THE SHADOW OF A CRIME
A CUMBRIAN ROMANCE
By Hall Caine
1885
Author of “The Manxman,” “The Deemster” etc.
“_Whom God's hand rests on, has God
At his right hand_.”
NEW YORK HURST & COMPANY PUBLISHERS
1895
TO
MY ABLE FELLOW-JOURNALIST
JOHN LOVELL
WHO IN A DARKER HOUR OF LABOR AND MISGIVING
CHEERED ME WITH AN ESTIMATE OF THIS NOVEL
THAT THE PUBLIC HAS SINCE RATIFIED.
CONTENTS
Chapter
I. The City of Wythburn
II. The Crime in the Night
III. In the Red Lion
IV. The Outcast
V. The Empty Saddle
VI. The House on the Moss
VII. Sim's Cave
VIII. Robbie's Redemption
IX. The Shadow of the Crime
X. Mattha Branth'et “Flytes” the Parson
XI. Liza's Wiles
XII. The Flight on the Fells
XIII. A 'Batable Point
XIV. Until the Day Break
XV. Ralph's Sacrifice
XVI. At Sunrise on the Raise
XVII. The Garths: Mother and Son
XVIII. The Dawn of Love
XIX. The Betrothal
XX. “Fool, of Thyself Speak Well”
XXI. Mrs. Garth at Shoulthwaite
XXII. The Threatened Outlawry
XXIII. She Never Told Her Love
XXIV. Treason or Murder
XXV. Liza's Device
XXVI. “Fool, Do Not Flatter”
XXVII. Ralph at Lancaster
XXVIII. After Word Comes Weird
XXIX. Robbie's Quest Begun
XXX. A Race Against Life
XXXI. Robbie, Speed On!
XXXII. What the Snow Gave Up
XXXIII. Sepulture at Last
XXXIV. Fate that Impedes, Fall Back
XXXV. Robbie's Quest Ended
XXXVI. Rotha's Confession
XXXVII. Which Indictment?
XXXVIII. Peine Forte et Dure
XXXIX. The Fiery Hand
XL. Garth and the Quakers
XLI. A Horse's Neigh
XLII. The Fatal Witness
XLIII. Love Known at Last
XLIV. The Clew Discovered
XLV. The Condemned in Doomsdale
XLVI. The Skein Unravelled
XLVII. The Black Camel at the Gate
XLVIII. “Out, Out, Brief Candle”
XLIX. Peace, Peace, and Rest
L. Next Morning
LI. Six Months After
PREFACE.
The central incident of this novel is that most extraordinary of all
punishments known to English criminal law, the _peine forte et dure_.
The story is not, however, in any sense historical. A sketchy
background of stirring history is introduced solely in order to
heighten the personal danger of a brave man. The interest is domestic,
and, perhaps, in some degree psychological. Around a pathetic piece of
old jurisprudence I have gathered a mass of Cumbrian folk-lore and
folk-talk with which I have been familiar from earliest youth. To
smelt and mould the chaotic memories into an organism such as may
serve, among other uses, to give a view of Cumberland life in little,
has been the work of one year.
The story, which is now first presented as a whole, has already had a
career in the newspapers, and the interest it excited in those
quarters has come upon me as a surprise. I was hardly prepared to find
that my plain russet-coated dalesmen were in touch with popular
sympathy; but they have made me many friends. To me they are very
dear, for I have lived their life. It is with no affected regret that
I am now parting with these companions to make way for a group of
younger comrades.
There is one thing to say which will make it worth while to trouble
the reader with this preface. A small portion of the dialogue is
written in a much modified form of the Cumbrian dialect. There are
four variations of dialect in Cumberland, and perhaps the dialect
spoken on the West Coast differs more from the dialect spoken in the
Thirlmere Valley than the latter differs from the dialect spoken in
North Lancashire. The _patois_ problem is not the least serious of the
many difficulties the novelist encounters. I have chosen to give a
broad outline of Cumbrian dialect, such as bears no more exact
relation to the actual speech than a sketch bears to a finished
picture. It is right as far as it goes.
