The Master was home again, tall and limber, though his coat was drenched with blood. His old laugh was in the front of hardship. He was glad, with a clean, hard joy, to have brought Causleen safe to Logie, after all, through moil of the Garsykes Men. And Rebecca was glad with him—fiercely glad that the Wilderness had been outwitted once again.
Every sorrow she had known, since her own man died for Logie forty years ago, returned now to this grey henchwoman of the house—the wedded days she should have had, the bairns that might have been—and hate of Garsykes swept through her like a tempest.
Then she saw the Master and Causleen glance at each other with such silent, all-sufficing knowledge that jealousy chilled her to the bone. Why should they come in their young, insolent strength, and flaunt their caring in her face?
The brindled cat was in ill-humour, too. All day he had wandered from house to stable-yard in search of his boon-comrade, Storm, and now the friendly reek of him stole out from Hardcastle’s drenched coat. Jonah leaped from Rebecca’s shoulder, and purred and growled by turns, reaching up to sniff the scent that was Storm’s, but with a cold, dismaying difference. Then the cat neither growled nor purred. All the life seemed to dwindle in him. The fur, stiff with battle, fell limp and draggled, and he mewed with piteous appeal.
“Gone away, Jonah,” said Hardcastle, a queer break in his voice. “Storm’s sleeping up the fells.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE QUIET WEDDING
The Garsykes Folk had grown tired of guarding the cave mouth. For a night, and half the next day, Nita’s tongue had whipped them into watchfulness; and when they were growing out of hand at last, she made light of what Hardcastle could do to them.
“Get you in first, Long Murgatroyd,” she gibed. “What with the ghosts and the silence, we’ve tamed Hardcastle by this time. You needn’t fear.”
Murgatroyd fetched a laugh up, big as his body. “If you’ll come with me,” he said.