FOREWORD
AS Mr. Walpole's preface was written before I had received the MS. of this book for the assistance which I had undertaken, and as his absence in the West Indies, closely following my own return from America, has allowed no opportunity for subsequent consultation, I think a word of explanation is due both to him and to myself - and, from a different angle, to Mr. Denwood - as to the extent and limit of my own contribution to its present form.
The manuscript, as Mr. Walpole saw it, suffered from a radical defect of construction which a practised novelist would have avoided. It was in the form of a narrative by William Moffatt, commencing at the time when he returned from America, and the earlier events were told by Red Ike to him in the course of a long conversation which completed the first book.
The first person is often used by the inexperienced author, who is least aware of the difficulties he will encounter or skilful to overcome them. It is the least satisfactory of narrative forms (excepting that of a series of letters) and the most difficult to handle (excepting the diary). It should never be used unless it is intended to confine the tale to such facts as are naturally within the narrator's knowledge, or such emotions as he can have experienced or observed.
The use of two first persons, and the inclusion of much which could not have come within the knowledge or observation of those who told it, forced me to the reluctant conclusion that the book could not be adapted for publication without the major operation of changing it to the third person throughout, and placing the incidents in chronological order.
With greater hesitation, I have occasionally modified the exuberance of the more violent episodes or conversations, not unaware that a good melodrama may be preferred to an indifferent comedy.
But in such redaction as I have indicated I have added little of value. It is not an instance of two authors pooling their inventions, nor of one writing a tale of which the other has provided the plot. My part has been no more than that of arrangement and modification, and the re-writing of some earlier portions where the plan of reconstruction which I adopted rendered it unavoidable.
The finest prose passages in the book (as also the lyrics, except for two slight modifications) are Mr. Denwood's unaided and unaltered work.
S. Fowler Wright
A WORD AS PREFACE
I WILL not delay readers of this remarkable book for more than a moment. That it is a remarkable book no one who reads it will, I think, deny.
Mr. Denwood is not a professional novelist; that is, in fact, the very last thing that he is. He tells here a story and he paints some vivid and memorable characters, but it is neither the characters nor the story that gives this book its character. Red Ike is memorable because of its feeling of place.
Now Cumberland has not, as yet, been very generously dealt with by English novelists. There are the stories of Professor Collingwood, the Helbeck of Bannisdale of Mrs. Ward (and that is Westmorland), that old but rather child-like favourite Hope the Hermit, the Sorrowstones of Mr. Calvert, The Secret Valley of Nicholas Size - it is difficult at the moment to recall more than these.
I am, I think, quite safe in saying that none of them, not even Mr. Calvert's Sorrowstones, a fine work, catches the breath and life of the Fells as does this novel of Mr. Denwood's.
It is because he is not a novelist so much as a poet that he has here so extraordinary a spirit. All his life long he has breathed the air of these hills and dales as though he were part of them. He has never self-consciously thought: "Now I will make a story of this." The hills themselves have simply driven him to do so. It is so often a tragical thing that the people who know the country best, its sights, sounds, colours and skylines, are least able to write about what they know. That is why a book like Mr. Denwood's is so rare a thing.
I do not know whether it is rash to compare him with George Borrow. Perhaps it is - and yet the comparison must be made. Borrow is a very great writer. I do not say Red Ike is another Lavengro - but I do say that it comes nearer to the true spirit of Lavengro than any other English novel of recent years.
This book will perhaps be chiefly loved by those who care for Cumberland. Perhaps because I care for that country so dearly I am a little prejudiced in Red Ike's favour. But I do not think so. One criticizes most severely those whom one loves the best, and the spirit of Red Ike is really independent of prejudice.
For many years to come lovers of Cumberland will treasure this book.
RED IKE
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I
DESTINY or freewill? It is the old insoluble question. If Will Moffatt and Red Ike had not lain out under the stars by the Brutchstone* that warm June night in eighteen-eighty-three?. . . Or if Joe Gream and Peg Shore had wandered another way? Or say if it had happened to rain? Perhaps destiny would still have led them by other no less sombre paths to the end that they could not guess. But we have enough to do to watch the growth that followed from that unlikely chance, without guessing what crop might have come from seeds that were never sown.
Red Ike watched them embrace. They did more than that. When he saw what they would be at, he rose suddenly and rushed away. They might have heard, had they been less self-occupied than they were, thinking themselves to be out of sight or knowledge of men on the lonely height of the moor.
* A wonderful phallic stone on the top of Naddle Fell about three miles south-west of Keswick.
As to Will Moffatt, he lay and watched. He was curious - and amused. He was not over-concerned that his friend went off as he did. Red Ike had his sudden moods. And he partly guessed how he felt. Will Moffatt looked at Peg with rather different eyes. She could bring as many men as she would to the Brutchstone in the moonlight hours, and let them do with her as they pleased, and his sleep would be none the less. But to Ike she was a pure dream that he doubted his worth to win. It was in that hope that he worked and saved. She knew that well enough. He could have bought her at a less price, but she had the shrewdness to see that it was one that he would be slow to pay. Meanwhile, it was not only that Joe had the better purse He was more of her kind.
We must observe that they were both young at this time, Will and Ike. Will was twenty-two, and Ike was younger than that, though he had come to a strength that it would be prudent to fear, if his anger stirred, as it would at times in a quick way. They looked at life as the young do, through the half-light of the dawn, which may be golden or grey, but it is alike to them, for their eyes and thoughts are for that which the mist hides.
Will lay as he was, and let his friend go. Had he known that it would be seven years before they would meet again he might have done differently, but how could he guess that? And by the next day he had trouble enough of his own at Sandyflatts, so that even Red Ike had little place in his mind.
He let Joe and Peg go, and lay still under the stars for a time. He was in no hurry to go home. There is time to sleep in the day. But the night's poaching that they had planned must go, now that Ike had rushed off in that sudden way. He was not troubled at that. He would have thought (had he thought of it at all) that there were other nights that would do as well. But he could go home when he would. There was no one living at Sandyflatts except his mother and he.
So, meaning to go home, but being in no haste, he lay still, and, the night being warm and the heather soft, he went to sleep in the end, and waked to see the summer sun at a good height, and then he went home at a quick pace, though he had no thought of what he should find, for, if you often poach at night, it is well to be home before you may be watched from a mile away.
CHAPTER II
THE morning was well advanced when Will Moffatt came to the door of his own home. Even as it then was, Sandyflatts was forbidding enough. A grey-built solitary house, set in the desolation of the moors that stretched round it in miles of barren undulation, interspersed with masses of heather, gorse, and bracken. Its wild tract was lined with countless runnels in whose peatmoss banks, tunnelled by the fierce spates of many winters, the small yellow-bellied trout fled for safety when the shadow of a heron or wild duck crossed the water's surface. There the curlew comes in early March, and the whole moor is continuously athrill with its tremulous, wailing cry until the frosts of the falling year. There the nightjar sits on its favourite old grey stone, which is the very colour of itself, and sings its strange song to rising moon or lonely star.
And there the eastern hill is faced by a Druids' Circle of stones, some of which mark the course of the year as a sundial marks the hours of the day.
On this hill in olden days were seen the mirages of marching armies. But in later times these have been replaced by scenes of festivity. There shadowy pleasure-fairs are held, with showmen's booths, and the gathered crowds before the platforms. There the modern electric switchback, hoopla stalls, and all the sordid paraphernalia and flotsam and jetsam of a virile civilization perform, as if in mockery, the mimic antics of present-day humanity. The country folks scattered over this sparsely-populated district view with awe the wild revels thus held in the daylight hours, and have named it: "The Hill of Devils."
Will Moffatt had no such thoughts as these as he came whistling cheerfully to a door which had been opened already, and entered a kitchen at the table of which sat a woman, dead, her head upon her folded arms.
When a bullet crashes through bone and flesh there is often little pain at the first. The stunned nerves fail to respond. A man looks foolishly at his shattered limb, uncertain of what he thinks or feels. The pain will come soon enough, but it is yet to begin.
Will Moffatt said "Mother" in a cheerful, and then again in a puzzled way. Then he touched her, and knew.
Half an hour after that, he had lifted her on to the kitchen sofa as best he might, and set out to get help from those of whom he thought as his friends, and (except Red Ike) the only friends that he had. He set out over the moor to where John Lynd farmed at The Bents, - three hundred acres of "as good land as ever lay out of doors," as they would say in those parts.
No one knew how long the Lynds had farmed on that land. Extra land had come to them from time to time under the several Commons Enclosures Acts, and John Lynd was a prosperous man enough, though not one who had saved. He owned a good blood-horse, and no better cross-country rider followed the hounds than he.
He was something more than a common man of his kind, having been an only son, and better educated than was usual in his class at that time, and beyond that he was of a restless ambition which was not easily stilled. He had tried to make a place for himself in the public life of the county, but he was lacking in the gift of oratory, and had been embittered by the failure of his efforts in that direction.
He had a wife, an a daughter, Jean, of about the age of Will Moffatt, who had been free enough of the house during his boyhood years, where he would go to borrow books, or to ask guidance of the older man at some point of difficulty on the hard path of self-education, some point of grammar, history, or philosophy, for he did not attempt to penetrate the mysteries of modern science till a later time.
Up to that time Will Moffatt had taken the world for granted, as youth will. He had not even concerned himself to wonder why his mother's home was bounded by the walled-in eighth of an acre behind it, though he knew in a vague way that his ancestors had owned all the expanse beyond.
He sought eagerly for the knowledge that came within reach of his hands, absorbing the books he read as he absorbed, unconsciously as a flower, the beauty and glory of the Nature around him, revelling in the storms, or lying with his head on a stone until he felt as much a part of ever-changing ever-lasting scene as were the inanimate fells and moors themselves.
Now Jean saw Will approach. She waited for him, leaning on the fold-gate. She called him a light good-morning, and then her tone changed quickly as she saw his face. "What's wrong, Will?"
It seems strange to tell, but Will did not know how to begin. He stood there telling nothing but by the silent misery of his face. When she asked him again, in a sharper fear, he said, "Can I see your mother?"
"Mother's not very well. She's not down yet. . . Tell me, Will." Her hands reached his as he told.
If he loved her at that time it was that which he scarcely knew, and her own thoughts lay quiet in her own mind, and, to the man who watched them from the bedroom window above, the way they stood may have seemed to mean more than it did, he not knowing of what they spoke, but it happened that Will lifted his eyes, and met a black anger in those of John Lynd, at which he was puzzled enough, and would have been more so at another time, for Jean's father had always been kindly enough in a rough way, and, not thinking how the scene might look to the older man, he could have guessed no reason at all.
"I'll tell Mother," Jean said. "You'd better come in and sit down.
He was sitting on the kitchen settle a moment later when John Lynd came in. He said brusquely, "What are you doing here?"
Will met that tone more easily than he had done the questioning sympathy in a girl's eyes. He said briefly, "Mother's dead."
"Well, what do you want us to do?"
Will said that he did not know, but they were the first people he had thought of in his distress.
"Then you'd better go back. Mrs. Lynd will find someone to do what's necessary, and drive over later."
John Lynd turned with these words, and Left the kitchen. Will stood silent a moment, and turned away also from that unexpected brutality. He went back with his grief across the open moor, pondering in vain the meaning of this conduct from a man who had always shown a careless friendliness, and a disposition to praise and help his studies even up to two days before. At another time, under other circumstances, he might have puzzled over it to the point of elucidation. As it was, when his mother was buried three days later, he hardly noticed that the Lynds were the only family within miles of the Church garth who were not present at the funeral.
It was the next Sunday morning that realization came, when he went to the churchyard, and saw Jean standing by his mother's grave.
When Will Moffatt hesitated he was always less likely to do the wrong thing than to do nothing at all. So he had lain on at the Brutchstone when Red Ike went; so he had been silent to Jean's question, doubting how his grief should be told. Now he drew back, and watched. He had not seen Jean for a week, and now she prayed at his mother's grave. He knew how he loved her then, and he saw at the same instant that it was that which had roused the black anger in her father's eyes, and the brutal words that had sent him home. He could not guess what it meant. He did not know that John Lynd was his mother's brother. It was many years before he learnt the wrong he had done her. But the storm broke the next day.