A word as to the background of history. I shall look for the sympathy
of the artist and the forgiveness of the historian in making two or
three trifling legal anachronisms that do not interfere with the
interest of the narrative. The year of the story is given, but the aim
has been to reflect in these pages the black cloud of the whole period
of the Restoration as it hung over England's remotest solitudes. In my
rude sketch of the beginnings of the Quaker movement I must disclaim
any intention of depicting the precise manners or indicating the exact
doctrinal beliefs of the revivalists. If, however, I have described
the Quakers as singing and praying with the fervor of the Methodists,
it must not be forgotten that Quietism was no salient part of the
Quakerism of Fox; and if I have hinted at Calvinism, it must be
remembered that the “dividing of God's heritage” was one of the causes
of the first schism in the Quaker Society.
H.C.
New Court, Lincoln's Inn.
THE SHADOW OF A CRIME.
CHAPTER I. THE CITY OF WYTHBURN.
Tar-ry woo', tar-ry woo',
Tar-ry woo' is ill to spin:
Card it weel, card it weel,
Card it weel ere you begin. _Old Ballad._
The city of Wythburn stood in a narrow valley at the foot of
Lauvellen, and at the head of Bracken Water. It was a little but
populous village, inhabited chiefly by sheep farmers, whose flocks
grazed on the neighboring hills. It contained rather less than a
hundred houses, all deep thatched and thick walled. To the north lay
the mere, a long and irregular water, which was belted across the
middle by an old Roman bridge of bowlders. A bare pack-horse road
wound its way on the west, and stretched out of sight to the north and
to the south. On this road, about half a mile within the southernmost
extremity of Bracken Water, two hillocks met, leaving a natural
opening between them and a path that went up to where the city stood.
The dalesmen called the cleft between the hillocks the city gates; but
why the gates and why the city none could rightly say. Folks had
always given them these names. The wiser heads shook gravely as they
told you that city should be sarnty, meaning the house by the
causeway. The historians of the plain could say no more.
They were rude sons and daughters of the hills who inhabited this
mountain home two centuries ago. The country around them was alive
with ghostly legend. They had seen the lights dance across Deer Garth
Ghyll, and had heard the wail that came from Clark's Loup. They were
not above trembling at the mention of these mysteries when the moon
was flying across a darksome sky, when the wind moaned about the
house, and they were gathered around the ingle nook. They had few
channels of communication with the great world without. The pack-horse
pedler was their swiftest newsman; the pedler on foot was their weekly
budget. Five miles along the pack-horse road to the north stood their
market town of Gaskarth, where they took their wool or the cloth they
had woven from it. From the top of Lauvellen they could see the white
sails of the ships that floated down the broad Solway. These were all
but their only glimpses of the world beyond their mountains. It was a
mysterious and fearsome world.
There was, however, one link that connected the people of Wythburn
with the world outside. To the north of the city and the mere there
lived a family of sheep farmers who were known as the Rays of
Shoulthwaite Moss. The family consisted of husband and wife and two
sons. The head of the house, Angus Ray, came to the district early in
life from the extreme Cumbrian border. He was hardly less than a giant
in stature. He had limbs of great length, and muscles like the gnarled
heads of a beech. Upon settling at Wythburn, he speedily acquired
property of various kinds, and in the course of a few years he was the
largest owner of sheep on the country side. Certainly, fortune favored
Angus Ray, and not least noticeably when in due course he looked about
him for a wife.
Mary Ray did not seem to have many qualities in common with her
husband. She had neither the strength of limb nor the agile grace of
the mountaineer. This was partly the result of the conditions under
which her girlhood had been spent. She was the only child of a
dalesman, who had so far accumulated estate in land as to be known in
the vernacular as a statesman. Her mother had died at her birth, and
before she had attained to young womanhood her father, who had married
late in life, was feeble and unfit for labor. His hand was too
nervous, his eye too uncertain, his breath too short for the constant
risks of mountaineering; so he put away all further thought of adding
store to store, and settled himself peaceably in his cottage under
Castenand, content with the occasional pleasures afforded by his
fiddle, an instrument upon which he had from his youth upward shown
some skill. In this quiet life his daughter was his sole companion.
