Liza was a simple country wench, but it would be an error to suppose that because she had been bred up in a city more diminutive than anything that ever before gave itself the name, and because she had lived among hand-looms and milking-pails, and had never seen a ball or an opera, worn a mask or a domino, she was destitute of the instinct for intrigue which in the gayer and busier world seems to be the heritage of half her sex. Putting her head aside demurely, as with eyes cast, down she ran her fingers through one of her loose ribbons, she said softly, —

  “And who says I’m so very partial to Robbie? I never said so, did I? Not that I say I’m partial to anybody else either — not that I ay so — Joseph!”

  The sly emphasis which was put upon the word that expressed Liza’s unwillingness to commit herself to a declaration of her affection for some mysterious entity unknown seemed to Mr. Garth to be proof beyond contempt of question that the girl before him implied an affection for an entity no more mysterious than himself. The blacksmith’s face brightened, and his manner changed. What had before been almost a supplicating tone, gave place to a tone of secure triumph.

  “Liza,” he said, “I’m going to bring that Robbie down a peg or two. He’s been a perching himself up alongside of Ralph Ray this last back end, but I’m going to feckle him this turn.”

  “No, Joseph; are you going to do that, though?” said Liza, with a brightening face that seemed to Mr. Garth to say, “Do it by all means.”

  “Mayhap I am,” said the blacksmith, significantly shaking his head. He was snared as neatly by this simple face as ever was a swallow by a linnet hidden in a cage among the grass.

  “And that Ralph, too, the great lounderan fellow, he treats me like dirt, that he does.”

  “But you’ll pay him out now, won’t you, Joseph?” said Liza, as though glorying in the blacksmith’s forthcoming glory.

  “Liza, my lass, shall I tell you something?” Under the fire of a pair of coquettish little eyes, his head as well as his heart seemed to melt, and he became eagerly communicative. Dropping his voice, he said, —

  “That Ralph’s not gone away at all. He’ll be at his father’s berrying, that he will.”

  “Nay!” cried Liza, without a prolonged accent of surprise; and, indeed, this fact had come upon her with so much unexpectedness that her curiosity was now actually as well as ostensibly aroused.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Garth; “and there’s those as knows where to lay hands on him this very day — that there is.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised, now, if yon Robbie Anderson has been up to something with him,” said Liza, with a curl of the lip intended to convey an idea of overpowering disgust at the conduct of the absent Robbie.

  “And maybe he has,” said Mr. Garth, with a ponderous shake of the head, denoting the extent of his reverse. Evidently “he could an’ he would.”

  “But you’ll go to them, won’t you, Joseph? That is them as wants them — leastways one of them — them as wants him will go and take him, won’t they?”

  “That they will,” said Joseph emphatically. “But I must be off, lass; for I’ve the horses to get ready, forby the shortness of the time.”

  “So you’re going on horseback, eh, Joey? Will it take you long?”

  “A matter of two hours, for we must go by the Black Sail and come back to Wastdale Head, and that’s round-about, thou knows.” “So you’ll take them on Wastdale Head, then, eh?” said Liza, turning her head aside as though in the abundance of her maidenly modesty, but really glancing slyly under the corner of her bonnet in the direction taken by the mourners, and wondering if they could be overtaken.

  Joseph was a little disturbed to find that he had unintentionally disclosed so much of the design. The potency of the bright blue eyes that looked up so admiringly into his face at the revelation of the subtlety with which he had seen through a mystery impenetrable to less powerful vision, had betrayed him into unexpected depths of confidence.

  Having gone so far, however, Mr. Garth evidently concluded that the best course was to make a clean breast of it — an expedient which he conceived to be insusceptible of danger, for he could see that the funeral party were already on the brow of the hill. So, with one foot stretched forward as if in the preliminary stage of a hurried leave-taking, the blacksmith told Liza that he had met the schoolmaster that morning, and had gathered enough from a word the little man had dropped without thought to put him upon the trace of the old garrulous body with whom the schoolmaster lodged; that his mother, Mistress Garth, had undertaken the office of sounding this person, and had learned that Ralph had hinted that he would relieve Robbie Anderson of his duty at the top of the Stye Head Pass.

