Causleen shivered. The day’s warmth, the joy of their wedded lives—the news that had trembled on her lips as they drew rein on top of swart Pengables and the thought of what these wide-flung acres meant to Hardcastle—all went by. It was as if they stepped together from eager sunlight into a pine-wood where the breeze blew chill and shrewish and there was darkness overhead.
“How dare she stay so near—how dare she, Dick, with Garsykes festering below? Has she no wit to understand that ghosts of the dead will creep up to her cottage-door? She was their evil spirit.”
“Let her be,” broke in Hardcastle. “She goes abroad with her face hidden when she sells her baskets these days. They say her wits are gone.”
“Pray God they are,” said Causleen, bitter with remembrance of the day when Nita had named her light-of-love and wanton. “She needs forgetfulness.”
They rode down the fells together, man and wife; but cold was on them, as if Garsykes still had power to spin webs of dread about their feet. All that had been gathered close—the slow months, while the Lost Folk were doing their worst with Logie—the stealthy peril of the caves, and their winning through into moonlit liberty of Drumly Ghyll—and, after that, the plague and fire that had swept Garsykes into a death that could not sleep.
Causleen longed to give her man the news she had for him, and could not, though their horses whinnied from sheer joy of the sunlight and the roving breeze that blew from everywhere, packed with lane-side sweets of elder-bloom and honeysuckle.
As they rounded the corner of the road, where it turned sharply down to Crooning Water, they saw a shrouded figure sitting on the grey parapet. The slender fingers, browned by sun and wind, were nimble at the basket-weaving, as of old, and Nita was singing as she worked—singing one of the eerie ballads handed down in Garsykes to keep warm their hate of Logie.
They drew rein, Hardcastle and Causleen, appalled by this venom that had survived her recovery from the plague—survived the havoc of a village left derelict till time ended.
The basket-weaver ceased her song. She drew the hood down from her face, and laughed with dreadful mockery.
And now they saw what the plague had done with her. Her body was lissome as of old, her eyes full of nameless witchery; but the shrunken face was grey and livid—a dread, unsightly face best hidden from all passers-by.