THE HINDERED VENTURE
I
Michael Draycott was waiting for him at the gate when Hardcastle came
over the moor to Broken Firs the next afternoon, and he nodded a cheery
greeting.
“You’re on the very stroke of the time you promised, Master.”
“I have to be, Michael. You’re so often near dying that a minute beyond
might be too late.”
“Now, I willun’t have that old joke thrown at me,” chuckled the farmer.
“Maybe I have my fancies, like one here and there; but I do get up from
my death-bed wonderful regular.”
“And then you want to dip into my pockets for repairs. It would pay me
to keep you ill in bed.”
“Not in the long run, when roofs began to gape and gates dropped all to
bits. There’d be a tidier penny to pay then than now.”
“Have it your own way, Michael, but remember I’m a poor man.”
The ancient ritual went its way, as they moved from one corner to
another of the trim farmstead—Hardcastle with shrewd reluctance,
Michael with deep resolve to get all he wanted, and a little more.
The little more was broached as Hardcastle was leaving, after a
wide-spread meal in the farmstead’s parlour.
“Talking of mistals——” said Michael.
“We didn’t happen to be.”
“No, but we were thinking o’ them. That one yonder would be all the
better if it was doubled in size. The farm’s prospering so, I’ve
scarcely room for my beasts to turn about in.”
“But, Michael, you’re bound to die soon, in one of those bad turns of
yours. You’d better be thinking of your latter end, instead of
farm-buildings.”
The man’s weather-red face grew plump with laughter. “I’m not on such
nodding-terms with death as I used to be, Master. There’s summat in this
durned feud with Garsykes that makes me want to live to a hundred and
three.”
“Six of us feel like that,” said Hardcastle, glancing down to where
Garsykes caught the last of the crimson sun-glow.
“Aye, and six o’ that sort can be fifty or two-score when need asks. I
couldn’t have thought it—the way old bones grow young in these good
times.”
All they had shared of peril lay silent between them, but confessed, as
they watched the last glow redden and die out across the Garsykes
hollow, leaving it to a grey, disastrous sleep.
“I’ll go agateards with you, Master,” said Draycott by and by—“lest
young blood gets the better of you, and you run single-handed into yond
foul stye.”
“There’s no likelihood, Michael. I’m ready for them if they come to
Logie, and it stands at that.”
“Ah, but you’re young. And youth can’t bide to wait sometimes.”
Michael went with him as far as the turn of the track, where the heather
ran down to the pastures; and then he bade him a hale good-night and
God-speed.
“I’ve a sick heifer needing me, Master—and, forgive me, I was thinking
of the feud instead.”
Hardcastle swung down the track. The sun had westered now about these
higher slopes, and dusk overtook him as he reached the top of the
sheep-track that wound to Logie. Across the frost-haze of the valley,
lights twinkled out from Garsykes one by one, and he laughed grimly as
he stood and watched them. Tired wayfarers might mistake them for stars
of hope, might blunder out of the hill-top wastes into such welcome as
waited for them there.
A harsh joy in feud came to him. The end of Logie was sure as anything
could be in this world, but he would hold his good house to the last.
There would be no surrender, and with a quick flash of humour he
pictured Rebecca playing a besom heftily amid the flaming havoc of her
kitchen. And Storm, maybe, after much red sheep-slaying, would kill a
man or two of the Wilderness, and so die an honest dog.
The old days of peace and money-getting were remote as a dream
remembered on waking to full life. Out there, behind the twinkling
lamp-gleams, were men and women plotting now, no doubt, some crafty
lighter blow before they came in force against the house.
Death had seemed, in those old days, an end to life, a sorrowful laying
away of folk under green turf that stopped their ears for ever to the
wheeling cries of moor-birds—closed their nostrils to savour of wind
and sun and rain across the striding lands—ended all things and all
joy.
