“Wharfe’s a woman, as I said. She drowned the heir of all these lands once—a stripling, and his greyhound checked him at the leap. And then his mother reared the Priory below; and Wharfe slips by the ruins to this day, gentle as a dove—penitent, you’d think, for what she did up here.”
Causleen’s interest was stirred, in spite of herself, by the boldness of his fancy, the sure, straightforward hold he had on the lore of other days. At their first coming, when Donald resented the pike hung on the wall at Logie, the Master spoke of Flodden as if he had shared the battle lately. Now he talked of what happened in the elder years, before the shock of Flodden came, as if they, too, were recent. To-day seemed one with all the yesterdays to this man who loved his country-side and knew its inner secrets.
The breeze blew shriller now. Raw and wet, it fluted through the glory of the woods, plucking a red leaf here and there in passing.
“Brant was right,” said Hardcastle, “though I fancied his weather-wisdom had gone astray this once.”
As he spoke, and while Causleen was thinking bitterly that the prophet of ill-weather was always on the safe side of life, a great crying sounded overhead—a harsh, tortured crying, as of human things in anguish.
“What is it?” she asked sharply.
“Rebecca would say it was The Gabble-Ratchet.”
The first crying overhead had passed into silence, but now another came, louder and more anguished.
“Brant was right,” Hardcastle repeated—“and it’s time we both got up to Logie.”
She found herself going with him up the steep rise of the woods—found herself yielding a hand to his when he reached down to help her across some slippery rock-face—and had no time to wonder that she let her pride be quiet. There was something in the wet, rising breeze, something in the Gabble-Ratchet uproar overhead not long since, that made for awe and need of a man’s hand, whether he was rich or poor in courtesy.