VENOM
Nita Langrish, later in the day of Hardcastle’s home-coming with the
pedlar’s girl, took her way up to Logie between the melting drifts.
Straight and slim she went, and an old tinker who met her on the road
stood and gaped at her.
“Begosh, I wish I was younger,” he chuckled. “I’d go a-courting.”
Nita laughed at him, as if her heart were light as his, and turned
once—in vanity—to be sure that he was watching her go down the hill.
Then she thought of Hardcastle, of what she had heard just now in
Garsykes; and an evil mood got into her blood.
She came to Logie Brigg and looked down at Wharfe River, swirling in
high flood between the slender arches. Half-frozen packs of snow were
riding here and there above the peat-brown waves. Under her feet the
fierce waters roared and sang their Viking call of kill and spare not.
It was all in tune with her heart, as she climbed the steep rise to
Logie. The trees were so thick about the house that she could not see
yet whether its walls gaped wide and blackened. The man she had sent to
fire it had not returned with news. He had perished in the storm
likely—after he’d done his work, she hoped.
When she topped the rise, and came to Logie’s gate, blue wood-smoke was
curling up from peaceful chimneys, and Rebecca stood there talking with
Brant the shepherd.
“There’s a friend of yours in the Long Pasture yonder.” Rebecca’s voice
was grimly bantering. “The snow has cleaned his face for him, but I’d
have known he came from Garsykes all the same. It couldn’t take the
rabbity smell o’ the man away.”
Again a little wind of dread stirred at Nita’s heart, as it had chilled
her when Long Murgatroyd had spoken of death for one or other of them.
“What friend of mine should be in any Logie field?” she asked.
“Aye, deny your own. It’s like you, Nita. Won’t you go and have a look
at the man?”
“Why should I go?”
“He’s not much to look at, I own—but he died running an errand of
yours. He sent a queer sort of cry up when the snow took him—cursed
Nita Langrish for sending him to Logie—so that you must have heard it
out to Garsykes, I’d have fancied.”
Nita faced her ancient adversary with cool devilry.
“I’m sorry he died before he fired Logie. He was always a fool, and
clumsy.”
“You dare own to it?” snapped Rebecca.
The girl was uncanny in her self-assurance, her eager beauty. “Yes,” she
said. “What has Nita the basket-weaver to fear, when all the men go daft
about her?”
Rebecca reached a lean hand out across the gate—swift as Jonah the cat
might have flicked a paw—but Nita was too quick for her. She drew back
from all life’s onsets, with soft, elusive speed.
“All the men but one,” laughed Nita, from the middle of the roadway.
“Aye, all but the Master. You’ll never fool him twice.”
“The pedlar’s brat is doing that for me. Have they come home, the pair
of them?”
“They have, thanks be.”
“_Thanks be?_”
Rebecca answered the girl’s scorn with tart assurance. “Why, yes. I sent
that bairn of the pedlar’s out to get a breath o’ fresh air—the dear
knows she needed it—and it would have lain on my conscience if she’d
foundered in the snow. The Master happened on her, luckily.”
“Garsykes has learned as much. From all we hear, they made themselves
snug enough for the night—blessed the snow for coming, I fancy.”
“The devil knotted thy whipcord of a tongue, Nita, but its lash doesn’t
hurt us Logie Folk. We keep clean houses hereabout—and cleanish minds.
What else was to be done, save shelter from such an audacious storm?”
“Well, they sheltered to some purpose. Murgatroyd saw them sitting by
the hearth—she on his knee.”
“I’ve known Murgatroyd all his life,” broke in Rebecca, “and all his
life he never spoke a true word unless he fell into it by accident. Get
ye back to Garsykes, and feed your pigs on such-like trash.”
Shepherd Brant had been tugging at his beard, wroth kindling slowly till
its fire was bright and steady.
“There’s another man o’ Logie doesn’t heed your snares, Nita.”
“You’re old, shepherd. I’d mistake you for a grey rock if I didn’t see
you move from time to time. Have you shot Storm the sheep-slayer yet?”
“Not yet. When I do, it’s a sign that Garsykes ends.”
Then once again some little breeze of fear played about Nita, but she
would not heed it.
“A gypsy woman came to our village, Brant, not so long since. She had
the Sight.”
“Oh, aye,” growled the shepherd.
“She told us of Hardcastle and his fight against Garsykes.”
“Gleaned that sort o’ news from any man or child about the country-side.
I’m acquainted with all the tricks of Romany—especially
sheep-stealing.”
“She said an ancient shepherd was seeking a dog named Storm, to kill
him.”
“It’s true.”
“That the shepherd would do his best to ruin Logie, by killing Logie’s
luck.”
“She lied, like all the Romaneys.”
“I tell you what she told me, shepherd,” said Nita, her grey eyes quiet
and candid. “And I told the gypsy woman that Garsykes would see to
Logie’s ruin.”
She turned to go down the road again and halted with fearless insolence.
