She was drawn out of doors at last. The workaday present galled and fretted. Nothing would serve but communion with her lover, such as she found only at the gate down yonder—the lover who could not rest in his grave because his death at Garsykes’ hands went unrequited.
Before ever she reached the gate, a scud of thin, harsh smoke came down the rising breeze. She glanced in question across the valley that hid Wharfe River, flaring under Logie Brigg—glanced up at old Pengables, swarthy against the molten sky, and down again to the hollow where Garsykes lay.
Rebecca caught her breath. Things hoped for, till the heart grows sick, are not to be believed at first. Yet soon she had to credit what was doing yonder. She leaned a shoulder down for Jonah, and the cat leaped nimbly up, spitting and growling at the wisps of smoke.
“D’ye see it, lad?” she asked, pointing a skinny finger.
Where Garsykes lay, a running sheet of fire blazed up into the sun-glare. It stayed for a moment to swallow a cottage, then passed nimbly forward to the next. The thatched roofs, one by one, broke upward in a shower of wind-blown flame. And all about the land there was the startled din of moor-birds, wheeling and crying, afraid for their nestlings on the heights.
“Now God be thanked,” said Rebecca, young, happy vigour in her voice.
Then she fell into a trance. Forty years her man had waited, coming to the gate each night to ask if Garsykes swine still roamed the land. And now she felt a hand steal into hers, content at last. And she woke, as from a marriage-bed, with throstles singing up the new-found dawn.
“I’m coming soon, my lad,”—her voice was soft and girlish—“after I’ve settled two young lovers into Logie. They don’t need Rebecca now.”