The Shadow of a Crime Part 10

"G.o.d help me! O G.o.d, help me!" he cried.

"Give me the reins," said Ralph, "and be here when I come back. I can't be long. Keep the door of the kitchen shut--mother is there. Go into his room, and see that all is ready."

"No, no, I can't do that." w.i.l.l.y was shuddering visibly.

"Remain here, at least, and give no warning when I return."

"Take me with you, Ralph; I can't stay here alone."

"Take the lantern, then," said Ralph.

And the brothers walked, with the mare between them, to where the path was, under the shadow of the trees. What shadow had fallen that night on their life's path, which Time might never raise? Again and again the horse slipped its foot on the frozen road. Again and again w.i.l.l.y would have stopped and turned back; but he went on-he dared not to leave his brother's side. The dog howled in front of them. They reached the spot at last.

Angus Ray lay there, his face downwards. The mighty frame was still and cold and stiff as the ice beneath it. The strong man had fallen from the saddle on to his head, and, dislocating his neck, had met with instant death. Close at hand were the marks of the horse's sliding hoofs. She had cast one of her shoes in the fall, and there it lay. Her knees, too, were still bleeding.

"Give me the lantern, w.i.l.l.y," said Ralph, going down on his knees to feel the heart. He had laid his hand on it before, and knew too well it did not beat. But he opened the cloak and tried once more. w.i.l.l.y was walking to and fro across the road, not daring to look down. And in the desolation of that moment the great heart of his brother failed him too, and he dropped his head over the cold breast beside which he knelt, and from eyes unused to weep the tears fell hot upon it.

"Take the lantern again, w.i.l.l.y," Ralph said, getting up. Then he lifted the body on to the back of the mare that stood quietly by their side.

As he did so a paper slipped away from the breast of the dead man.

w.i.l.l.y picked it up, and seeing "Ralph Ray" written on the back of it, he handed it to his brother, who thrust it into a pocket unread.

Then the two walked back, their dread burden between them.

CHAPTER VI. THE HOUSE ON THE MOSS.

When the dawn of another day rose over Shoulthwaite, a great silence had fallen on the old house on the moss. The man who had made it what it was--the man who had been its vital spirit--slept his last deep sleep in the bedroom known as the kitchen loft. Throughout forty years his had been the voice first heard in that mountain home when the earliest gleams of morning struggled through the deep recesses of the low mullioned windows. Perhaps on the day following market day he sometimes lay an hour longer; but his stern rule of life spared none, and himself least of all. If at sixty his powerful limbs were less supple than of old, if his Jove-like head with its flowing beard had become tipped with the h.o.a.r frost, he had relaxed nothing of his rigid self-government on that account. When the clock in the kitchen had struck ten at night, Angus had risen up, whatever his occupation, whatever his company, and retired to rest. And the day had hardly dawned when he was astir in the morning, rousing first the men and next the women of his household. Every one had waited for his call.

There had been no sound more familiar than that of his firm footstep, followed by the occasional creak of the old timbers, breaking the early stillness. That footstep would be heard no more.

Dame Ray sat in a chair before the kitchen fire. She had sat there the whole night through, moaning sometimes, but speaking hardly at all.

Sleep had not come near her, yet she scarcely seemed to be awake. Last night's shock had more than half shattered her senses, but it had flashed upon her mind a vision of her whole life. Only half conscious of what was going on about her, she saw vividly as in a gla.s.s the incidents of those bygone years, that had lain so long unremembered.

The little cottage under Castenand; her old father playing his fiddle in the quiet of a summer evening; herself, a fresh young maiden, busied about him with a hundred tender cares; then a great sorrow and a dead waste of silence,--all this appeared to belong to some earlier existence. And then the sun had seemed to rise on a fuller life that came later. A holy change had come over her, and to her transfigured feeling the world looked different. But that bright sun had set now, and all around was gloom. Slowly she swayed herself to and fro hour after hour in her chair, as one by one these memories came back to her--came, and went, and came again.

