The storm was now all but over. The moon shone clear, and the clouds that scudded across its face were few. Lauvellen, to the east, was visible to the summit; and Raven Craig, to the west, loomed black before the moon. A cutting wind still blew, and a frost had set in sharp and keen. Already the sleet that had fallen was frozen in sheets along the road, which was thereby made almost impassable even to the sure footsteps of the mountaineer. The trees no longer sighed and moaned with the wind; on the stiffening firs lay beads of frozen snow, and the wind as it passed through them soughed. The ghylls were fuller and louder, and seemed to come from every hill; the gullocks overflowed, but silence was stealing over the streams, and the deeper rivers seemed scarcely to flow.
Ralph and Rotha walked side by side to Shoulthwaite Moss. It was useless for the girl to return to Fornside, Ralph had said. Her father would not be there, and the desolate house was no place for her on a night like this. She must spend the night under his mother's charge.
They had exchanged but few words on setting out. The tragedy of her father's life was settling on the girl's heart with a nameless misery. It is the first instinct of the child's nature to look up to the parent as its refuge, its tower of strength. That bulwark may be shattered before the world, and yet to the child's intuitive feeling it may remain the same. Proudly, steadfastly the child heart continues to look up to the wreck that is no wreck in the eyes of its love. Ah! how well it is if the undeceiving never comes! But when all that seemed strong, when all that seemed true, becomes to the unveiled vision weak and false, what word is there that can represent the sadness of the revealment?
“Do you think, Ralph, that I could bear a terrible answer if I were to ask you a terrible question?”
Rotha broke the silence between them with these words. Ralph replied promptly,—
“Yes, I do. What would you ask?”
The girl appeared powerless to proceed. She tried to speak and stopped, withdrawing her words and framing them afresh, as though fearful of the bluntness of her own inquiry. Her companion perceived her distress, and coming to her relief with a cheerier tone, he said,—
“Don't fear to ask, Rotha. I think I can guess your question. You want to know if—”
“Ralph,” the girl broke in hurriedly—she could better bear to say the word herself than to hear him say it—“Ralph, he is my father, and that has been enough. I could not love him the less whatever might happen. I have never asked him—anything. He is my father, and though he be—whatever he may be—he is my father still, you know. But, Ralph, tell me—you say I can bear it—and I can—I feel I can now—tell me, Ralph, was it poor father after all?”
Rotha had stopped and covered up her face in her hands. Ralph stopped too. His voice was deep and thick as he answered slowly,—
“No, Rotha, it was not.”
“Not father?” cried the girl; “you know it was not?”
“I know it was not.”
The voice again was not the voice of one who brings glad tidings, but the words were themselves full of gladness for the ear on which they fell, and Rotha seemed almost overcome by her joy. She clutched Ralph's arm with both hands.
“Heaven be praised!” she said; “now I can brave anything—poor, poor father!”
After this the girl almost leapt over the frozen road in the ecstasy of her new-found delight. The weight of weary months of gathering suspense seemed in one moment to have fallen from her forever. Half laughing, half weeping, she bounded along, the dog sporting beside her. Her quick words rippled on the frosty air. Occasionally she encountered a flood that swept across the way from the hills above to the lake beneath, but her light foot tripped over it before a hand could be offered her. Their path lay along the pack-horse road by the side of the mere, and time after time she would scud down to the water's edge to pluck the bracken that grew there, or to test the thin ice with her foot. She would laugh and then be silent, and then break out into laughter again. She would prattle to herself unconsciously and then laugh once more. All the world seemed made anew to this happy girl to-night.
True enough, nature meant her for a heartsome lass. Her hair was dark, and had a tangled look, as though lately caught in brambles or still thick with burrs. Her dark eyebrows and long lashes shaded the darkest of black-brown eyes. Her mouth was alive with sensibility. Every shade of feeling could play upon her face. Her dress was loose, and somewhat negligently worn; one never felt its presence or knew whether it were poor or fine. Her voice, though soft, was generally high-pitched, not like the whirl of wind through the trees, but like its sigh through the long grass, and came, perhaps, to the mountain girl from the effort to converse above the sound of these natural voices. There was a tremor in her voice sometimes, and, when she was taken unawares, a sidelong look in her eyes. There was something about her in these serious moods that laid hold of the imagination. She had surely a well of strength which had been given for her own support and the solace of others at some future moment, only too terrible. But not to-night, as she tripped along under the moonlight, did the consciousness of that moment overshadow her.
And what of Ralph, who strode solemnly by her side? A change had come over him of late. He spoke little, and never at all of the scenes he had witnessed in his long campaign—never of his own share in them. He had become at once an active and a brooding man. The shadow of a supernatural presence seemed to hang over everything. Tonight that shadow was blacker than before.
In the fulness of her joy Rotha had not marked the tone in which Ralph spoke when he gave her in a word all the new life that bounded in her veins. But that tone was one of sadness, and that word had seemed to drain away from veins of his some of the glad life that now pulsated in hers. Was it nothing that the outcast among men whom he alone, save this brave girl, had championed, had convinced him of his innocence? Nothing that the light of a glad morning had broken on the long night of the blithe creature by his side, and brightened her young life with the promise of a happier future?
