HEMLOCK
Hardcastle found no partridge in the long pasture that led to Draycott’s
farm; but a hare got up under his feet as he neared the gate. Most shots
came easily to Hardcastle, but from boyhood’s days a hare had roused
always the same surprise, with its lopping stride that seemed slow and
bulky, disguising a strong wind’s speed.
He missed now with the first barrel—at simple range—and puss got into
a scrub of hazels that climbed the hillside. When she ran through it,
brown against the grey rocks above, she was out of range to all but the
most sanguine fancy. Hardcastle gave her the left barrel at a venture,
and his heart warmed as he saw her sprawl every way at once and lie
still against the rocks.
When he went to pick her up and found her shot cleanly through the head,
he took it for a good omen. Long hazards seemed to be his luck, and he
needed many kinds of luck these days.
Old Michael Draycott was sitting up in the great four-poster bed when
Hardcastle went in. The man’s apple-red face was paler than its wont,
but his eyes were keen and shrewd as ever.
“I’ll know more than you before so very long,” was Draycott’s greeting.
“You know more already, Michael—the ways of sheep, and land tending,
and things I learned from you as a lad.”
“Aye, and I could still teach you summat about horses and dogs, though
you’ll differ as to that. But I wasn’t thinking of such matters. Before
long I’ll take a journey no man knows t’other side of—and in a
twinkling I’ll be wiser than all Logie-side. I’m not afraid, you’ll
know—I’m just in a fret to be gone, and know what lies beyond, and be
master of you all.”
“You’ll not be master yet, for you’re not within sight of dying,
Michael.”
“You were always very free with your opinions. Why shouldn’t I die, with
all my bones a-tremble, and a wambling back and front of me?”
“Because your father lived to ninety, and you’re a lad of sixty-five.
He’d think shame of you to creep over the Border at your time of day.”
“There’s sense in that,” Michael agreed, with a hard, wheezy laugh.
“Come to think of it, there’s a good deal of sense. I never thought of
it in that way.”
“I’ve left a hare in your porch, against the time you’re needing a
sturdy meal.”
“It’ll have to hang for a week or more before it’s ripe, but thank you
all the same,” said Michael, wistfully. “I own that the thought of it
gets me back to this side o’ things again. You jug a hare, if it’s to be
treated right, and run a pint of staunch port wine into the stour of it,
and thank the God who made you for the dish.”
“So you needn’t make your will just yet?”
“Ah, but I must, though I’m feeling stronger every minute since you
came. It’s this way, Master. I never wedded, as you know—thanks be for
the escapement. All the kin I have is a nephew that’s gone oversea, and
a niece that’s pretending to be a lady in London town. If I knew which I
hated most, I’d will all I have to t’ other.”
“Then leave it over, Michael, till you’ve got your strength back.”
“Maybe I might. But I’ve one thing to say to you, Hardcastle of Logie.
They put a token on my gate last night, because I was tenant to you.”
“That carries to us all,” said the Master, hard and wary on the sudden.
“Have you thought what it means?”
“Yes. I’m cold when I think of it—for myself, but more for you of
Logie-side.”
“Now listen. I built this snug fortune o’ mine from naught at all, as
you might say, and thrived on sheep and cattle, thinking of little else.
But I wouldn’t have built it unless I’d payed tribute to the Lost Folk,
same as my father did before me.”
“My own father never had that failing,” said Hardcastle, stating a fact
and proud of it.
“The Wilderness was not so strong then. Staunch as he was, he’d have
sung to another tune these days. They out-number us, I tell you.”
“He’d have sung to the same tune—but with a lustier voice because the
odds were bigger.”
The apple-red was glowing again in Draycott’s cheeks. His fancied
ailments were forgotten. “So you take no shame to spread fire and murder
through the country-side?”
“I take pride for holding my own ground.”
“Aye, stubborn, like all you Hardcastles; but lord help me to guess
where pride comes in.”
“What do you pay in tribute now? Twice what it was in my father’s
time—and so on till you’d have been beggared, you tax-paying folk.
That’s where pride comes in, Michael. I’m glad to have set war between
this and the Wilderness.”
Michael Draycott was prone to coddle his fancied illnesses, but under
the foible lay a heart quick to answer real trouble when it came. He got
out of bed with a speed astonishing in a sick man no longer young, and
stood there in his nightshirt, fronting Hardcastle.
“There’ll not be many with you among the lazy men of Logie—but there’ll
be me for one. While I get my breeches on, will you pass word to the
kitchen that I’m roaring for a meal?”
For the first time since they set a token on his gate, the Master
laughed, from his heart upward. Michael had salted the coming days with
humour, and it went with him as he halted at the kitchen door, and saw
inside a red-haired lass who was baking an apple-pie.