They met on the open moor. There was no one within possible sight. John Lynd meant to have it out once for all. He came to the point in a curt way, and when Will admitted his love for Jean, he burst out with an oath that he wasn't going to see his daughter wedded to a penniless bastard brat.
Will Moffatt's anger leapt into sudden flame, as that of those who are of a slow nature may sometimes do, at this refusal, and at the vile and unexpected imputation which it contained. He shouted, "You lying cur!" His hand reached for a stone.
John Lynd stood his ground, a cynical smile on his lips. He tapped the barrel of the gun which lay across his arm. "Do you want a charge of shot in the legs?"
Will looked back with eyes that were as wrath and resolute as those of the older man, but the stone dropped. There is little use in arguing with a loaded shot-gun in the hands of a man who has a reputation for violence of temper.
John Lynd observed the action with the same cynical smile. He went on. "Now listen to me, Will Moffatt, and it's the last warning you'll get. You'll be gone from here by tomorrow night, and if you show your face again on any land of mine, or where my word goes, you'll be harried to the devil, i f you don't get a charge of shot, as a pole-cat should. There's not a house on the moor that can shelter you against my will. You can make up your mind to that."
"I can live at Sandyflatts, Mr. Lynd, as long as I like, without asking you."
"Oh, yes? Whose do you think it is?"
"It's mine, now my mother's dead."
"It's no more yours than it was ever hers. I can turn you out when I will. . . You'd better clear while you can. . . .Now go."
Will Moffatt looked at the sneering, contemptuous eyes, and he knew that he had heard the truth. He controlled the impulse of passionate reply. He saw the hands that were restless upon the weapon that his opponent held. It was not his hour. He turned and went without further words.
He lingered for a few days in the depressing atmosphere of his solitary death-haunted home, feeling that the hands of all men were against him. What chance had he with slender means, in such a place, with such an enmity? He decided to quit the moorland forever, to forget his miseries, and make his own career in another world. The next week he sailed from Liverpool to New York, telling no one of where he went.
CHAPTER III
RED IKE fled through the night. He cast himself down on the heather of Lonscape fell with his mind in a tumult of revulsion and anger, shame and grief.
He had worshipped Peg Shore, and she had encouraged his advances. He had known well enough that Joe Gream was in love with her also, and that he had far more to offer. But he had had her word. He had trusted her with the unquestioning simplicity of his own nature.
Now he told himself that he had always known she was wanton: that he could have had her, if he would, on the same terms. He cried Fool! to the fells, and the fells echoed in mockery. Hearing that mocking cry, he knew the falsity of his own thought. He cried Liar! and the fells answered again. He writhed, clutching the earth with his hands in an extreme of passion that must find some physical outlet. He leapt to his feet again, and rushed deeper into the night, and the wilderness of the fells.
He lay down again exhausted by the pace at which he had thought to flee from his own self, and faced his grief again. The pure love which he had thought his own had dominated his life until that night. It was for Peg that he had hoarded and schemed: for Peg that he had haggled over the price of the game that he and Will had poached on a hundred nights. Now he lay like a wild and wounded thing, resolving that he had done with love, and with all the restraints and reticences that had ruled his life. Then in the pause of exhausted passion at which men may turn to suicide or self-control, he stood up, stretching his arms to the void. He made a gesture of casting-off, crying aloud, "This for a woman! Have there not been many men - how many men! - in worse case than mine? Men who have not learned the truth till they have been tied for life to a wanton's will. I am a free man still!"
He laughed aloud, and was startled by the echoed sound, which had a hollow and discordant jar, so that his own voice seemed strange. He thought, "At least, I can be a man, and let the woman go, or take her for what she is, pure or impure." He walked home with a quiet and steady step, and was soon in bed and asleep.
He rose after a few hours' sleep, and was first down in a room in which a siskin sang. It was Peg's gift, and with a quiet smile he took down the cage. "Go," he thought, "with the peace of God. You will be loyal to the mate you choose. There is no creature of the wilds that is so base as mankind."
It was a month before he saw Peg Shore again, and then he came upon her at the stepping-stones on the moor. The beck was in flood, and she stood in doubt on the edge. She saw a man who was taller and better-made than any other she knew. He had the vigour of early youth, and the clean health of the open life that the poacher lives. He was a good sight to her, though he had the dreamer's eyes, which are not easy to read, and she knew he worshipped her for that which she could never be. In the shallow shrewdness of her mind, she thought little of his prospects or purse, but the man himself was of a desirable kind.
He stopped as he came up to her side, and she raised confident smiling eyes. "Won't you help me over, Ike?"
He looked at her silently, as one who studies a strange thing.
"What's the matter with Red Ike?" she asked in her teasing way. "Has a bogle frightened him that he hasn't come my way for a month past?"
He answered that. "We saw two bogles, Will Moffatt and I. They were at the Brutchstone a month tonight."
Not a muscle of her mouth moved, nor did her eyes fall before his as she answered, "Sneaks and eavesdroppers always see and hear more than is good for them."
"In this case it was better to be without sight, and beyond hearing."
"Why?" she asked, lifting her eyebrows in a puzzled way.
He looked hard in her eyes and answered with a slow deliberation. "Because I did not wish to hear the gurgle of mating."
She did not drop her eyes, which showed a sudden realization of what he knew, and a fierce anger that followed, but she flushed purple as she answered in a torrent of abuse before which he stood unmoved till her words failed.
"Well, Peg," he said, when she paused at last, "who's at fault, you or me?"
"Coward!"
"Not at all. I was glad to know your relations with Joe before I was too late. See - this was for you." He held out a ring which he had bought some weeks earlier, dreaming that it would not be long before it would have been on her hand.
"You bought that for me?"
"Yes. That's the fool I was."
"Then I wish it had been on my hand when I went with Joe Gream that night, now I know what a sneak you are. But I'll be even with you before I've done, so you'd better beware."
"Yes?" he answered. "And you'd better beware of Joe Gream. Few men want a soiled woman, not even the man that soils her. If Joe Gream can get Jean Lynd, she'll be the woman for him, though I reckon she's got her eyes on a better man."
"How do you know of that?" she asked in a sharp, changed tone.
"Because I'm a sneak and an eavesdropper."
"I think you're a devil," she said bitterly.
"Well, look for yourself. The Lynds' house is open to you. You're Jean's friend, and Joe Gream is there half his nights. It's nothing to me. Look here."
He took the ring between finger and thumb, and shot it towards the boiling cauldron of the falls a dozen yards below.
CHAPTER IV
RED IKE walked away feeling that he had had the best of that encounter, as, perhaps, he had; but it had brought Peg back to his mind in a way that he found it hard to shake off. He learnt, as many others had done before, that it is easier to ignore a woman than to forget her. He had been drinking more than he should during the past month, which was a new thing to him, and after a time, during which he did nothing but let the money that he had been hoarding up for Peg slip away as it would, he joined a gang of gypsies that had camped at Mirkholme, and roamed with them into Scotland, and spent about six months in the Rob Roy country.
They welcomed Ike, because he had the name of being the most skilful poacher on the Borders. The gypsies knew how to poach, as they knew how to thieve, but there were things in the making and using of nets that they had not learnt, and now, as they went idly and merrily through the countryside, they levied generous toll on the lordly preserves that skirted the public ways. Sometimes partridges by the score would fall victims to the sweepnet, or they would stove a full clutching of pheasants with a long pole and a box of fuming sulphur from the thick black firewood plantations, and would soon be boiling them in a bule pan over a turf fire, or spitting and frizzling them in a savoury circle beneath the midnight sky.
Nor was venison an unknown joint. Long before a beast could be missed, its skin and entrails would be buried miles behind, and the carcase eaten. The gallant salmon was their easy prey in many of the narrow boiling streams of Scotland. When Ike had taught them how to use the double-armed net, with pole and bladder, hardly a day passed that they did not dine on fresh fish.
The gypsies looked at him as a valuable addition for these services, but he came to sicken of an existence that was wilder and more lawless than anything of which he had dreamed before, and from which the common decencies of life were too often absent. His departure was hastened at the last by a singular incident.
The women were of the ordinary type of the nomad tribes, dirty, gaudy, loud-tongued, and brazen, but there was one exception. Jael Boswell, in spite of her surroundings, was of a natural reticence which contrasted with the free and shameless familiarities of her companions sufficiently to suggest that she was, in part at least, of an alien race. Red Ike was drawn to her by this difference, and paid her some attention, which she accepted with an apparent willingness. Yet he held her always at arm's length, his experience of Peg Shore not being easily forgotten.
She came to him once when he was reading a tattered volume of Shakespeare's plays that his pocket held. She drew the book from his hand.
"Which play do you think the greatest, Red Ike?"
He looked surprised as he answered, "Macbeth."
"Why?"
"Because its sombre power fascinates me."
The shadow of a smile passed over her face as she said: You mean, I suppose, that it appeals to the instinct of wonder inherent in you, and yet you pretend to hold in scorn the gypsy's lore," and continuing, "where, Red Ike, would you draw the boundary between a gaping crowd held entranced by the witchery of Shakespeare, and the fool who is having his fortune told? Both are swayed by their love of the marvellous. I grant that the sophist might draw a distinction, but it would be purely one of degree. What do you say to that?"
"Jael," he answered, "your question is not so subtle to me as is the mystery of how you have come to know anything of such a matter, or of the ease with which you express yourself. Have you had some schooling?
"I am the only woman of my tribe who has had any education. From my eighth until my thirteenth year I was sent to a private seminary, for what reason and by whom I know not. I made rather rapid progress and since then I have followed up my advantage as far as might be amid the bustle of our roving life. Old plays and present day verse have long been a source of delight to me, though I have not entirely neglected other kinds of reading. Tomorrow, if you wish, I will show you my books."
The strident voice of old Abegail cursing Jael for some neglect, or owing perhaps to the hag's mistrust of her companion, put an end to the conversation. That night Red Ike went out poaching on the banks of Loch Lomond with Ben Faa, a young gypsy with whom he was on terms of a rather surly companionship. They returned to camp about an hour before sunrise, hid their catch within the double floor of the van, and then went to snatch a few hours' rest before the tribe would be on the move again.
No sooner was Red Ike stretched on his pallet of bracken than he felt a hand placed upon his breast, and a pair of warm lips pressed to his cheek. Turning on his side, lh felt the head of his companion, and his hand wandered down the body to the hips, and he knew by the length of the hair and the curves of the waist that it was a woman who lay beside him.
But who? was the question. If the wife of one of the gypsies, and they were caught together, blood might flow, but if a single woman no harm would transpire, but he would be looked upon henceforth as the woman's mate. To speak would be to betray her to others within earshot. How came she to be lying beside him? Was she mistaking him for another in the darkness. What should he do to get rid of her? He attempted to rise, but she clasped him round the waist, and held him down.
Then he felt her face; her long eyelashes; her mouth; her nose.
Yes, he could not be mistaken, she was Jael Boswell.
He placed his mouth to her ear, and whispered: "Jael, not now. Leave me tonight, and I'll find means to confer with you tomorrow. We'll lag behind on the march, and I'll explain myself." But her only answer was to cling closer to him, and solicit by silent gestures his body's contact with hers.
"No, by God I" he said, fiercely, and tearing her arms apart, he threw her from him, and rushed from the tent. He was miles away from the camp when the daylight came.
Cursing all creation, at the close of the day, he threw himself down on the Gleniffer Braes, and gazed into the blue void above. Was there ever such a mad-brained idiot as he? Flying first from his native place because of a faithless whore whom he loved, and now from the solicitations of a woman whose love was perhaps purity itself, judged by the morality of her class. He who had sworn a few months back to take his pleasures wherever they might be found, was leaving love behind him, and unconsciously returning to his native country, and to Peg Shore!