“Look, Ralph, look at the withered sedge, all frost-covered!” said Rotha in her happiness, tripping up to his side, with a sprig newly plucked in her hand. Ralph answered her absently, and she rattled on to herself, “Rotha shall keep you, beautiful sedge! How you glisten in the moonlight!” Then the girl broke out with a snatch of an old Border ballad,—
“Poor father,” she said more soberly, “poor father; but he'll come back home now—come back to our own home again”; and then, unconscious of the burden of her song, she sang,—
The moon shone clearly; the tempest had lulled, and the silvery voice of the girl was all that could be heard above the distant rumble of the ghylls and the beat of Ralph's heavy footsteps. In a moment Rotha seemed to become conscious that her companion was sad as well as silent. How had this escaped her so long? she thought.
“But you don't seem quite so glad, Ralph,” she said in an altered tone, half of inquiry, half of gentle reproach, as of one who felt that her joy would have been the more if another had shared it.
“Don't I? Ah, but I am glad—that is, I'm glad your father won't need old Mattha's bull-grips,” he said, with an attempt to laugh at his own pleasantry.
How hollow the laugh sounded on his own ears! It was not what his father would have called heartsome. What was this sadness that was stealing over him and stiffening every sense? Had he yet realized it in all its fulness? Ralph shook himself and struck his hand on his breast, as though driving out the cold. He could not drive out the foreboding that had taken a seat there since Sim looked last in his eyes and cried, “Let me go.”
Laddie frisked about them, and barked back at the echo of his own voice, that resounded through the clear air from the hollow places in the hills. They had not far to go now. The light of the kitchen window at Shoulthwaite would be seen from the turn of the road. Only through yonder belt of trees that overhung the “lonnin,” and they would be in the court of Angus Ray's homestead.
“Ralph,” said Rotha—she had walked in silence for some little time—“all the sorrow of my life seems gone. You have driven it all away.” Her tremulous voice belied the light laugh that followed.
He looked down at her tear-dimmed eyes. Was her great sorrow indeed gone? Had he driven it away from her? If so, was it not all, and more, being gathered up into his own heart instead? Was it not so?
“You have borne it bravely, Rotha—very bravely,” he answered. “Do you think, now, that I could have borne it as you have done?”
There was a tremor in his tone and a tenderness of expression in his face that Rotha had never before seen there.
“Bear it as I have done?” she repeated. “There is nothing you could not bear.” And her radiant face was lit up in that white moonlight with a perfect sunshine of beauty.
“I don't know, Rotha, my girl,” he answered falteringly; “I don't know—yet.” The last words were spoken with his head dropped on to his breast.
Rotha stepped in front of him, and, putting her hand on his shoulder, stopped him and looked searchingly in his face.
“What is this sadness, Ralph? Is there something you have not told me—something behind, which, when it comes, will take the joy out of this glad news you give me?”
“I could not be so cruel as that, Rotha; do you think I could?”
A smile was playing upon his features as he smoothed her hair over her forehead and drew forward the loose hood that had fallen from it.
“And there is nothing to come after—nothing?”
“Nothing that need mar your happiness, my girl, or disturb your love. You love your father, do you not?”
“Better than all the world!” Rotha answered impulsively. “Poor father!”
“Better than all the world,” echoed Ralph vacantly, and with something like a sigh. Her impetuous words seemed to touch him deeply, and he repeated them once more, but they died away on his lips. “Better than all the—” Then they walked on.
They had almost reached the belt of trees that overhung the road.
“Ralph,” said Rotha, pausing, “may I—kiss you?”
He stooped and kissed her on the forehead. Then the weight about his heart seemed heavier than before. By that kiss he felt that between him and the girl at his side there was a chasm that might never be bridged. Had he loved her? He hardly knew; he had never put it to himself so. Did she not love him? He could not doubt it. And her kiss! yes, it was the kiss of love; but what love? The frank, upturned face answered him but too well.
They were within the shadow of the trees now, and could see the lights at Shoulthwaite. In two minutes more their journey would be done.
“Take my hand, Rotha; you might slip on the frosty road in darkness like this.”
The words were scarcely spoken, when Rotha gave a little cry and stumbled. “In an instant Ralph's arm was about her, and she had regained her feet.
“What is that?” she said, trembling with fear, and turning backwards.
“A drift of frozen sleet, no doubt,” Ralph said, kicking with his foot at the spot where Rotha slipped.
“No, no,” she answered, trembling now with some horrible apprehension.
Ralph had stepped back, and was leaning over something that lay across the road. The dog was snuffling at it.
“What is it?” said Rotha nervously.
He did not answer. He was on his knees beside it; his hands were on it. There was a moment of agonizing suspense.
“What is it?” Rotha repeated.
Still there came no reply. Ralph had risen, but he knelt again. His breath was coming fast. Rotha thought she could hear the beating of his heart.
“Oh, but I must know!” cried the girl. And she stepped backward as though to touch for herself the thing that lay there.
“Nothing,” said Ralph, rising and taking her firmly by the hand that she had outstretched,—“nothing—a sack of corn has fallen from the wagon, nothing more.” He spoke in a hoarse whisper.
He drew her forward a few paces, but she stopped. The dog was standing where Ralph had knelt, and was howling wofully.