  Having heard this, Liza had heard enough, and she was not unwilling that the blacksmith should make what speed he could out of her sight, so that she in turn might make what speed she could out of his sight, and, returning to the Moss without delay, communicate her fearful burden of intelligence to Rotha.

  CHAPTER XII. THE FLIGHT ON THE FELLS.

  I. After going a few paces in order to sustain the appearance of continuing the journey on which she had set out, Liza waited until the blacksmith was far enough away to admit of retracing her steps to the bridge. There she climbed the wooden fence, and ran with all speed across the fields to Shoulthwaite. She entered the house in a fever of excitement, but was drawn back to the porch by Rotha, who experienced serious difficulty in restraining her from a more public exposition of the facts with which she was full to the throat than seemed well for the tranquillity of the household. With quick-coming breath she blurted out the main part of her revelations, and then paused, as much from physical exhaustion as from an overwhelming sense of the threatened calamity.

  Rotha was quick to catch the significance of the message communicated in Liza’s disjointed words. Her pale face became paler, the sidelong look that haunted her eyes came back to them at this moment, her tremulous lips trembled visibly, and for a few minutes she stood apparently powerless and irresolute.

  Then the light of determination returned to the young girl’s face. Leaving Liza in the porch, she went into the house for her cloak and hood. When she rejoined her companion her mind was made up to a daring enterprise.

  “The men of Wythburn, such of them as we can trust,” she said, “are in the funeral train. We must go ourselves; at least I must go.”

  “Do let me go, too,” said Liza; “but where are you going?”

  “To cross the fell to Stye Head.”

  “We can’t go there, Rotha — two girls.”

  “What of that? But you need not go. It’s eight miles across, and I may run most of the way. They’ve been gone nearly an hour; they are out of sight. I must make the short cut through the heather.”

  The prospect of the inevitable excitement of the adventure, amounting, in Liza’s mind, to a sensation equivalent to sport, prevailed over her dread of the difficulties and dangers of a perilous mountain journey, and she again begged to be permitted to go.

  “Are you quite sure you wish it?” said Rotha, not without an underlying reluctance to accept of her companionship. “It’s a rugged journey. We must walk under Glaramara.” She spoke as though she had the right of maturity of years to warn her friend against a hazardous project.

  Liza protested that nothing would please her but to go. She accepted without a twinge the implication of superiority of will and physique which the young daleswoman arrogated. If social advantages had counted for anything, they must have been all in Liza’s favor; but they were less than nothing in the person of this ruddy girl against the natural strength of the pale-faced young woman, the days of whose years scarcely numbered more than her own.

  “We must set off at once,” said Rotha; “but first I must go to Fornside.”

  To go round by the tailor’s desolate cottage did not sensibly impede their progress. Rotha had paid hurried visits daily to her forlorn little home since the terrible night of the death of the master of Shoulthwaite. She had done what she could to make the cheerless house less cheerless. She had built a fire on the hearth and spread out her father’s tools on the table before the window at which he worked. Nothing had tempted him to return. Each morning she found everything exactly as she had left it the morning before.

  When the girls reached the cottage, Liza instinctively dropped back. Rotha’s susceptible spirit perceived the restraint, and suffered from the sentiment of dread which it implied.

  “Stay here, then,” she said, in reply to her companion’s unspoken reluctance to go farther. In less than a minute Rotha had returned. Her eyes were wet.

  “He is not here,” she said, without other explanation. “Could we not go up the fell?”

  The girls turned towards the Fornside Fell on an errand which both understood and neither needed to explain.

  “Do the words of a song ever torment you, Liza, rising up in your mind again and again, and refusing to go away?”

  “No — why?” said Liza, simply.

