Complete works of hall c.., p.24
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 24
“Never once, Ralph — mute as the grave, she is — poor body.”
“And Rotha — Rotha—”
“Yes, the lass is with her, she is.”
“God bless her in this world and the next!”
Then the two pushed on again, with a silence between them that was more touching than speech. They rode long and fast this spell, and when they drew up once more, Ralph turned in his saddle and saw that the ruins that stood at the top of the Kendal Scar were already far behind them.
“It’s a right good thing that you’ve given up your solitary life on the fells, Sim. It wilt cheer me a deal, old friend, to think you’ll always live with the folks at Shoulthwaite.” Ralph spoke as if he himself had never to return. Sim felt this before Ralph had realized the implication of his words.
“It’s hard for a hermit to be a good man,” continued Ralph; “he begins with being miserable and ends with being selfish and superstitious, and perhaps mad. Have you never marked it?”
“Maybe so, Ralph; maybe so. It’s like it’s because the world’s bitter cruel that so many are buryin’ theirsels afore they’re dead.”
“Then it’s because they expect too much of the world,” said Ralph. “We should take the world on easier terms. Fallible humanity must have its weaknesses and poor human life its disasters, and where these are mighty and inevitable, what folly is greater than to fly from them or to truckle to them, to make terms with them? Our duty is simply to endure them, to endure them — that’s it, old friend.”
There was no answer that Sim could make to this. Ralph was speaking to the companion who rode by his side; but in fact he seemed to be addressing himself.
“And to see a man buy a reprieve from Death!” he continued. “Never do that — never? Did you ever think of it, Sim, that what happens is always the best?”
“It scarce looks like it, Ralph; that it don’t.”
“Then it’s because you don’t look long enough. In the end, it is always the best that happens. Truth and the right are the last on the field; it always has been so, and always will be; it only needs that you should wait to the close of the battle to see that.”
There would have been a sublime solemnity in these rude words of a rude man of action if Sim had divined that they were in fact the meditations of one who believed himself to be already under the shadow of his death.
* * * * *
The horses broke again into a canter, and it was long before the reins of the riders brought them to another pause. The day was bitterly cold, and, notwithstanding the exertion of riding, Sim’s teeth chattered sometimes as with ague, and his fingers were numb and stiff. It was an hour before noon when the travellers left Kendal, and now they had ridden for two hours. The brighter clouds of the morning had disappeared, and a dull, leaden sky was overhead. Gradually the heavy atmosphere seemed to close about them, yet a cutting wind blew smartly from the east.
“A snowstorm is coming, Sim. Look yonder; how thick it hangs over the Gray Crag sheer ahead! We must push on, or we’ll be overtaken.”
“How long will it be coming?” asked Sim.
“Five hours full, perhaps longer,” said Ralph; “we may reach Penrith before that time.”
“Penrith!”
Sim’s tone was one of equal surprise and fear.
Ralph gave him a quick glance; then reaching over the neck of his horse to stroke its long mane, he said, with the manner of one who makes too palpable an effort to change the subject of conversation: “Isn’t this mare something like old Betsy? I couldn’t but mark how like she was to our old mare that is lost when the ostler brought her into the yard this morning.”
Sim made no reply.
“Poor Betsy!” said Ralph, and dropped his head on to his breast.
Another long canter. When the riders drew up again it was to take a steadier view of some objects in the distance which had simultaneously awakened their curiosity.
“There seem to be many of them,” said Ralph; and, shielding his ear from the wind, he added, “do you catch their voices?”
“Are they quarrelling? — is it a riot?” Sim asked.
“Quick, and let us see.”
In a few moments they had reached a little wayside village.
There they found children screaming and women wringing their hands. In the high road lay articles of furniture, huddled together, thrown in heaps one on another, and broken into fragments in the fall. A sergeant and company of musketeers were even then in the midst of this pitiful work of devastation, turning the people out of their little thatched cottages and flinging their poor sticks of property out after them. Everywhere were tumult and ruin. Old people were lying on the cold earth by the wayside. They had been born in these houses; they had looked to die in these homes; but houses and homes were to be theirs no more. Amidst the wreck strode the gaunt figure of a factor, directing and encouraging, and firing off meantime a volley of revolting oaths.
“What’s the name of this place?” asked Ralph of a man who stood, with fury in his eyes, watching the destruction of his home.
“Hollowbank,” answered the man between his teeth.
Ralph remembered that here had lived a well-known Royalist, whom the Parliament had dispossessed of his estates. The people of this valley had been ardent Parliamentarians during the long campaign. Could it be that his lordship had been repossessed of his property, and was taking this means of revenging himself upon his tenantry for resisting the cause he had fought for?
An old man lay by the hedge looking down to the ground with eyes that told only of despair. A little fair-haired boy, with fear in his innocent face, was clinging to his grandfather’s cloak and crying piteously.
“Get off with you and begone!” cried the factor, rapping out another volley.
“Is it Hollowbank you call this place?” said Ralph, looking the fellow in the face. “Hellbank would be a fitter name.”
The man answered nothing, but his eyes glared angrily as Ralph put spur to his horse and rode on.