“Laddie, come here,” Ralph said; “Rotha, come away.”
“I could bear the truth, Ralph—I think I could,” she answered.
He put his arm about her, and drew her along without a word. She felt his powerful frame quiver and his strong voice die within him. She guessed the truth. She knew this man as few had known him, as none other could know him.
“Go back, Ralph,” she said; “I'll hurry on.” And still the dog howled behind them.
Ralph seemed not to hear her, but continued to walk by her side. Her heart sank, and she looked piteously into his face.
And now the noise reached them of hurrying footsteps in front. People were coming towards them from the house. Lanterns were approaching them. In another moment they were in the court. All was astir. The whole household seemed gathered there, and in the middle of the yard stood the mare Betsy, saddled but riderless, her empty wool-creels strapped to her sides.
“Thank Heaven, here is Ralph,” said Willy. He was standing bareheaded, with the bridle in his hand.
“Bless thee!” cried Mrs. Ray as her son came up to her. “Here is the mare back home, my lad, but where is thy father?”
“The roads are bad to-night, mother,” Ralph said, with a violent effort to control the emotion that was surging up to his throat.
“God help us, Ralph; you can't mean that!” said Willy, catching his brother's drift.
“Give me the lantern, boy,” said Ralph to a young cowherd that stood near. “Rotha, my lass, take mother into the house.” Then he stepped up to where his mother stood petrified with dismay, and kissed her tenderly. He had rarely done so before. The good dame understood him and wept. Rotha put her arms about the mother's neck and kissed her too, and helped her in.
Willy was unmanned. “You don't mean that you know that father—”
He could say no more. Ralph had raised the lantern to the level of the mare's creels to remove the strap that bound them, and the light had fallen on his face.
“Ralph, is he hurt—much hurt?”
“He is—dead!”
Willy fell back as one that had been dealt a blow.
“God help me! O God, help me!” he cried.
“Give me the reins,” said Ralph, “and be here when I come back. I can't be long. Keep the door of the kitchen shut—mother is there. Go into his room, and see that all is ready.”
“No, no, I can't do that.” Willy was shuddering visibly.
“Remain here, at least, and give no warning when I return.”
“Take me with you, Ralph; I can't stay here alone.”
“Take the lantern, then,” said Ralph.
And the brothers walked, with the mare between them, to where the path was, under the shadow of the trees. What shadow had fallen that night on their life's path, which Time might never raise? Again and again the horse slipped its foot on the frozen road. Again and again Willy would have stopped and turned back; but he went on-he dared not to leave his brother's side. The dog howled in front of them. They reached the spot at last.
Angus Ray lay there, his face downwards. The mighty frame was still and cold and stiff as the ice beneath it. The strong man had fallen from the saddle on to his head, and, dislocating his neck, had met with instant death. Close at hand were the marks of the horse's sliding hoofs. She had cast one of her shoes in the fall, and there it lay. Her knees, too, were still bleeding.
“Give me the lantern, Willy,” said Ralph, going down on his knees to feel the heart. He had laid his hand on it before, and knew too well it did not beat. But he opened the cloak and tried once more. Willy was walking to and fro across the road, not daring to look down. And in the desolation of that moment the great heart of his brother failed him too, and he dropped his head over the cold breast beside which he knelt, and from eyes unused to weep the tears fell hot upon it.
“Take the lantern again, Willy,” Ralph said, getting up. Then he lifted the body on to the back of the mare that stood quietly by their side.
As he did so a paper slipped away from the breast of the dead man.
Willy picked it up, and seeing “Ralph Ray” written on the back of it, he handed it to his brother, who thrust it into a pocket unread.
Then the two walked back, their dread burden between them.
When the dawn of another day rose over Shoulthwaite, a great silence had fallen on the old house on the moss. The man who had made it what it was—the man who had been its vital spirit—slept his last deep sleep in the bedroom known as the kitchen loft. Throughout forty years his had been the voice first heard in that mountain home when the earliest gleams of morning struggled through the deep recesses of the low mullioned windows. Perhaps on the day following market day he sometimes lay an hour longer; but his stern rule of life spared none, and himself least of all. If at sixty his powerful limbs were less supple than of old, if his Jove-like head with its flowing beard had become tipped with the hoar frost, he had relaxed nothing of his rigid self-government on that account. When the clock in the kitchen had struck ten at night, Angus had risen up, whatever his occupation, whatever his company, and retired to rest. And the day had hardly dawned when he was astir in the morning, rousing first the men and next the women of his household. Every one had waited for his call. There had been no sound more familiar than that of his firm footstep, followed by the occasional creak of the old timbers, breaking the early stillness. That footstep would be heard no more.
Dame Ray sat in a chair before the kitchen fire. She had sat there the whole night through, moaning sometimes, but speaking hardly at all. Sleep had not come near her, yet she scarcely seemed to be awake. Last night's shock had more than half shattered her senses, but it had flashed upon her mind a vision of her whole life. Only half conscious of what was going on about her, she saw vividly as in a glass the incidents of those bygone years, that had lain so long unremembered. The little cottage under Castenand; her old father playing his fiddle in the quiet of a summer evening; herself, a fresh young maiden, busied about him with a hundred tender cares; then a great sorrow and a dead waste of silence,—all this appeared to belong to some earlier existence. And then the sun had seemed to rise on a fuller life that came later. A holy change had come over her, and to her transfigured feeling the world looked different. But that bright sun had set now, and all around was gloom. Slowly she swayed herself to and fro hour after hour in her chair, as one by one these memories came back to her—came, and went, and came again.