  “Nothing — only I can’t get a song out of my head today. It comes back and back —

  One lonely foot sounds on the keep,

  And that’s the warder’s tread.”

  The girls had not gone far when they saw the object of their search leaning over a low wall, and holding his hands to his eyes as though straining his sight to catch a view of some object in the distance. Simeon Stagg was already acquiring the abandoned look of the man who is outlawed from his fellows. His hair and beard were growing long, shaggy, and unkempt. They were beginning to be frosted with gray. His dress was loose; he wore no belt. The haggard expression, natural to his thin face, had become more marked.

  Sim had not seen the girls, and in the prevailing wind his quick ear had not caught the sound of their footsteps until they were nearly abreast of him. When he became fully conscious of their presence, Rotha was standing by his side, with her hand on his arm. Liza was a pace or two behind.

  “Father,” said Rotha, “are you strong enough to make a long journey?”

  Sim had turned his face full on his daughter’s with an expression of mingled shame, contrition, and pride. It was as though his heart yearned for that love which he thought he had forfeited the right to claim.

  In a few words Rotha explained the turn of events. Sim’s agitation overpowered him. He walked to and fro in short, fitful steps, crying that there was no help, no help.

  “I thought I saw three men leading three horses up High Seat from behind the smithy. It must have been those very taistrels, it must. I was looking at them the minute you came up. See, there they are — there beyond the ghyll on the mere side of yon big bowder. But they’ll be at the top in a crack, that they will — and the best man in Wythburn will be taken — and there’s no help, no help.”

  The little man strode up and down, his long, nervous fingers twitching at his beard.

  “Yes, but there is help,” said Rotha; “there must be.”

  “How? How? Tell me — you’re like your mother, you are — that was the very look she had.”

  “Tell me, first, if Ralph intended to be on Stye Head or Wastdale Head.”

  “He did — Stye Head — he left me to go there at daybreak this morning.”

  “Then he can be saved,” said the girl firmly. “The mourners must follow the path. They have the body and they will go slowly. It will take them an hour and a half more to reach the foot of the pass. In that time Liza and I can cross the fell by Harrop Tarn and Glaramara and reach the foot, or perhaps the head, of the pass. But this is not enough. The constables will not follow the road taken by the funeral. They know that if Ralph is at the top of Stye Head he will be on the lookout for the procession, and must see them as well as it.”

  “It’s true, it is,” said Sim.

  “They will, as the blacksmith said, go through Honister and Scarf Gap and over the Black Sail to Wastdale. They will ride fast, and, returning to Stye Head, hope to come upon Ralph from behind and capture him unawares. Father,” continued Rotha, — and the girl spoke with the determination of a strong man,— “if you go over High Seat, cross the dale, walk past Dale Head, and keep on the far side of the Great Gable, you will cut off half the journey and be there as soon as the constables, and you may keep them in sight most of the way. Can you do this? Have you the strength? You look worn and weak.”

  “I can — I have — I’ll go at once. It’s life or death to the best man in the world, that it is.”

  “There’s not a moment to be lost. Liza, we must not delay an instant longer.”

  II. Long before the funeral train had reached the top of the altitude. Ralph had walked over the more rugged parts of the pass, and had satisfied himself that there was no danger to be apprehended on this score. The ghyll was swollen by the thaw. The waters fell heavily over the great stones, and sent up clouds of spray, which were quickly dissipated by the wind. Huge hillocks of yellow foam gathered in every sheltered covelet. The roar of the cataract in the ravine silenced the voice of the tempest that raged above it.

  From the heights of the Great Gable the wind came in all but overpowering gusts across the top of the pass. Ralph had been thrown off his feet at one moment by the fierceness of a terrific blast. It was the same terrible storm that began on the night of his father’s death. Ralph had at first been anxious for the safety of the procession that was coming, but he had found a more sheltered pathway under a deep line of furze bushes, and through this he meant to pioneer the procession when it arrived. There was one gap in the furze at the mouth of a tributary ghyll. The wind was strong in this gap, which seemed like a natural channel to carry it southward; but the gap was narrow, it would soon be crossed.

