LANGDALE'S HORSE.
It was well he did so, for the fiery cross had chosen that moment to
arrive; Simon found his household waiting for him at the foldgate, and
with them a red-faced man from Settle, who had ridden across the fells
with the news that Langdale's people were harrying the place. Before
the messenger had had time to come to details, the Puritan was himself
again. The light of battle gleamed in his sober eyes, his face grew
hard as his native rock. Knowing that he was looked for with anxiety,
and that at the rendezvous few would be more welcome, he lost not a
moment, but quickly, yet without hurry, fetched his pike and coat,
girt on his pistols, and filled his bandoliers. Luke, who had had some
minutes the start of him, and whose eyes burned with a sombre
enthusiasm, showed himself equally forward. When the two stood ready
at the gate, then, and then only, they discovered that the third
brother had no intention of accompanying them. He stood back on the
inner side of the wall with a frown on his pale face, his attitude a
curious mixture of shrinking and resolution.
"Come, man, be quick!" Simon cried sharply. "What are you waiting
for?"
"I'm not coming, Simon," was the reply.
"Not coming?"
"Some one must stay and take care of the place," the butler answered,
wiping his forehead. "I'll stay. Your wife will need some one."
"Fool! what can one man do here?" the Puritan retorted fiercely.
"Come, I say. This is no time for loitering when the work calls us."
Gridley shook his head and moistened his lips with his tongue. "I'm
not a fighting man," he muttered feebly.
For a moment the elder brother glared at him, as though he were minded
to cross the fence and strike him down. Fortunately, however, Simon
found a vent for his passion as effectual and more characteristic. "If
you do not fight, you do not eat," he said coldly. "At any rate in my
house. Mistress," he continued to his wife, "see that my orders are
obeyed. Give that craven neither bit nor sup until I come again. If he
will not fight he shall not feed!"
And with that he went.
When little Jack came back to the house an hour later, and crept shyly
into the kitchen, as his manner was, he found it empty. The light was
beginning to wane, and the coming evening already filled the corners
of the gaunt, silent room, in which not even a clock ticked, with
shadows. The boy stood awhile, looking about him and listening in the
stillness for any movement in the inner room, or on the floor above.
Hearing none, he went outside in a kind of panic; but there too he
found no one. Still, the light gave him courage to re-enter and mount
the stairs. He called "Gridley!" again and again, but no one answered.
He tried Luke's room; it was empty. On this the lad was about to fly
again in a worse panic than before--for the loneliness of the house
might have appalled an older heart than his--when the sound of
footsteps relieved his fears. He stole to the window, and saw the
butler and Mistress Gridley come round the corner of the house, the
former carrying a spade on his shoulder.
Jack wondered timidly what they had been about with the spade, and
where Simon and Luke were; but naturally he got no explanation, and
was glad to escape from the grim looks with which they greeted him. It
was time for the evening meal, and the woman set it on, and gave him
his share as usual. The butler, however, he saw with surprise took no
part in it, but sat at a distance with a scowl on his face, and
neither ate nor drank. On the other hand, Mistress Gridley ate more
than usual. Indeed, he had never seen her in better appetite or
spirits, She rallied her companion, too, on his abstinence so
pleasantly and with so much good-temper, that the child was quite
carried away by her humor, and went to bed in better spirits than had
been his since the beginning of his life at Malham.
In the morning it was the same, with the exception that Gridley looked
strangely pale about the cheeks. Again he took no share of the meal,
but in the middle of breakfast he came up to the table in an odd,
violent fashion, falling back only when Mistress Gridley snatched up a
knife, and made a playful thrust at him. She laughed at the same time,
but the laugh was not musical, and the child, detecting a false note
in it, grew puzzled. Even for him the scene had lost its humor. The
man's face, as he retired cowed and baffled to the window-seat, where
the side light brought out all that was most repulsive in his craven
features, told a tale there was no mistaking. The child stayed awhile,
fascinated by the spectacle, and saw the woman take her seat on the
meal chest and spin, smiling and patient, while Gridley gnawed his
nails and devoured her with his eyes. But the longer he watched the
more frightened he grew; and at last he broke the spell with an
effort, and fled to the purer air outside.