"Returning to Peg Shore!" he cried. "If we meet again I'll slit her throat, or may the next thunder levin strike me."
Nevertheless, he continued his journey southward, and arrived at Carlisle weary in body and reckless in soul. He had not been there many days before an episode of sudden violence landed him at last in prison.
He stept into freedom, to behold Jael Boswell holding out her hand. If any act could have moved a man's heart towards a woman, this was one. But some perverse devilry in his nature withheld him even then from greeting her as she deserved, and he coldly shook her hand, showing neither surprise nor welcome.
She gave him a look that showed at once her disappointment and that she would give no further trouble; but when he moved along the street she walked beside, and pressed money upon him. He glanced at the coins, accepted two half-crowns, and returned the rest,
"Come and have a meal," she said.
He would not assent to that, but promised to look out for her at the oncoming hiring fair to be held in November. "I shall be at The Roaring Militia Man," he said, and they shook hands, and parted.
He arrived home in darkness, to a house that was tenantless. He went on to Sandyflatts, where he expected to find Will Moffatt. It also was tenantless and desolate. Next morning beheld him at daybreak standing beside a new-made grave in St.-John's-in-The-Vale churchgarth. He had no need to ask whose it was. It was side by side with his father's, and he turned and left the spot with the bitterness of a black past and a dark future weighing upon his soul.
He returned to Sandyflatts and examined windows, doors, and chimney. He clambered over the garth-wall and found the milkhouse window blocked up, and wondered and puzzled to solve the meaning of this desolation. Then he remembered the secret passage from the old well-pit in the garth, which as he thought was known only to Will and himself, and lifting the flagstone that covered it, he dropped from sight. Then a further riddle awaited him. Everything smelled musty as a grave, and he knew that the place had not been inhabited for months. He struck a light, and examined every nook. There was nothing to be learned. What had become of Will Moffatt? Was he dead and buried? Should he enquire? No. He would remain here until nightfall, and then find out what could be learned in his own way.
Having settled his mind on this point, he stretched tired limbs on the wood screen, and slept through the day. He was not one to pay the supernatural the tributes either of belief or fear, but it seemed to him as he woke that Will Moffatt's mother stood at his side, and that her hand was on his brow with a cool and pleasant touch.
Her words came clearly to his waking ears, "Wait here for Will," but when he raised himself and looked round, there was nothing to hear or see.
CHAPTER V
HOW was he to act for the best? Whilst pondering on this he heard the sound of footsteps upon the highway, and the indistinct talk between a man and a woman as they approached the house. They stepped to the door, inserted a key into the lock, shot the bolt, and lifted the latch. He did not move, because he did not care who they were.
"Damn!" said the man, "the door's been barred inside."
"It can't be that. I tell you the house is empty," the woman answered.
"Let's make sure," said the man, "there's no saying what freak Will Moffatt might take into his head."
He came to the window, and tore down the hoardings someone had nailed before it. There was a smashing of glass and a bull's-eye lantern shone into the room. Red Ike seized the arm and wrenched the lantern away, turning it full upon the pair outside. It showed the frightened angry face of Joe Gream, with Peg's startled eyes over his shoulder. Dropping the lantern, Red Ike gripped the arm with both hands. The frightened man struggled furiously, but Ike did not loose till the arm snapped like a match-stick over the window sill.
Cursing and screaming in mingled pain and fear, they fled into the darkness. Red Ike picked up the lantern, blew out the light, which still burned, slid the bars of the door, and stepped out into the night.
Luckily, the new-made skeleton key, which had no doubt been forged to fit the lock of Sandyflatts, was still in the keyhole. He turned it silently, and then ran on across the pathless moorland, his thought being to reach Joe Gream's forge before the return of the frightened pair. As he approached, he saw that a light was streaming through the unblinded window, so climbing on to the shoeing shed, from which he could see into the kitchen, he lay flat to wait and watch events. Joe's mother was busy preparing supper. A simmering pan of oatmeal porridge hung over the fire, and a large bowl of buttermilk and two platters were on the table. Evidently Joe and Peg were not wedded. The thought gave him a grim, unworthy satisfaction; yet, as he watched the old woman busy with her household duties, a feeling akin to sorrow crept over him, that his act of violence was about to cause her trouble. Then a pair of strong arms gripped his feet, and pulled him from the roof of the shoeing shed. The next moment he was struggling under a powerful adversary. He felt the pressure of a fierce grip on his throat, and a knee pressing him down. He strove in vain to break the grasp of those merciless hands, until he jerked his own knee between the thighs of his adversary. In an instant the grip on his throat relaxed. The man rolled over, groaning in agony. Red Ike knew the voice for that of John Lynd, and it was a simple thought that it would have gone ill with him had his face been seen. He rose, and dashed into the darkness.
Yet his purpose held, though he knew that he must use every precaution if he were to find out what he sought and remain unrecognized. If Joe had not gone home with his wounded arm, it was at Peg's cottage that he would be. Very cautiously Ike approached The Knoll, and was about to step up to the window, and peer into the house, when a half-bred mastiff bloodhound sprang upon him. He felt its paws on his breast, and its hot breath enter his mouth, but, with the presence of mind of a practised poacher and wrestler, he cast the brute over his leg and away, and then drawing his clasp-knife he awaited the next attack. As it sprang again for his throat, he gripped it by the forepaw and turned it on to its back, by a trick that the gypsies knew, holding it powerless, till his knife was across its throat. The warm blood spirtled over his hand, as the dog rolled over without a cry, for he had severed its windpipe, feeling, in the heat of the struggle, as little compunction as though he had pressed his boot on an adder's head.
It had become increasingly apparent that things were out of joint, and that something had happened of which he was ignorant, quite apart from his own quarrel with Joe Gream. He could not guess the mystery in which he had become so rapidly enveloped. But he was determined to solve it, even at the risk of prison or death itself. As he watched, the light which had been in The Knoll window went out. He turned to seek shelter on the moor among the whins, and to debate with himself on his next move, when he stumbled and fell over the dead dog. An oath burst from his lips, and before he could regain his feet he was once more in the grip of John Lynd. He felt himself in a powerful grasp, and guessed it was he by his method of tackling. He guessed that he would try to make sure this time, and went limp in his hands. He sought by a ruse of non-resistance to delude his opponent to think that he was going to take things quietly. And then, bending his body until he was well underneath him, he quickly gripped him by the right shoulder, and buttocked him clean over his head. He struck the ground with a thud, and lay shaken and winded. With a jeering laugh, Red Ike bounded on to the moorland, and the darkness again became his friend.
High up on the breast of the Hill of Devils he lay till the next morning came, and he could watch the comings and goings of the scattered community below him. The Naddle fells and the north-eastern shoulder of Helvellyn range were one mass of purple and gold. The more distant ranges were dark purple and blue, beautiful to behold to a stranger. To him, born and bred amongst them, they were the walls of God's temple, and he gazed with deep transport upon them. The Bents' chimney was the first to smoke, after it The Knoll, then the cottage adjoining the forge. The forge itself would be fireless for many a day.
He longed for a pair of good field-glasses to bring within ken the moving mites of humanity below him. But the distance baffled his sight, and so he turned on to his back, and watched the passing clouds, and the revolutions of the hunting buzzard hawks as they scanned the fell sides for quarry, circling slowly till every yard of ground would have been surveyed, and they would wheel away to the inspection of an adjoining area.
He had not slept through the night, and now the warmth of the morning air soothed his body, and he fell into a dream-free slumber.
It was high noon when he woke, and, turning on his side, beheld, in the far distance, upon the Mosedale road, a gypsy's van, and knew by its colour and build to whom it belonged. He half rose from his point of vantage, and then sank as quickly. It would not do for him to be seen.
If he moved in that direction, it must be by night. Hour after hour he watched the gypsies drawing leisurely nearer Mirkholme, their old and favoured haunt. That part of the moorland belonged to John Lynd, and he had often wondered why he allowed the gypsies unmolested to remain there for indefinite lengths of time. The motives of men are sometimes hidden and strange, and the ties of blood are often the prompting of deeds which would be otherwise inexplicable.
He lay thus while the sun circled three parts of the heavens, and as it sank to nadir behind the highest fells the longing to be up and away to the moorlands below was insistent within him. He watched with increasing impatience the slowly dying embers on the fringe of the world gilding the hill-tops with reflected glory; and as these gradually lost their glow, the ravines on the shoulders of the fells became full of shadow, sombre and restful, as eternity shall be when man with his fierce passions, vain imaginings, high hopes, and base desires, has passed through folly to the eternal night.
When the darkness fell, Red Ike made his way back to Sandyflatts, and found it silent and deserted. He replaced the boards which Joe Gream had torn down from before the window. He locked and barred the door from the inside, and then left the house by the passage through the old well. He was determined, at whatever cost, to solve the meaning of Joe and Peg's visit to Sandyflatts; of John Lynd's attack on himself, of Peg's ferocious dog, and finally why the solitary gypsy's van had returned to Mirkholme at the fall of the year, and who were its occupants.
He crossed the moorland cautiously, giving a wide berth to all foot trods, houses, and outlying buildings.
The Bents, when he approached, was in darkness. Wondering at this, he was about to cut across an angle of the moor leading to Mirkholme, when he heard voices in the distance, and hurriedly climbed into one of the black yew-trees that half encircled The Bents.
"I tell you, it was Will Moffatt," said John Lynd.
"Are you sure?" questioned the other. It was the voice of Ben Faa, the gypsy.
"Quite. I know by the way in which he buttocked me over his head, after he cut the dog's throat at The Knoll. No other man in these parts could have thrown me so cleverly and cleanly. Besides, I taught him that trick myself. He used my method exactly."
They then passed on, and entered The Bents.
Wondering what devilment those two might be planning together, Red Ike dropped from the branches of the yew-tree, and next minute he was tearing across the moorland to Mirkholme. There, himself unseen in the darkness, he saw Jael Boswell standing before the van door in the leaping fire light.
Looking over the half-screened doorway, and watching her intently, was old Abegail, not a bad type of gypsy, but a gypsy still, and no matter in whose veins the blood of the tribe runs he had learnt to trust them not at all, or as little as possible. Retiring further into the darkness of the whin-clad moorland, he uttered three times the wild, weird cry of the brown owl. The old witch looked in the direction of the sound. Jael stood still, apparently unmoved, but he knew otherwise. He saw her lift the lid from the bule-pan hanging over the fire, and examine the contents.
Satisfied that all was right, she ascended the steps, and entered the van. A few minutes passed, and he heard the old woman cursing her for a pariah, and driving her forth on to the moorland again. By the light of the fire, Jael turned and raising her clenched fists towards the old hag, she poured the most fearful maledictions upon the whole gypsy race, and then fled towards him in the darkness.
"Jael, what is the uproar about?"
"Hush," she said, "the devil himself's abroad tonight."
He laughed, and answered, "No doubt he is. His name is legion, and his machinations are manifest and always abounding."
"Come," she answered, "I have something to tell you."
"Where shall we go, Jael?"
"To Sandyflatts."
"But the house is tenantless."
"You were there last night, Red Ike."
The urgency and straightforwardness of her speech impelled him to follow. Yet as he did so he was debating inwardly how best to hoodwink her, for he knew that he could only enter by the passage from the old well, as he had not only locked the door, but barred it on the inside.
But Jael dispelled his dilemma with the words: "Over the wall with you. I'll follow. I know the way." And before he could answer she led the way, and he followed in her wake.
In the darkness of the empty house, he lit the bull's-eye lantern he had wrenched from Joe Gream, and then hung a quilt before the window, making sure that no gleam of light could be seen from outside. This done, he turned to Jael, and stood transfixed in wonder at the apparition before him. Her eyes were as brilliant as twin dog-stars on a winter night. The glow of her pure skin from her bare shoulders to the forehead was like the tint of a June rose shining through a thin gauze of olive. Her hair, glossy and black as pitch, rolled in delicious waves down to and about her waist. She was moulded like to Milo's Venus, flawless, and thrice as entrancing, being a living woman, alluring, enticing, and with arms outspread towards him. He leapt to her embrace, and time was not; past and future had no meaning. The present alone was reality. . .
