Long as he had known it—and he rode seldom from Skipton without a glance at the message overhead—Hardcastle had taken it as a symbol of his own grim fight for Logie. Now that was changed. He had a wife beside him, and the feud with Garsykes grew doubly worth the while.
He glanced at the carved challenge, and made English of it for her. “Henceforth, sweetheart,” he said, and laughed quietly as a conqueror might.
In silence they rode past the castle walls and up into the grey, solitary fells. The track twisted this way and that to lessen the steepness of the climb, till they breasted the last of the hill and passed through the rocky gap that was the gateway of the homeland watered by Wharfe River.
They drew rein, and could only marvel at the land stretched wide below them. The winter’s sun shone warm and mellow over the far spaces, grey-blue with haze. Every striding league of heath, each gully where leafless rowans waited for the spring, showed to Hardcastle like the map of his own heart. Pride—big hearted, eager pride—leaped out as he pointed down the slope.
“We own most of it, wife. Is it a good bridal-gift?”
Her eyes filled with tears. He gave all he had, for her to share. And he named her wife. She had not guessed how all-sufficing the name was, how real and warm and safe. And somehow, across the chill upland breeze, a summer fragrance blew, as of clove-pinks and ladslove in a wayside garden.
All they had gone through together returned—the stealthy siege of Logie, the stark, long peril in the cave—and she drew a sharp breath of thanksgiving that this was the end of nightmare.
“Life is sweet to hold, Dick,” she said, smiling through her tears.
They rode in another silence, rich with speech, down the slack of Storner Bank. And now the wood-reek from Logie’s chimneys eddied up, so near that they could smell its savour.
“We’re home,” said Hardcastle, drawing his horse nearer hers.