The Shadow of a Crime Part 8

Sim had got up, and was tramping across the floor. Ralph got up too, and faced him.

"It is your duty, in the sight of Heaven, to give that man's name."

"No, no; heaven forbid," cried Sim.

"It is your duty to yourself and to--"

"I care nothing for myself."

"And to your daughter--think of that. Would you tarnish the child's name with the sin laid on the father's--"

"G.o.d in heaven help me!" cried Sim, tremulous with emotion. "Ralph, Ralph, ask me no more--you don't know what you ask."

"It is your duty to Heaven, I say."

He put his hand on Sim's shoulder, and looked steadily in his eyes.

With a fearful cry Sim broke from his grasp, sprung to the door, and in an instant was lost in the darkness without. Ralph stood where Sim had left him, transfixed by some horrible consciousness. A slow paralysis seemed to possess all his senses. What had he read in those eyes that seemed to live before him still?

"Good neet," said old Matthew as he got up and trudged out. Most of the company rose to go. "Good night," said more than one, but Ralph answered nothing. Robbie Anderson was last.

"Good night, Ralph," he said. His gruff voice was thick in his throat.

"Aye, good night, lad," Ralph answered vacantly.

Robbie had got to the door, and was leaning with one hand on the door-frame. Coming back, he said,--

"Ralph, where may your father be to-night?"

"At Gaskarth--it's market day--he took the last shearing."

He spoke like one in a sleep. Then Robbie left him.

"Is Rotha ready to go?" he asked.

CHAPTER V. THE EMPTY SADDLE.

The night has been unruly:...

Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death.

_Macbeth_.

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 impa.s.sable 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 pa.s.sed 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 la.s.s. 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 gra.s.s, 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 s.n.a.t.c.h of an old Border ballad,--

Dacre's gane to the war, w.i.l.l.y, Dacre's gane to the war; Dacre's lord has crossed the ford, And left us for the war.

"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,--

Naworth's halls are dead, w.i.l.l.y, Naworth's halls are dead; One lonely foot sounds on the keep, And that's the warder's tread.

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.