Midnight passed. . .
The early hours of another day were at hand by the calling of the moorfowl, and by the indefinable feeling or realization so distinctly understood by all lonely inhabitants of the out-of-the-way places of the world. Not even Wordsworth has fully expressed it, rich as were his gifts of intuition and suggestion.
Jael was sleeping peacefully on the stone flags by his side, the incarnation of natural womanhood. What cared she for the laws of country or church? Being a gypsy, unshackled by custom or convention, she did not understand the meaning of ostracism, and might have cared little had she done so.
To her, the gratification of her instincts was of paramount moment. Earth was her heaven. Red Ike her god, and sensuous delight the realization of the worth of living. A Keats might have flown, from the cold atmosphere of a Fanny Brawne, to that of the rich, warm, and fragrant, if lawless one created by Jael.
Red Ike touched her bare pulsing breast, and in her deep satisfying slumber she spoke his name in such a dreamy, rapturous, abandon of passion that he folded her in his arms and kissed her lips. Yet, even then, he felt that he did not love her, as men adore the ideal woman of their adolescent dreams; in fact he could have parted from her, or seen her happy in another's embrace, without feeling the emotion that had been stirred within him by Peg Shore's infidelity. And yet he knew that she was true and pure, as Peg could never be. He felt with a confident certainty that he was the first dominant sexual power in her life, and knowing this he might have lived with her during the rest of his days had she wished and willed it. But she did not. She had no thought of settling down to a formal routine of life, or breeding through long years of semi-poverty, a brood of future half-civilized children to be the semi-slaves of those who harried the tribe to which she belonged. Her instinct was for a freedom of love that left her with absolute independence of thought and action. Hence she had no desire beyond the present hour, no fear, and no care; she was resourceful in emergency, but without plan; impulsive, loving and daring, a splendid type of animal womanhood. Lacking the low scheming cunning of the house dweller, she was in many ways the exact opposite of Peg Shore. Tomorrow was an unknown quantity, to be reckoned with when it arrived.
So, roused from her sleep, she sat up. A low musical laugh, like the first note of a throstle on an April morning, broke through the darkling room.
"I was dreaming of you, Red Ike."
"And I am here."
Leaping to her feet she ejaculated: "Light the lantern."
"Why, Jael?"
"I can hear the rumble of carts."
"Well, what of that, Jael? The highway lies outside."
"Hist, there is someone at the door."
The lock was shot, and the sneck lifted.
"I told you so," said Jael.
"Blast it!" came a voice from outside, "the door is barred again."
Jael held her finger to her lips: "That's Joe Gream."
The thunder of a huge stone banged against the door shook through the house, but the impact made no impression on the stout iron-barred oak woodwork.
"There's someone else outside, as well as Joe Gream, Jael. I broke his arm yester-night."
A glance from Jael told him she knew.
"He thinks 'twas Will Moffatt."
Red Ike lifted his cudgel as the rumbling cart stopped by the door. Then a hurried consultation followed, and they caught the low, cynical laugh of John Lynd.
"Back the cart against the boarded-up window," he cried.
Ike motioned to Jael to step inside the milkhouse, and blew out the lantern. As she did so, the shuffle of a horse and a grinding cart prepared them for the event. Ike stood in readiness. With a crash the window was hurled out of its bearings into fragments on the kitchen floor. Still he did not move.
The morning was yet dark and overcast. The dawn would be delayed. A wind was rising, and rain was falling. It seemed as though the elements were about to league themselves with the scoundrels outside Sandyflatts. The cart was drawn back from the window on to the highway. Still Ike waited. His time to strike was not yet. They moved cautiously, remembering his assault on Joe Gream the night before.
The flaring light of an old bag saturated with paraffin oil was held through the window, and shone full upon Jael standing in the milkhouse doorway. A howl of jealous rage and amazement broke from Ben Faa, and he leapt upon the window sill. Red Ike's cudgel swung, and knocked him back to the feet of his confederates.
"By God!" exclaimed John Lynd, "I'd burn him out now if he were the devil from hell."
And cursing Will Moffatt as he did so, he backed a cart up to the stoved-in window. By the glare of the burning bag outside, they saw that it was loaded with straw, and that John Lynd held a revolver in his hand.
Joe Gream was at the horse's head. John Lynd set fire to the cart-load of straw, and Ben Faa forked it into the house.
The wind had risen, and rolling peals of thunder broke over the moorland. Great flashes of lightning tore through a deluge of rain, and from time to time would show for an instant the three men at their devilish work.
The two inmates of the house, blinded and choked by the smoke of the burning straw, were driven back to the milkhouse, where they watched, for a time, the furniture blaze up, and heard the downpour of the rain that beat on roof and walls as though to frustrate the attack of the deadlier element.
Thinking it impossible that the house should be saved, they were about to retire into the secret passage to the old well, when there was a rending crash, and part of the roof fell in an inward ruin, as though struck by lightning, or demolished by the fury of the raging storm.
CHAPTER VI
WONDERING how he came to be lying in darkness with a broken head at the well pit bottom, Red Ike sat up and began to collect his thoughts Resting his head upon his hand, as his brain cleared, he tried to find a solution of the strange happenings of the past few days. But in vain. Truly there was mystery upon mystery, and the reason for burning Sandyflatts the crowning mystery of all. It was evident that John Lynd and Joe Gream thought that he, Red Ike, was Will Moffatt. But he knew nothing of any enmity among them. They had always appeared to be friends.
What had come to pass? He gave up the problem.
Then suddenly, and last of all, he thought of Jael. He called her name, and received no answer but the echo of his own voice from the farther end of the secret passage.
Had she perished in the burning house? Anxious and in doubt, he raised himself and made his way to the milkhouse. A sheet of clotted blood caught his sight, but no Jael. He rushed into the kitchen and drew back appalled before the destruction that met his view. The once neat and clean home of Nance Moffatt had become a charred and rain-drenched ruin. He searched around until convinced that Jael, harmed or unharmed, was not there.
Then he fell to wondering how he had got to the bottom of the old well pit. He concluded that he must have been hurt by the falling roof, and that Jael must have dragged and left him there. A chance view through a broken mirror on the charred wall showed that his head was bandaged. Doubtless, he thought, the clotted blood on the milkhouse floor was his. Seeing that there was nothing more that he could hope to discover there, he retired into the secret passage, and lay down again at the bottom of the old well-pit.
It was then little beyond noon. He resolved to take no risks of being recognized by daylight, and so composed himself to sleep, and did not waken till night was far advanced.
He emerged from his resting place into the serene beauty of a starlight sky. A brown owl hooted from the old bullace tree that hung against and over the garth wall. Stretching his limbs, and feeling well and fit despite the experiences of the last two days, he was soon out of the open moorland. When he came to the cattle-pool, fed by the meeting of the three runnels that form the main beck, he stripped and washed. The bandage Jael had wrapped round his head he rolled up carefully, and placed beneath a stone amongst the great clump of broom on the edge of the pool. There was a deep cut across the back of his skull, and feeling it, he found the wound had been carefully trimmed of hair, and salved. He knew that this must be Jael's work, and the thought determined him to go to Mirkholme, and demand to see her. Caution whispered "Beware," but he told himself impatiently that he was afraid of no man, and striding determinedly along he reached the camping ground, and found it deserted. Cursing his luck, and knowing the uselessness of appealing to anyone but Jael to clear up the points that perplexed him. he resolved to circumvent the design (if such it were) of John Lynd and Ben Faa, of hurrying Jael from his reach. So he crossed from Mirkholme at an angle, and made straight for Lonscale gap, and then held eastward, after skirting the shoulder of Saddleback. Within an hour before dawn, he hoped to be at Sour Nook, and felt sure that he should find the gypsies there in camp, in a favourite wooded howe above the banks of the clear-winding Caldew. So he did; and without pause, as being one of themselves, and of a certain welcome, he walked up, and stood before the camp fire. A huge brindled lurcher which he had trained to retrieve its kills, and to do other things as valuable and useful, bounded towards him with joyous contortions of its lithe body. Too well it knew that to bark was to earn for itself a fierce thrashing.
Watchful and silent, he gazed into the blebbing, boiling pan over the fire, guessing that the eyes of Ben Faa, Abegail, and Jael were upon him. Assuming an abstracted, indolent attitude, he waited to see who would be first to speak. After a few moments of suspense, Ben stepped from the van, and accosted him in an off-hand manner, yet with furtive glances over his body, and roused him to an additional alertness.
He could feel the tension between them, and braced himself up for the coming contest, which he knew was inevitable. If by sheer intelligence he could overreach him, well and good, if not, then he would fight him with a good will, though not for Jael, for he did not feel, even then, that the event of the night before, which he had not sought, had united them in an enduring bond. However, as if to remove his suspicions, Ben cast himself upon the ground, and held out a plug of tobacco towards him.
He declined it, saying he did not smoke.
"I had forgotten that," Ben answered, and rolling over on to his back he gazed covertly up at him.
At that moment, old Abegail appeared at the van door.
"Jael, here's Red Ike," she cried.
With the air of an amorous princess of the Arabian Nights Entertainment, Jael stepped from the van, and lightly hailed him. A loosely-fitting robe of amber-coloured merve silk, girdled with a curiously fashioned belt, and fastened with an ivory clasp inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl, added a sensuous grace to her perfect figure. Thrown over her shoulders was a transparent gauze scarf, through which the luscious delight of her dark-glowing healthy skin drew the eye with subtle power, an alluring witchery, arresting attention and capable of overwhelming the balance of a susceptible or artistic nature. Over Red Ike the glamour of her presence fell, but without enthralment. Admiration he would give to beauty in all its forms, whether human or animal, mountain, and lake, and cloud, or bird and flower, but there was an element in his nature that resisted even the domination of beauty. He would be free in his own soul, though the hands of all were against him. He had fallen once to the spell of love, and it had roused him only to anger and self-contempt and a bitter pain. Nor could the memory of what had been during last night - not even that - entirely obliterate from his mind the earlier episode when she had made the first advance, and he had fled from her in the night.
He took the hand that she stretched out to greet him, as she came forward, and said, "Where has Red Ike been since last we met, and why did he leave us?"
The form of the question prompted him to an equal caution. He said, "A presentiment of my mother's death impelled me to return home. She lies buried in the churchgarth over yonder."
Old Abegail, watching in the rear, gave a mocking laugh. "Has the gift of the seer fallen to Red Ike from the gypsy caravans?"
"Stranger things may have happened than that," he replied carelessly.
A curious smile was lurking about Jael's mouth, as she questioned him, as if at random, "Have you heard that. during last night's storm, Sandyflatts was struck with lightning and burned to the ground?"
"No," he answered coolly. "I hadn't heard that. I hope no one was injured."
"We don't know that. Abegail read it in tile crystal. We were on our way to Mirkholme today, but have received an urgent summons to Scotland. We shall be returning at once.
"Wait till tomorrow, and I'll go with you."
At this unfortunate remark, Ben had turned on to his elbow. and in a defiant tone swore there was no room in the van for another traveller. He saw that jealousy alone prompted his surly attitude towards him. Did he really believe, he wondered, that Will Moffatt was with Jael during the burning of Sandyflatts, and that he knew nothing of the affair? Had John Lynd's delusion that, in his encounters with him, he was Will Moffatt, had the effect of dispelling the doubt which he had heard Ben suggest to him when he stood hidden in the black yew tree at The Bents? There was the dissimulation of Jael in his favour, and he resolved to profit by it. He did not believe they meant returning to Scotland. But unless he made a pretence of wishing to go with them, he would have no chance of having any private talk with Jael.
So every objection that Ben made he waved aside, until at the last the gypsy broke out into open and threatening enmity.
