Complete works of hall c.., p.14
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 14
Mr. Garth meant to direct a scorching sneer as silent preamble to his discourse; but owing to the fact that Robbie’s blow had fallen about the blacksmith’s eyes, and that those organs had since become sensibly eclipsed by a prodigious and discolored swelling, what was meant for a withering glance looked more like a meaningless grin. At this apparent levity under her many distresses, Liza’s wrath rose to boiling point, and she burst out upon Mr. Joseph with more of the home-spun of the country-side than ever fell from her lips in calmer moments.
“Thoo dummel-head, thoo,” she said, “thoo’rt as daft as a besom. Thoo hes made a botch on’t, thoo blatherskite. Stick that in thy gizzern, and don’t thoo go bumman aboot like a bee in a bottle — thoo Judas, thoo.”
Mr. Garth was undoubtedly taken by surprise this time. To be attacked in such a way by the very person he meant to attack, to be accounted the injurer by the very person who, he thought, had injured him, sufficed to stagger the blacksmith’s dull brains.
“Nay, nay,” he said, when he had recovered his breath; “who’s the Judas? — that’s a ‘batable point, I reckon.”
“Giss!” cried Liza, without waiting to comprehend the significance of the insinuation, and — like a true woman — not dreaming that a charge of disloyalty could be advanced against her,— “giss! giss!” — the call to swine— “thoo’rt thy mother’s awn son — the witch.”
Utterly deprived of speech by this maidenly outburst of vituperation, Mr. Garth lost all that self-control which his quieter judgment had recognized as probably necessary to the safety of his own person. White with anger, he raised his hand to strike Liza, who thereupon drew up, and, giving him a vigorous slap on each cheek, said, “Keep thy neb oot of that, thoo bummeller, and go fratch with Robbie Anderson — I hear he dinged thee ower, thoo sow-faced ‘un.”
The mention of this name served as a timely reminder to Mr. Garth, who dropped his arm and rode away, muttering savagely under his breath.
“Don’t come hankerin’ after me again,” cried Liza (rather unnecessarily) after his vanishing figure.
This outburst was at least serviceable in discharging all the ill-nature from the girl’s breast; and when she had watched the blacksmith until he had disappeared, she replied to Rotha’s remonstrances as so much scarcely girl-like abuse by a burst of the heartiest girlish laughter.
* * * * *
There was much commotion at the Red Lion that night. The “maister men” who had left the funeral procession at Watendlath made their way first to the village inn, intending to spend there the hours that must intervene before the return of the mourners to Shoulthwaite. They had not been long seated over their pots when the premature arrival of John Jackson and some of the other dalesmen who had been “sett” on the way to Gosforth led to an explanation of the disaster that had occurred on the pass. The consternation of the frequenters of the Red Lion, as of the citizens of Wythburn generally, was as great as their surprise. Nothing so terrible had happened within their experience. They had the old Cumbrian horror of an accident to the dead. No prospect was dearer to their hope than that of a happy death, and no reflection was more comforting than that one day they would have a suitable burial. Neither of these had Angus had. A violent end, and no grave at all; nothing but this wild ride across the fells that might last for days or months. There was surely something of Fate in it.
The dalesmen gathered about the fire at the Red Lion with the silence that comes of awe.
“A sad hap, this,” said Reuben Thwaite, lifting both hands.
“I reckon we must all turn out at the edge of the dawn to-morrow, and see what we can do to find old Betsy,” said Mr. Jackson.
Matthew Branthwaite’s sagest saws had failed him. Such a contingency as this had never been foreseen by that dispenser of proverbs. It had lifted him out of himself. Matthew’s sturdy individualism might have taken the form of liberalism, or perhaps materialism, if it had appeared two centuries later; but in the period in which his years were cast, the art of keeping close to the ground had not been fully learned. Matthew was filled with a sentiment which he neither knew nor attempted to define. At least he was sure that the mare was not to be caught. It was to be a dispensation somehow and someway that the horse should gallop over the hills with its dead burden to its back from year’s end to year’s end. When Mr. Jackson suggested that they should start out in search of it, Matthew said, —
“Nay, John, nowt of the sort. Ye may gang ower the fell, but ye’ll git na Betsy. It’s as I telt thee; it’s a Fate. It’ll be a tale for iv’ry mother to flyte childer with.”
