“She did. The Master was all for guns and fishing, and letting a farm go here and there while he played at life. If the likes of her had married him, she’d have pushed him down to dear-knows-what of mortgages and ruin. But they quarrelled, thanks be, and the Master went hard as a flint. I watched him close and proper, I promise you, those first months after they parted. It bit deep, and might have taken him into any sort of devilment; but instead it stiffened him.”
“Soured and roughened him,” flashed Causleen, remembering how Donald and she had come to Logie first.
“Maybe. I own that I’d like to hear him laugh about the house again—just once in the week, say—but then you can’t have everything in this world. Instead of squandering farms, he’s buying them.”
Rebecca, rolling the dough out as she talked, remembered suddenly the pasty already in the oven, and darted to its rescue.
“There, now,” she scolded, “it would have been burned in another minute. That comes of your gossip, when you know I like a quiet kitchen. Take those white cheeks of yours out of doors, girl. You’ve been cluttered up too long between four walls. Take ’em out, and leave me to my baking.”
Causleen was learning the difference between the bark and bite of those at Logie, and Rebecca’s glance was kindly. “There is father,” she said, glancing wistfully through the open door at the sunlit warmth outside.
“And me to see to him till you come back. I’m not old enough yet to make a song about tending my kitchen and one ailing man. Take jobs by turns, and one’s a rest from t’ other.”
So Causleen, with a sob of sheer relief, stepped out into the afternoon. She died by inches in such imprisonment as she had known at Logie, but her feet seemed shod with fairy-boskins now that she was free to roam a land that reminded her at every turn of her lost Highlands. Through the russet sun-glow she went, up into the moors that knew no walls except the sky’s. The heather was not as tall as in her own country, where she had waded knee deep through it; but the scent and the friendliness were the same. When a cock-grouse got up and whirred over rise and hollow of the untamed lands, she knew his challenge of go-back, go-back, for a note as cheery as Rebecca’s when she had bidden her find an hour of freedom.
She left the moor at last, tempted by the lure of Logie Woods below, with their burnished colours glowing in the heat-haze; and once more, as she stepped into their cool shelter, the sense of home was with her. Underfoot the pale gold of fallen larch-leaves shimmered softly in the silver light that filtered through—a thick carpet, soft to tread. Ripe, nutty odours were abroad, and peace was sounding her elfin-trumpets through every brake and hollow. The wise big-hearted autumn was here, as in far Inverness—a northern autumn, that had fought for this tranquillity.
Causleen, in sheer content, followed the winding track, till it led her to a little, brawling stream, brown with moor-peat and ferned in every crevice of its banks with greenery for the water-pixies and their kind. She forgot every footsore step she had taken on the Pedlar’s Road. Here was the twin-hollow to one in the homeland, where she had grown from child to woman, dreaming of Highland feuds, and Highland loves, and the glamour that would come one day when a man’s eyes were steady and honest with her own, asking all she had to give.