But the opposition only stirred Red Ike to a colder determination that he would have his way. The evident jealousy of the gypsy only roused him to an open challenge, for her whom he had thought but a moment since he could resign without difficulty.
With folded arms he looked down on Ben Faa, and taunted him with his lack of good fellowship. Then he turned to Jael, and praised her beauty and dress, thanked her for the affable welcome she had given him, spoke of the delight that he always had in her company; and finally offered her marriage. Would she care to become a house dweller? If so, his hand and heart were hers. A shadow flitted over her features and passed again, and then her face became as inscrutable as the Sphinx that forever and changeless gazes across the desert sands, and forgotten generations of buried cities, temples and gods. She looked at him without reply, and in her eyes was the age-old mystery, the enigma of the daughters of Lilith which is never answered, though it has been asked since the world's dawn.
And while they stood thus, old Abegail thrust herself between them. "Will Jael wed the like of you?" Her voice rose in a shrill derision. "You marrowless scum of a rotten race, born, and cradled, and fed, and doomed to die in the shadow of a superstition at which the gypsies laugh! You, whom law and custom harass through life, like blood-hounds at the heels of a fugitive! You wed our Jael, and crush her free proud spirit into the narrow bounds of a parish no bigger than my hand! Jael, our Jael! The glory of the gypsy race! There's not a camp in the three continents but boasts her beauty, and will own her power. Their hope today, their queen tomorrow, when the film of death glazes the eyes of Abegail Faa."
Red Ike stepped back in astonishment as this tirade was poured upon him. He was about to answer the sibyl when Jael stepped between them and spoke with an aspect of authority, and a natural dignity. "The answer belongs to me. I want no husband but the one of my choice, and my choice today" (she looked straight into the eyes of Red Ike as she said this) "may change tomorrow. I am a free spirit. I will be free as the eagle that broods on the black crags above the highland strath where I was born."
As the old witch realized the tenor of this reply, she drew aside and began to chant a low mystic rune, and to dance, weirdly gesticulating the while, around a curiously carved stick, which she had planted upright in the ground. Ben Faa, who had so far watched the scene without interposing, now lay crouched up like a dog in fear and trembling until the rite was over.
Red Ike said nothing. He looked at the witch's antics with a laugh that was half amusement and half contempt, and then turned and walked a short distance away, and sat down with his back against one of those great upstanding stones erected by early races, which are found dotted, chiefly near the banks of rivers, in the seaward-sloping dales of Cumberland.
The oncoming dawn was now breaking with a faint tinge of orange; anon quivering shafts of light, shot from that wonderful archer, the sun, burnished the orient. Then the great globe itself rose resplendent from the depths of space, and began its circular march again. Red Ike looked at the symbol of human destiny. Of birth and death; of resurrection maybe, and new-born glory; a never-ending process between, at the farthest, every three score years and ten. But to what end? Who can guess?
He thought it to be a strange book that none may read. Nor (he thought) can the sibyl Abegail more than another. No, not by a single step. 'Tis a dark and gloomy vista, and he who hopes and he who doubts may well be fooled at last.
Then a low sweet laugh-sounded on his ears, and rising to his feet he saw Jael, a mocking gleam of merriment in her eyes.
"A penny for your thoughts, Red Ike."
"They'd be dear at that."
"Then they are very worthless."
"I should like to talk with you, Jael."
"So you may, but fate wills that we shall part for the present."
"Nonsense, Jael. In this case I shall take fate into my own hands, and mould it to my will."
"There are too many lumps of clay to begin with at once, and all together," she rejoined. "Deal with each lump separately. Watch and wait. When I can help you I shall."
"Then do you know why Will Moffatt left Sandyflatts, Jael?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Ask Jean Lynd. She'll tell you."
"Where shall I find her, or Will Moffatt?"
"I don't know that."
"Are they together?"
"No."
"Do the three scoundrels who burned down Sandyflatts know that I was there with you last night? Do they think Will Moffatt was with you?"
"They're puzzled."
"Do they think anyone was there with you?"
"They saw no one but me."
"What happened in the milkhouse?"
"Something struck you when the lightning came, or else you stumbled and fell."
"Good. Shall I go with you to Scotland?"
"You can please yourself; you'll have to fight for it if you do."
"Then I shall fight in any case, and please myself whether I go or not afterwards. Why did you speak so strangely, Jael? And why did Abegail dance and chant round the carved stick? And swear by the eyes of the Pyramids and the North Star?"
"To impress a fool, Red Ike."
"Was she conniving with you, or was she in earnest?"
"In deadly earnest. She believes her incantations have an efficacy most powerful, especially when she chants them round the carved stick during the dark hour of night that always precedes the dawn."
"What was she soliciting the fates to do for her?"
"To take you off by death. Did she dare, she would remove you by poison, or the knife. She wishes me to mate with Ben Faa, so that he may become the consort of the gypsies' queen after her day."
"She is not so old, Jael. She may outlive you yet."
"No, no. She is in the grip of an incurable malady. The wonder is that she's alive today. But she has an indomitable will, that does not suffer her to think of defeat or death. She has ruled our scattered tribes with unequalled power since her ascension to the gypsy throne almost forty years ago. She was then a young woman about my age, but thrice as beautiful."
"That is not possible, Jael."
"Next year is her jubilee. She is resolved to live till after that event, which will be celebrated in France within the stone circle of that once mighty structure, the still-imposing and majestic ruin of Carnac. For each standing stone of that wonderful amphitheatre there will be a representative from a gypsy tribe, and I shall be chosen Abegail's successor. And, oh that that cringing dog, whom you saw curled up in abject fear less than an hour ago, were a man like Red Ike! The gypsy consort whom I shall choose - " and here she laughed bitterly - "must be no weak-kneed craven, afraid of the wreck of an old woman, dancing and chanting around a carved stick, and mocked by her own shadow cast by the firelight of a gypsy's camp in the dark hour before dawn."
During this conversation, Red Ike had never taken his eyes from Jael, but though a sign of emotion, well under control beneath a careless laugh, showed itself now and again, she was an inscrutable enigma still. True, her words implied contempt for Ben Faa, and but little respect for the gypsy rites, yet the darkest side of her nature still lay outside the pale of his comprehension. The fact was that he was but glimpsing the undeveloped character of a personality, strong, stern, and unbending. One of those strange types of humanity whose ultimate realization of themselves depends so much upon circumstance, to which they will adapt themselves so readily that it will appear to be their creation, and not, as the fact is, the creator of that which they become.
Red Ike arose from his seat against the upstanding stone just as a gleam of morning sunlight touched Jael with its glory. And lo! she became transfigured; and he, astounded, gazed upon her. She was no longer the gypsy Jael, but another, the veritable counterpart of Jean Lynd, exact in every outline. A sweet, modest, refined woman of the sheltered class. Was he bewitched? There she stood in the flesh before him. A cloud crossed the sun's disc, the glory fell, and he exclaimed - "Jael?"
"Well," she said, "have you seen the devil? You're as white as a ghost."
And the old inscrutable mask of the Sphinx settled upon her face again.
He answered nothing, turning from her presence into the depth of the wooded howe. He broke through the thick undergrowth of bramble and wild raspberry canes, and green five-fingered ground ivy, till he was far enough away from the gypsies' camp to be secure from observation. Glancing round to make sure he had not been followed, he threw himself down amongst luxuriant bracken, on the edge of a bold crag above the swift-flowing, white-foaming, roaring Caldew.
He knew that he had seen that day, with a flash of intuition, that which might have remained for ever an unexpected thing. Jean Lynd was Jael. Jael was Jean Lynd. They were not one single entity, he knew, but the striking resemblance between them was no mere freak of nature, but the sure result of a close relationship of blood, near enough to be guessed at correctly.
This then was the clue to John Lynd's forbearance with the gypsies on his land at Mirkholme. He resolved that he would not abandon the search till he had uncovered the heart of the mystery.
CHAPTER VII
THE sun was past its noon when Red Ike rose refreshed from sleep amongst the cool lush bracken. He descended the face of the crag, and stripping himself by a deep pool he revelled in the ice-cold water.
A snowy-breasted cusel sat on a moss-covered boulder on the far side of the beck, and sang cheerily, as he swam past. A lone dweller in the solitude, had it not learned to distrust the near approach of man, or was it aware by instinct of those who did not mean it harm? He left it still singing there after he had dressed, and ascended the face of the crag, and set out again for the gypsies' camp.
Jael and old Abegail were not to be seen, neither were the horses. Ben was lying asleep, or feigning it. He was couched in a well-defined circular hollow in the centre of the wooded howe. Many such hollows are to be seen in secluded places all over England. They are the game cockpits constructed by our forefathers, and are ten to fifteen yards in circumference. After the passing of the Act against cock-fighting, their use gradually passed from the knowledge of all but the oldest inhabitants of the countryside. Yet around these arenas in the grey light of dawn occasionally gather lovers of this old English sport, even to this day.
He walked up to the van, and seeing that it was unoccupied, sat dawn upon the steps of the doorway. The great brindled lurcher came and stretched itself at his feet. Ben raised himself on to his elbow, and called the dog to him. It blinked up at Red Ike, and wagged its tail, but did not move. With a curse, Ben leapt to his feet and called again to the dog. Still it did not move. Striding forward, he grasped the poor brute by the neck, and began to thrash it unmercifully. Red Ike rose, and strode up to him. The sight roused him to one of the sudden angers which his strength made perilous for those upon whom they fell. His fist caught the gypsy behind the ear, with all his might in the blow. Ben Faa rolled over, and lay still. The dog fled, and crouched its quaking body in the bottom of the old game cockpit.
Red Ike saw that his chance had come. He entered and searched the van. In an open black ebony case which was fixed to the van's side, he saw the carved stick. A small table of the same wood, the top of which was curiously inlaid with ivory, gold and pearls, stood by the bed. He had no time to spare to examine the table-top, but he noticed it was slightly tilted. Raising it further he uncovered a cunningly-devised space in the top of the table-bole in which was a small, black ebony box. Lifting the lid, he glance at the contents. There were some letters, which he thrust hurriedly into his pocket, leaving the empty envelopes. There was also a gold chain, with a pendant attached. He sprang this, and saw inside two miniatures, John Lynd and Jael. Satisfied with the proof it gave, he dropped the bauble back into its box, closed the lid, and left the table-top tilted as he had found it. Then, with the carved stick in his hand, and the key for its locked case in his pocket, he passed from the camp, leaving Ben Faa lying where he had fallen, and the brindled lurcher crouched at the bottom of the old game cockpit.
For the moment, he thought only to retreat to some quiet spot where he could examine the letters without fear of interruption, and consider his future plans.
He had no fear of pursuit. He thought that days might pass before either the letters or the stick would he missed. Probably the gypsies would leave the district at once, and not discover their loss until the old sibyl had again some reason to overawe Ben, or some other members of the tribe. with her gymnastics and contortions and chanted rune. But he knew that when the loss was discovered the whole gypsy tribe would be roused to restore it to her.
He did not think that they would scruple to murder him, if, by so doing, they could regain its possession. He decided that he would consult his own safety, as well as secure its retention, if he should deposit it in a hiding-place which they could not find. He would make straight for Carrick fell, and lie low in the bracken on its mighty breast until nightfall. Avoiding the open country roads, and taking advantage of all available cover, within an hour he was safely ensconced in a position of vantage, whence he could overlook the moorlands that spread below, one wide expanse almost level to the distant Cumbrian capital, that city of contentious border warfare, of legend and song, of Wallace and the Bruce, of Edward Longshanks, of the gallant De Harcla, of Kinmont Will and the bold Buccleugh, and hosts of others of fearless lawless kind, who had played their parts like puppets on the stage of life, to pass at last, one by one, within the shadow of eternity, but to remain reflected through the magic pages of romance, the delight and wonder of the generations that were to follow.