“The wind did come with a great bouze,” said John. “It must have been the helm-wind, for sure; yet I cannot mind that I saw the helm-bar. Never in my born days did I see a horse go off with such a burr.”
“And you could not catch hold on it, any of you, ey?” asked one of the company with a shadow of a sneer.
“Shaf! dost thoo think yon fell’s like a blind lonnin?” said Matthew.
“Nay, but it’s a bent place,” continued Mr. Jackson. “How it dizzied and dozzled, too! And what a fratch yon was! My word! but Ralph did ding them over, both of them!”
“He favors his father, does Ralph,” said Matthew.
“Ey! he’s his father’s awn git,” chimed Reuben. “But that Joe Garth is a merry-begot, I’ll swear.”
“Shaf! he hesn’t a bit of nater intil him, nowther back nor end. He’s now’t but riffraff,” said Matthew. Ralph Ray’s peril and escape were incidents too unimportant to break the spell of the accident to the body of his father.
Robbie Anderson turned in late in the evening.
“Here’s a sorry home coming,” he said as he entered.
It was easy to see that Robbie was profoundly agitated. His eyes were aflame; he rose and sat, walked a pace or two and stood, passed his fingers repeatedly through his short curly beard, slapped his knee, and called again and again for ale. When he spoke of the accident on the fell, he laughed with a wild effort at a forced and unnatural gayety.
“It’s all along of my being dintless, so it is,” he muttered, after little Reuben Thwaite had repeated for some fresh batch of inquirers the story, so often told, of how the mare took to flight, and of how Ralph leaped on to the young horse in pursuit of it.
“All along of you, Robbie; how’s that, man?”
“If I’d chained the young horse at the bottom of the hill there would have been no mare to run away, none.”
“It’s like that were thy orders, then, Robbie?”
“It were that, damn me, it were — the schoolmaster there, he knows it.”
“Ralph told him to do it; I heard him myself,” said Monsey, from his place in the chimney-nook, where he sat bereft of his sportive spirit, yet quite oblivious of the important part which his own loquacity had unwittingly played in the direful tragedy.
“But never bother now. Bring me more ale, mistress: quick now, my lass.”
Robbie had risen once more, and was tramping across the floor in his excitement. “What’s come over Robbie?” whispered Reuben to Matthew. “What fettle’s he in — doldrums, I reckon.”
“Tak na note on him. Robbie’s going off agen I’m afeart. He’s broken loose. This awesome thing is like to turn the lad’s heed, for he’d the say ower it all.”
“Come, lass, quick with the ale.”
“Ye’ve had eneuf, Robbie,” said the hostess. “Go thy ways home. Thou findst the beer very heady, lad. Thou shalt have more in the morning.”
“To-night, lass; I must have some to-night, that I must.”
“Robbie is going off agen, surely,” whispered Reuben. “It’s a sorry sight when yon lad takes to the drink. He’ll be deed drunk soon.”
“Say nowt to him,” answered Matthew. “He’s fair daft to-neet.”
The evening was far advanced when the dalesmen rose to go.
“Our work’s cut out for us in the morning, men.” said John Jackson. “Let’s off to our beds.”
CHAPTER XIV. UNTIL THE DAY BREAK.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away.
It was not at first that Ralph was a prey to sentiments of horror. His physical energy dominated all emotion, and left no room for terrible imaginings — no room for a full realization of what had occurred. That which appeared to paralyze the others — that which by its ghastly reality appeared to fix them to the earth with the rigidity of stone — endowed him with a power that seemed all but superhuman, and inspired him with an impulse that leapt to its fulfilment.