Now, as he stood looking over the wandering valley mists, he seemed, for
one bewildering moment, to see with clearer vision. For Logie’s honour
he had grappled with the three gaunt men who met him at the pinfold—was
it weeks or years ago?—and since then death had shadowed him. Aye, but
was death more than a stride from one life to another? What if, for men
who had loved the homeland, there were wider moors beyond, and sweeter
winds and lustier joy in strength?
The thought stayed with him. New horizons widened over widening
hill-spaces. What if death were no wormy end of life, but a beginning of
new days?
No breeze ruffled these upland wastes. Little frets of night-time life
stirred among the gnarled heather and the bents. The land’s soul was in
a mood as deep and still as Hardcastle’s, and a fine communion held
between the Master who was a lover to his acres, the acres that loved
him.
He roused himself at last, with another laugh at Garsykes and himself,
and was turning to swing down the sheep-track when a cry broke sharp as
a pistol-shot across the moor. It sounded close at hand. Then a second
cry came—far-off, it seemed—and another. Hardcastle peered through the
dark that had scarcely served to show him a yard of the track ahead. He
could see nothing, but the cries rose to a shriek of terror, and he ran
forward, this way and that, forgetting that the moor was thick with
ambush. Twice he sucked a foot out from the bog, and once he blundered
against a rock that cut deep.
Still the cries sounded, weaker now. The darkness baffled hearing, as
well as sight, after a fashion of its own. Someone was dying, near at
hand, and Hardcastle could not find him. The failing cries maddened his
will to save—the will that would have gone through six-foot drifts to
save sheep over-blown.
Then the grey haze lifted. A brave, young moon shone over
Logie-land—over the misty hollow, and across to Garsykes—and, not
twenty paces off, Hardcastle saw a little lad, half of him buried in
green slime. In his haste to get to him, the Master was all but lost
himself; for his heavier weight crashed through the ooze that was less
firm even than true bogland. He sank to his knees before touching firm
ground on the sloping brink of the marsh, then reached forward and
gripped the lad’s upstretched arms; and never afterwards, in trying to
recall what followed, could he remember anything but a struggle that
seemed endless. Each tug, to drag the boy towards him, unsteadied his
own foothold; and, when he had him in his arms, the fight to regain dry
land again brought every muscle thick-standing and near to
breaking-point.
They came to firm ground at last, and the boy clung about him with
piteous cries.
“I want my mammy—oh, I want my mammy.”
“Well, I can’t be that—and, be damned to you, you’re a wet sort of lad
to father. Where d’ye hail from, laddie?”
“From Garsykes.”
Hardcastle glanced across the narrow valley, and back again to the boy.
Tired as he was, exasperated by the simple answer, the humour of it all
appealed to him. Apart from peril of other marshes he might blunder
into, how could he let this waif go lonely with his fright across the
mile that would seem endless leagues to him—the mile that stretched
between this and Garsykes?
There was nothing for it but to go—a fool, knowing the way of the Lost
Folk and their mercies—into the midst of what they had in store for
him. Rebel as he would against suicide of this sort, he could not thrust
aside a lad who shivered as he clung to him.
So they two went across the moonlit wilderness, picking their way
between the bogs and the broken grounds. It was not easy going. The
light was enough to show them a safe way till clouds came over the
moon’s face now and then, and they were alone with darkness and the
unfenced mines that lurked for heedless feet.
Hardcastle’s temper grew rusty as a file. He was taking all these pains
for one of Garsykes brats, and the brat was wet and clinging. He wearied
of the lad’s piteous crying for his mother, and cursed himself for
inhumanity.
They plodded on, till they came half down the slope on his side of the
stream. And now a great hubbub sounded from Garsykes, up above them, and
lanterns were bobbing to and fro. A woman’s voice rose shrill into the
stillness of the night.
“You’ve got to find my lad, or I’ll know why!”
“Turning us out o’ doors on a wild-goose chase,” came the answer.