From such thoughts as these, which filled his mind in the long solitary brooding hours, when he would lie out on the huge fells under sun or stars, he was roused to the memory of the peril in which he lay by the sight of the great brindled lurcher, with its nose to the ground, running upon his trail. Eagerly scanning its course, he saw no one in its wake. The brute, responding to the only constant kindness it knew, was coming to share his life. A glad thrill of comradeship swept through him with this realization, and a few minutes later it lay at his feet, welcomed with a caress, and the words of praise that it understood so well.
The carved stick was lying beside him. He took it up, and examined it carefully. Like the table and the box in the gypsies' van, it was black ebony and richly carved with quaint devices of rare invention. The workmanship revealed the skill of a master-hand. A serpent, beautiful and life-like, wound its sinuous form around it from end to end. With mouth agape, the reptile held between its jaws an ivory ball movable on a gold wire pin fixed through the centre. On the ball was carved the universe, the Old and New Worlds, oceans and islands in the minutest detail, the sun, moon, and planets, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. On the stick itself, in addition to the serpent, were carved the nude figures of a man and a woman standing on either side of a Sphinx. There were also birds and fishes, and a wealth of foliage and flowers. The marvel of all was that each object was enamelled in colours with exquisite perfection. A wonderful piece of workmanship, worthy to hold its own with any example of the rarest craftsmanship of Benvenuto Cellini.
The stick was old, undoubtedly, but not earlier than the fifteenth century, as was shown by the representation of the New World.
He was about to lay it aside when, whim-led, he pressed the serpent's jaws. The ball opened in halves, and in dark purple lettering, the colour of human blood, were written these words:
THE GYPSY'S LUCK
"This stick then," he said to himself, "is a fetish, prized, and perhaps held in reverence and awe, by a race that is supposed to hold no religious belief, and to scoff secretly at all human and divine law. The Christian looks up to a cross and the mangled Christ, the Mahometan to the crescent, the gypsy to a stick. And all are swayed by one powerful feeling call it what you will, it is rooted in wonder; it was so at the beginning, and will be till time is not."
Stretched at his ease on the wilds of Carrick fell side, he waited patiently for the coming of night. He had resolved to take refuge for at least a week in an underground drift of an old slate quarry on the steep side of Helvellyn. Once there unseen, he had little doubt that he would be safe from all intrusion, save that of the brown owl, or occasionally the sweetmart, or fell fox.
Thinking himself to have been unseen and unfollowed, he reached his destination by midnight, and after examining every corner of his retreat, he prepared himself a bed on a rough-hewn ledge, with a wisp of dried bracken pilfered from a stack as he came along. Whilst doing this, he noticed a bore in the rock-face about four inches in circumference. and finding it dry he hid the carved stick therein, and sealed it up with a stone and some clay paste.
This done, he sat down on his bed of bracken, when suddenly he remembered the letters he had taken from the black ebony box, which he had forgotten in examining the curiosity of the gypsies' stick.
Now, by the yellow light of a flickering candle, he went over them, till there was only one that was left unread. From them he learned that Jael's mother was daughter to the old sibyl Abegail. That John Lynd, in his early youth, had joined the Faa tribe, and travelled with them over the British Isles, and then through France, Spain, Italy and Egypt. Also that he had been at Carnac when Abegail was enthroned and crowned queen of all the gypsies the world over. There was no open confession in any of them that he was Jael's father, but of that he had no doubt. The letters were all in the handwriting of John Lynd. He was about to read the last one when the lurcher lying at his feet stood up and bristled its back, and turned its erected ears to the entrance of the drift. Laying the unread letter beside the others on the bracken, he went towards the entrance of the drift, to see what might be disturbing the dog. The next instant the report of a revolver rang out. A bullet whizzed past his ear, and struck the candle where he had left it behind him. The light went out. He dropt quickly to the ground, and waited in the darkness.
He's done for," said a voice he did not at once recognize. "I heard him fall."
"Don't be too sure, he's a cunning fox. And he's one to fight like a devil. Strike a light, and I'll shoot again if necessary."
"John Lynd and Ben Faa, by God!" thought the crouching man, "and I'm trapped here like a rat."
"Devil take them," cried Ben, "I've lost the matches."
"Then crawl in, and fetch the letters; you saw where he laid them, on the ledge to the left."
There was a grumbling protest from Ben. It was evident that he did not like the idea. John Lynd's voice was raised in an overbearing anger. "You'll fetch them out, or, by the blood of Red Ike, there'll be another bullet for you."
"Mr. Lynd!"
"Blast you! If I don't hear you move in a second. . . It's your last chance."
Red Ike's arm held the lurcher down while Ben felt his way along the drift for the ledge. Once he stepped on to him, and shrank back from what he thought to be the body of a dead man. Red Ike heard the papers crinkle as Ben Faa picked them up, and crawled back out of the drift.
"I've got them, Mr. - - "
"Hand them here. Is the Red Devil dead?"
"Dead as the Brutchstone," said Ben.
"Damn you, and the Brutchstone. And damn him for a meddling fool. I can smell the reek of his blood from here. Come along now."
The steps and voices withdrew.
Red Ike's first thought as the men passed from the drift, was that the gypsies could not be aware that he had the carved stick, unless John Lynd's impetuous desire to recover the letters had driven, for the moment, the thought of it from Ben Faa's mind. Were there other gypsies he wondered placed on guard to prevent any possible chance of escape from the drift? He could not know, but he felt certain they would return. To clear out quickly was the best thing to do. But at the entrance he paused.
From the opening of the drift an old sledway falls with a sharp incline to the dale below, and here, without warning, detached boulders will often break from their hold on the crag-face that frowns above, and roll with frightful speed, rumbling like thunder on their course, and carrying death to man or beast that stands in their path. Red Ike had seen such falls smash trees a century old like matchwood, and fly at last into a thousand splinters on striking the debris of their shattered fellows, heaped in fantastic and motionless disorder. There they lie like buried generations of bygone mortals - waiting, waiting, waiting for they know not what.
Now, as Red Ike stood at the entrance, he heard the warning, sliddering, crackling noise of the crags in motion above him. He drew back into the drift and listened. A terrific roar like thunder broke the midnight silence. Thousands of tons of crag fell sheer from the heights above, and crashed headlong down the brant incline of the old sledway, and he knew that only by a miracle could John Lynd and Ben Faa have escaped death on their way to the dale below. But it was still his need to find another and safer shelter, and he again made his way to the entrance, which had become darker now, so that he must feel his way by the wall.
He found that it was now almost entirely blocked by a huge boulder several tons in weight. With great difficulty he squeezed himself through an aperture, beyond which he could see the stars, and, followed by the lurcher, he stood once more under the wide sky. But what a scene met his gaze! Tons on tons of rock blocked the one-time sledway. Falling on hands and knees, he crept along until he found himself once more among the bracken and whins.
Elated at his escape, he stood up and swept his glance from peak to peak of the dark looming heights around him.
The Pole star was on his right, and so, turning leftward, he climbed to the summit of the fell, and lying down beside a cairn of stones, slept with the lurcher curled up beside him,; until the blackcocks crowed to the advancing dawn.
His nerves braced with sleep and the high mountain air, he felt fit and ready to do battle in a just cause with any living man. The lurcher stood looking up into his face with. the questioning gaze that the poacher knows so well, and that is rarely noticeable in any but a highly-trained intelligent crossbred s eyes.
Stooping, he caressed it, and said, "Good lad, how-way fetch."
With arched back, and wagging tail, and nose to the ground, it completed three-quarters of a circle, struck the "drag" of something that had passed in the dark, and bounded into the thick bracken. Shortly, a shrill scream told its own tale, and the lurcher, with the air of a conqueror, came racing back, and laid a splendid hare at his feet.
One good meal a day is enough for a dog, no matter how hard it be worked, and, strange though it seem, the garbage. of a new-killed rabbit or hare is preferred to the fleshy portions. Had it been otherwise, it is likely that Red Ike would have made a smaller meal. As it was, he took the two hams for himself, and the lurcher had the feast of a lifetime.
The sweet morning air, rich with the blended scents of heather and late-flowering whins, and a thousand blooms that come to perfection in early autumn on the Lakeland fells wandered on a light south-west wind. Far and near the voices of the inhabitants of deep solitudes fell on the ear. The bark of a raven gloating at the sight of a stricken sheep, the sharp cries of a pair of kestrels, the lowing of cattle, the neighing of fell-bred ponies, the bleat of wild goats, and then the loud blast of a hunter's horn rousing the sluggards in the valleys below to rise and join the hunt.
Tally Ho! Tally Ho! Tally Ho! Hurrah for Blencathra! The most splendid pack that ever threaded a mountain pass. Fleet as lightning, and with sinews of steel, they are out to track the plundering fox, and run him to earth. Yonder they go, Tally Ho! Tally Ho! Five-and-twenty couple. White, black-and-white, and liver-and-white, with tails erect and stiff, running in full cry. Up the steeps of Latrigg, through leagues of bracken and ling. Away! Away! They are turning for the deep dens in Skiddaw forest, where the peat-moss, spongy and springy, defies the feet of man to make quick headway, but over which the light feet of the greyhound fox, that knows every inch of the pathless waste, passes swift and sure. Red Ike heard their chiming cries, faint and far and mellow with distance, and knew that very shortly the whole pack would burst into view over the heights of Blencathra, or the Hill of Devils. Yonder they came, tireless and relentless, not a straggler amongst them. A glorious sight, that makes the pulse dance, and the eye flash with the lust of the chase, that terrible instinct that lies latent within us all, and, though unguessed at, is yet close to the roots of life itself.
He now watched the fox, glimpsed again and again as he made straight for the ancient borrans amongst the crags that fell last night. Poor Reynard, flee thou to another shelter. Here there is none. What the fates will must be. From a thousand feet above he saw the fox running to the dale below him, and, standing upright on his hind legs, gaze in wonder at the masses of rock lying before him. He could see him sniffing the air. Clearly he was nonplussed and unable to decide his next move. The pack behind, ever drawing nearer and nearer, and in front almost impassable piles of sharp-edged newly-splintered rocks, with no known track amongst them The old sledway was blotted out of existence. The borrans his fore-elders had known and inhabited from time immemorial were no more. Buried under tons of debris, those erstwhile populous catacombs would never again be the noisome mansions of the four-footed denizens of the wild. That day was past and gone. Realizing the hopeless and helpless position he was in, he turned and faced his pursuers. He could die snarling and fighting. A not inglorious end, when the odds are fifty to one. Dropping into position, he waited the oncoming rush of the foremost hound, a gallant bitch, bred from the renowned John Peel strain. The "drag" being hot, she ran up to him before realizing the nearness of her prey. Red Ike saw both their backs bristling, then the fox dart forward like a red bolt and bury his claws in the hound's eyeballs, but ere he again recoil, the ravenous pack had seized and torn him into a thousand shreds.
By this time the foremost hunters were on the scene, and soon a small group gathered in animated discussion. The hounds were called together and coupled, a sure sign that the hunt was being abandoned for the day.
Closely and eagerly, he watched their next movements. Had someone been caught, and maimed or killed by the fall of rock? Yes, they were slinging a dark object across a horse. He would have given much to know, but would not change his position to see whither they bore it. John Lynd might yet be alive. When they turned towards Mirkholme, the gypsies' camping ground, he knew at least that some of the tribe were again at their old haunt.
Having leisure to think, Red Ike began to ask himself whether he had done right or wrong to steal the carved stick? It was worthless to him, who had no love for curios. As long as he kept it from the gypsies, he judged his life would be safe. He did not consider that it might have a money value. That they would use whatever extreme measures, short of his death (which would not help them), to discover its whereabouts, he did not doubt. But if he kept his own counsel, not even an expert quarryman, let alone the gypsies, in spite of their boasted occult knowledge and divination, would be able to unearth it from its tomb. Of that he was certain. He doubted, even, if anyone but himself could find the drift. For the entrance was almost blocked, and the whole surface of the crags had been changed by the fall.
