A GAOL DELIVERY
The Wilderness Folk were aghast, in the days that followed, to see dead
Hardcastle riding with Causleen, man and wife, across the uplands. Flesh
and blood they could not be, for all Garsykes knew that they were buried
in the cave. Yet flesh and blood they were, glad of each other and the
hills.
Old superstition bred and festered in the Garsykes hovels. It was
ill-luck and always had been, to run counter to a Hardcastle, whatever
toll they took of those farming under him. Strange tales were bandied to
and fro in Widow Mathison’s inn by greybeards of this Lost Village under
the hills—tales of the ancient days, when one and another from Garsykes
had held up a Master of Logie on the road and brought confusion on the
settlement.
“They’ve the luck, these damned Hardcastles,” the tale would finish
always. “It’s no use trying to meddle with Logie any more.”
Nita Langrish had shared their gospel for awhile. Then she had rallied
from the shock of seeing Hardcastle ride home with the pedlar’s
girl—the bridal-look about their faces, and both on horseback instead
of lying under piled rocks yonder.
Each time she met them afterwards, her purpose hardened. She lay awake
o’ nights no longer, wondering how they had won free of the cavern. It
was enough to know that the pedlar’s brat was mistress now at
Logie—reigning where she might have taken pride of place, instead of
weaving baskets for up-Dale folk to buy. Through the weeks and months
she waited, striving to put some sort of courage into her slack-set
people, and telling them always that dead men of theirs cried out for
vengeance against Logie. Memory of these deaths, and the way of them was
too sharp at first; but fear lessened by degrees, and Nita fanned the
dull embers of resentment into life.
As winter stepped through March gales to springtime, and the fells were
white with lambs newborn, Hardcastle took a lusty hold of life. The lean
years had gone out of mind. The only thought he gave Garsykes was a
warning to Causleen not to roam abroad without him.
She had little need. On horseback or afoot they were together
constantly; and, as he taught her the lore of ancient lands and storied
bridle-tracks, she lit his heritage with new, fresh wonder, as of dawn
after a long night’s tempest.
Closer they came together, and closer, as the spring advanced and
cowslips nodded in the meadow-grass. Sometimes Hardcastle would fall
silent, afraid almost of his joy in living; and her hand would slip
through his arm.
“What is it, Dick?” she would ask.
“Half of me has come back,” he would answer, smiling down at her—“the
half that’s been missing all these years.”
Rebecca, too, was in better heart. Jealousy yielded by degrees to a new,
enthralling hope. As she baked, and scrubbed, and churned, a little song
would creep into her mind, and stay there. Logie might have an heir at
last. And she would dandle him on knees hard-worn in Logie’s service.
When June was well in, and the meadows growing strong for the
scything-time, Shepherd Brant stumped into Rebecca’s kitchen one morning
and sat him down.
“Well?” she snapped. “What’s wrong this time? I’d as little expect to
see thee without thy shadow, Brant, as without a grievance.”
“What’s wrong? Why, Garsykes. It’s humming like a hornets’ nest again,
they say.”
“I guessed as much. Jonah gives me less of his company these days, and
sits a lot in the under-stairs cupboard. So I know Storm’s there.”
“You and your ghosts, woman. I’ve no patience. Dead men can walk—I’ve
seen a few in my time—but it’s a heathen fancy that the four-footed
sort have spirits.”
“Some o’ the four-footed have a bigger spirit than some o’ the
two-legged, and have a properer right to walk. But, then, you were
always against Storm, poor martyr,” she added, re-opening their ancient
feud. “It wasn’t enough that he died for the Master.”
“For a sheep-killer he died fairish well. I’ll own to as much as that,”
broke in the other, tugging at his scanty beard. “But, as for his ghost
coming back to guard the house—I thought you’d better wits than that
Rebecca.”
Hardcastle, hearing his shepherd’s voice, had come down the passage;
and, standing in the doorway, he laughed suddenly. They were so much a
part of Logie, these two, with their friendly enmity and their strife of
tongues.