Hardcastle knew the voice for Long Murgatroyd’s, and his surly protest
was taken up by one and another.
“The lad will be at High Stellings, where you sent him an hour since.
They’d never let him run a risk of dark o’er-taking him—open mines and
what-all—so they’re keeping him till morn.”
“Aye. They’re keeping him. So let’s all get back to thy inn, widow, and
chalk up more riches for thee on thy door.”
“There’ll be neither ale nor chalks till we’ve found Ned. I tell you
he’s lost on the moor. I know it in my bones. And, whisht ye, what was
that?”
Far-off she had heard the lad’s cry for his mammy, though they were deaf
to its meaning.
“A peewit, widow—or a curlew, maybe. One of ours must be poaching up
the fells, and started a wild-bird up.”
But soon the oft-repeated cry, as it came nearer, was plain to all, and
their lanterns went bobbing up and down, each man thinking he knew where
to find the sound, and each baffled constantly by the utter darkness.
Hardcastle made for the nearest light, and found himself face to face
with Long Murgatroyd, who gaped at him as at a ghost and turned his
lantern from the Master to Ned’s dripping figure. Then he gave a rough,
unsteady chuckle.
“Here’s the big and little of it come to Garsykes, neighbours. You’ve
got your lad, widow, and we’ve got summat, too, we wanted.”
The rest came crowding about Murgatroyd. The shivering waif had leaped
at a bound into his mother’s arms, and Hardcastle found himself alone,
confronting half the men of Garsykes. With peril came a sharp, useless
sort of vision for all that made up this wild happening. The half-circle
of lanterns—the scowling faces, part in light and part in shadow—the
dumb, do-nothing darkness of the waste lands—they were part of a scene
he looked on at, as if it were no concern of his.
That for a moment. Then he gathered his strength, as a man might pull a
bow-string tight. Most of these folk were deep in liquor, and all were
scathing with rancour that had grown by what it fed on since the day he
paid no tribute.
“We’d best end Logie now,” said Long Murgatroyd—“Logie and its mucky
pride.”
A wolfish growl answered him, though still some dread of Hardcastle held
them. He had gone like “a ghost-guarded man” through these last weeks of
all that Garsykes could bring to his undoing. They were many—but they
lived in a country haunted by trolls and mine-goblins, and superstition
was in their slackened fibres.
A breeze got up, quick and merry, from the top of swart Pengables Hill.
The clouds overhead were riven apart, and the eager moon leaped through.
It maddened the Garsykes Men afresh to see Hardcastle standing there
straight to his height and waiting silently for what might follow.
Widow Mathison, still clutching her boy as if she feared to let him go
again, ran suddenly in front of Hardcastle and loosened her tongue on
the rabble.
“Where’s your shame, you hulking wastrels? Do as you like to Hardcastle
when you can catch him fair—but not when he’s on this sort of errand.
Ned’s all I have, and can’t you see by the drip of him that he’s been
saved fro’ drowning?”
“What do we care?” muttered Long Murgatroyd. “Ned’s no bairn of ours.”
“That makes him the likelier lad,” said the widow, tartly. “And now you
can all pack home, for I willun’t have you touch the man.”
Appealed to singly, there were men here who would have been pricked by
shame; but they were a mob out of hand, beast-like and robbed of what
wits they ever had.
“Who’s the widow to come hectoring it over us?” snarled one.
“Quit talking,” shouted another. “Let drive at Hardcastle instead.”
The Master stepped quietly in front of Widow Mathison, and they swayed
and jostled, eager to attack, but held for a moment by brutish fear of
his unconcern. In that moment the moon was snapped up by a scudding
cloud, and Hardcastle took his luck as it came.
His one hope of defence was to attack. Without a pause he ran forward,
lifting the stout stick he carried, and smashed the lanterns one by one.
Then, in the dark of his own making, he rained blows at random into the
midst of the screaming throng.