On Rotha the care of the household had fallen. The young girl had sat long by the old dame overnight, holding her hand and speaking softly to her between the outbursts of her own grief. She had whispered something about brave sons who would yet be her great stay, and then the comforter herself had needed comfort and her voice of solace had been stilled. When the daylight came in at the covered windows, Rotha rose up unrefreshed; but with a resolute heart she set herself to the duties that had dropped so unexpectedly upon her. She put the spinning-wheel into the neuk window-stand and the woo-wheel against the wall. They would not be wanted now. She cleared the sconce and took down the flitches that hung from the rannel-tree to dry. Then she cooked the early breakfast of oatmeal porridge, and took the milk that the boy brought from the cow shed and put it into the dishes that she had placed on the long oak table which stretched across the kitchen.
Willy Ray had been coming and going most of the night from the kitchen to his own room—a little carpeted closet of a bedroom that went out from the first landing on the stairs, and looked up to the ghyll at the back. The wee place was more than his sleeping-room; he had his books there, but he had neither slept nor read that night. He wandered about aimlessly, with the eyes of one walking in his sleep, breaking out sometimes into a little hysterical scream, followed by a shudder, and then a sudden disappearance. Death had come to him for the first time, and in a fearful guise. Its visible presence appalled him. He was as feeble as a child now. He was ready to lean on the first strong human arm that offered; and though Rotha understood but vaguely the troubles that beset his mind, her quick instinct found a sure way to those that lay heavy at his heart. She comforted him with what good words she could summon, and he came again and again to her with his odd fancies and his recollections of the poor feeble philosophy which he had gleaned from books. The look in the eyes of this simple girl and the touch of her hand made death less fearsome than anything besides. Willy seemed to lean on Rotha, and she on her part appeared to grow stronger as she felt this.
Ralph had gone to bed much as usual the night before—after he had borne upstairs what lay there. He was not seen again until morning, and when he came down and stood for a moment over his mother's chair as she sat gazing steadfastly into the fire, Rotha was stooping over the pan, with the porridge thivle in her hand. She looked up into his face, while his hand rested with a speechless sympathy on his mother's arm, and she thought that, mingled with a softened sorrow, there was something like hope there. The sadness of last night was neither in his face nor in his voice. He was even quieter than usual, but he appeared to have grown older in the few hours that had intervened. Nevertheless, he went through his ordinary morning's work about the homestead with the air of one whose mind was with him in what he did. After breakfast he took his staff out of the corner and set out for the hills, his dog beside him.
During the day, Rotha, with such neighborly help as it was the custom to tender, did all the little offices incident to the situation. She went in and out of the chamber of the dead, not without awe, but without fear. She had only once before looked on death, or, if she had seen it twice before this day, her first sight of it was long ago, in that old time of which memory scarcely held a record, when she was carried in her father's arms into a darkened room like this and held for a moment over the white face that she knew to be the face of her mother. But, unused as she had been to scenes made solemn by death, she appeared to know her part in this one.
Intelligence of the disaster that had fallen on the household at Shoulthwaite Moss was not long in circulating through Wythburn. One after another, the shepherds and their wives called in, and were taken to the silent room upstairs. Some offered such rude comfort as their sympathetic hearts but not too fecund intellects could devise, and as often as not it was sorry comfort enough. Some stood all but speechless, only gasping out at intervals, “Deary me.” Others, again, seemed afflicted with what old Matthew Branthwaite called “doddering” and a fit of the “gapes.”
It was towards nightfall when Matthew himself came to Shoulthwaite. “I'm the dame's auldest neighbor,” he had said at the Red Lion that afternoon, when the event of the night previous had been discussed. “It's nobbut reet 'at I should gang alang to her this awesome day. She'll be glad of the neighborhood of an auld friend's crack.” They were at their evening meal of sweet broth when Matthew's knock came to the door, followed, without much interval, by his somewhat gaunt figure on the threshold.
“Come your ways in,” said Mrs. Ray. “And how fend you, Mattha?”
“For mysel', I's gayly. Are ye middlin' weel?” the old man said.
“I'm a lang way better, but I'm going yon way too. It's far away the bainer way for me now.” And Mrs. Ray put her apron to her eyes.
“Ye'll na boune yit, Mary,” said Matthew. “Ye'll na boune yon way for mony a lang year yit. So dunnet ye beurt, Mary.”
Mattha's blubbering tones somewhat discredited his stoical advice.
Rotha had taken down a cup, and put the old man to sit between herself and Willy, facing Mrs. Ray.
“I met Ralph in the morning part,” said Matthew; “he telt me all the ins and outs aboot it. I reckon he were going to the kirk garth aboot the berryin'.”
Mrs. Ray raised her apron to her eyes again. Willy got up and left the room. He at least was tortured by this kind of comfort.