But thinking to see for himself how far the fall had extended, he was in the act of descending to the drift when he beheld two figures advancing rapidly towards the dale from Mirkholme. Withdrawing himself into the bracken again, he lay down with the lurcher beside him. He pointed out the distant figures to it, and knew that it recognized one of them by the quick tension of its body, and he guessed rightly that Ben Faa was alive and well. On a nearer approach he recognized John Lynd also. He too had escaped. Who then had been killed by the fall of rock? Probably a gypsy sentry, if such had been with them.
Now anyone lying a thousand feet above a dale, if the wind is favourable, can hear distinctly a conversation taking place below him.
Red Ike lay there, feeling, curiously enough, no resentment towards either of the men as they approached, but rather a curious satisfaction in knowing that he had outwitted them so far, and was master of the situation. He had the carved stick, and he knew the contents of all the letters but one; though that one, as he could not guess, contained the most vital information of them all.
He watched them coming through the narrow opening of the dale mouth, and then ascend the very boulder from which the fox, standing upon his hind legs, had surveyed the new-piled fragments of rocks that blocked the way to the borrans and the drift.
What would they do next?
He was not kept long in doubt. John Lynd led the way. He could hear him cursing the gypsy, body and soul, as they scrambled along, until both stood directly below him.
"Right here was the location of the accursed hole," said John Lynd, "and I'll be damned if there's a vestige of it to be seen. I m sure of the spot. That rowan-tree, that now overhangs the face of the cliff, grew twenty paces further back before the fall. There is no doubt that Red Ike and the carved stick are buried for ever, and a noble cairn they've got. May the fires of hell consume them both!"
When the gypsy spoke his voice had a strange ring. "Neither hell-fire nor any element can harm the carved stick. It is immune from decay or destruction. It was grown on the shore of the Dead Sea when the world was young, and under the charm of a mighty wizard, whose direct descendants are Abegail and Jael. Were it hidden in the very centre of the earth itself, it would finally be restored into the keeping of the gypsy queen."
"Then why the devil bother about coming to recover it?" The slow wit of the gypsy found no ready answer, and without further parley the two departed whence they came.
CHAPTER VIII
RED IKE crept back to Sandyflatts in the night, and made it his abode for several weeks, never stirring out by daylight, and living on the toll of game that the lurcher and he took, ranging several miles over the moors. By this time his beard was a foot long, so that it, and his unkempt shaggy hair, both as red as a fox, gave him a wild and unrecognizable appearance. He would have been hard for any to know, except by the tone of his voice.
It was November now, and the long nights were in his favour, enabling him to travel miles out and in before dawn. The freedom from restraint, combined with constant bodily exercise on fell and moorland, made his already robust constitution as hard as adamant. He became fleet-footed, reckless of danger, and of such abounding spirits that he laughed to scorn the idea of anyone grappling with and holding him in the dark, or of running him down, be the race ever so far.
To dispose of his poached merchandise, he waylaid travelling butchers when returning from their country rounds, and never haggled over the price when selling it to them, or bargaining for future orders. He only stipulated the times and places of meeting, and that they must come alone and ask no questions, nor pry into his mode of life, nor inquire who or what he was. They were well content to keep a still tongue, making the bargains they did.
Whilst he was thus waiting one night at the cross-roads, it being near the Martinmas hiring fairs, the jostling of show-men's vans crossing the moorland on their way to Carlisle kindled a fierce desire within him to mingle with the crowds that foregather there. A longing possessed him to see the wild horse-play of the dancing lofts and drinking dens, and to listen to the merry songs and tales, only to be heard at such times and in such places, from the mouths of scallywags and loose women, often no better than ministers of lust and disease, who flit from fair to fair, until they fall out of existence in some loathsome lazar-house, or die by their own hands in the throes of insanity.
He had withdrawn into the shelter of a thick clump of whin bushes as the vans were passing, when a white lurcher bitch trotted up and rubbed itself against him, and before he could lay hold of his own dog both had disappeared into the darkness.
At the cross-roads he waited the dog's return until the dawn was about to break, and then hurried home to Sandyflatts. But the dog was not there.
Surmising that it had followed the showmen to Carlisle, and was now probably a prisoner chained to one of the vans, he resolved to go to Carlisle Fair in search of it, and by the next night he had taken up his quarters in Dan Lockering's lodging-house, hiring his bed for two nights. This was the most disreputable lodging in the city, but probably the only one that would have admitted him in his unkempt condition. Thinking he was a hanger-on of the shows, no one took the least notice of him, so, after his supper of ale and bread and cheese, he stripped himself stark-naked, as enforced by the regulations of the house, counted what money he had brought with him, and handed it and his clothes to the landlord for safe keeping. Then he slipped into bed, beside an unknown roadster-as nude as himself. But not to sleep. Fresh arrivals kept thundering on the door continually, and the stifling, fetid atmosphere of the place at last became unbearable. Jumping out of bed, to the wonder and annoyance of his bedfellow, he roared for the landlord, and cursing his lice, fleas and all creation, demanded his clothes, dressed himself and sat in the kitchen until morning - the morning of the day that was to prove one of the most eventful in his life.
All that day he dodged from van to van in the hope of finding his lurcher, but without success. Chagrined and disappointed, at the edge of the evening he went into The Roaring Militia Man Inn, and called for a drink. A goodly company was in the room, and a general smile broke out amongst them at his appearance and unexpected order. The landlord, looking him over, asked him to step round to the bar at the back of the house, where he would be served. This he refused to do, and sat doggedly and stolidly still. Seeing he was, or might be, a rough customer to meddle with, the landlord laughed, and jokingly said, "All right, Man Friday." Red Ike took no notice of this, nor of the many uncalled for and unsavoury remarks passed about him, making allowance for the merry jests of the fair day. However, when jest became license, and a young fellow tilted his hat to the side of his head, and called him the King of the Yahoos, he pushed him aside with an impatient gesture, and when he came at him again and lifted up his chin to look into his face, he rose to his feet, and with a double fist, and all his force, caught him under the jaw, knocking him into a heap at the far side of the room.
"Christ! I thought he was an old man," ejaculated the startled landlord.
"I only want to be left alone. Can't I have a quiet drink without being insulted here? You," pointing to his late tormentor, "are the type of riff-raff whom the landlord should order round to the back bar to drink." He then drained his glass, and was about to depart when the landlord laid a hand on his shoulder, and said, "Sandy, do you want a job?"
Red Ike guessed the job that would be offered after the scene that had just occurred. He asked only: "The price?"
"A pound."
"Right." And he was forthwith engaged to be the chucker-out at The Roaring Militia Man for the rest of the drinking hours that night. Not a position of high importance in law-abiding England, but nevertheless one with possibilities of trouble on a night like that.
A cold heavy sleet came on as the night advanced, and the dense crowds on the fair grounds began to disperse, the lesser and more staid portion to the peace and warmth of their homes, the larger and wilder and more insatiable, to the dancing lofts and drinking dens.
During the day, he had not seen a gypsy, although he had scanned closely and keenly the hucksters of both sexes vending their trashy wares to a credulous people, whom no amount of trickery practised upon them takes a step farther on the road to wisdom. Autolycus was here as of old, a merry rogue and wise in his day and generation, making use of the talents he had to his own benefit, and letting the foolish world jog along as it liked.
Soon The Roaring Militia Man became packed to the doors, and hard drinking and uproarious shouting and singing was the order of the hour.
Red Ike sat behind the bar, on the edge of a beer barrel, drinking glass after glass, content that no disturbance was taking place to call for his interference, when Jael's voice, sweet and clear as a bird's, came to him from the adjoining room. Her singing, to the accompaniment of a guitar, hushed everyone to silence.
She had come to the fair then, he thought, in spite of the belief of John Lynd and Ben Faa that he had perished under the fall of rock. He remembered his promise when released from prison, that he would meet her here, and for the first time in their acquaintance he felt for her a feeling new and strange to him. Yet had he not loved Peg Shore? And the memory of that dark incident in his life, the scene at the Brutchstone, still rankled in his breast. No, he would not trust Jael. She might be no better than Peg, and he thrust the delight of her from mind and heart, swallowing glass after glass of noxious hell-fire, that it might turn his thoughts from a temptation to which he was resolved that he would not yield.
Meanwhile Jael, unconscious of his nearness, sang song after song, now a merry ditty, now some tender Border lay whose liquid burden, distilled and purified through the medium of her rich nature, was pouring out unconsciously upon a fair-day rabble, for a few pence, the suppressed vehemence of a passionate, hopeless love. For whom?
For Red Ike; and what was he? Nothing, but yet a saint to what he was shortly to become in the mouths of men.
And now he fell to wondering. Was Ben Faa with her? He would see that for himself. Yes, he was there collecting into a hat the money at the end of each song. Red Ike clenched his fists, and felt a sudden desire to throttle him Yet he knew that he had no right to interfere between him and Jael. If she wished to attend the fair, for whatever purpose, it was no concern of his. He had heard her declare herself a free woman, with the absolute right to bestow herself whenever and on whomsoever she thought fit. Yet the devil of jealousy tore at his heart, and his drink-addled brain was past the stage where calm reason is possible. Gloomily he returned to his seat on the beer barrel, and called for his glass to be filled again.
The hours took wings and flew under the spell of song and drink. until but one remained before the roysterers at The Roaring Militia Man would be turned out of doors.
Even yet, the night might have passed in peace, had not a free fight broken out, some trivial drunken quarrel, in the room where Jael was singing and playing. Doing no more than the duty for which he had been engaged, Red Ike pushed his way into the room, crying "Hold!" and flourishing his cudgel above his head.
But at the sound of his voice, Ben Faa started back, yelling Red Ike! Red Ike!"
"Or his ghost," he shouted in answer.
Jael forced her way through the press, the guitar still in her hand. She laid a hand upon his bare neck, and the blood leapt lusting through his veins at her touch.
"Nay," she said, "he's quick."
"Yes," he cried, "and by the carved stick and the devils in hell, a match for the whole bloody gypsy tribe."
At that word, a sign passed amongst five or six of them that had gathered there, and like mad dogs they leapt upon him, and like dogs he threw them backward to right and left, striking them down with the cudgel, one by one, till the space around him was clear. Then he saw Ben Faa, skulking behind Jael, while he shouted the others on. He stepped forward to settle him too, but spreading wide her arms so that he could not strike without harming her, and looking him straight in the eyes, she said quickly: "Enough, Red Ike, I'm afraid there's blood on your hands already."
Then, turning to Ben, and pointing to the door, her voice hoarse with emotion, she said: "Go - Go."
Like a beaten cur he sidled past into the darkness and sleet outside.
Bending over the limp prostrate bodies on the floor, Jael examined each, and then stepping up to Red Ike she whispered - " Fool, you've killed the Weasel. Clear off, while you can." But it was too late for that. Before he could gather his wits to realize the enormity of his act, or the desperate position in which he stood, Ben Faa was back, and half a dozen stave-armed constables blocked the way to freedom and the open moors. Seeing no chance of escape, he held out his wrists for the gyves in a sullen silence, and was marched off to the doom that overshadowed him.
CHAPTER IX
RED IKE stood his trial for murder at Carlisle. at the New Year Assizes. The principal witness against him was Ben Faa, and if hard swearing could have hanged him, our tale would have ended there. But Jael offered herself as a witness on his behalf, and showed that he had not even been in the room when the fight began. She said that he had no interest in the quarrel in which it originated, and had not known the dead gypsy, even within an hour of his death.
The judge eyed her keenly and watchfully as she gave this testimony. "Wait a moment," he said, when her cross-examination was concluded, and she would have left the box. "There are a few questions that I should like to ask you. . . The dead man was no friend of yours?"
"He was not a friend nor an enemy," she answered. "I did not know him at all."
"But he was one of your tribe?"
"He was a French gypsy who had just come to England." She went on to explain that he was one of several who had come to make arrangements with the English tribes to send members to attend a great festival to be held in Carnac the following year.
"What is the purpose of this festival?"