Luck could not hold for long, he knew. Already the cloud was passing,
and with clearer light would come the end for him. But meanwhile it was
good to be alive, drawing healthy music from Garsykes skulls.
When the moon raced free again, it shone on a few fallen men, on others
who yelped like wolves and came at him headlong. He glanced about him,
ran nimbly to a corner where two field-walls protected him from rear
attack, and waited for them. A man had to die once and some day. What
better end could Logie ask of him?
II
Will o’ Wisp, lurking beside the track that Hardcastle would take from
Broken Firs, wearied of his job. It had been well enough, with Nita
beside him, to do her bidding; but the silence and the night-time
sobered him. What grudge had he, after all, against the Master of Logie?
The man had taken a random shot at him, long ago, when he tried to rob
the post-boy. That was all in the day’s work of chance and mischance.
But what of this lying in wait, cold-blooded, for a shot that could not
miss its mark?
Will was a rogue by nature—and from choice because life offered more
frolic along unlicensed roads. Yet decency, of his own sort, travelled
all roads with him, like a faithful comrade, and the longer Hardcastle
tarried in his coming, the chillier grew this enterprise of waiting to
shoot a man as if he were a sitting rabbit.
What had he heard in the Garsykes tavern? That Nita played with men as
cats play with mice—that the way of her with them all was one and the
same—and the end a long sliding down the slope to hell. They did not
mince matters in their talk, the Garsykes Folk, and Will o’ Wisp thought
of these things now.
Still Hardcastle did not come down the moor. Nita had pretended to know
the way he would take to-night, the hour of his return. She was wrong,
it seemed, and the rogue felt a stealthy gladness. The breeze sobbed and
fluted through the naked spinney where he crouched. His gun lay chilly
in half-frozen hands. Were they right when they spoke of the little
basket-weaver as of a thing accursed?
He was too far on the Logie-side of the moor to hear the cries that had
drawn Hardcastle from his home-track past the spinney; and at length he
gave up the errand that had brought him here.
“Nita has hanged enough men in her garter,” he muttered, stretching his
cramped limbs.
Then he went down and across the pastures, leaping a wall nimbly here
and there, till he came near Garsykes and its tumult. He saw lanterns
flitting like his namesake Will o’ Wisps about the pastures, heard Widow
Mathison swing her tongue like a flail, and noisy voices answer to the
lash.
It was all a mystery to him as he pressed forward, halting only when the
clouds raced over from Pengables, hiding one step from the next. Through
the stormy murk, as he listened, came a thunder-din of oaths, a pig-like
screeching from men not used to bear pain silently.
The moon ran free again, and in the sharp, cold light he saw Hardcastle
standing in the angle of two limestone walls, with half Garsykes
yammering to be at him.
Will o’ Wisp had no liking for the village he had blundered into weeks
ago. There were degrees of rascaldom, and his own feet went merrily on
the margin of such deeps as Garsykes knew. Something in Hardcastle’s
dour silence as he faced the rabble with uplifted cudgel—some liking,
inborn in him, for a man meeting heavy odds, brought music into Will’s
heart. Moreover, he was in mood to take sides with any man that Nita
hated.
“What’s this, you Garsykes louts?” he asked.
They turned on him, ready to tear him to pieces instead of Hardcastle.
“Here’s Nita’s last favourite, Lord help him,” laughed Long Murgatroyd.
“He carries a fowling-piece, as it happens—and it’s loaded—and you’re
a timid folk in Garsykes, unless all the luck’s in front of you. No,
Murgatroyd, I wouldn’t stir a foot, if I was you. You’d find it a queer
thing to be dead, with a charge of shot inside you instead of ale.”
Will o’ Wisp was himself. Free of Nita, free of cold-blooded murder up
the moor, it tickled his fancy to be master of these folk—master too,
of what would happen soon to Hardcastle.
He took his stand on a moonlit hillock, letting the polished barrel of
his gun glint from one to another of the mob.