Mounted on the young horse, he galloped after the mare along the long range of the pikes, in and out of their deep cavernous alcoves, up and down their hillocks and hollows, over bowlders, over streams, across ghylls, through sinking sloughs and with a drizzling rain overhead. At one moment he caught sight of the mare and her burden as they passed swiftly over a protruding headland which was capped from his point of view by nothing but the mist and the sky. Then he followed on the harder; but faster than his horse could gallop over the pathless mountains galloped the horse of which he was in pursuit. He could see the mare no more. Yet he rode on and on.
When he reached the extremity of the dark range and stood at that point where Great Howe fringes downward to the plain, he turned about and rode back on the opposite side of the pikes. Once more he rode in and out of cavernous alcoves, up and down hillocks and hollows, over bowlders, over streams, across rivers, through sinking sloughs, and still with a drizzling rain overhead. The mare was nowhere to be seen.
Then he rode on to where the three ranges of mountains meet at Angle Tarn and taking first the range nearest the pikes he rode under the Bow Fell, past the Crinkle Crags to the Three-Shire Stones at the foot of Greyfriars, where the mountains slope downward to the Duddon valley. Still the mare was nowhere to be seen.
Returning then to the Angle Tarn, he followed the only remaining range past the Pike of Stickle until he looked into the black depths of the Dungeon Ghyll. And still the mare was nowhere to be seen. Fear was behind her, and only by fear could she be overtaken. It was at about two o’clock in the afternoon that the disaster had occurred. It was now fully three hours later, and the horse Ralph rode, fatigued and wellnigh spent, was slipping its feet in the gathering darkness. He turned its head towards Wythburn, and rode down to the city by Harrop Tarn.
At the first house — it was Luke Cockrigg’s, and it stood on the bank above the burn — he left the horse, and borrowed a lantern. The family would have dissuaded him from an attempt to return to the fells, but he was resolved. There was no reasoning against the resolution pictured on his rigid and cadaverous countenance.
The drizzling rain still fell and the night had closed in when Ralph set his face afresh towards the mountains.
And now the sickening horrors of sentiment overtook him, for now he had time to reflect upon what had occurred. The figure of the riderless horse flying with its dead burden before the wind had fixed itself on his imagination; and while the darkness was concealing the physical surroundings, it was revealing the phantasm in the glimmering outlines of every rock and tree. Look where he would, peering long and deep into the blackness of a night without moon or stars, without cloud or sky, with only a blank density around and about, Ralph seemed to see in fitful flashes that came and went — now on the right and now on the left of him, now in front and now behind, now on the earth at his feet and now in the dumb vapor floating above him — the spectre of that riderless horse. Sometimes he would stop and listen, thinking he heard a horse canter close past him; but no, it was the noise of a hidden river as its waters leapt over the stones. Sometimes he thought he heard the neigh of a horse in the distance; but no, it was only the whinny of the wind. His dog had followed close behind him when he fled from the pass, and it was still at his heels. Sometimes Laddie would dart away and be lost for a few minutes in the darkness. Then the dog’s muffled bark would be heard, and Ralph’s blood would seem to stand still with a dread apprehension that dared not to take the name of hope. No; it was only a sheep that had strayed from its fold, and had taken shelter from wind and rain beneath a stone in a narrow cleft, and was now sending up into the night the pitiful cry of a lost and desolate creature.
No, no, no; nowhere would the hills give up the object of his search; and Ralph walked on and on with a heart that sank and still sank.
He knew these trackless uplands as few knew them, and not even the abstraction of mind that came with these solitary hours caused him an uncertain step. On and on, through the long dark night, to the Stye Head once more, and again along the range of the rugged pikes, calling the mare by the half-articulate cry she knew so well, and listening for her answering neigh, but hearing only the surging of the wind or the rumble of the falling ghyll; then on and on, and still on.