“He's of the bettermer sort, he is,” said Matthew with a motion of his head towards the door at which Willy had gone out. “He taks it bad, does Willy. Ralph was chapfallen a laal bit, but not ower much. Deary me, but ye've gat all sorts of sons though you've nobbut two. Weel, weel,” he added, as though reconciling himself to Willy's tenderness and Ralph's hardness of heart, “if there were na fells there wad be na dales.”
Matthew had turned over his cup to denote that his meal was finished. The dame rose and resumed her seat by the fire. During the day she had been more cheerful, but with the return of the night she grew again silent, and rocked herself in her chair.
“It's just t'edge o' dark, lass,” said Matthew to Rotha while filling his pipe. “Wilt thoo fetch the cannels?”
The candles were brought, and the old man lit his pipe from one of them and sat down with Mrs. Ray before the fire.
“Dus'ta mind when Angus coomt first to these parts?” he said. “I do reet weel. I can a' but fancy I see him now at the manor'al court at Deer Garth Bottom. What a man he was, to be sure! Ralph's nobbut a bit boy to what his father was then. Folks say father and son are as like as peas, but nowt of the sort. Ye could nivver hev matched Angus in yon days for limb and wind. Na, nor sin' nowther. And there was yan o' the lasses frae Castenand had set een on Angus, but she nivver let wit. As bonny a lass as there was in the country side, she was. They say beauty withoot bounty's but bauch, but she was good a' roond. She was greetly thought on. Dus'ta mind I was amang the lads that went ahint her—I was, mysel'. But she wad hev nowt wi' me; she trysted wid Angus; so I went back home and broke the click reel of my new loom straight away. And it's parlish odd I've not lived marraless iver sin'.”
This reminiscence of his early and all but only love adventure seemed to touch a sensitive place in the old man's nature, and he pulled for a time more vigorously at his pipe.
Mrs. Ray Still sat gazing into the fire, hardly heeding the old weaver's garrulity, and letting him chatter on as he pleased. Occasionally she would look anxiously over her shoulder to ask Rotha if Ralph had got back, and on receiving answer that he had not yet been seen she would resume her position, and, with an absent look in her eyes, gaze back into the fire. When a dog's bark would be heard in the distance above the sound of the wind, she would break into consciousness afresh, and bid Rotha prepare the supper. But still Ralph did not come. Where could he be?
It was growing late when Matthew got up to go. He had tried his best to comfort his old neighbor in her sorrow. He had used up all his saws and proverbs that were in the remotest degree appropriate to the occasion, and he had thrown in a few that were not remarkable for appositeness or compatibility. All alike had passed by unheeded. The dame had taken the good will for the good deed, and had not looked the gift-horses too closely in the mouth.
“Good night, Mattha Branthet,” she said, in answer to his good by; “good night, and God bless thee.”
Matthew had opened the door, and was looking out preparatory to his final leavetaking.
“The sky's over-kessen to-neet,” he said. “There's na moon yit, and t'wind's high as iver. Good neet, Mary; it's like ye'll be a' thrang eneuf to-morrow wi' the feast for the berryin', and it's like eneuf ma mistress and laal Liza will be ower at the windin'.”
The dame sighed audibly.
“And keep up a blithe heart, Mary. Remember, he that has gude crops may thole some thistles.”
When the door had closed behind the weaver, Willy came back to the kitchen from his little room.
“Ralph not home yet?” he said, addressing Rotha.
“Not yet,” the girl answered, trying vainly to conceal some uneasiness.
“I wonder what Robbie Anderson wanted with him? He was here twice, you know, in the morning. And the schoolmaster—what could little Monsey have to say that he looked so eager? It is not his way.”
“Be sure it was nothing out of the common,” said Rotha. “What happened last night makes us all so nervous.”
“True; but there was a strange look about both of them—at least I thought so, though I didn't heed it then. They say misfortunes never come singly. I wish Ralph were home.”
Mrs. Ray had risen from her seat at the fire, and was placing one of the candles upon a small table that stood before the neuk window.
With her back to the old dame, Rotha put her finger on her lip as a motion to Willy to say no more.
When Ralph retired to his own room on the night of his father's death there lay a heavier burden at his heart than even that dread occurrence could lodge there. To such a man as he was, death itself was not so terrible but that many passions could conquer the fear of it. As for his father, he had not tasted death; he had not seen it; his death was but a word; and the grave was not deep. No, the grave was not deep. Ah, what sting lay in that thought!—what fresh sting lay there!
Ralph called up again the expression on the face of Simeon Stagg as he asked him in the inn that night (how long ago it seemed!) to give the name of the man who had murdered Wilson. “It's your duty in the sight of Heaven,” he had said; “would you tarnish the child's name with the guilt laid on the father's?” Then there had come into Sim's eyes something that gave a meaning to his earlier words, “Ralph, you don't know what you ask.” Ah, did he not know now but too well? Ralph walked across the room with a sense as of a great burden of guilt weighing him down. The grave was not deep—oh, would it were, would it were! Would that the grave were the end of all! But no, it was as the old book said: when one dies, those who survive ask what he has left behind; the angel who bends above him asks what he has sent before. And the father who had borne him in his arms—whom he had borne—what had he sent before?
Ralph tramped heavily to and fro. His dog slept on the mat outside his door, and, unused to such continued sounds within, began to scrape and growl.