“I’m judge among you,” he said, with his heedless laugh.
“Are you, now?” growled Murgatroyd. “A likely man, you, to be judge of
any folk.”
“I know ’em all so well, knowing myself,” chuckled Will. “There’s my
loaded gun, too—and that helps a man to be a judge. What’s all this
moil about, widow?”
Widow Mathison told him, instead, her mind about all Garsykes Men, born
or unborn—with gusto, now that Hardcastle was safe. That made Will
little the wiser till the lad broke from his mother’s grasp and then ran
back again, afraid of what he had suffered on the fells.
“I fell into cold water, I did,” he whimpered, “and couldn’t get myself
out. And a big man came and tugged at me, and brought me to my mammy.”
Will o’ Wisp understood now; and wrath kindled in his lazy mind.
“You’d kill Hardcastle for that?”
“Aye,” said Long Murgatroyd. “What do we care for the widow’s brat?”
Will o’ Wisp let his gun roam quietly from one to another of the
company. And then he spoke.
“In all my days I never happened on as foul a stye as Garsykes.
Hardcastle o’ Logie saved one of yours—and there’s something you never
learned, it seems.”
“Oh, aye?” sneered Murgatroyd.
“There’s fairation. Be dummocked, there’s fairation.”
Still facing them, he made his way to Hardcastle and nodded cheerily.
“I’m going Logie way myself,” he said, “so we might as well step up
together. Three’s company sometimes, and I’m taking the gun as a parting
gift from Garsykes.”
Hardcastle fell into step beside him, swinging his cudgel. A pluckier
mob would have rushed the pair of them, knowing that Will’s
fowling-piece could speak only once before they were trodden down. But
each man thought of his own skin, and stood cursing stupidly, and
watched them dip over and down the hill-crest.
The Master and Will o’ Wisp went in silence through the blue-grey, misty
night, till Hardcastle turned suddenly.
“There’s no return to Garsykes for you, after this. I’m in your debt.”
“Nay. I’d meant to go. I’m not their sort of rogue, and never was.”
“There’s supper and a bed at Logie.”
“Bless you, I want no thanks. If there was danger to-night I’d come and
gladly. But they’ll let you alone for awhile. I know ’em.”
Nothing Hardcastle could say persuaded the vagabond to change his mind,
when they came to the hill that swept with a break-neck fall to Logie
Brigg.
“I’m getting as far as I can from Nita Langrish,” laughed Will. “She’d
be weaving her spells about me to-morrow if I stayed as near as this.”
With that he borrowed a fill of ’baccy for his pipe, bade Hardcastle a
rollicking farewell, and went his ways into the everywhere that lay
within the night-time forest and beyond.
Hardcastle chuckled quietly. After all, few strangers had come into
Garsykes, and fared out the better in this world’s gear. Will o’ Wisp
could boast of a good fowling-piece that was his by right of conquest.
Then the Master turned for home; and the steep of the road brought
anguish to the knee that had blundered against a rock while he was
rescuing the widow’s lad. There had been no time to think of it till
now.
For very pain he was forced to rest on Logie Brigg, and at these times
life lies in wait for every man. Pride to keep Garsykes at bay was well
enough. So was joy in the lusty strength that had cracked a crown or two
to-night. Now these were gone. He halted on the bridge, as the pedlar
and Causleen had done, before the trees were bare—weary, heartsick and
body-sick, no flame alight on any beacon-hill ahead. It was as if he was
a child again, seeking the mother who had slept these twenty years where
the churchyard listened to the lap of waters round its graves.
Under him swirled Wharfe River, playmate and comrade and lover through
the peaceful days; and now her voice stole kindly to his ear, talking of
brave days to come. When all seemed in the losing, the river told him,
it was time for the hale-souled sort to gather courage.