There was no sight in Wythburn more touching than to see this girl
solacing her father's declining years, meeting his wishes with
anticipatory devices, pampering him in his whims, soothing him in the
imaginary sorrows sometimes incident to age, even indulging him with a
sort of pathetic humor in his frequent hallucinations. To do this she
had to put by a good many felicities dear to her age and condition,
but there was no apparent consciousness of self-sacrifice. She had
many lovers, for in these early years she was beautiful; and she had
yet more suitors, for she was accounted rich. But neither flattery nor
the fervor of genuine passion seemed to touch her, and those who
sought her under the transparent guise of seeking her father usually
went away as they came. She had a smile and the cheeriest word of
welcome for all alike, and so the young dalesmen who wooed her from
the ignoble motive came to think her a little of a coquette, while
those who wooed her from the purer impulse despaired of ruffling with
the gentlest gales of love the still atmosphere of her heart.
One day suddenly, however, the old statesman died, and his fiddle was
heard no more across the valley in the quiet of the evening, but was
left untouched for the dust to gather on it where he himself had hung
it on the nail in the kitchen under his hat. Then when life seemed to
the forlorn girl a wide blank, a world without a sun in it, Angus Ray
went over for the first time as a suitor to the cottage under
Castenand, and put his hand in hers and looked calmly into her eyes.
He told her that a girl could not live long an unfriended life like
hers--that she should not if she could; she could not if she
would--would she not come to him?
It was the force of the magnet to the steel. With swimming eyes she
looked up into his strong face, tender now with a tremor never before
seen there; and as he drew her gently towards him her glistening tears
fell hot and fast over her brightening and now radiant face, and, as
though to hide them from him, she laid her head on his breast. This
was all the wooing of Angus Ray.
They had two sons, and of these the younger more nearly resembled his
mother. Willy Ray had not merely his mother's features; he had her
disposition also. He had the rounded neck and lissom limbs of a woman;
he had a woman's complexion, and the light of a woman's look in his
soft blue eyes. When the years gave a thin curly beard to his cheek
they took nothing from its delicate comeliness. It was as if nature
had down to the last moment meant Willy for a girl. He had been an apt
scholar at school, and was one of the few persons in Wythburn having
claims to education. Willy's elder brother, Ralph, more nearly
resembled his father. He had his father's stature and strength of
limb, but some of his mother's qualities had also been inherited by
him. In manner he was neither so austere and taciturn as his father,
nor so gentle and amiable as his mother. He was by no means a scholar,
and only the strong hand of his father had kept him as a boy in fear
of the penalties incurred by the truant. Courage and resolution were
his distinguishing characteristics.
On one occasion, when rambling over the fells with a company of
schoolfellows, a poor blind lamb ran bleating past them, a black cloud
of ravens, crows, and owl-eagles flying about it. The merciless birds
had fallen upon the innocent creature as it lay sleeping under the
shadow of a tree, had picked at its eyes and fed on them, and now, as
the blood trickled in red beads down its nose, they croaked and cried
and screamed to drive it to the edge of a precipice and then over to
its death in the gulf beneath, there to feast on its carcass. It was
no easy thing to fend off the cruel birds when in sight of their prey,
but, running and capturing the poor lamb, Ralph snatched it up in his
arms at the peril of his own eyes, and swung a staff about his head to
beat off the birds as they darted and plunged and shrieked about him.
It was natural that a boy like this should develop into the finest
shepherd on the hills. Ralph knew every path on the mountains, every
shelter the sheep sought from wind and rain, every haunt of the fox.