He was wise, for the morn was at its best. It was the most perfect
morning of the year. Ingleborough had no cap on, Penighent stood up
hard and sharp against the blue sky. The summer sunshine, unrelieved
by a single cloud or so much as a wreath of mist, fell hotly on the
open moor, where the larks sank and the bees hummed, and the boy's
heart rose in sympathy with the life about him. Feeling an unwonted
lightness and cheerfulness, he started to climb the fell at the back
of the house, following the right bank of the hollow in which the
yew-trees grew. This hollow, as it rose to a level with the upper
moor, spent itself in a dozen fissures, which, radiating in every
direction, drained the moss. Some were three or four feet deep, some
ten or twelve, with steep and everhanging edges.
Presently the boy found his progress barred by one of these, and
peeping into its shadowy depths, which a little to his left melted
into the gloom of the yew-trees, grew timid and stopped, sitting down
and looking back the way he had come, to gain courage. For a while his
eyes dwelt idly on the sunny slope. Then on a sudden he saw a sight
which he remembered all his life.
A quarter of a mile below the house, a road crossed the moor. On this
a solitary horseman had just appeared, urging a piebald horse to a
tired trot, while continually looking back the way he had come. The
boy had scarcely remarked him and the strange color of his steed, when
a second rider came into sight over the brow, with a man running by
his side and clinging to his stirrup-leather. To him succeeded two
more horsemen, trotting abreast and spurring furiously; and then while
the lad wondered what it all meant, and who these people were, a
single footman topped the brow, and after running a score of
paces--but not in the direction the others had taken--flung himself
down on his face among the bracken.
[Illustration: Flung himself on his face among the bracken.--Page 59.]
He had scarcely executed this man[oe]uvre, when a party of six men,
three mounted--the boy could see them rising and falling briskly in
their stirrups--and three running beside them, appeared above the
ridge, and quickening their pace followed with a loud cry on the
others' heels. The cry seemed to spur on the fugitives--such he now
saw the first party to be--to fresh exertions, but despite this, the
two horsemen who brought up the rear were quickly overtaken by the
six. The lad saw a tiny flash and heard a faint report. One of the two
threw up his arms and fell backwards. The other made as if he would
have turned his horse to meet his pursuers; but it shied and carried
him across the moor. Two of the six rode after him, one on either
side, and the lad saw the flash of their blades in the sunshine as
they rained cuts on his head and shoulders--which the poor wretch
vainly strove to shield by raising his arms--till he too sank down,
and the two turned back to their comrades, who were still following
after the three who survived.
The boy, sick and shuddering, and utterly unmanned by the sight he had
seen, hid his eyes; and for a time saw no more. His very heart melted
within him for terror and for pity. Sweating all over, he rolled
himself into a little hollow beside him where the ground sank, and lay
there trembling. By-and-by he heard a scream, and then another, and
each time he drew in his breath and closed his eyes. Then silence fell
again upon the moor. The bees hummed round him. A peewit screamed and
wheeled above his head.
He plucked up heart after a while to peep fearfully over the edge of
the little basin in which he lay, and saw that the six men were
retracing their steps, but not, as they had gone, in a body. They were
now beating the moor backwards in a long line, each man a score of
paces from his neighbor. The lad, after watching them a moment, had
wit enough to understand what they were doing, and from his elevated
position could see also their quarry, who had lost no time in removing
himself from the spot where he had first thrown himself down in the
fern. He was half way up the fell now, on a level with the farm, and a
hundred paces above the uppermost of his enemies. Apparently he was
satisfied with his position, or despaired of bettering it, for he lay
still, though the searchers drew each moment nearer.
Jack could see their flushed cheeks and streaming brows as they toiled
along in the sunshine, probing the fern with pikes and going sometimes
many yards out of the way to inspect a likely bush. He felt his heart
stand still when they halted opposite the man's lair and seemed to
suspect something; and again he felt it race on as if it would choke
him, when they passed by unnoticing, and began to quarter the ground
towards the farm.
Their backs were scarcely turned before the man, whose conduct from
the first had proved him a hardy and resolute fellow, moved again, and
crawling stealthily on his stomach, as the ground afforded him
shelter, began to make his way up the hill. The lad, lying still and
fascinated, watched him; forseeing that the fugitive's course must
bring him, if pursued, to the hollow in which he lay, yet unable to
move or escape. It seemed an age before the man reached the mound, and
wriggling himself up its least exposed side, pushed his head
cautiously over the rim, and met the boy's eyes.
Both started violently; but whereas Jack saw before him only a
swollen, blood-stained face, white and haggard with fatigue, and half
disguised by a kerchief which covered the man's brow and came down to
his eyes, the man saw more--much more.
"Jack!" he muttered, the instinct of caution remaining with him even
in his great astonishment. "Jack! Why, don't you know me, lad? It is
I, Frank."