“When I’m selling my baskets up dale and down—how they’ll laugh at the
tale of how they shared the hut together—Hardcastle and she.”
With that she went her way, singing the little eerie ballad she had sung
to Widow Mathison’s boy when Hardcastle met her in the road not long
ago.
_Now grow you big, and grow you tall,_
_Lad o’ the Wilderness,_
_You’ll give the Logie Folk a call,_
_When nights are dark and drear and all,_
_Lad o’ the Wilderness._
Rebecca watched her go, and all her strength to endure grew tough and
sinewy. They were few and lonely, here at Logie, now the feud was up;
and Nita Langrish was a dismaying power about the land, with her beauty
that put men in leading strings.
“That’s meant for Logie’s funeral song,” she muttered, as they watched
the retreating figure. “Well, shepherd, we’re neither killed nor buried
yet.”
Nita, half down the steep bend of the road that led to Logie Brigg, saw
Causleen come through the wicket-gate and out into the highway.
“Looking for the Master?” she asked gently.
Causleen knew little of the basket-weaver, except that she was an old
love of Hardcastle’s, and read no guile in the question, in the
innocent, soft eyes.
“Yes. He has ridden for the doctor. My father is—is worse.”
“It’s as well, maybe.” Nita’s jealousy noted the quiver in the other’s
voice, but did not spare her sorrow. “He may never need hear about the
woodmen’s hut.”
Causleen stood very still for a moment, looking at Nita Langrish. The
blow was so sudden, the pain of it so like a knife-thrust driven home,
that she was dizzy and bewildered. Then the quick, Highland fire leaped
to her face, showing a wild beauty that angered Nita all afresh.
“He knows and understands,” she said—“_as you could not_.”
All that was said and left unsaid in those few words stung Nita like a
lash. This peddling castaway could hold her own, and more than her own.
“Maybe not. But I can set the whole Dale rocking with the tale Long
Murgatroyd brought home.”
With that she laughed in Causleen’s face and went her way. Half down the
road, where it wound sheer and stark to Logie Brigg, she met Hardcastle,
urging a hard-driven horse.
“Your light o’ love is waiting for you,” she said, curtseying in sheer
mockery.
“One in a lifetime is enough for me, Nita,” he answered grimly, and rode
on. He and his horse had travelled many a hilly mile in pursuit of a
hard-worked doctor, and had not found him; and he was sorry, because
Causleen was tired enough already, after last night’s storm, without
this added trouble of the father who was near to death.
He came in sight of the wicket-gate, and slipped from saddle, and let
his horse find its own way to stable. Causleen was at the gate, her back
turned to the roadway, and Hardcastle was afraid, somehow, to listen to
the girl’s wild sobbing. It startled and unmanned him. He longed to get
away, yet could not leave her in this plight.
“I’ve done my best to find the doctor,” he said, putting a kindly hand
on her shoulder, “but he’s away up Amerdale. Is Donald worse?”
She drew away, as if his touch scorched her. “He is better—just for
awhile—and I ran out to see if you had brought the doctor. And a woman
came instead—so pretty, and with so foul a tongue.”
Hardcastle remembered Nita’s mocking curtsey—recalled Long Murgatroyd’s
intrusion into the foresters’ hut last night—and the riddle of it all
grew plain. Nita’s tongue had been busy with the pedlar’s girl and he
knew what it could do even to rough men. Something stirred at his
heart—the heart frozen long since, so that it had forgotten how to
suffer, joy or grief.
“Nobody cares what Nita says. She says, and goes on saying—and folk
laugh.”
“Yes. Folk often laugh, when they should cry instead. It is not your
fault that we had to shelter from the storm—yet how I loathe you for
it, Hardcastle of Logie.”
She was on fire with pride, with contempt of Nita Langrish and her power
to wound. And, dimly as yet, Hardcastle understood her passion. “What
else was there to do but shelter?”
“Nothing; but that does not help us. It was not your fault that we came
to your gate, father and I, and became your pensioners.”
“My guests,” said Hardcastle, with gruff kindliness.
“Threadbare guests, forced on you. And what can I do, with father as he
is?”
“Stay on.”
Causleen remembered Nita’s words, her laughter as she went down the
road; and the poison festered, as if a snake had bitten her. How could
she stay on, with all the country-side passing Nita’s gossip to and fro?
How could she leave, while her father lay between life and death,
babbling of far Inverness and pipes that skirled about the moorland
glens?
“I thank and loathe you,” she said, and left him there—muddled, not for
the first time in his life, by the ways of a maid with a man.
Hardcastle watched her till she was hidden by a shower of red,
fast-falling leaves. He was impatient of some feeling that the girl had
roused, some stirring at the heart he had hardened against intrusion.
The Wilderness had put a slight on her, as it had striven to slight
Logie. She was going in fear of the open, as he went sometimes where
there was nothing doing and he had leisure to remember how strong and
merciless was the hornets’ nest he had roused at Garsykes.
Then suddenly he understood the bond between them. She was proud and
weary. So was he.