“It’s no time for laughing, if all I hear be true,” said Brant, getting
to his feet with a grim salute. “The Wilderness Folk are ripe for any
sort of mischief.”
“Aye, but it will get no further than their tongues. I’m glad you’re
here, though, Stephen. I’ve to ride over the tops to Norbrigg, and shall
go easier in mind.”
“Don’t ye go, Master.”
“That’s what I’ve been dinning at him,” shrilled Rebecca. “When a man
takes a wife to himself, he’s no right to go pleasuring abroad, with the
Garsykes muck at large.”
“They’re broken men, I tell you. You with a gun, Brant, and Rebecca with
her rolling-pin—you’re enough to hold the house.”
“And you’re taking the mistress into it?”
“Taking her to the hill-winds. She’s stifled in these Logie woods.”
With that he went down the corridor, buoyant and heedless. A stable-lad
was holding the two horses, and Causleen waited for him.
“Brant’s here,” he said, as he mounted her. “It’s as well, with Rebecca
thinking fire and slaughter is brewing up.”
She laughed with him. Laughter was in their hearts, and joy rode
pick-a-back behind them down the winding lane. The bird-cherry trees
were in blossom, their white tassels dusting the sleepy air with
fragrance. From every bush—from the high sycamores whose leaves drowsed
in the summer’s heat—birds were wild with song. Thrushes piped high.
Blackbirds sent out their mellower note, and all the small fry joined in
this wild din of June.
“Causleen,” said Hardcastle, his voice softened by the wonder of their
days together, “I was surly when you came at first. Dear God, if I had
missed you.”
“That was not meant. Was there ever a wind that blew but brought us
closer?”
It was in this mood—sure of each other, with a high pride in
wedlock—that they reached the gate opening on the Norbrigg road. On the
top bar lay a flint arrow, brown and smooth in the sun-glare, and
Hardcastle checked himself as he stooped to unhasp the gate.
His glance sought Causleen’s. Both were thinking of the first token
found by Pedlar Donald, of all that followed. They were thinking, too,
with sharp revulsion, of the arrow-heads that littered the floor of
Garsykes Cave.
For a moment their nightmare journey through the cavern clouded the
sunlight, chilled the eager breath of summer. Then Hardcastle put the
token into his pocket, as he had put the earlier one, and said not a
word as they rode up into the hills. It was only when they drew rein to
breathe their horses, and Garsykes showed below them, that he broke the
silence.
“We’ll go through no second waiting-time, wife,” he said—“waiting for
what the Wilderness is pleased to do.”
“Yes, Dick?”
“Brant would have found the Logie Men ready enough to muster, if we’d
been lost that day. They’ll _have_ to muster now, and we’ll make an end
of the swine-styes yonder, once for all.”
From the strength of their great caring, from the very heart of her
bridal pride, joy quickened in Causleen. Better war, savage and instant,
than to go through another stealthy siege at the hands of Garsykes.
“Break them outright, Dick,” she said. “For my sake, break them.”
They rode up and further up into the wide-flung spaces of the fells. No
woodland birds sang here. That lowland litany of joy was out of hearing.
Instead, there came the wheeling cries of hawk and plover, red-shank and
snipe and hoodie-crow—battle-music, swift as a pibroch, keen as the
thin, nipping wind that fought the glaring sun-heat.
Past Lone Rigg Cross they went—which marked the graves of a lad found
dead in some far-off winter’s gale—and up raking Skircarl Rise, till
they drew rein again to give their sweating nags a rest.
They were on the roof-top of the Dale now, Moorland and gaunt pastures,
gashed by wild ravines, raked to the further mountains, grey-blue in the
distant, shimmering haze—a haze so drifting that it was hard to know
Pen-y-Gent’s long, sloping crest or Ingleborough’s bluff, upstanding
bulk.
“A good land, to live or die for,” said Hardcastle, all his love for
this far-striding homeland finding voice.