When the earliest gleams of light flecked the east, Ralph was standing at the head of the Screes. Slowly the gray bars stretched across the sky, wider and more wide, brighter and more bright, now changed to yellow and now to pink, chasing the black walls of darkness that died away on every side. In the basin below, at the foot of the steep Screes, whose sides rumbled with rolling stones, lay the black mere, half veiled by the morning mist. Still veiled, too, were the dales of Ireton, but far away, across the undulating plains through which the river rambled, flowed the wide Western Sea, touched at its utmost bar by the silvery light of the now risen sun.
Ralph turned about and walked back, with the flush of the sky reflected on his pale and stony face. His lantern, not yet extinguished, burned small and feeble in his hand. Another night was breaking to another day; another and another would yet break, and all the desolation of a heart, the ruin of many hearts — what was it before Nature’s unswerving and unalterable course! The phantasms of a night that had answered to his hallucinations were as nothing to the realities of a morning whose cruel light showed him only more plainly the blackness of his despair.
The sentiments of horror which now possessed him were more terrible because more spiritual than before. To know no sepulture! The idea was horrible in itself, horrible in its association with an old Hebrew curse more remorseless than the curse of Cain, most horrible of all because to Ralph’s heightened imagination it seemed to be a symbol — a symbol of retribution past and to come.
Yes, it was as he had thought, as he had half thought; God’s hand was on him — on him of all others, and on others only through him. Having once conceived this idea in its grim totality, having once fully received the impress of it from the violence and suddenness of a ghastly occurrence, Ralph seemed to watch with complete self-consciousness the action of the morbid fancy on his mind. He traced it back to the moment when the truth (or what seemed to him the truth) touching the murder of Wilson had been flashed upon him by a look from Simeon Stagg. He traced it yet farther back to that night at Dunbar, when, at the prompting of what he mistook for mercy, he had saved the life of the enemy that was to wreck his own life and the lives of all that were near and dear to him. To his tortured soul guilt seemed everywhere about him, whether his own guilt or the guilt of others, was still the same; and now God had given this dread disaster for a sign that vengeance was His, that retribution had come and would come.
Was it the dream of an overpowered imagination — the nightmare of a distempered fancy? Yet it would not be shaken off. It had bathed the whole world in another light — a lurid light.
Ralph walked fast over the fells, snatching at sprigs of heather, plucking the slim boughs from the bushes, pausing sometimes to look long at a stone, or a river, or a path that last night appeared to be as familiar to him as the palm of his hand, and had suddenly become strange and a mystery. The shadow of a supernatural presence hung over all.
Throughout that day he walked about the fells, looking for the riderless horse, and calling to it, but neither expecting to see nor to hear it. He saw once and again the people of Wythburn abroad on the errand that kept him abroad, but they never came within hail, and a stifling sense of shame kept him apart, none the less that he knew not wherefore such shame should fall on him, all the same that they knew not that it had fallen.
The day would come when all men would see that God’s hand was on him.
Yes, Ralph; but when that day does indeed come, then all men shall also see that whom God’s hand rests on has God at his right hand.
When the darkness was closing in upon a second night, Ralph was descending High Seat towards Shoulthwaite Moss. Behind him lagged the jaded dog, walking a few paces with drooping head and tail; then lying for a minute, and rising to walk languidly again.
CHAPTER XV. RALPH’S SACRIFICE.
When he reached the old house, Ralph was prepared for the results of any further disaster, for disaster had few further results for which it was needful to prepare. A light burned in the kitchen, and another in that room above it where lately his father had lain. When Ralph entered, Willy Ray was seated before the fire, his hand in the hand of Rotha, who sat by his side. On every feature of his pallid face were traces of suffering.
“What of mother?” said Ralph huskily, his eyes traversing the kitchen.
Willy rose and put his hand on Ralph’s shoulder. “We will go together,” he said, and they walked towards the stair that led to the floor above.
