Storm

CAUSLEEN-2

“They find such in the caves behind their houses, they tell me,” said Donald.

“Aye, and lay them on the gates of honest men.” Hardcastle had come to grips with fear, as he had closed yesterday with the three men at the pinfold; but dread was a harder foe to meet. As he advanced it withdrew its phantom regiment, only to loose another on him from behind—quick, cold shapes that leaped on him and clung. This was the price asked of him for keeping Logie’s honour safe. He had given no tribute to the Lost Folk—would give none in the future—and already the creeping stealth of their revenge was with him.

“It’s a bleak thing to have at your door for ever, this hate of the Wilderness Men?” said Donald, watching him.

Hardcastle, whatever he was feeling, shut a trapdoor on it. His face was grim again, inscrutable. “A bleak thing, pedlar—but then I was reared on winter gales.”

Donald was aware, by some hidden gift that came to him at times, of much that was to come about the house of Logie. “This gale from the Wilderness is like to blow for a longish while.”

“Then I’ll have to weather it for a longish while, and so much for that.”

Something stirred in Causleen’s heart against her will. Hardcastle had given them a churlish welcome. He did not want them at his door, asked only to be rid of them; but resentment was dulled, because she had seen the sudden weakness of his fear, his hard recovery. She, too, had known the broken roads, the dread that walked by night. She, too, had made, day in and day out, her own hard recovery. They had this in common, she and the Master of Logie.

A clank of pattens sounded from the stable-yard, breaking a silence heavy with the sense of doom, and old Rebecca came into their midst, a lean, tall figure of a woman.

“Jacob, the farm-boy, said there was a pedlar here,” she croaked.

“There is,” said Donald, and in a twinkling unfastened his pack and laid its wares out in the moonlight that rode high and clear above the russet beeches.

Rebecca could not be done with handling them—took up an apron here, a piece of lace-work there, all as if her youth returned.

“I’m too old for such-like trash, pedlar, though God knows I like the feel of it.”

“Too old? I shouldn’t have guessed it,” purred Donald. “You’ve no mirror in the house, maybe, to cure you of that fancy.”

He put a mob-cap into her hands—a cunning thing of lavender, simple enough till a woman’s eye appraised all the little by-ways of its blandishment. Against her will, the years fell away from Rebecca. She hid her grey, scanty locks beneath the cap—donned a lavender apron to match it—and was away in dreamland, a lass of twenty waiting for her man.

It was a good dream while it lasted; but she wearied of it, and searched restlessly among the strewn litter of the pack till she chanced on odds and ends of baby-wear—a pair of shoes, the two of them small as the hollow of a man’s hand, and the little intricate clothes, with daft blue ribands, threaded in and out about them. All they meant crept round her, and tears unshed too long found outlet. Donald heard the great broken heart of life find voice. He was himself a broken man, and knew. Rebecca came out of that weakness with a temper raw as a file. “Pedlars are seldom fools,” she snapped, “but you’re the primest that ever stepped into Logie-side.”

“What have I done?” asked Donald.

“You’ve bared sorrow to the bone, when I thought I’d done with grief!”

Causleen, looking on, felt once again that the end of an old life, the beginning of a new, had come to them—to tired Donald, and herself. The moonlight, racing between dappled clouds, shone free above the beeches on Rebecca—on Hardcastle, grim and silent. From under Logie Bridge, far below them, Wharfe River sang her slumber-song as she swept between her high, grey arches. Roy, the old retriever that had snarled at them, was fidgetting about the Master, and whined as if he scented peril. All was stealthy trouble, though owls were hooting tranquilly across the woods, and rooks cawed fitfully through the soft storm of leaves that was baring their spring nests to sight.

“That’s the best cure,” said the pedlar gently—“the best for any sort of wound. Let fresh air into it, though the knife grits down to the bone.”

Rebecca stood there, tall and lean. In her eyes was a smouldering fire that Causleen and the pedlar understood.