"Frank?"
"Ay, Frank! You know me now."
The boy did know him then, more by his voice than his face; and broke
into a passion of weeping, holding out his hands and murmuring
incoherent words. The fugitive whom chance had brought to his feet was
his brother! the brother whom he had not seen for more than a year, of
whose misfortunes and misdeeds he had dimly heard, the brother whom he
had mourned as dead!
Twelve months of hardship and danger and rough companionship had
changed Frank Patten much, inwardly as well as outwardly; but they had
not sapped the family tie nor closed his heart against such a meeting
as this. He crept into the hollow beside the child with every nobler
feeling in his nature aroused, and with one eye on the moor below and
one on him strove to comfort him.
Courage is contagious. The elder brother possessed it in a peculiar
degree, uniting the daring of youth to the hardihood and resource
which as a rule come only of long experience; and Jack was not slow to
feel his influence. The boy quickly stilled his sobs and dried his
tears. In such crises resolutions are formed rapidly, the impulse to
help is instinctive. In a few moments he was back in the old place,
watching the moor; while Frank, whose bandaged head was so much more
likely to catch the eye and attract attention, lay resting in the lap
of the hollow.
"Do you see them now?" Frank asked presently, when he had somewhat
recovered his breath and strength.
"They are standing in front of the farm," Jack answered. "Now they are
beating the ground towards the further brow."
Frank nodded. "They think I must have doubled back," he said coolly.
"It was a narrow squeak, but I am all right as it is, if I can get
three things."
"What are they, Frank?" Jack asked timidly, gazing with awe and
admiration at the ragged, blood-stained, sinewy figure beside him.
"Water, food, and a hiding-place," his brother answered tersely; "but
first, water. The sun has burned me to a cinder, and I am parched with
thirst. I little thought when I rode gaily into Settle yester-even
that this would come of it. But the game is not fought out yet."
"Have they not beaten you?" Jack ventured to ask.
"Not a bit of it!" his brother answered with a reckless laugh. "'Twas
only an affair of outposts, lad. In a week, Duke Hamilton will be at
Preston with thirty thousand gallant fellows at his back. It will not
be a handful of disbanded troopers will scatter it. But I thirst,
Jack, I thirst."
Jack slid back into the hollow and sprang to his feet. "There is a
spring at the back of the house," he said eagerly. "I can go to it
through the yew-trees, Frank, and be back in five minutes, or ten at
most. But I have nothing to carry the water in, and the pitcher is
kept in the house."
In a trice Frank pulled off one of his long boots. "Take that," he
said. "It is as nearly water-tight as awl and needle and good leather
can make it. Many a man has used a worse blackjack. But can you go and
return unseen, lad?"
"Trust me," said Jack, bravely, taking up the boot. "You shall see."
He had just bethought him of the fissure in the moss which had set a
limit to his explorations. It ran athwart the slope a few paces behind
the hollow in which he lay, and seemed to promise safe and secret
access through the yew coppice to the rear of the house where the well
was. Nodding confidently to his brother, he crawled back to the rift;
then dropping into it where it grew shallow, a little to the right, he
turned down it and followed it until it presently opened into the dell
in which the yew-trees grew. Their cool shadow no longer terrified
him, for he was thinking of another, and had a purpose; two things
which form the best of armor against empty fears. Carrying the boot
with caution, so that it might not be seen easily or at once were he
surprised, he plunged into the gloom under the trees, and creeping
along, presently reached the spring, which lay a few paces only from
the back of the house.
It was clear of the trees, and here he had to venture something. He
waited and listened, and presently heard Mistress Gridley's voice. She
was on the farther side of the house talking to some of the Puritan
troopers, who had dismounted at the wall of the fold, and were
discussing their victory. Taking his courage in his hand the boy
advanced to the spring, and dipping the boot, staggered back with it
into the shelter of the trees, where he lay a moment under cover to
assure himself that he had not been observed. Quickly satisfied on
this point, and the more quickly as he discovered that the boot leaked
a little, he lost no more time, but hastening back the way he had
come, in three or four minutes reached the surface of the moor, and
had the satisfaction of seeing his brother plunge his burning face
into the boot and quench his thirst with water of his providing.
Never had the boy known so proud a moment. It was an epoch in his
life. He was athirst himself, his lips were parched and his mouth was
burning, but he would have suffered a hundred times as much before he
would have taken a drop. He looked on, glowing with happiness: fear
and weakness, heat and thirst all forgotten. For he had done a man's
deed.