Halliwell Sutcliffe

“ Hardcastle was aware of the magic of this steep, winding roadway, faring up to his own gate between the woods of Logie. Wise, silent beeches reddened to their fall of leaf. A chestnut flung its crimson challenge to the death-in-winter soon to come. The sycamores were sending little clouds of leaves as playthings for the breeze. Over all, and through all, was the quick reek of autumn and the smell of wood-fires lazing up from Logie’s hearths.
Hardcastle was aware of it all, as of something that had stirred him once, in his wooing days, when a lass had painted all the country-side for him. ”

“ The sleet was drifting in quiet flakes before a wind that was tired for a while of its own speed. From the western spur of moor a long, slanting gleam of sunlight lit up this bleak land’s loneliness—lit up Sir Jasper’s figure as he sat, unconcerned, disdainful, in the saddle of a restive horse. For a moment the dragoons drew back; they had lived in a world where each fought for his own advancement only, and they were perplexed by this spectacle of a man who, alone and far behind retreating comrades, made open confession of his faith. ”

“ Exhausted by his eloquence, Hirst would reach out for his mug of ale, and Cilla would go softly up the stair, with shame in her cheeks and peace at her heart. She would lean at the open window, not knowing that the night wind blew cold, and would see new beauties in the moonlit street, the moonlit, hazy fields beyond.
It was to be the bitterest winter known for fifty years in Strathgarth. Yet, when December came, and the frost strengthened its grip, and all the land began to wear a pinched and sullen look, Gaunt felt the warmth of life increase. ”

“ New horizons widened over widening hill-spaces. What if death were no wormy end of life, but a beginning of new days?
No breeze ruffled these upland wastes. Little frets of night-time life stirred among the gnarled heather and the bents. The land’s soul was in a mood as deep and still as Hardcastle’s, and a fine communion held between the Master who was a lover to his acres, the acres that loved him.
He roused himself at last, with another laugh at Garsykes and himself, and was turning to swing down the sheep-track when a cry broke sharp as a pistol-shot across the moor. ”

“ Cilla had no thought of heat. She had returned to the cool days of spring, when Gaunt had made her feel the beauty of this land which she had known from childhood. She cared less for the man, maybe, than for the glamour he had brought her; and each proof that he was strong, was proof, too, that the glamour had not lied to her.
When at last she got to bed, it was only to fall asleep and dream of Keta’s Well, and of saunters by the stream, and softer golds and deeper crimsons than she had ever seen in the skies at Garth, until Reuben came to teach her what the homeland meant. ”

“ And Rupert laughed as he trotted forward. He had faced many things during his odd, disastrous five-and-twenty years—loneliness hard to bear, good-humoured liking that was half-contempt from the men who counted him a scholar, distrust and loathing of himself. But now he felt strength come into his right hand, as a sword-hilt does. His feet were set on the free, windy road. He had gone a little way to prove himself, and the zest of it was like rare wine, that warms the fancy but leaves both head and heart in a nice poise of sanity. ”

“ Nita looked down on the steamy haze of Garsykes. Up here, where her cottage nestled in a dingle of the highlands, the breeze blew clear and free. Death might ride as he would through a village she despised and loathed—but how could he touch little Nita, who wove baskets for the Dale? She glanced far out to Logie, its grey chimneys pushing up above the lush, green woodlands. Hardcastle and his bride were there, and already she was weaving snares for them, supple as the willows that were her stock-in-trade, when a heavy tread sounded close at hand. ”

“ Lady Royd was standing apart, as if nothing mattered, now she had heard that Sir Jasper lay wounded at the farm; if her man had not been strong enough to ride in and guard her at such a time, he must be near to death, she felt. She had made him her idol, starving her sons of love because the father claimed it; and she was paying her debts now, in confusion and humiliation. Nance scarcely heeded her. Her eyes passed from Simon and Ben Shackleton to the slim, erect figure at the gate, and instinctively she crossed to Rupert’s side. ”

“ Seldom in the memory of Garth had the pomp and circumstance of the young summer proceeded with so few mischances. There had been no sudden snow to hinder the lambs new-dropped about the pastures; there had been no frost o’ nights; and the throstles sang their clarion note as if no winter’s wind had ever piped a harsher tune about the grey fell-village.
At eight of one of these spring mornings—the wind light from the south, and the sun playing bo-peep with fleecy clouds—Priscilla of the Good Intent stood waiting under the elm tree which long ago had given its name to the village inn. ”

“ Hardcastle, not knowing why, halted in his stride, and stood looking out across the waste. If the hills were brown and steadfast washed by rain and sun, below him lurked the mines, the bogs that sucked a man down, dragging at him till limb by limb the chill ooze chained him. And there were the Wilderness Men, whose enmity was a dread thing to earn.
A stab of fear took him unawares as if one of the Stealthy People had crept on him from behind. He shook it off, telling himself that the dread was part of his heritage of Logie. A grown man must learn to shake off nursery tales. ”