After all, there was no certain evidence yet. To-morrow morning he would go up the fell and see Sim alone. He must know the truth. If it concerned him as closely as he divined, the occasion to conceal it was surely gone by with this night's event. Then Robbie Anderson,—what did he mean? Ralph recalled some dim memory of the young dalesman asking about his father. Robbie was kind to Sim, too, when the others shunned him. What did it all mean?
With a heavy heart Ralph began to undress. He had unbelted himself and thrown off his jerkin, when he thought of the paper that had fallen from his father's open breast as he lifted him on to the mare. What was it? Yes, there it was in his pocket, and with a feverish anxiety Ralph opened it.
Had he clung to any hope that the black cloud that appeared to be hanging over him would not, after all, envelop him? Alas! that last vestige of hope must leave him. The paper was a warrant for his own arrest on a charge of treason. It had been issued at the court of the high constable at Carlisle, and set forth that Ralph Ray had conspired to subvert the government of his sovereign while a captain in the trained bands of the rebel army of the “late usurper.” It was signed and countersigned, and was marked for the service of James Wilson, King's agent. It was dated too; yes, two days before Wilson's death.
All was over now; this was the beginning of the end; the shadow had fallen. By that paradox of nature which makes disaster itself less hard to bear than the apprehension of disaster, Ralph felt relieved when he knew the worst. There was much of the mystery still unexplained, but the morrow would reveal it; and Ralph lay down to sleep, and rose at daybreak, not with a lighter, but with an easier heart.
When he took up his shepherd's staff that morning, he turned towards Fornside Fell. Rising out of the Vale of Wanthwaite, the fell half faced the purple heights of Blencathra. It was brant from side to side, and as rugged as steep. Ralph did not ascend the screes, out went up by Castle Rock, and walked northwards among the huge bowlders. The frost lay on the loose fragments of rock, and made a firm but perilous causeway. The sun was shining feebly and glinting over the frost. It had sparkled among the icicles that hung in Styx Ghyll as he passed, and the ravine had been hard to cross. The hardy black sheep of the mountains bleated in the cold from unseen places, and the wind carried their call away until it died off into a moan.
When Ralph got well within the shadow cast on to the fell from the protruding head of the Castle Rock, he paused and looked about him. Yes, he was somewhat too high. He began to descend. The rock's head sheltered him from the wind now, and in the silence he could hear the thud of a pick or hammer, and then the indistinct murmur of a man's voice singing. It was Sim's voice; and here was Sim's cave. It was a cleft in the side of the mountain, high enough and broad enough for a man to pass in. Great bowlders stood above and about it.
The sun could never shine into it. A huge rock stood alone and apparently unsupported near its mouth, as though aeons long gone by an iceberg had perched it there. The dog would have bounded in upon Sim where he sat and sang at his work, but Ralph checked him with a look. Inexpressibly eerie sounded the half-buried voice of the singer in that Solitary place. The weird ditty suited well with both.
The singer stopped, as though conscious of the presence of a listener, and looking up from where he sat on a round block of timber, cutting up a similar block into firewood, he saw Ralph Ray leaning on his staff near the cave's mouth. He had already heard of the sorrow that had fallen on the household at Shoulthwaite. With an unspeakable look of sympathy in his wild, timid eyes, as though some impulse of affection urged him to throw his arms about Ralph and embrace him, while some sense of shame impelled him to kneel at his feet, Sim approached him, and appeared to make an effort to speak. But he could say nothing. Ralph understood his silence and was grateful for it. They went into the cave, and sat down in the dusk.
“You can tell me all about it, now,” Ralph said, without preamble of any sort, for each knew well what lay closest at the other's heart. “He is gone now, and we are here together, with none but ourselves to hear.”
“I knew you must know it one day,” Sim said, “but I tried hard to hide it from you—I did, believe me, I tried hard—I tried, but it was not to be.”
“It is best so,” Ralph answered; “you must not bear the burden of guilt that is not your own.”
“I'm no better than guilty myself,” said Sim. “I don't reckon myself innocent; not I. No, I don't reckon myself innocent.”
“I think I understand you, Sim; but you were not guilty of the deed?”
“No, but I might have been—I might but for an accident—the accident of a moment; but I've thought sometimes that the crime is not in the deed, but the intention. No, Ralph, I am the guilty man, after all: your father had never thought of the crime, not he, but I had brooded over it.”
“Did you go out that night intending to do it?” Ralph said.
“Yes; at least I think I did, but I don't feel sure; my mind was in a broil; I hardly knew what I meant to do. If Wilson had told me as I met him in the road—as I intended to meet him—that he had come back to do what he had threatened to do so often—then—yes, then, I must have done it—I must.”
“What had he threatened?” Ralph asked, but there was no note of inquiry in his voice. “Whom did it concern?”
“It concerned yourself, Ralph,” said Sim, turning his head aside. “But no matter about that,” he added. “It's over now, it is.”
Ralph drew out of his pocket the paper that had fallen from his father's breast.
“Is this what you mean?” he said, handing it to Sim.
Sim carried it to the light to read it. Returning to where Ralph sat, he cried in a shrill voice,—
“Then he had come back to do it. O God, why should it be murder to kill a scoundrel?”
“Did you know nothing of this until now?”