“Maybe you’re no fool after all. I’ve let fresh air into a grief that was festering inward, and praise the dear God for that. They say you met three of the Lost Folk yesterday,” she went on, turning to Hardcastle after a restless silence.

“Three at the pinfold—yes. They took tribute.”

“Not of the sort they asked?”

“Not of the sort they asked,” snarled Hardcastle.

And now again Causleen knew that she had come into a haunted country and to a haunted house. They were sorrowing for their dead, slain foully, Rebecca and the Master—were tending some feud-fire kindled generations since—and the girl was wrapt away to the Highlands, where pipes were playing gallantly about the hills and moaning in the glens of slaughter. They played now about this house of Logie, but with a difference. Up yonder the strife was ended long since—the forlorn hopes that had tilted against merchantry, and bribes, and guile. They could only grieve for what could never come again. But here was a fight in the making. Hardcastle was resolute for some quarrel close at hand; and she had learned enough of the Lost Folk, as they went through their evil country, to know what the strife must mean in the coming days.

“Would you have the tale, pedlar?” said Rebecca. “I’ve need to excuse tears shed in sight of any stranger.”

“Aye, tell it.”

“I had a man of my own once—a straight lad to his height, and good at the wooing. We’d had a lover’s tiff, and me too proud to do aught but send word by roundabouts that he might come and be sorry for his lout’s ways.”

Rebecca fought with her grief again, and conquered it. The rooks cawed fitfully from overhead. A bat fluttered up and down the moonlit courtyard, and Wharfe River sang old ballads of the peaceful days under her time-worn bridge. But there was no peace, here at Logie—only the rasp of Rebecca’s voice as she went on with her tale.

“Instead of my man, there came news to the gate. Two of the Lost Folk had met him by the way, and asked tribute. He said he was Hardcastle’s man, and wouldn’t budge. And they killed him for it.”

“A good sort of death,” said Hardcastle, and Causleen saw grey fear creep round him while he spoke.

The russet gloaming, the quietness of wood and pastures, the silent front of Logie, grey with travail of the years—all made for the realities that live beneath the turmoil of each day’s duties. Rebecca seldom showed any of her heart. She bared it now.

“You chose to loosen your pack, pedlar,” she said, in harsh, even tones, “and you loosed the bygone years as well. Every night and all I go to the gate, and keep tryst with my man that never came. I’d have kissed him free and full—would have worn my hands to the knuckle for him through our wedded days—but he couldn’t come.”

The woman in Causleen answered the break in Rebecca’s voice. “How long ago was this?” she asked, with soft, Highland pity.

“I’ve forgotten. Forty years, maybe, but I’ve lost count.”

Rebecca still wore the mob-cap and the apron, and the moonlight softened the harsh lines of face and body. It was only when she spoke again, after long silence, that she seemed old indeed.

“The Lost Folk killed him, and every night I get to the gate and say my prayers. For every kiss he might have had, I pray a blight on them. For every child that might have run about my knees I ask that two of their heathen brats may die in trouble. They robbed me; and before I die, God send word to the Wilderness Men that curses stick and sting.”

“From what I’ve seen of the Wilderness Folk,” said Donald, “they’ll be dour enemies, stubborn and crafty.”

“That’s no news,” snapped Hardcastle.

“Stubborn and dour they’ll be—and I wish I’d a younger pair of arms to help you.”

A hard, keen light showed in Rebecca’s eyes. Her thin body quivered with sudden passion. “There will come a token on the gate, Master.”

“It’s here.”

Hardcastle held out his palm, as Donald had done awhile since, and Rebecca gloated on the sight of the little, brown thing that meant the end of peace for all at Logie.

“Through the years I’ve wanted this. What will you do with it, Master?”

Hardcastle turned, with a hard laugh, and set the arrow-head on the drip-stone over his door.

“It stays here—a charm against all alms-giving on Logie roads.”

CHAPTER III