“God in heaven!” cried Ralph when Sim had come up by his side, “to think that work like this goes on in God’s sight!”
“Yet you say the best happens,” said Sim.
“It does; it does; God knows it does, for all that,” insisted Ralph. “But to think of these poor souls thrown out into the road like cattle. Cattle? To cattle they would be merciful! — thrown out into the road to lie and die and rot!”
“Have they been outlawed — these men?” said Sim.
“Damnation!” cried Ralph, as though at Sim’s ignorant word a new and terrible thought had flashed upon his mind and wounded him like a dagger.
Then they rode long in silence.
Away they went, mile after mile, without rest and without pause, through dales and over uplands, past meres and across rivers, and still with the gathering blackness overhead.
What force of doom was spurring them on in this race against Life? It was the depth of a Cumbrian winter, and the days were short. Clearly they would never reach Penrith to-night. The delay at Hollowbank and the shortened twilight before a coming snowstorm must curtail their journey. They agreed to put up for the night at the inn at Askham.
As they approached that house of entertainment they observed that the coach which had left Carlisle that morning was in the act of drawing up at the door. It waited only while three or four passengers alighted, and then drove on and passed them in its journey south.
Five hours hence it would pass the northward coach from Kendal.
When Ralph and Sim dismounted at the Fox and Hounds, at Askham, the landlord came hastily to the door. He was a brawny dalesman, of perhaps thirty. He was approaching the travellers with the customary salutations of a host, when, checking himself, and coming to Ralph, he said in a low tone, “I ask pardon, sir, but is your name Ray? — Captain — hush!” he whispered; and then, becoming suddenly mute, without waiting for a reply to his questions, he handed the horses to a man who came up at the moment, and beckoned Ralph and Sim to follow him, not through the front of the house, but towards the yard that led to the back.
“Don’t you know me?” he said as soon as he had conveyed them, as if by stealth, into a little room detached from the rest of the house.
“Surely it’s Brown? And how are you, my lad?”
“Gayly; and you seem gayly yourself, and not much altered since the great days at Dunbar — only a bit lustier, mayhap, and with something more of beard. I’ll never forget the days I served under you!”
“That’s well, Brown; but why did you bring us round here?” said Ralph.
“Hush!” whispered the landlord. “I’ve a pack of the worst bloodhounds from Carlisle just come. They’re this minute down by the coach. I know the waistrels. They’ve been here before to-day. They’d know you to a certainty, and woe’s me if once the gommarels come abreast of you. It’s like I’d never forgive myself if my old captain came by any ill luck in my house.”
“How long will they stay?” “Until morning, it’s like.”
“How far is it to the next inn?”
“Three miles to Clifton.”
“We shall sleep till daybreak to-morrow, Brown, on the settles you have here. And now, my lad, bloodhounds or none on our trail, bring us something to eat.”
CHAPTER XXXI. ROBBIE, SPEED ON!
Upon reaching the Woodman at Kendal, Robbie found little reason to doubt that Sim had been there and had gone. A lively young chambermaid, who replied to his questions, told him the story of Sim’s temporary illness and subsequent departure with another man.
“What like of a man was he, lass — him as took off the little fellow?” asked Robbie.
“A very personable sort; maybe as fine a breed as you’d see here and there one,” replied the girl.
“Six foot high haply, and square up on his legs?” asked Robbie, throwing back his body into an upright posture as a supplementary and explanatory gesture.
“Ey, as big as Bully Ned and as straight as Robin the Devil,” said the girl.
Robbie was in ignorance of the physical proportions of these local worthies, but he was nevertheless in little doubt as to the identity of his man. It was clear that Sim and Ralph had met on this spot only a few hours ago, and had gone off together.
“What o’clock might it be when they left?” said Robbie.
“Nigh to noon — maybe eleven or so.”
It was now two, and Ralph and Sim, riding good horses, must be many miles away. Robbie’s vexation was overpowering when he thought of the hours that he had wasted at Winander and of the old gossip at the street corner who had prompted him to the fruitless search.
“The feckless old ninny,” he thought in his mute indignation; “when an old man comes to be an old woman it’s nothing but right that he should die, and have himself done with.”
Robbie was unable to hire a horse in order to set off in pursuit of his friends; nor were his wits so far distraught by the difficulties tormenting them that he was unable to perceive that, even if he could afford to ride, his chance would be inconsiderable of overtaking two men who had already three hours’ start of him.
He went into the taproom to consult the driver of the Carlisle coach, who was taking a glass before going to bed — his hours of work being in the night and his hours of rest being in the day. That authority recommended, with the utmost positiveness of advice, that Robbie should take a seat in his coach when he left for the North that night.
“But you don’t start till nine o’clock, they tell me?” said Robbie.
“Well, man, what of that?” replied the driver; “yon two men will have to sleep to-night, I reckon; and they’ll put up to a sartenty somewhear, and that’s how we’ll come abreast on ‘em. It’s no use tearan like a crazy thing.”
The driver had no misgivings; his conjecture seemed reasonable, and whether his plan were feasible or not, it was the only one available. So Robbie had to make a virtue of a necessity, as happens to many a man of more resource.