At the shearing, at the washing, at the marking, his hand was among
the best; and when the flocks had to be numbered as they rushed in
thousands through the gate, he could count them, not by ones and twos,
but by fours and sixes. At the shearing feasts he was not above the
pleasures of the country dance, the Ledder-te-spetch, as it was
called, with its one, two, three--heel and toe--cut and shuffle. And
his strong voice, that was answered oftenest by the echo of the
mountain cavern, was sometimes heard to troll out a snatch of a song
at the village inn. But Ralph, though having an inclination to
convivial pleasures, was naturally of a serious, even of a solemn
temperament. He was a rude son of a rude country,--rude of hand, often
rude of tongue, untutored in the graces that give beauty to life.
By the time that Ralph had attained to the full maturity of his
manhood, the struggles of King and Parliament were at their height.
The rumor of these struggles was long in reaching the city of
Wythburn, and longer in being discussed and understood there; but, to
everybody's surprise, young Ralph Ray announced his intention of
forthwith joining the Parliamentarian forces. The extraordinary
proposal seemed incredible; but Ralph's mind was made up. His father
said nothing about his son's intentions, good or bad. The lad was of
age; he might think for himself. In his secret heart Angus liked the
lad's courage. Ralph was “nane o' yer feckless fowk.” Ralph's mother
was sorely troubled; but just as she had yielded to his father's will
in the days that were long gone by, so she yielded now to his. The
intervening years had brought an added gentleness to her character;
they had made mellower her dear face, now ruddy and round, though
wrinkled. Folks said she had looked happier and happier, and had
talked less and less, as the time wore on. It had become a saying in
Wythburn that the dame of Shoulthwaite Moss was never seen without a
smile, and never heard to say more than “God bless you!” The tears
filled her eyes when her son came to kiss her on the morning when he
left her home for the first time, but she wiped them away with her
housewife's apron, and dismissed him with her accustomed blessing.
Ralph Ray joined Cromwell's army against the second Charles at Dunbar,
in 1650. Between two and three years afterwards he returned to
Wythburn city and resumed his old life on the fells. There was little
more for the train-bands to do. Charles had fled, peace was restored,
the Long Parliament was dissolved, Cromwell was Lord Protector.
Outwardly the young Roundhead was not altered by the campaign. He had
passed through it unscathed. He was somewhat graver in manner; there
seemed to be a little less warmth and spontaneity in his greeting; his
voice had lost one or two of its cheerier notes; his laughter was less
hearty and more easily controlled. Perhaps this only meant that the
world was doing its work with him. Otherwise he was the same man.
When Ralph returned to Wythburn he brought with him a companion much
older than himself, who forthwith became an inmate of his father's
home, taking part as a servant in the ordinary occupations of the male
members of the household. This man had altogether a suspicious and
sinister aspect which his manners did nothing to belie. His name was
James Wilson, and he was undoubtedly a Scot, though he had neither the
physical nor the moral characteristics of his race. His eyes were
small, quick, and watchful, beneath heavy and jagged brows. He was
slight of figure and low of stature, and limped on one leg. He spoke
in a thin voice, half laugh, half whimper, and hardly ever looked into
the face of the person with whom he was conversing. There was an air
of mystery about him which the inmates of the house on the Moss did
nothing to dissipate. Ralph offered no explanation to the gossips of
Wythburn of Wilson's identity and belongings; indeed, as time wore on,
it could be observed that he showed some uneasiness when questioned
about the man.
At first Wilson contrived to ingratiate himself into a good deal of
favor among the dalespeople. There was then an insinuating smoothness
in his speech, a flattering, almost fawning glibness of tongue, which
the simple folks knew no art to withstand. He seemed abundantly
grateful for some unexplained benefits received from Ralph. “Atweel,”
Wilson would say, with his eyes on the ground,--“atweel I lo'e the
braw chiel as 'twere my ain guid billie.”
Ralph paid no heed to the brotherly protestations of his admirer, and
exchanged only such words with him as their occupations required. Old
Angus, however, was not so passive an observer of his new and
unlooked-for housemate. “He's a good for nought sort of a fellow,
slenken frae place to place wi' nowt but a sark to his back,” Angus
would say to his wife. Mr. Wilson's physical imperfections were an
offence in the dalesman's eyes: “He's as widderful in his wizzent old
skin as his own grandfather.” Angus was not less severe on Wilson's
sly smoothness of manner. “Yon sneaking old knave,” he would say, “is
as slape as an eel in the beck; he'd wammel himself into crookedest
rabbit hole on the fell.” Probably Angus entertained some of the
antipathy to Scotchmen which was peculiar to his age. “I'll swear he's
a taistrel,” he said one day; “I dare not trust him with a mess of
poddish until I'd had the first sup.”