  From the desultory labor of such investigations Ralph returned again and again to the head of the great cleft and looked out into the distance of hills and dales. The long coat he wore fell below his knees, and was strapped tightly with a girdle. He wore a close-fitting cap, from beneath which his thick hair fell in short wavelets that were tossed by the wind. His dog, Laddie, was with him.

  Ralph took up a position within the shelter of a bowlder, and waited long, his eyes fixed on the fell six miles down the dale.

  The procession emerged at length. The chill and cheerless morning seemed at once to break into a spring brightness — there at least, if not here. Through the leaden wintry sky the sun broke down the hilltop at that instant in a shaft of bright light. It fell like an oasis over the solemn company walking there. Then the shaft widened and stretched into the dale, and then the mists that rolled midway between him and it passed away, and a blue sky was over all.

  III. “Which way now?”

  “Well, I reckon there be two roads; maybe you’d like—”

  “Which way now? Quick, and no clatter!”

  “Then gang your gate down between Dale Head and Grey Knotts as far as Honister.”

  “Let’s hope you’re a better guide than constable, young man, or, as that old fellow said in the road this morning, we’ll fley the bird and not grip him. Your clattering tongue had served us a scurvy trick, my man; let your head serve us in better stead, or mayhap you’ll lose both — who knows?”

  The three men rode as fast as the uncertain pathway between the mountains would allow. Mr. Garth mumbled something beneath his breath. He was beginning to wish himself well out of an ungracious business. Not even revenge sweetened by profit could sustain his spirits under the battery of the combined ridicule and contempt of the men he had undertaken to serve.

  “A fine wild-goose chase this,” said one of the constables. He had not spoken before, but had toiled along on his horse at the obvious expenditure of much physical energy and more temper.

  “Grumbling again, Jonathan; when will you be content?” The speaker was a little man with keen eyes, a supercilious smile, a shrill sharp voice, and peevish manners.

  “Not while I’m in danger of breaking my neck every step, or being lost on a moor nearly as trackless as an ocean, or swallowed up in mists like the clouds of steam in a century of washing days, or drowned in the soapsuds of ugly, gaping pits, — tarns you call them, I believe. And all for nothing, too, — not so much as the glint of a bad guinea will we get out of this fine job.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” said the little man. “If this blockhead here,” with a lurch of the head backwards to where the blacksmith rode behind, “hasn’t blundered in his ‘reckonings,’ we’ll bag the game yet.”

  “That you never will, mark my words. I’ve taken the measure of our man before to-day. He’s enough for fifty such as our precious guide. I knew what I was doing when I went back last time and left him.”

  “Ah, they rather laughed at you then, didn’t they? — hinted you were a bit afraid,” said the little man, with a cynical smile.

  “They may laugh again, David, if they like; and the man that laughs loudest, let him be the first to come in my place next bout; he’ll be welcome.”

  “Well, I must say, this is strange language. I never talked like that, never. It’s in contempt of duty, nothing less,” said Constable David.

  “Oh, you’re the sort of man that sticks the thing you call duty above everything else — above wife, life, and all the rest of it — and when duty’s done with you it generally sticks you below everything else. I’ve been a fool in my time, David, but I was never a fool of that sort. I’ve never been the dog to drop a good jawful of solids to snap at its shadow. When I’ve been that dog I’ve quietly put my meat down on the plank, and then — There’s another break-neck paving-stone— ‘bowders’ you call them. No horse alive could keep its feet in such country.”

  The three men rode some distance in silence. Then the little man, who kept a few yards in front, drew up and said, —

  “You say the warrant was not on Wilson’s body when you searched it. Is it likely that some of these dalesmen removed it before you came down?”

  “Yes, one dalesman. But that job must have been done when another bigger job was done. It wasn’t done afterwards. I was down next morning. I was sent after the old Scotchman.”

 

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