“Nothing. Wilson threatened it, as I say; he told me he'd hang you on the nearest gibbet, he did—you who'd saved his life—leastways, so they say—the barren-hearted monster!”
“It's ill-luck to serve a bad man, Sim. Well?”
“I never quite thought he'd do it; no, I never did quite think it. Why is it not a good deed to kill a bad man?”
“How did it happen, Sim?” said Ralph.
“I hardly know—that's the truth. You mind well enough it was the day that Abraham Coward, my landlord, called for his rent. It was the day the poor woman and her two wee barns took shelter with me. You looked in on me that night, you remember. Well, when you left me—do you recollect how?”
“Yes, Sim.”
“My heart was fair maizlet before, but that—that—kiss infected my brain. I must have been mad, Ralph, that's the fact, when I thought of what the man meant to do to the only friend I had left in the world—my own friend and my poor little girl's. I went out to the lanes and wandered about. It was very dark. Suddenly the awful thought came back upon me, it did. I was standing at the crossways, where the road goes off to Gaskarth. I knew Wilson must come by that road. Something commanded me to walk on. I had been halting, but now a dreadful force compelled me to go—ay, compelled me. I don't know what it was, but it seemed as if I'd no power against it, none. It stifled all my scruples, all of them, and I ran—yes, ran. But I was weak, and had to stop for breath. My heart was beating loud, and I pressed my hand hard upon it as I leaned against the wall of the old bridge yonder. It went thump, thump. Then I could hear him coming. I knew his step. He was not far off, but I couldn't stir; no, not stir. My breath seemed all to leave me when I moved. He was coming closer, he was, and in the distance beyont him I could hear the clatter of a horse's feet on the road. The man on the horse was far off, but he galloped, he galloped. It must be done now, I thought; now or not at all. I—I picked up a stone that lay near, I did, and tried to go forward, but fell back, back. I was powerless. That weakness was agony, it was. Wilson had not reached the spot where I stood when the man on the horse had overtaken him. I heard him speak as the man rode past. Then I saw it was your father, and that he turned back. There were high words on his side, and I could hear Wilson's bitter laugh—you recollect that laugh?”
“Yes, yes; well?”
“In a moment Angus had jumped from the horse's back—and then I heard a thud—and that's all.”
“Is that all you know?”
“Not all; no, not all, neither. Your father had got up into the saddle in an instant, and I labored out into the middle of the road. He saw me and stopped. 'Ye've earned nowt of late,' he said; 'tak this, my man, and gae off and pay your rent.' Then he put some money into my hand from his purse and galloped on. I thought he'd killed Wilson, and I crept along to look at the dead man. I couldn't find him at first, and groped about in the darkness till my hand touched his face. Then I thought he was alive, I did. The touch flayt me, and I fled away—I don't know how. Ralph, I saw the mark of my hand on his face when they drew me up to it next day in the bedroom of the inn. That night I paid my rent with your father's money, and then I went home.”
“It was my father's money, then—not Wilson's?” said Ralph.
“It was as I say,” Sim answered, as though hurt by the implication.
Ralph put his hand on Sim's shoulder. Self-condemned, this poor man's conscience was already a whirlpool that drew everything to itself.
“Tell me, Sim—that is, if you can—tell me how you came to suspect Wilson of these dealings.”
As he said this Ralph tapped with his fingers the warrant which Sim had returned to him.
“By finding that James Wilson was not his name.”
“So you found that, did you; how?”
“It was Mother Garth's doings, not mine,” said Sim.
“What did she tell you?”
“Nothing; that is, nothing about Wilson going by a false name. No; I found that out for myself, though it was all through her that I found it.”
“You knew it all that bad night in Martinmas, did you not?”
“That's true enough, Ralph. The old woman, she came one night and broke open Wilson's trunk, and carried off some papers—leastways one paper.”
“You don't know what it was?”
“No. It was in one of Wilson's bouts away at—at Gaskarth, so he said. Rotha was at the Moss: she hadn't come home for the night. I had worked till the darknin', and my eyes were heavy, they were, and then I had gone into the lanes. The night came on fast, and when I turned back I heard men singing and laughing as they came along towards me.”
“Some topers from the Red Lion, that was all?”
“Yes, that was all. I jumped the dike and crossed the fields instead of taking the road. As I came by Fornside I saw that there was a light in the little room looking to the back. It was Wilson's room; he would have no other. I thought he had got back, and I crept up—I don't know why—I crept up to the window and looked in. It was not Wilson who was there. It was Mrs. Garth. She had the old man's trunk open, and was rummaging among some papers at the bottom of it.”
“Did you go in to her?”
“I was afeart of the woman, Ralph; but I did go in, dotherin' and stammerin'.”
“What did she say?”
“She was looking close at a paper as I came upon her. She started a little, but when she saw who it was she bashed down the lid of the trunk and brushed past me, with the paper in her hand. 'You can tell him, if you like, that I have been here.' That was all she said, and before I had turned about she had gone, she had. What was that paper, Ralph; do you know?”
“Perhaps time will tell, perhaps not.”
“There was something afoot atween those two; what was it?”
“Can't you guess? You discovered his name.”
“Wilson Garth, that was it. That was the name I found on his papers. Yes, I opened the trunk and looked at them when the woman had gone; yes, I did that.”
