Barbara Lynn Part 34

"Heigh-ho," exclaimed Red Geordie, who felt it his duty to restore the conversation to a more natural tone, "I'll have to be taking the road again. It's a dree day for a body to be riding through the Girdlestone, a dree day, but less dree than it used to be before the Shepherd's Rest was built. I mind well, when the snow lay on the fells, and wind swept down them like a beast, trying to snap off your fingers and toes, and there was neither inn nor cot for twenty miles! Those were days! I've seen me riding with a match-lock over my shoulder and a brace of pistols in my belt, like any rumbustical cateran. What with robbers and winds and thunderstorms, the frights I got bristled up my hair so that it's never laid down since."

"The first time I rode through the pa.s.s," said Timothy, "I thought I had come to the Delectable Mountains. It was a summer morning. I rode on and on in a kind of a dream till suddenly I came to a gibbet with a dead man swinging upon it. It distressed me." The little silver-headed man looked as though the memory of it still distressed him. "For the rest of my journey, I meditated upon our nature and the divine justice that is above our justice, for it sees with the eyes of mercy."

"I know who he was," said Red Geordie. "You can spare your sympathy for him, master. He murdered his wife and flung her body into Quaking Hag, and that minds me, by the by, I saw the last time I pa.s.sed that Devil's pot that the fence is broken."

The good wife busied herself about preparing a meal. She made the fire burn brighter, and put the kettle on to boil; all the time she talked.

"They say he walks round Quaking Hag at nights, carrying a light to lead witless folk into the peat holes. If the fence is down I wonder you let your horses go on their lone. They might wander from the track and you'd never see them no more."

"Oh," laughed the man, "Black Geordie kens the road as well as me. With a Black Geordie in front, and a Red Geordie behind, it's not many spooks will trouble us. I'll go and whisper a word in the old fellow's lug, and send him on. He'll be past the Hag before I catch him up. He should have been a general in the army--that old fellow--for he comes clean out o'

all messes."

He went to the door, and soon there was the sound of hoofs upon the road. Joel saw the string of beasts disappear into the mist as they went on up the pa.s.s. Their master came back to the kitchen, and with him entered Peter Fleming.

"Another gla.s.s, mistress," cried Red Geordie. "One for each of us; gla.s.ses all round; a stirrup cup for me, and a happy union for you. Your health, Master Joel Hart! and school-master Peter, here's to you!"

At Peter's entrance Joel's haughtiness vanished, and with it went the white whisht-look that had caused the dame anxiety. His eyes began to burn, and his lips twitched. Colour mounted to his brow, and concentrated into two red patches upon his cheek-bones. He got up from his seat, in the furthest corner of the ingle-nook, and moved nearer to Peter, looking at him with a gaze that roused suspicions in Red Geordie's mind.

He thought of the rumours that were flying about, concerning these two men. Rumours were never to be relied upon--twenty years following the pack-horses had shown him their inconsequence. He had an intimate knowledge of the manner in which they grew, as they rolled from village to village, himself being an active agent in starting them upon their mad careers.

He watched Joel intently, and scrubbed his upstanding whiskers with a rasping sound. Peter might not know it, but hate was the fire that glittered in Hart's eyes, hate was the colour that painted his wan cheeks, hate made his lips twitch, and drew him from his corner to the other end of the bench, for like love it finds satisfaction in being near the object of its pa.s.sion.

"Good Lord!" he said to himself. "Here's enough gunpowder to blow us all up."

Then he turned to Peter.

"And how's your bonny wife, school-master?" said he. "You should have brought her with you to make a little sunshine in the Girdlestone, such a dim, dark day as this is! A bonny face is always a bonny face, and worth looking at, even when it does belong to another man."

Joel scowled.

"When Fleming's here I want no bonny faces," he replied. "Peter's a good friend, and an old one. We're the best of friends, even though we did wrestle in such a manner that it brought me to death's door. But we'll have another wrestling yet, eh? Come, we'll drink to the next wrestling.

Mistress, wine, and the best you've got."

"I'm glad to see you in such good spirits," said Peter kindly, but he thought that Joel had already had more wine than was good for him.

"Spirits! Yes, I'm looking forward to the next time we try a fall together."

"I've given up wrestling," said Peter.

"Man, will you not try another fall with me?"

"No. I'm going to let my muscles run to fat--as the good folk predict.

You gave me such a taste of it at the Shepherds' Meet, that my appet.i.te is satisfied for ever."

"Satisfied, no! You'll not be able to stand still, when you see other men in the ring. Besides we haven't finished the bout. You didn't throw me, you know. We'll finish it some fine day when I go back to Forest Hall."

"Let me ken the hour," said Red Geordie, picking up his whip, "I'll come and umpire. Hoo! but I'd like fine to see the end o' that wrestling.

Well, I must be off or Black Geordie will bring the whole lot back to look for me. Good-bye, to you Master Hart. Good-bye, Peter Fleming. A word with you, Master Timothy."

The old man accompanied Red Geordie to the door.

"He's mad," said the pack-master, indicating the kitchen with his whip.

The kind old face looked distressed.

"A hint in your ear, master," and the man bent down and whispered, "murder."