Reluctant to go, they gathered the reins at last and were moving forward
at a lagging pace when a traveller came up from the Norbrigg side, over
the steep brink of the hill. He was so tall and lean, so quick and yet
so stumbling in his stride, that they wondered who he was, and how he
came there. The one moving thing on this lone, empty road, he seemed
forlorn, and yet gigantic.
The man stopped as he neared them and touched a greasy cap. “D’ye know a
place called Garsykes?” he asked. “It should be somewhere near by now.”
“Yes,” said Hardcastle, with grim humour, “I know a place called
Garsykes. Do you want to get there?”
“I do, quick as my legs will take me.”
Hardcastle pointed the way for him, where the lazy track curved down to
the lowlands and the curling smoke below. Then he took the arrow-head
from his pocket and tossed it into the man’s hand.
“Tell them it comes from Logie,” he said, and rode forward with
Causleen.
The man stared after them for a moment, then fell again into the lopping
stride that carries tired legs far. Between the heather and the benty
lands he went, and came to Garsykes’ cobbled street, and dropped heavily
on to the stone bench outside the inn.
Long Murgatroyd was sitting there with a quart mug at his elbow, and he
glanced curiously at the newcomer.
“And where might you be from?” he asked.
The stranger sat bunched-up, his sombre eyes staring straight in front
of him. “From York,” he said. “There’s been a gaol delivery—and I’m one
of the delivered.”
“Take a pull at my mug, lad. You’ve walked a tidy bit too far, by the
look o’ you. There, that’s better. And what did they gaol you for, if a
body might ask?”
A sullen grin wrinkled the man’s face. “They said it was for robbery on
the highroad; but I knew better. It was for letting myself be fool
enough to be catched at it.”
Murgatroyd nodded with rough friendliness. “Garsykes is just the spot
for you. You can do as you like, all up and down the country-side, and
nobody dare catch you at it.”
“I heard as much in gaol. So I stepped over and down, and here I am.”
Murgatroyd stirred uneasily as a little snatch of song drifted down the
street, and Nita Langrish came picking her way daintily through the
garbage and the litter.
She stopped at the sight of the stranger. Hope never died in her that
one day a strong man would come from over the hill and help her lead her
wastrels up to Logie for the last, big fight.
Murgatroyd watched her trying to weave filmy spells about this new
arrival—watched with the old, half-slumbering lust to take her beauty
by the throat and end it—with the old, indolent zest, too, in seeing
yet another fall into her toils.
The stranger was past blandishment. All that York gaol had done to him,
all the road-sores under his feet and the drumming anguish in his brain,
seemed doubled now that the need to keep going no longer spurred him on.
He fumbled for his pipe and moleskin pouch, and with them drew from his
pocket a flint arrow-head that tinkled on the cobble-stones. He did not
heed, but Nita saw it lying there and drew back as from a thing she
feared.
“Where did you find it?” she asked, her voice harsh and shrill.
“That?” said the vagabond, glancing down. “I’d forgotten it. It was
given me by a big chap, striding a big horse. He told me to carry it to
Garsykes.”
He lit his pipe with shaking fingers, pulled fiercely at it for awhile,
then threw it down and lay back on the bench. The sweat dripped from
him. His lean body was shaken as with palsy, and his face was red and
ashen-grey by turns.
“I’m not done yet,” he stammered, groping for the pipe that was his
first and last stand-by. “What sort of fool should I be to give in just
when I’m free of gaol?”
Long Murgatroyd snarled at Nita, the basket-weaver. “I told you how it
would go,” he said, “when you sent three of us to take Hardcastle at the
pinfold. And now here’s the token back. He knows he’s weathered the
worst of us.”
“No,” said Nita sharply. “There’ll be worse to come—for Logie.”
The lean-limbed stranger roused himself. Fever glowed in his eyes and
his voice was hoarse and wolfish. “There’s always worse to come,” he
said, and fell back, the sweat pouring down his haggard face.