He limped up the hill to Logie with gaining hope, and found it easier
for a lame man to climb than it had been to make the sharp descent that
jarred every step. For all that, he was spent and tired when he came to
his own gate—till he saw Causleen waiting for him there. The moon
showed him a face pale and eager, framed by dark hair that was loose
about it like a glory.
“You were in danger somewhere, and I could not help you.” The Highland
voice was low and troubled. “There was a crying up the waste lands—your
feet blundered into marshes——”
“How should you know?” he broke in.
“The vision came,” she went on, with great simplicity. “I did not ask
for it. It came.”
Hardcastle’s heart beat faster, for no reason that he knew of. Since
Causleen’s first coming there had been recurring enmity between them
broken by little rifts that let the sunlight through. He had not known
till lately how he had begun to need and seek her comradeship. To-night
he gained a deeper knowledge. Her welcome at the gate was the one thing
he had craved, all the long way from Garsykes, and it was his.
“You’re glad I’m home again?”
She grew still and cold. “Glad? Yes. You have been kind to us—two
pedlars tramping to your gate. The vision came, and I spent myself in
sending help to you across the waste—help of the spirit—and, of course
you’ll laugh at fancies—I spent myself, not for your sake, but because
you’d shown us kindness—of your own rough sort. I wished to pay a
debt.”
Logie’s Master had known mixed weather on the uplands, but never such a
March-tide change from sun to bitter, east-wind spite. The pedlar’s girl
was remote from him as the top of old Pengables Hill, with its head
among the driving sleet.
“Is it Nita,” he asked clumsily, “and her chatter of the night we spent
down yonder?”
“It is Nita.”
The man’s big, simple heart found room at last. Through these last weeks
he had been groping forward to the light.
“Best marry me,” he said. “I’ve wanted it, Causleen.”
She answered nothing for awhile. Then sleet came stinging at his face
again.
“I do not care for pity. Oh, you are clumsy in your kindness! Gossip has
touched us, and you stoop to offer marriage to the beggar-maid. You are
generous.”
“I want it,” he repeated doggedly.
“I’ve shame enough to bear as it is. Would I add to it? To sit each day
at table, and look across at you, and know that I owed it all to
pity—would that be happiness?”
She turned to go, then glanced at his knee as if she had not seen till
now that it was bleeding through the torn cloth of his riding-breeches.
“You crashed against a rock,” she said softly. “The vision showed me
that, too. Can I wash and bind it for you?”
“It is of no account.”
“You mean that Rebecca the paragon would have more skill? She is so
wonderful.”
Hardcastle could only wonder at her moods. She had seemed to care that
he had taken a hurt, and now she was jealous of Rebecca. And again she
had turned and was looking at him with wide, questioning eyes.
“You asked if it was Nita. It was—but not her gossip. Why do you lie to
me, Hardcastle of Logie?”
With that she was gone in earnest, and Hardcastle limped slowly up the
dappled moon-dusk of the road. Near home as he was, a late-found
instinct prompted him to hold his cudgel in readiness for whatever the
swaying shadows of the firs might hide. His left hand swung idly at his
side, till suddenly a wet snout pushed against it and a friendly smell
stole up in greeting.
“Back again, are you, Storm?” said the Master, with gruff banter. “Red
from the feast, as usual?”
But the dog’s grey muzzle was innocent of stains. For three days he had
ravened, then had slept off the after-sickness, had lapped greedily at
every stream he passed. No guile showed in the brown, humid eyes. He
knew nothing of repentance, or need of it. It was just that his
wander-lust was over, and somewhere deep in his being was the knowledge
that danger threatened Logie. He was home again, and at his post.
“It was time you came,” said Hardcastle. “Dogs I know, and horses I
know—but women are beyond me.”
Storm had the better of him; for a half-hour later Causleen found him in
the cupboard under the stair, and brought him food, and made much of him
before she bent above his tousled head.
“Oh, Storm,” she said, and cried her heart out.