On Rotha the care of the household had fallen. The young girl had sat long by the old dame overnight, holding her hand and speaking softly to her between the outbursts of her own grief. She had whispered something about brave sons who would yet be her great stay, and then the comforter herself had needed comfort and her voice of solace had been stilled. When the daylight came in at the covered windows, Rotha rose up unrefreshed; but with a resolute heart she set herself to the duties that had dropped so unexpectedly upon her. She put the spinning-wheel into the neuk window-stand and the woo-wheel against the wall. They would not be wanted now. She cleared the sconce and took down the flitches that hung from the rannel-tree to dry. Then she cooked the early breakfast of oatmeal porridge, and took the milk that the boy brought from the cow shed and put it into the dishes that she had placed on the long oak table which stretched across the kitchen.

w.i.l.l.y Ray had been coming and going most of the night from the kitchen to his own room--a little carpeted closet of a bedroom that went out from the first landing on the stairs, and looked up to the ghyll at the back. The wee place was more than his sleeping-room; he had his books there, but he had neither slept nor read that night. He wandered about aimlessly, with the eyes of one walking in his sleep, breaking out sometimes into a little hysterical scream, followed by a shudder, and then a sudden disappearance. Death had come to him for the first time, and in a fearful guise. Its visible presence appalled him. He was as feeble as a child now. He was ready to lean on the first strong human arm that offered; and though Rotha understood but vaguely the troubles that beset his mind, her quick instinct found a sure way to those that lay heavy at his heart. She comforted him with what good words she could summon, and he came again and again to her with his odd fancies and his recollections of the poor feeble philosophy which he had gleaned from books. The look in the eyes of this simple girl and the touch of her hand made death less fearsome than anything besides. w.i.l.l.y seemed to lean on Rotha, and she on her part appeared to grow stronger as she felt this.

Ralph had gone to bed much as usual the night before--after he had borne upstairs what lay there. He was not seen again until morning, and when he came down and stood for a moment over his mother's chair as she sat gazing steadfastly into the fire, Rotha was stooping over the pan, with the porridge thivle in her hand. She looked up into his face, while his hand rested with a speechless sympathy on his mother's arm, and she thought that, mingled with a softened sorrow, there was something like hope there. The sadness of last night was neither in his face nor in his voice. He was even quieter than usual, but he appeared to have grown older in the few hours that had intervened.

Nevertheless, he went through his ordinary morning's work about the homestead with the air of one whose mind was with him in what he did.

After breakfast he took his staff out of the corner and set out for the hills, his dog beside him.

During the day, Rotha, with such neighborly help as it was the custom to tender, did all the little offices incident to the situation. She went in and out of the chamber of the dead, not without awe, but without fear. She had only once before looked on death, or, if she had seen it twice before this day, her first sight of it was long ago, in that old time of which memory scarcely held a record, when she was carried in her father's arms into a darkened room like this and held for a moment over the white face that she knew to be the face of her mother. But, unused as she had been to scenes made solemn by death, she appeared to know her part in this one.

Intelligence of the disaster that had fallen on the household at Shoulthwaite Moss was not long in circulating through Wythburn. One after another, the shepherds and their wives called in, and were taken to the silent room upstairs. Some offered such rude comfort as their sympathetic hearts but not too fecund intellects could devise, and as often as not it was sorry comfort enough. Some stood all but speechless, only gasping out at intervals, "Deary me." Others, again, seemed afflicted with what old Matthew Branthwaite called "doddering"

and a fit of the "gapes."

It was towards nightfall when Matthew himself came to Shoulthwaite.

"I'm the dame's auldest neighbor," he had said at the Red Lion that afternoon, when the event of the night previous had been discussed.

"It's n.o.bbut reet 'at I should gang alang to her this awesome day.

She'll be glad of the neighborhood of an auld friend's crack." They were at their evening meal of sweet broth when Matthew's knock came to the door, followed, without much interval, by his somewhat gaunt figure on the threshold.

"Come your ways in," said Mrs. Ray. "And how fend you, Mattha?"

"For mysel', I's gayly. Are ye middlin' weel?" the old man said.