“ He and Nance were alone here on the uplands. A ragged, crimson sunset lingered over the moor. A cock-grouse got up from the heather on their right, and whirred down the bitter wind, chuckling harshly as it went. It was a man’s land, this, full of hills that stepped, sleety and austere, to the red of the stormy sky. A man should have been easily the master here; and yet Underwood knew that he was dwarfed, belittled, by this slim lass of Demaine’s, whose eyes held truth and looked him through and through. ”

“ The gypsy wildness in her needed colour, warmth, the speed of strange adventures; as a child, and later as a woman, she had peopled the heath with voices other than the curlew’s and the plover’s. The countless hollows, bottomed by rank mosses and deep bracken, hid ambushed men; behind each hillock that concealed the track from her, she would look for some figure to come riding down to meet her, and no toil about the farm, no harshness of the workaday life which hemmed her in at Ghyll, had killed this glamour of the heath. ”

“ He was no longer his own master but thrall to terrors bred in the womb of generations.
Fancy began to play strange tricks. Hardened to life and weather he might be; but he was no match for the unseen hordes of fear that came about him. The sweat broke out on Hardcastle, fighting longer odds than three men against one. It was only shame of his fear that got some sort of manhood into him, and a rough courage that was friendless and utterly alone. He learned then what Brant had meant when he spoke of dread, cold as east wind with snow behind it. ”

“ The riders and the men on foot went by. The tread of hoofs, the tread of feet, was slow and measured, as the tread of mourners is; and down and up, and up and down, the echoes of the pipes’ lament roamed through Derby’s street. It was an hour—and there are few such—when men, with their strength and their infirmities, and their rooted need of battle, grow tender and outspoken as little children, who have found no need as yet to face life in the open.
The Prince and Sir Jasper were alone. The fighting men had passed them, and the chattering townsfolk. ”

“ To David Blake’s fancy—rough, kindly, not far wide of the mark at any time—she “made the day new-washed and happier”; yet it was Billy who next found his tongue.
“Te-he! Ye look as if life was playtime for ye, too,” said he, still blowing at his bellows, but looking at her slily over his shoulder.
“Maybe,” she laughed—and the kind, wise music of the thrush was in her laughter. “’Tis very true, Billy. Life’s playtime for me.” ”

“ Hardcastle laughed quietly. “There are lambs that were never born because he slew the ewes. But he’s ours, Rebecca.”
They stood together in the silence. Peril brooded like thunder-weather over the house of Logie. The wind, chattering and plucking at the casements, spoke of stealth, of nameless treacheries closing round about its walls. The pedlar was crying in his sleep for another glimpse of Ben Crummock before he died.
Do as they would, gloom spun its webs about them—little, clinging webs that hindered courage—till Jonah, the brindled cat, stalked down the passage. ”

“ They had been laggards in the Prince’s service; they were recusants, come at the last hour to prove themselves; but they felt, seeing Nance step down between them, her face stained with weariness and long vigil, that a royal lady had come into their midst.
Nance went through the charred doorway, and halted a moment as the pleasant frost-wind met her. The moonlight and the clean face of the sky gave her a sense of ease and liberty, after the cramped days indoors. The siege’s uproar, its stealthy quiet, were lost in this big silence of the frosty spaces overhead. ”

“ For this one day he loved Priscilla as a better man might do; he lacked only the courage to be true to another, at any hazard of his present happiness. For Reuben Gaunt had never learned, or had never cared to learn, that honesty is ever and ever like the tight, grey walls of Garth valley—foundationed well, well built, and proof against the winds of winter-tide. ”

“ Before ever she reached the gate, a scud of thin, harsh smoke came down the rising breeze. She glanced in question across the valley that hid Wharfe River, flaring under Logie Brigg—glanced up at old Pengables, swarthy against the molten sky, and down again to the hollow where Garsykes lay.
Rebecca caught her breath. Things hoped for, till the heart grows sick, are not to be believed at first. Yet soon she had to credit what was doing yonder. She leaned a shoulder down for Jonah, and the cat leaped nimbly up, spitting and growling at the wisps of smoke. ”

“ Their very hatred of weakness, of swerving from the straight, loyal path, reacts on them, and they find temptation doubly strong. Sir Jasper, as he rode down into the nipping frost that hung misty about the chimney-stacks below him, had never seen this house of his so comely, so likeable. Temptation has a knack of rubbing out all harsher lines, of showing a stark, midwinter landscape as a land of plenty and of summer. There were the well ordered life, the cheery greetings with farmer-folk and hinds who loved their squire. ”

“ Ten days of rain, with scarcely an hour’s cessation now and then, were followed by exquisite, crisp sunshine, till Yeoman Hirst declared that the face of the land “looked as clean-washed as a babby’s.” The breeze was sweet and nutty to the smell. Flowers, checked till now by the drought, began to show out of their proper season, while September’s natural brood stirred into blossom in every field and hedgerow. It was a season such as puts new heart into men, whether they admit the weather’s influence or make pretence of denial. ”