“The master is crying out for breakfast, Susan.”
She turned a scared face to him. “He was dying awhile since,” she
stammered.
“He was; but now he’s alive again, like the rest of us. You’ll get used
to these recoveries when you’ve been longer in the house.”
With that he was gone; and humour stayed with him as he went down the
pasture and out into the highroad. Nita was finishing her basket when he
reached the bridge that girdled Crooning Water, and she glanced at him
with innocent, grey eyes.
“You are going home to Logie?” she asked. “You’ll have news of a friend
there.”
Again old bitterness soured laughter and all else in Hardcastle. “The
Wilderness teaches most trades, Nita. You’re for telling the future
nowadays—silver in your parlour, and promise of a dark lady coming?”
“I’m for telling the present. The friend is no lady, dark or fair—and
he’s waiting for you at the gate.”
Hardcastle forgot her, forgot even the sharp, slender plough she had
driven across his life, breaking it up. He came to Logie Brigg, and feet
of the marching men sounded in his ears as he strode up the hill to
Logie. In their day fight was easy—march, and camp, and straightforward
ding of blows when battle came—but this modern warfare thrust on him
was a stealthy matter, hard to wage. The old days were better.
And now Hardcastle heard not only the tread of feet, but song of the
battle-men as they went to whatever chanced. They did not pick their
road, as he was asking to choose it now, did not fall to dreaming of
warfare that had been. The ruts and the hardships had been different
then; but the call to conquer them was the same.
Hardcastle did not know himself in this mood. His fore-elders were
intent about him—brave, brawny folk who compassed Logie, a regiment of
fighting men. And so in great heart he climbed the hill, and came to his
gate, and found a message scrawled in chalk.
_Hemlock grows in the Wilderness._
That was all, till he tried to open the gate, and felt a weight against
it. He put an impatient shoulder to the topmost bar, and there inside
lay Roy, a dead thing with no joy of welcome. Froth of the death-throes
flecked his jaws and his gold-brown hide. He had watched for the Master
faithfully, and for reward lay here.
A silence came to Hardcastle, and a great sickness—sickness of heart,
that is the worst to bear. He could not believe for awhile that this
comrade had gone before his time. He had reared him as a puppy—a ball
of golden fluff that played strange antics—had nursed him through
distemper and trained him to the gun. As if he stood at the graveside of
a familiar friend, long thoughts went racing down the years. He recalled
the very smell of the heather when grouse swept cluttering up the moor,
the crisp, frosty silence as they waited for the wild-duck to come over.
They had roused all Logie-land together, good weather and foul, and had
tramped home with happy weariness.
The trouble went deep. Roy had slept outside his bedroom door, had been
the first to welcome him when he got up for the day’s business, the last
to wag his tail in token of good-night. And Roy had gone. His body was
here—but what of the eager spirit, the loyalty that never faltered, the
eyes that spoke because the tongue was dumb? Many had failed Hardcastle
in his time, but never Roy.
No longer since than yesterday, Roy had been with him up the pastures,
and now he was away to some far land. What land? With the question came
a swift, wayward hope that he had found moors out yonder, and birds
rising to the gun, and wind among the brackens—a faith that they would
rejoin each other later on, when his time came to die.
Nothing could ease grief of this sort but remembrance of the second
token on his gate. Hemlock grew in the Wilderness, and they had poisoned
the thing he loved best in the world—the friend that Nita, weaving her
basket where the Brigg crossed Crooning Water, had told him would be
waiting. And now little, crimson lines began to dance before his eyes,
and widened swiftly till he saw nothing but a sheet of fiery red, and
behind it the styes where the Lost Folk housed themselves. It was
battle-sunrise, drinking up the fears of generations; and many never had
known it, from Flodden’s day to this.
Causleen, spent with watching by the long-settle where her father lay in
deep sleep at last, had come out for a breath of this clean, upland air.
She would go to the gate, and a little beyond, maybe—but not far away
from the sick man who might need her at any moment.
She got no further than the gate. Her sympathy was quick for dogs; and,
seeing Roy there in all his dead, silent disarray, she knelt beside him
and hid a sudden rush of tears in the coat that had been warm yesterday,
when he growled at her coming and afterwards gave friendship.
“He was so brave and bonnie—and he’s gone,” she said, glancing up
between wet lashes.
“Roy needs no praise,” growled Hardcastle, roughened by his loss. “If
you’d known him as I did, you’d let your tongue be still.”
Her pride took fire. From the first he had been surly and resentful of
her coming. Yet her feet dragged, as she left him with his dead. She
halted and glanced back; and there was Hardcastle, his shoulders bowed
with sorrow.
“Ah, you cared for him,” she said, her voice low with pity.
“Cared? He was all left to care for, except Logie.”