In spite of this determined disbelief on the part of the head of the
family, old Wilson remained for a long time a member of the household
at Shoulthwaite Moss, following his occupations with constancy, and
always obsequious in the acknowledgment of his obligations. It was
observed that he manifested a peculiar eagerness when through any
stray channel intelligence was received in the valley of the sayings
and doings in the world outside. Nothing was thought of this until one
day the passing pedler brought the startling news that the Lord
Protector was dead. The family were at breakfast in the kitchen of the
old house when this tardy representative of the herald Mercury
arrived, and, in reply to the customary inquiry as to the news he
carried, announced the aforesaid fact. Wilson was alive to its
significance with a curious wakefulness.
“It's braw tidings ye bring the day, man,” he stammered with evident
concern, and with an effort to hide his nervousness.
“Yes, the old man's dead,” said the pedler, with an air of consequence
commensurate with his message. “I reckon,” he added, “Oliver's son
Richard will be Protector now.”
“A sairy carle, that same Richard,” answered Wilson; “I wot th' young
Charles 'ul soon come by his ain, and then ilka ane amang us 'ul see a
bonnie war-day. We've playt at shinty lang eneugh. Braw news,
man--braw news that the corbie's deid.”
Wilson had never before been heard to say so much or to speak so
vehemently. He got up from the table in his nervousness, and walked
aimlessly across the floor.
“Why are you poapan about,” asked Angus, in amazement; “snowkin like a
pig at a sow?”
At this the sinister light in Wilson's eyes that had been held in
check hitherto seemed at once to flash out, and he turned hotly upon
his master, as though to retort sneer for sneer. But, checking
himself, he took up his bonnet and made for the door.
“Don't look at me like that,” Angus called after him, “or, maybe I'll
clash the door in thy face.”
Wilson had gone by this time, and turning to his sons, Angus
continued,--
“Did you see how the waistrel snirpt up his nose when the pedler said
Cromwell was dead?”
It was obvious that something more was soon to be made known relative
to their farm servant. The pedler had no difficulty in coming to the
conclusion that Wilson was some secret spy, some disguised enemy of
the Commonwealth, and perhaps some Fifth Monarchy man, and a rank
Papist to boot. Mrs. Ray's serene face was unruffled; she was sure the
poor man meant no harm. Ralph was silent, as usual, but he looked
troubled, and getting up from the table soon afterwards he followed
the man whom he had brought under his father's roof, and who seemed
likely to cause dissension there.
Not long after this eventful morning, Ralph overheard his father and
Wilson in hot dispute at the other side of a hedge. He could learn
nothing of a definite nature. Angus was at the full pitch of
indignation. Wilson, he said, had threatened him; or, at least, his
own flesh and blood. He had told the man never to come near
Shoulthwaite Moss again.
“An' he does,” said the dalesman, his eyes aflame, “I'll toitle him
into the beck till he's as wankle as a wet sack.”
He was not so old but that he could have kept his word. His great
frame seemed closer knit at sixty than it had been at thirty. His
face, with its long, square, gray beard, looked severer than ever
under his cloth hood. Wilson returned no more, and the promise of a
drenching was never fulfilled.
The ungainly little Scot did not leave the Wythburn district. He
pitched his tent with the village tailor in a little house at
Fornside, close by the Moss. The tailor himself, Simeon Stagg, was
kept pitiably poor in that country, when one sack coat of homespun
cloth lasted a shepherd half a lifetime. He would have lived a
solitary as well as a miserable life but for his daughter Rotha, a
girl of nineteen, who kept his little home together and shared his
poverty when she might have enjoyed the comforts of easier homes
elsewhere.