"I'm a lang way better, but I'm going yon way too. It's far away the bainer way for me now." And Mrs. Ray put her ap.r.o.n to her eyes.

"Ye'll na boune yit, Mary," said Matthew. "Ye'll na boune yon way for mony a lang year yit. So dunnet ye beurt, Mary."

Mattha's blubbering tones somewhat discredited his stoical advice.

Rotha had taken down a cup, and put the old man to sit between herself and w.i.l.l.y, facing Mrs. Ray.

"I met Ralph in the morning part," said Matthew; "he telt me all the ins and outs aboot it. I reckon he were going to the kirk garth aboot the berryin'."

Mrs. Ray raised her ap.r.o.n to her eyes again. w.i.l.l.y got up and left the room. He at least was tortured by this kind of comfort.

"He's of the bettermer sort, _he_ is," said Matthew with a motion of his head towards the door at which w.i.l.l.y had gone out. "He taks it bad, does w.i.l.l.y. Ralph was chapfallen a laal bit, but not ower much.

Deary me, but ye've gat all sorts of sons though you've n.o.bbut two.

Weel, weel," he added, as though reconciling himself to w.i.l.l.y's tenderness and Ralph's hardness of heart, "if there were na fells there wad be na dales."

Matthew had turned over his cup to denote that his meal was finished.

The dame rose and resumed her seat by the fire. During the day she had been more cheerful, but with the return of the night she grew again silent, and rocked herself in her chair.

"It's just t'edge o' dark, la.s.s," said Matthew to Rotha while filling his pipe. "Wilt thoo fetch the cannels?"

The candles were brought, and the old man lit his pipe from one of them and sat down with Mrs. Ray before the fire.

"Dus'ta mind when Angus coomt first to these parts?" he said. "_I_ do reet weel. I can a' but fancy I see him now at the manor'al court at Deer Garth Bottom. What a man he was, to be sure! Ralph's n.o.bbut a bit boy to what his father was then. Folks say father and son are as like as peas, but nowt of the sort. Ye could nivver hev matched Angus in yon days for limb and wind. Na, nor sin' nowther. And there was yan o'

the la.s.ses frae Castenand had set een on Angus, but she nivver let wit. As bonny a la.s.s as there was in the country side, she was. They say beauty withoot bounty's but bauch, but she was good a' roond. She was greetly thought on. Dus'ta mind I was amang the lads that went ahint her--I was, mysel'. But she wad hev nowt wi' me; she trysted wid Angus; so I went back home and broke the click reel of my new loom straight away. And it's parlish odd I've not lived marraless iver sin'."

This reminiscence of his early and all but only love adventure seemed to touch a sensitive place in the old man's nature, and he pulled for a time more vigorously at his pipe.

Mrs. Ray Still sat gazing into the fire, hardly heeding the old weaver's garrulity, and letting him chatter on as he pleased.

Occasionally she would look anxiously over her shoulder to ask Rotha if Ralph had got back, and on receiving answer that he had not yet been seen she would resume her position, and, with an absent look in her eyes, gaze back into the fire. When a dog's bark would be heard in the distance above the sound of the wind, she would break into consciousness afresh, and bid Rotha prepare the supper. But still Ralph did not come. Where could he be?

It was growing late when Matthew got up to go. He had tried his best to comfort his old neighbor in her sorrow. He had used up all his saws and proverbs that were in the remotest degree appropriate to the occasion, and he had thrown in a few that were not remarkable for appositeness or compatibility. All alike had pa.s.sed by unheeded. The dame had taken the good will for the good deed, and had not looked the gift-horses too closely in the mouth.

"Good night, Mattha Branthet," she said, in answer to his good by; "good night, and G.o.d bless thee."

Matthew had opened the door, and was looking out preparatory to his final leavetaking.

"The sky's over-kessen to-neet," he said. "There's na moon yit, and t'wind's high as iver. Good neet, Mary; it's like ye'll be a' thrang eneuf to-morrow wi' the feast for the berryin', and it's like eneuf ma mistress and laal Liza will be ower at the windin'."