and it isn’t now. Fancied he was dead, I reckon? Well, he’s quick. All the Hardcastles are made that way. Gluttons for sleep they always were and will be.”
The brindled cat had learned Rebecca’s mood at a glance and leaped to the top of a cupboard, where he sat with vain hope that he was safe. Rebecca, in sore and restless trouble, searched for outlet, and her roving glance fell on Jonah. With a twist of the long hearth-brush in her hands, she brought him down, and aimed a wild blow at him in his flight.
“That’s for washing yourself like a dandy, same as if naught was amiss at Logie.”
Then she lit the fire with vicious haste; and, when she looked up again, Causleen saw the slow, thin tears of age trickling down.
“I’m worrited, lass, and don’t ye heed. They can come blazing Logie down every night and all, and welcome. It’s when Garsykes willun’t come, and keeps us at full stretch, I get to my nagging.”
The morning went by on leaden feet. Michael Draycott had gone to the work waiting for him at Broken Firs. The Master slept on, spent and in some far land that seemed neighbour to the grave. The wind stole whining from the moors and through the forest trees. There seemed little hope for Logie.
Causleen could bear it no longer. All trouble was easier to face in the frank open than prisoned by walls that harboured dread. So, when Rebecca had gone to the dairy for a moment, she stole to Hardcastle’s side.
“Dick, do you hear me?” she whispered, longing to hear him answer, yet hoping he would sleep on, to find his strength.
No answer came, except the clack-clack of Rebecca’s pattens on the dairy floor. So then she bent and kissed him, and went out—across the mistal-yard, and up the home pastures, and out into the moors that lay near to Garsykes. She needed the winds of God about her—needed, too, in some half-confessed fashion, to be sentry while the Master slept.
At Logie, Rebecca went on with her cooking and her scouring as if no inner voice was whispering of havoc, soft-footed, stealthy. All she had longed for—all she had prayed, through the lonely years that had gone since they killed her man—was gathering to a head. In her bones she knew it, as she knew “the rheumatics” that was twisting them out of all earthly shape.