“Your father is nothing but an ache and a stound to you, lass,” Sim
would say in a whimper. “It'll be well for you, Rotha, when you give
me my last top-sark and take me to the kirkyard yonder,” the little
man would snuffle audibly.
“Hush, father,” the girl would say, putting the palm of her hand
playfully over his mouth, “you'll be sonsie-looking yet.”
Sim was heavily in debt, and this preyed on his mind. He had always
been a grewsome body, sustaining none of the traditions of his craft
for perky gossip. Hence he was no favorite in Wythburn, where few or
none visited him. Latterly Sim's troubles seemed to drive him from his
home for long walks in the night. While the daylight lasted his work
gave occupation to his mind, but when the darkness came on he had no
escape from haunting thoughts, and roamed about the lanes in an effort
to banish them. It was to this man's home that Wilson turned when he
was shut out of Shoulthwaite Moss. Naturally enough, the sinister Scot
was a welcome if not an agreeable guest when he came as lodger, with
money to pay, where poverty itself seemed host.
Old Wilson had not chosen the tailor's house as his home on account of
any comforts it might be expected to afford him. He had his own
reasons for not quitting Wythburn after he had received his very
unequivocal “sneck posset.” “Better a wee bush,” he would say, “than
na bield”. Shelter certainly the tailor's home afforded him; and that
was all that he required for the present. Wilson had not been long in
the tailor's cottage before Sim seemed to grow uneasy under a fresh
anxiety, of which his lodger was the subject. Wilson's manners had
obviously undergone a change. His early smoothness, his slavering
glibness, had disappeared. He was now as bitter of speech as he had
formerly been conciliatory. With Sim and his troubles, real and
imaginary, he was not at all careful to exhibit sympathy. “Weel, weel,
ye must lie heids and thraws wi' poverty, like Jock an' his mither”;
or, “If ye canna keep geese ye mun keep gezlins.”
Sim was in debt to his landlord, and over the idea of ejectment from
his little dwelling the tailor would brood day and night. Folks said
he was going crazed about it. None the less was Sim's distress as
poignant as if the grounds for it had been more real. “Haud thy
bletherin' gab,” Wilson said one day; “because ye have to be cannie
wi' the cream ye think ye must surely be clemm'd.” Salutary as some of
the Scotsman's comments may have been, it was natural that the change
in his manners should excite surprise among the dalespeople. The good
people expressed themselves as “fairly maizelt” by the transformation.
What did it all mean? There was surely something behind it.
The barbarity of Wilson's speech was especially malicious when
directed against the poor folks with whom he lived, and who, being
conscious of how essential he was to the stability of the household,
were largely at his mercy. It happened on one occasion that when
Wilson returned to the cottage after a day's absence, he found Sim's
daughter weeping over the fire.
“What's now?” he asked. “Have ye nothing in the kail?”
Rotha signified that his supper was ready.
“Thou limmer,” said Wilson, in his thin shriek, “how long 'ul thy dool
last? It's na mair to see a woman greet than to see a goose gang
barefit.”
Ralph Ray called at the tailor's cottage the morning after this, and
found Sim suffering under violent excitement, of which Wilson's
behavior to Rotha had been the cause. The insults offered to himself
he had taken with a wince, perhaps, but without a retort. Now that his
daughter was made the subject of them, he was profoundly agitated.
“There I sat,” he cried, as his breath came and went in gusts,--“there
I sat, a poor barrow-back't creature, and heard that old savvorless
loon spit his spite at my lass. I'm none of a brave man, Ralph: no, I
must be a coward, but I went nigh to snatching up yon flail of his and
striking him--aye, killing him!--but no, it must be that I'm a
coward.”
Ralph quieted him as well as he could, telling him to leave this thing
to him. Ralph was perhaps Sim's only friend. He would often turn in
like this at Sim's workroom as he passed up the fell in the morning.
People said the tailor was indebted to Ralph for proofs of friendship
more substantial than sympathy. And now, when Sim had the promise of a
strong friend's shoulder to lean on, he was unmanned, and wept. Ralph
was not unmoved as he stood by the forlorn little man, and clasped his
hands in his own and felt the warm tears fall over them.