"No, no, you're mistaken. He's just excited and has been drinking too much."

"It's murder! I saw it in his face. If School-master Peter is a wise man he'll go school-mastering to another place, and take his wife with him."

Red Geordie mounted his horse, and rode off saying:

"I ken what's what in the man's face. I don't ride the pack roads for nowt, master."

CHAPTER XX

THE SPELL OF THUNDERGAY

The winter was one of storms. They rose suddenly towards evening, and continued intermittently throughout the night, with long, strange pauses between each, until the dawn of the next morning, when the sun got up amid bars of yellow and purple cloud. But the glory of sunrise was brief. The days were cold, short, and grey, and when darkness fell the wind howled as though nature were in a fury bordering upon madness. The silences, too, which fell so suddenly, when the storm was at its highest, seemed to indicate periods of exhaustion, like those which follow upon the unbridled pa.s.sions of human beings.

In the bleak and solitary dale, where the farm of Greystones stood, there was little light till noon, for the mountain-wall surrounding it, kept out the rays of the sun; and Thundergay, at its head, poured a current of raw air into the hollow filling it with mist, through which the wild geese called mournfully, and the sheep wandered, too depressed to bleat, but seeking always for sustenance among the loose rocks and beds of scree. Once a day their scanty meal was supplemented by a feast of holly twigs which Barbara or the hind cut for them. They knew the time by instinct, and, half an hour before, might be seen travelling along the dale from all directions, and gathering round the thicket where the hollies grew.

This winter Mistress Annas Lynn began to feel the cold, and another woollen rug was put on the bed. She spent most of the day in keeping herself warm, and her usual occupation of knitting ceased. She did not sleep much, and often Barbara would tip-toe to the bedside to see if her great-grandmother were awake, and would find the bright eyes open, and raised to her face in an instant, with a keen searching look. But she spoke little, and appeared to find plenty of interest in her own thoughts. Strange thoughts they must have been, which pa.s.sed through a mind so strong, individual, and so old.

But at night when the door was shut, the curtains drawn, the fire bright, she would sit up in bed and talk of the days long past, and times that were rude, but full of a spirit that kept the brain alive and made the flesh glow.

When she was young, men and women lived upon the strong meat of exertion and adventure. She said that they were giants compared to their sons and daughters, who could not digest anything more solid than pap. The old woman had a great contempt for the rising generation that she saw around her. She flung many a gibe at them, when they gathered in the kitchen, as they sometimes did of a winter evening, to hear her recount stories that made their hair stand on end and their flesh creep.

But in the midst of her quips and quiddities, she would sometimes break off to talk of Barbara. As her own energies began to fail, she drew vitality from the robust nature of her great-granddaughter. The girl was true kin to the strenuous souls of old. She had in her veins the blood of shepherd princes, her spirit was the spirit of kings--stern perhaps, silent perhaps, but tempered as steel, unflinching before lightning flash, or whirlwind, ready as her forefathers had been to face the moss-troopers should they ever come again to rob the sheep-fold. But Barbara was born three generations too late. She was like an eagle with clipped wings, and had never a chance to show the mettle of her make.

Sometimes Barbara was present at these story-tellings. She would sit with her cheek resting on her hand, watching the flames, and seeing in them pictures which her great-grandmother's words painted. She, too, often longed for a life of adventure. Now that she had cut herself off from her books and intercourse with Peter--she saw him as little as was compatible with their relationship--now that she had clipped her own wings, she found life stale, lacking in all enterprise and interest.

She would not allow herself to meditate upon the past. She swept her mind clear of it, no regrets, no longings, no phantoms or shadows must find a lodging there. But an individuality such as hers could not become thus permanently dwarfed. She might clip her own wings, but they would grow again, and bear her upwards to cleave other air, and find other climes than those to which she had been borne away in the past.

Through the grey winter days and the wild winter nights, she flung a part of herself to the winds, and as it fluttered upon the blast like an autumn leaf, she thought of the trees in Cringel Forest, and pitied their nakedness. But they would grow green again, and spread their glory to the summer. So, perhaps for her, there would come a renewal, and her soul would blossom like the may--nay--not like the may, sweet and beautiful as it was, but like the corn of wheat, which unless it fall into the ground and die, cannot bring forth fruit. She felt compa.s.sionate towards the wheat which went so patiently into the tomb, and came forth, like a shriven almoner of old, to give itself without reserve to the service of others.

Often when the wind shrieked about the old house, and the sycamores groaned under the lash, Mistress Lynn would listen with eager ears for the sound of Barbara's footsteps on the threshold. She knew by instinct, and understood by experience, that her great-granddaughter was going through some travail of soul. But she said nothing, only watched and waited, noting with her keen old brain the change of Barbara from a dreamy girl to a woman, whose will was becoming fixed in an inflexible mould, and whose mind was changing to something more mature but less comprehensible. As the winter deepened, the change grew more marked.

Often in the pauses of the storm Barbara would enter with a slight smile, and a look as though she had been talking with someone, and was still full of that which she had heard.

"Where hast been?" the old woman would ask her.

"At Ketel's Parlour."

"Alone?"