“I’ve the bridal-supper ready, and near spoilt. You were always late to your vituals, Master.”
She sat on in the kitchen, after all was served and she had left them to their meal; and she missed Jonah sorely. The cat had been with her till the moment when she went to greet the bridal-pair, and now had vanished like her own joy in serving Hardcastle. All had gone, it seemed, and she yielded to loneliness utter and complete.
She threw her apron over her head, and rocked to and fro. Grief had its way with her. The years behind gathered their hardships to a head, and tears broke through at last.
Then by and by she heard the kettle singing on the hob, and made a hefty brew of tea. And after that she went in search of Jonah.
They heard her tramping forlornly upstairs and down, and Causleen’s hand reached out to Hardcastle’s across their wedding-table.
“She’s old and sorry, Dick—and we’ve so much.”
Hardcastle found a quick new tenderness for this wife of his. She knew, as he did, that Rebecca was bone and fibre of his house—one by this time with its thick-set walls, the people who lived here aforetime—one to be cherished like a heritage.
Together they went in search and found Rebecca standing at the cupboard under the stair. The door was open, and her candle showed the brindled cat spitting and growling from the lair he had shared with Storm on many a day gone by.
The candlelight showed something else to Causleen, her vision sharpened by this wild home-coming—showed her the shape of Storm, the sheep-slayer, with a long, brown-red gash across his filmy hide—Storm, who was dead, returned to Logie and the Master.
Hardcastle had made a bitter jest to Nita of Storm’s following them, a ghost. And Storm was here.