As the young dalesman was leaving the cottage that morning, he
encountered in the porch the subject of the conversation, who was
entering in. Taking him firmly but quietly by the shoulder, he led him
back a few paces. Sim had leapt up from his bench, and was peering
eagerly through the window. But Ralph did no violence to his lodger.
He was saying something with marked emphasis, but the words escaped
the tailor's ears. Wilson was answering nothing. Loosing his hold of
him, Ralph walked quietly away. Wilson entered the cottage with a
livid face, and murmuring, as though to himself,--
“Aiblins we may be quits yet, my chiel'. A great stour has begoon, my
birkie. Your fire-flaucht e'e wull na fley me. Your Cromwell's gane,
an' all traitors shall tryste wi' the hangman.”
It was clear that whatever the mystery pertaining to the Scotchman,
Simeon Stagg seemed to possess some knowledge of it. Not that he ever
explained anything. His anxiety to avoid all questions about his
lodger was sufficiently obvious. Yet that he had somehow obtained some
hint of a dark side to Wilson's character, every one felt satisfied.
No other person seemed to know with certainty what were Wilson's means
of livelihood. The Scotchman was not employed by the farmers and
shepherds around Wythburn, and he had neither land nor sheep of his
own. He would set out early and return late, usually walking in the
direction of Gaskarth. One day Wilson rose at daybreak, and putting a
threshing-flail over his shoulder, said he would be away for a week.
That week ensuing was a quiet one for the inmates of the cottage at
Fornside.
Sim's daughter, Rotha, had about this time become a constant helper at
Shoulthwaite Moss, where, indeed, she was treated with the cordiality
proper to a member of the household. Old Angus had but little sympathy
to spare for the girl's father, but he liked Rotha's own cheerfulness,
her winsomeness, and, not least, her usefulness. She could milk and
churn, and bake and brew. This was the sort of young woman that Angus
liked best. “Rotha's a right heartsome lassie,” he said, as he heard
her in the dairy singing while she worked. The dame of Shoulthwaite
loved every one, apparently, but there were special corners in her
heart for her favorites, and Rotha was one of them.
“Cannot that lass's father earn aught without keeping yon sulking
waistrel about him?” asked the old dalesman one day.
It was the first time he had spoken of Wilson since the threatened
ducking. Being told of Wilson's violence to Rotha, he only said, “It's
an old saying, 'A blate cat makes a proud mouse.'” Angus was never
heard to speak of Wilson again.
Nature seemed to have meant Rotha for a blithe, bird-like soul, but
there were darker threads woven into the woof of her natural
brightness. She was tall, slight of figure, with a little head of
almost elfish beauty. At milking, at churning, at baking, her voice
could be heard, generally singing her favorite border song:--
“Gae tak this bonnie neb o' mine,
That pecks amang the corn,
An' gi'e't to the Duke o' Hamilton
To be a touting horn.”
“Robin Redbreast has a blithe interpreter,” said Willy Ray, as he
leaned for a moment against the open door of the dairy in passing out.
Rotha was there singing, while in a snow-white apron, and with arms
bare above the elbows, she weighed the butter of the last churning
into pats, and marked each pat with a rude old mark. The girl dropped
her head and blushed as Willy spoke. Of late she had grown unable to
look the young man in the face. Willy did not speak again. His face
colored, and he went away. Rotha's manner towards Ralph was different.
He spoke to her but rarely, and when he did so she looked frankly into
his face. If she met him abroad, as she sometimes did when carrying
water from the well, he would lift her pails in his stronger hands
over the stile, and at such times the girl thought his voice seemed
softer.
“I am thinking,” said Mrs. Ray to her husband, as she was spinning in
the kitchen at Shoulthwaite Moss,--“I am thinking,” she said, stopping
the wheel and running her fingers through the wool, “that Willy is
partial to the little tailor's winsome lass.”
“And what aboot Ralph?” asked Angus.