He was perhaps in his secret heart the better reconciled to a few hours’ delay in his present quarters, because he fancied that the little chambermaid had exhibited some sly symptoms of partiality for his society in the few passages of conversation which he had exchanged with her.
She was a bright, pert young thing, with just that dash of freedom in her manners which usually comes of the pursuit of her public calling; and it is only fair to Robbie’s modesty to say that he had not deceived himself very grossly in his estimate of the interest he had suddenly excited in her eyes. It was probably a grievous dereliction of duty to think of a love encounter, however blameless, at a juncture like this — not to speak of the gravity of the offence of forgetting the absent Liza. But Robbie was undergoing a forced interlude in the march; the lady who dominated his affections was unhappily too far away to appease them, and he was not the sort of young fellow who could resist the assault of a pair of coquettish black eyes.
Returning from the taproom to announce his intention of waiting for the coach, Robbie was invited to the fire in the kitchen, — a privilege for which the extreme coldness of the day was understood to account. Here he lit a pipe, and discoursed on the route that would probably be pursued by his friends.
It was obvious that Ralph and Sim had not taken the direct road home to Wythburn, for if they had done so he must have met them as he came from Staveley. There was the bare possibility that he had missed them by going round the fields to the old woman’s cottage; but this seemed unlikely.
“Are you quite sure it’s an old man you’re after?” said the girl, with a dig of emphasis that was meant to insinuate a doubt of Robbie’s eagerness to take so much trouble in running after anything less enticing than one of another sex who might not be old.
Robbie protested on his honor that he was never known to run after young women, — a statement which did not appear to find a very ready acceptance. The girl was coming and going from the kitchen in the discharge of her duties, and on one of her journeys she brought a parchment map in her hand, saying: “Here’s a paper that Jim, the driver, told me to show you. It gives all the roads atween Kendal and Carlisle. So you may see for yourself whether your friends could get round about to Wy’bern.”
Robbie spread out the map on the kitchen table, and at once proceeded, with the help of the chambermaid, to trace out the roads that were open to Ralph and Sim to take. It was a labyrinthine web, that map, and it taxed the utmost ingenuity of both Robbie and his little acquaintance to make head or tail of it.
“Here you are,” cried Robbie, with the air of a man making a valuable discovery, “here’s the milestones — one, two, three — them’s milestones, thou knows.”
“Tut, you goose; that’s only the scale,” said the girl; “see what’s printed, ‘Scale of miles.’”
“Oh, ey, lass,” said Robbie, not feeling sure what “scale” might mean, but too shrewd to betray his ignorance a second time in the presence of this learned chambermaid.
The riddle, nevertheless, defied solution. However much they pored over the map, it was still a maze of lines.
“It’s as widderful as poor old Sim’s face,” said Robbie.
Robbie and the chambermaid put their heads together in more senses than one. The map was most inconveniently small. Two folks could not consult it at the same time without coming into really uncomfortable proximity.
“There you are,” said Robbie, reaching over, pipe in hand, to where the girl was intent on some minute point.
Suddenly there was a cloud of smoke over the map. It also enveloped the students of geography. Then, somehow, there was a sly smack of lips.
“And there you are,” said the girl, with a roguish laugh, as she brought Robbie a great whang over the ear and shot away.
Jim, the driver, came into the kitchen at that moment on his way to bed, and unravelled the mystery of the map by showing that it was possible for Robbie’s friends to go off the Carlisle road towards Gaskarth and Wythburn at the village of Askham.
Robbie was satisfied with this explanation, and did his best under the circumstances to rest content until nine o’clock with the harbor into which he had drifted. He succeeded more completely, perhaps, in this endeavor than might be expected, when the peril of his friends and his allegiance to Liza Branthwaite is taken into account.
But when nine o’clock had come and gone, and still the coach stood in the yard of the inn, Robbie’s sense of duty overcame his appetite for what he would have called a “spoag.” It was usual for the Carlisle coach to await the coach from Lancaster, and it was because the latter had not yet arrived at Kendal that the former was unable to depart from it. Robbie’s impatience waxed considerably during the half-hour thence ensuing; but when ten o’clock had struck, and still no definite movement was made, his indignation became boisterous.
There were to be four inside passengers, all women; and cold as the night might prove, Robbie’s seat must be outside. The protestations of all five passengers were at length too loud, and their importunity was too earnest, to admit of longer delay. So the driver put in his horses and took his seat on the box.
This had scarcely been done when the horn of the Lancaster coach was heard in the distance, and some further waiting ensued.
“Let’s hope you’ll have no traffic out of, it when it does come,” said Robbie with a dash of spite. A few minutes afterwards the late coach drove into the yard and discharged its travellers.
Two of these, who were going forward to Carlisle, climbed the ladder and took seats behind Robbie. It was too dark to see who or what they were except that they were men, that they were wrapped in long cloaks, and wore caps that fitted close to their heads and cheeks, being tied over their beards and beneath their chins.
The much-maligned Jim now gave a smart whip to his horses, and in a moment more the coach was on the road.
The night was dark and bitterly cold, and once outside the town the glimmer of the lamps which the coach carried was all the light the passengers had for miles.