“You remember how she came to these parts? That was before my time of remembrance, but not before yours, Sim.”
“I think they said she'd wedded a waistrel on the Borders.”
“Did they ever say the man was dead?”
“No, I can't mind that they ever did. I can't mind it. He had beaten her and soured her into the witch that she is now, and then she had run away frae him with her little one, Joe that now is. That was what they said, as I mind it.”
“Two and two are easily put together, Sim. Wilson Garth, not James Wilson, was the man's name.”
“And he was Mrs. Garth's husband and the father of Joe?”
“The same, I think.”
Sim seemed to stagger under the shock of a discovery that had been slow to dawn upon him.
“How did it come, Ralph, that you brought him here when you came home from the wars? Everything seems, someways, to hang on that.”
“Everything; perhaps even this last disaster of all.” Ralph passed his fingers through his hair, and then his palm across his brow. Sim observed a change in his friend's manner.
“It was wrong of me to say that, it was,” he said. “I don't know that it's true, either. But tell me how it came about.”
“It's a short story, old friend, and easily told, though it has never been told till now. I had done the man some service at Carlisle.”
“Saved his life, so they say.”
“It was a good turn, truly, but I had done it—at least, the first part of it—unawares. But that's not a short story.”
“Tell me, Ralph.”
“It's dead and done with, like the man himself. What remains is not dead, and cannot soon be done with. Some of us must meet it face to face even yet. Wilson—that was his name in those days—was a Royalist when I encountered him. What he had been before, God knows. At a moment of peril he took his life at the hands of a Roundhead. He had been guilty of treachery to the Royalists, and he was afraid to return to his friends. I understood his position and sheltered him. When Carlisle fell to us he clung closer to me, and when the campaign was over he prayed to be permitted to follow me to these parts. I yielded to him reluctantly. I distrusted him, but I took his anxiety to be with me for gratitude, as he said it was. It was not that, Sim.”
“Was it fear? Was he afeart of being hanged by friends or foes? Hadn't he been a taistrel to both?”
“Partly fear, but partly greed, and partly revenge. He was hardly a week at Shoulthwaite before I guessed his secret—I couldn't be blind to that. When he married his young wife on the Borders, folks didn't use to call her a witch. She had a little fortune coming to her one day, and when she fled the prospect of it was lost to her husband. Wilson was in no hurry to recover her while she was poor-a vagrant woman with his child at her breast. The sense of his rights as a husband became keener a little later. Do you remember the time when young Joe Garth set himself up in the smithy yonder?”
“I do,” said Sim; “it was the time of the war. The neighbors told of some maiden aunt, an old crone like herself, who had left Joe's mother aboon a hundred pound.”
“Wilson knew that much better than our neighbors. He knew, too, where his wife had hidden herself, as she thought, though it had served his turn to seem ignorant of it until then. Sim, he used me to get to Wythburn.”
“Teush!”
“Once here, it was not long before he had made his wife aware of his coming. I had kept an eye on him, and I knew his movements. I saw that he meant to ruin the Garths, mother and son, to strip them and leave them destitute. I determined that he should not do it. I felt that mine was the blame that he was here to molest them. 'Tamper with them,' I said, 'show once more by word or look that you know anything of them, and I'll hand you over as a traitor to the nearest sheriff.'”
“Why didn't you do it anyhow, why didn't you?” said Sim eagerly.
“That would have been unwise. He now hated me for defeating his designs.
“You had saved his life.”
“He hated me none the less for that. There was only one way now to serve either the Garths or myself, and that was to keep the man in hand. I neither sent him away nor let him go.”
“You were more than a match for him to the last,” said Sim, “and you saved me and my lass from him too. But what about Joe Garth and his old mother? They don't look over-thankful to you, they don't.”
“They think that I brought Wilson back to torment them. No words of mine would upset the notion. I'm sorry for that, but leave such mistakes for time to set right. And when the truth comes in such a case it comes to some purpose.”
“Aye, when it comes—when it comes.”
Sim spoke in an undertone, and as though to himself.
“It's long in the coming sometimes, it is.”
“It seems long, truly.” The dalesman had caught Sim's drift, and with his old trick of manner, more expressive than his words, he had put his hand on Sim's arm.
“And now there is but one chance that has made it quite worth the while that we should have talked frankly on the subject, you and I, and that is the chance that others may come to do what Wilson tried to do. The authorities who issued this warrant will hardly forget that they issued it. There was a stranger here the day after the inquest. I think I know what he was.”
Sim shuddered perceptibly.
“He went away then, but we'll see him once more, depend upon it.”
“Is it true, as Wilson said, that Oliver's men are like to be taken?”
“There's a spy in every village, so they say, and blank warrants, duly signed, in every sheriff's court, ready to be filled in with any name that malice may suggest. These men mean that Puritanism shall be rooted out of England. We cannot be too well prepared.”
“I wish I could save you, Ralph; leastways, I wish it were myself instead, I do.”
“You thought to save me, old friend, when you went out to meet Wilson that night three months ago. My father, too, he thought to save me when he did what he did. You were both rash, both wrong. You could not have helped me at all in that way. Poor father! How little he has helped me, Heaven knows—Heaven alone knows—yet.”
Ralph drew his hand across his eyes.