"To crown a gypsy queen."
The judge made no comment on this. It was not easy to tell what he thought. But Red Ike noticed that John Lynd, who had been in court since the trial commenced, seemed to wince at the words, and a pallor spread over his face, which puzzled him, so that he forgot for a moment the peril in which he stood.
But the judge's questions went on. "How long have you known the prisoner?"
"Several months."
"Under what conditions and where?"
"He was with our tribe in Scotland for some months."
There was a moment's silence as the judge considered this answer. He knew that there was falsehood either in her evidence or that of Ben Faa. There was a man's life on the issue of which of them should be believed. That was for the jury to say, but it was his part to guide them to the right end. He was a merciful judge, but there had been too much of lawless and sometimes murderous violence at that fair during recent years. An example was needed. and if Ben Faa had told the truth. . . He watched the witness intently as he said, in his quiet way, "He was with your tribe in Scotland for some months - will you swear that, beyond that, there has been no personal intimacy between you and the prisoner, either at that time, or since?"
There was a hushed silence in the court, waiting for her reply, as Jael looked at the judge, meeting him with a gaze that was as inscrutable as his own.
"My lord," she said, "I came here only to tell the truth. I did not know that I should be asked such a question as that. The prisoner is a house-dweller. He is of your own kind. I am a nomad, and there is a gulf between us that neither could ever cross. He is nothing to me."
As she said this, she thought of the great traditions of her own race. Of their tents in the frozen North, where they had been the first men, camping around the icy Pole: of their wanderings through the then tropical Siberian forests where the mammoth ranged: of China: of Egypt: of how they wandered today in every part of the world, having no tenure, no dominion, no ties but the common bond of the gypsy blood, which to contaminate is the unpardonable sin.
"My lord," she added, "you may know that we gypsies go with our own kind."
The judge weighed her answer in a very shrewd mind. He saw that which she did not say, and if he had made a guess, he might have been near the truth. But he saw also that she was one who would not easily lie, even with some cause. He said, "Then you can swear that the evidence you have given the Court is not biased by any personal feeling?"
She answered boldly to that, "I swear it by the bones of my ancestors under the Polar ice, by the eyes of the Pyramids that point to those graves for ever, and by the Sacred Stick, which is the symbol of all we are "
The judge said "That is all." Afterwards he summed up fairly enough. It might be murder or manslaughter. It was for the jury to say. If they were in doubt. . . They took the hint. They agreed on a verdict of manslaughter, almost as soon as they left the box.
But the judge did not take a light view of the crime. An unarmed man had been killed. The prisoner had been in trouble before. Jael might call him a house-dweller, but the description did not fit overwell. The jury had very properly given him the benefit of the doubt. It became his part to give him a sentence of seven years, with hard labour.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER I
IN the early Autumn of 1890, after an absence of seven years, William Moffatt came back to Sandyflatts.
The previous afternoon he had tramped from Carlisle to Sebergan, and slept during the night at a wayside inn on the outskirts of that village. After breakfast he had called the host, and after paying what seemed to him a wonderfully cheap reckoning, he set out, having timed himself to reach his destination by sunrise. The night had been clear and frosty. With a light raincoat thrown over his shoulder, and a stout stick in his hand, he stepped out into the darkness of the winter's morn.
Full of health, having come to mature manhood, and feeling sure of himself in every way, he strode briskly along. His way lay over one of the wildest mountain passes in the Lake District, but he had travelled it so often, in past years, and at every season, that he could have crossed it blindfolded and in as straight a course as a heath-going sheep.
When he reached the summit of the pass he was half-way on his journey. A new moon like a sickle was visible oh the skyline, and Orion, girt with his shining belt of stars, was standing on the farthest rim of the distant Solway sea, into which he was about to plunge, to be resurrected again by the revolution of the circling universe.
Gazing over the wide expanse of space from his lofty stand, he beheld the infinite majesty of the starry creation outspread before him on all sides like a scroll, and bowing his head to the unknown power that brought it into being, he instinctively and dumbly worshipped in the presence of that great Panthos whose spirit he felt, with Aristotle, to be the very essence of thought which shall endure forever.
As the mood passed, he resumed his journey and began to descend the fell at whose foot lies the moor on the far centre of which stands Sandyflatts.
Around him he could feel the presence of the wanderers of the night returning to the shelter of borran and cave, surfeited with the flesh and blood of their hapless victims. He heard the bark of a fox within a few yards; the hoarse croak of a startled heron sailing past on the wind; the yelp of weasel or stoat; and the wild whoop of the owl calling its mate back from the chase to its home in the old disused close-head quarry.
Suddenly he felt a sharp wind rise, and begin to bite his ears, and turning his face towards the crest of the Hill of Devils he saw the first faint streak of morning light flushing the dawn. He was now within a quarter of a mile of Sandyflatts, and hurrying forward he stood opposite the bourtree that blocks the doorway, just as the sun surmounted the fells, and shot a shaft of prismatic haze over the outermost southern stone of the Druids' Circle, and enveloped him in its glory on the flagstone of the doorstep of his old home.
With a sense of satisfaction, he stood and surveyed the scene before him. The distant fells almost to their very tops looked black and forbidding, except where the brown bracken was tinged with winter sunlight. Wherever juniper or heather grew rankly, those particular parts of the fells seemed devoid of vegetation. It is the dead brown bracken alone that gives such a wonderful charm to Lakeland fells in wintertime.
In the distance, here and there, the smoke from lonely farms began to taint the morning air with the unmistakable scent of burned peat; and the halloo of shepherds, and the barking of dogs, told him that soon these inseparable companions of solitudes would begin to breast the toilsome mountain tracks in search of straggled members of their hardy flocks. Just as there are oases in the deserts, so are there patches of sweet herbage in the innermost recesses of the fells, and thither, despite the most careful watch of their shepherds, the oldest sheep will often wander. The danger is that, unless they be kept during winter months within an easy journey from the farms, they may be overtaken with sudden snowstorms, and perish in the deepening drifts.
Coming within sight of his childhood's home, after so long an absence, it may seem strange that he should have stood thus, within sight, and yet delayed to approach it. But it had puzzled him more than once, on the journey back, to say why he should return at all.
Driven, as he had been, as a leper from the neighbourhood, he came back to gaze upon the scenes of his childhood, having, with one possible exception, no friends in the district, no acquaintances with whom he could expect to be on terms of more than formal speech. Even the woman he had loved had become little more than a shadowy figment of the brain, a lost ideal that sometimes taunted him with an unrealizable desire, and at others had been a lure to turn his face on the homeward path.
And then one night below him, on the darkening Narragansett waters, where the stately passenger ships plying between New York and Boston were lighted from stem to stern, a vessel had glided past with the band in the first class saloon playing The Waeful Heart. Oh, what is the thing called tune? In a moment's space it seemed to him that he had lived through an eternity of anguish and despair, and as deep calls to deep, he arose and faced the pathway of the river to the Atlantic ocean, calling aloud, "My love, I come."
And on that impulse, no richer than when he had gone out seven years before, he had come back to his childhood's home.
CHAPTER II
BEFORE leaving Sandyflatts, Will Moffatt had boarded up all the windows, locked and double-barred the doors, and cemented a blue rammel flagstone over the chimney-top, to keep the owls and jackdaws from nesting in it, or descending into the rooms below during his uncertain absence. He had then squeezed himself through the milkhouse window and bricked that up, and turned his back on Sandyflatts, The Bents, the wild fells and moors, his mother's grave, and the woman he loved. His return, like his departure, was unnoticed and unknown to any. Now he approached a house which seemed little changed when seen from a distance in the winter dawn.
There was still the old bourtree blocking the door, still the over-hanging ivy, still the lintel of blue rammel stone with the rude carving J. & E.D. 1669, to propound the mystery of who built it, which there were no title deeds left to show. So he noticed first the ivy over the walls and windows, and not that the house was roofless and windowless, until, parting with his stick the ivy that dropped across the door lintel, a startled robin flew into the kitchen, and perched upon the rannel boke of the fireplace. Then he clambered after the robin, and gazed upon the desolation around him. The charred remains of his old home told their own tale. Yet he was not greatly affected by the sight. He knew that, unless his prospects and circumstances altered considerably for the better, Sandyflatts could no more be a resting-place after his day's labour, nor a sanctuary he could enter, and shut himself in from the hostility or coldness of the world. But who had set fire to all his possessions, and why had the thing been done?
He now began to search the ruins, and noticed that the small milkhouse at the back was intact, and pushing open the low door, he struck a light and entered the room. The sconces where his forbears had set up their milk to cream, and where his mother and he had cured their yearly supply of bacon, was, with the aid of rude unbarked posts and layers of firwood, improvised into a comfortable bedstead, and littered with a heap of bracken. In a corner was a stool, originally meant for clipping sheep on. These things were all the place contained, and he could see that it was, or had been very recently, used as a sleeping-room. Having seen all he could, he was about to leave the place when he heard someone step through the branches of the bour tree in the outer doorway; and slipping hastily aside into a corner he awaited developments. Within a minute he could feel beside him in the palpable darkness the body of a man, and knew by the smell of him and by instinct that he was in the presence of a healthy and vigorous personality. He seemed to have brought with him the very life and breath of the moorlands and the sense of the wild nature upon them.
Without a word he threw something heavy, and what Will Moffatt judged to be a bag of game, from his shoulders to the floor, and stepping with unerring precision towards the window that Will had bricked up years before, he struck a match, and lighted a candle. "Red Ike."
In a moment he had snatched up a stout cudgel, and swung round to face the intruder.
Will Moffatt held out his hand, but he looked doubtfully at him, keeping his cudgel poised and ready to strike. "What fetches a stranger here?" said he.
"I have come to see my old home, Ike, and surely you are the last man in the world to deny me the privilege."
"This place belongs to Will Moffatt, and until he comes to claim it, I shall allow no man to set an uninvited foot in its walls."
"But, Ike, I am Will."
"You are? Then step outside, and let me see you in daylight and I shall make sure."
They went out together, and Ike said doubtfully, "You're like him. Can you tell me what we saw pass between Peg Shore and Joe Gream at the Brutchstone?"
Will Moffatt described the occurrence.
"Aye, you're Will Moffatt sure enough. There are but four folk alive who know that."
"Then we are friends, Ike?"
"For life, Will Moffatt."
"How does it happen that I find you living at Sandyflatts in this manner, Ike?"
"Why did you leave Sandyflatts, Will?"
"Through misfortune and the loss of a woman, Ike."
"Your reasons for leaving the countryside are mine for burying myself in it. Come back into my den." And turning he led the way. Motioning to the shearing-stool, he sat upon the bed-edge, and began:
"You wonder at finding me here at Sandyflatts, and now that you've turned up again I can leave it when I choose. No. Don't interrupt. Wait until I explain myself. It's a long tale to tell."
With the memory of old-time friendship quickening in the hearts of both, they sat there while Red Ike told the events which had followed Will's disappearance, and of the disaster which had wrecked his life.
Red Ike had been released from prison but a week ago.
"I came back," he said, "at once, and made myself a bed of bracken on the sconce of the old milkhouse, and settled down to await your return."
"You felt sure I would come back?"
"Yes. I was sure of that. Had not the spirit of your mother begged me to wait? My one fear was that you might return, and I should not be here."
"What do you mean to do now?"
"Drift to the devil, I suppose. I've nothing to live for now."
Before Will could answer there was the sound of a dog whimpering round the door. The next moment it burst its way in.
Red Ike leapt to his feet, with his head thrown back. He. said, "It's the lurcher, by God!"
The dog stood still as a stone, save for the act of respiration, studying Red Ike and showing its wonder that it was not welcomed by the questioning of its brown eyes, the attitude in which it held its body, and even more definitely by the curve of its long stiffened tail.
"Ike, have you nothing to say to that? You have one true mate in the world even yet."
He held out his open hand towards the lurcher, which raised itself on its hind legs, walked forward, and put its right paw i