“ Nita Langrish, a bundle of withies over her shoulder, was standing in the roadway, her glance fixed on Logie. So intent she was on thoughts of the dead Master who had flouted her—hidden deep with the pedlar’s brat under the rocks in Garsykes cave—that she heard no sound of hoofs behind.
Nita had had her will of them both, and stood there as in a trance. Vengeance was sweet. She was minded to taste it to the full, looking down at masterless Logie. Every curling wisp of smoke rose from a hearth Hardcastle would never know again. No son of his would grow to claim the heritage. ”

“ Lady Royd, with the new-found motherhood that made her comelier, guessed what was passing in the boy’s mind; and she fussed about him, when he was asking only for free air and the chance to fight like other men. And Rupert thought, with a shame that deadened all his outlook, of the years when he had stood, scholarly, ironical, apart from the blood and tears that meet wayfarers who take the open road. He saw it all, to-night when the peevish wind was beating through the draughty house—saw the weakness that had divided him from the open-air, good fellows who liked and pitied him. ”

“ It was this need of glamour, maybe, which had bidden her long ago to set her heart on Gaunt; the man’s queer eyes, with the look in them of devilry and yet of boyish surprise at life, his irresolution, the very uncertainty from one day to the next whether he would come tame to her hand, or would be wooing elsewhere, all enticed Peggy, as the winding hill-tracks did, that promised some gallant meeting at the next corner—always at the next corner. ”

“ Garsykes—those still alive in it—saw the same three crows poised above its sweltering street. Rumour at its wildest could have pictured no scene more stark with horror; for the stranger who had brought Hardcastle’s challenge had brought gaol-fever, too, and it had spread like flame throughout a village ready to receive it.
The sun beat down from the shelterless fells till the cobbles of the street were hot to tread. Each festering refuse heap bred flies beyond number, and in the roadway lay the body of a man that none dared touch. ”

“ Through her anxieties, through her womanish picturing of the wounds and sickness that were lying in wait along this high-road that led south to victory and the Stuart, she was glad that “Wild Will” would need her prayers, her trust in him.
She rode slowly up by way of Hangman’s Snout—a bluff, round hill that once had carried a gallows-tree. Line by swarthy line the heath widened out before her as she climbed. Crumpled hillocks, flat wastes of peat, acre after acre of dead bracken intermixed with ling and benty grasses, swept out and up to the sky that was big with sunrise and with storm. ”

“ Spring, with its make-believe of primrose banks, and birds that litanied the sunshine, was a dream she had dreamed in company with Reuben Gaunt. That had passed, and hard winter had set in again. She was glad that it was so. Winter was a time of stress and hardship, that left no leisure for dreams. Better the snow than the soft air of an April gloaming, when all the tribes of furred and feathered things went wooing and set the like key-note for more sober human-folk. ”

“ Crooning Water, escaped not long since from the prison-house of Drumly Ghyll—its rocks steep and dark and terrible—raced down with a bubbling song of liberty, and halted to play round the whirlpool delved by waters that had gone before and were one by now with the distant seas. A place of sanctuary, like an old kirk ready with its welcome for young, honest love.
The woman on the bridge glanced up at Hardcastle’s approach, and into her eyes there leaped God knows what of devilry, appeal, regret. ”

“ At Will Underwood’s house, meanwhile, the laggard gentry of Lancashire were sitting over their wine, and were cursing this snowfall that would not let them hunt to-morrow. And they were troubled, all of them; for they knew that better men were facing hardship on the London road, while they, from faults of sloth or caution, were sheltered by house-walls. They were men, after all, under the infirmities that hindered them; and ease, for its own sake, never yet appealed for long to hearts built for weather and adventure. They needed hard exercise, to blunt the edge of conscience ”

“ The moon ran free again, and in the sharp, cold light he saw Hardcastle standing in the angle of two limestone walls, with half Garsykes yammering to be at him.
Will o’ Wisp had no liking for the village he had blundered into weeks ago. There were degrees of rascaldom, and his own feet went merrily on the margin of such deeps as Garsykes knew. Something in Hardcastle’s dour silence as he faced the rabble with uplifted cudgel—some liking, inborn in him, for a man meeting heavy odds, brought music into Will’s heart. Moreover, he was in mood to take sides with any man that Nita hated. ”

“ Into the scented room, with its candles shining from their silver sconces, Lady Royd came, tremulous and white of face, from watching Oliphant of Muirhouse ride out.
“Nance, my dear, I—I am tired,” she said.
“I think we all are,” Nance answered, rising from the spinet with a deference that had no heart in it.
“Oh, you’re querulous, and so am I,” said the other, with a shrewd glance at the girl’s face. “If our men could see us now—our men who fight for us—they would be astonished, Nance. We’re so little like their dreams of us. ”

“ She fell to crying; and, when that did not serve, she glanced at him through long, wet lashes. “If I cared for too many men—it was vanity, and no more. There was never a man but you.”
Wrath came to Hardcastle—sudden, heedless tempest, like a north wind from far, broken hills. “I’ll not say to any woman what’s on my tongue for you. I gave you—all Logie and myself—gave you my heart to be held, or played with. Tales came of other men, and I laughed at them—till I found them true.” ”