The Shadow of a Crime Part 19

"Liza, is that you?" he replied; "I'm in a hurry, la.s.s--good morning."

"Mr. Garth," repeated Liza, "and maybe you'll tell me what's all your hurry about. Has some one's horse dropped a shoe, or is this your hooping day, or what, that you don't know a body now when you meet one in the road?"

"No, no, my la.s.s--good morning, Liza, I must be off."

"Very well, Mr. Garth, and if you must, you must. _I'm_ not the one to keep any one 'at doesn't want to stop; not I, indeed," said Liza, tossing up her head with an air as of supreme indifference, and turning half on her heel. "Next time you speak to me, you--you--you _will_ speak to me--mind that." And with an expression denoting the triumph of arms achieved by that little outburst of irony and sarcasm combined, Liza tossed the ribbons aside that were pattering her face in the wind, and seemed about to continue her journey.

Her parting shot had proved too much for Mr. Garth. That young man had stopped a few paces down the road, and between two purposes seemed for a moment uncertain which to adopt; but the impulse of what he thought his love triumphed over the impulse of what proved to be his hate.

Retracing the few steps that lay between him and the girl, he said,--

"Don't take it cross, Liza, my la.s.s; if I thought you really wanted to speak to me, I'd stop anywhere for nowt--that I would. I'd stop anywhere for nowt; but you always seemed to me over throng with yon Robbie, that you did; but if for certain you really did want me--that's to say, want to speak to me--I'd stop anywhere for nowt."

The liberal nature of the blacksmith's offer did not so much impress the acute intelligence of the girl as the fact that Mr. Garth was probably at that moment abroad upon an errand which he had not undertaken from equally disinterested motives. Concerning the nature of this errand she felt no particular curiosity, but that it was unknown to her, and was being withheld from her, was of itself a sufficient provocation to investigation.

Liza was a simple country wench, but it would be an error to suppose that because she had been bred up in a city more diminutive than anything that ever before gave itself the name, and because she had lived among hand-looms and milking-pails, and had never seen a ball or an opera, worn a mask or a domino, she was dest.i.tute of the instinct for intrigue which in the gayer and busier world seems to be the heritage of half her s.e.x. Putting her head aside demurely, as with eyes cast, down she ran her fingers through one of her loose ribbons, she said softly,--

"And who says I'm so very partial to Robbie? _I_ never said so, did I?

Not that I say I'm partial to anybody else either--not that I _ay_ so--Joseph!"

The sly emphasis which was put upon the word that expressed Liza's unwillingness to commit herself to a declaration of her affection for some mysterious ent.i.ty unknown seemed to Mr. Garth to be proof beyond contempt of question that the girl before him implied an affection for an ent.i.ty no more mysterious than himself. The blacksmith's face brightened, and his manner changed. What had before been almost a supplicating tone, gave place to a tone of secure triumph.

"Liza," he said, "I'm going to bring that Robbie down a peg or two.

He's been a perching himself up alongside of Ralph Ray this last back end, but I'm going to f.e.c.kle him this turn."

"No, Joseph; are you going to do that, though?" said Liza, with a brightening face that seemed to Mr. Garth to say, "Do it by all means."

"Mayhap I am," said the blacksmith, significantly shaking his head. He was snared as neatly by this simple face as ever was a swallow by a linnet hidden in a cage among the gra.s.s.

"And that Ralph, too, the great lounderan fellow, he treats me like dirt, that he does."

"But you'll pay him out now, won't you, Joseph?" said Liza, as though glorying in the blacksmith's forthcoming glory.

"Liza, my la.s.s, shall I tell you something?" Under the fire of a pair of coquettish little eyes, his head as well as his heart seemed to melt, and he became eagerly communicative. Dropping his voice, he said,--

"That Ralph's not gone away at all. He'll be at his father's berrying, that he will."

"Nay!" cried Liza, without a prolonged accent of surprise; and, indeed, this fact had come upon her with so much unexpectedness that her curiosity was now actually as well as ostensibly aroused.

"Yes," said Mr. Garth; "and there's those as knows where to lay hands on him this very day--that there is."

"I shouldn't be surprised, now, if yon Robbie Anderson has been up to something with him," said Liza, with a curl of the lip intended to convey an idea of overpowering disgust at the conduct of the absent Robbie.

"And maybe he has," said Mr. Garth, with a ponderous shake of the head, denoting the extent of his reverse. Evidently "he could an' he would."

"But you'll go to them, won't you, Joseph? That is them as wants them--leastways one of them--them as wants _him_ will go and take him, won't they?"

"That they will," said Joseph emphatically. "But I must be off, la.s.s; for I've the horses to get ready, forby the shortness of the time."

"So you're going on horseback, eh, Joey? Will it take you long?"

"A matter of two hours, for we must go by the Black Sail and come back to Wastdale Head, and that's round-about, thou knows." "So you'll take them on Wastdale Head, then, eh?" said Liza, turning her head aside as though in the abundance of her maidenly modesty, but really glancing slyly under the corner of her bonnet in the direction taken by the mourners, and wondering if they could be overtaken.

Joseph was a little disturbed to find that he had unintentionally disclosed so much of the design. The potency of the bright blue eyes that looked up so admiringly into his face at the revelation of the subtlety with which he had seen through a mystery impenetrable to less powerful vision, had betrayed him into unexpected depths of confidence.

Having gone so far, however, Mr. Garth evidently concluded that the best course was to make a clean breast of it--an expedient which he conceived to be insusceptible of danger, for he could see that the funeral party were already on the brow of the hill. So, with one foot stretched forward as if in the preliminary stage of a hurried leave-taking, the blacksmith told Liza that he had met the schoolmaster that morning, and had gathered enough from a word the little man had dropped without thought to put him upon the trace of the old garrulous body with whom the schoolmaster lodged; that his mother, Mistress Garth, had undertaken the office of sounding this person, and had learned that Ralph had hinted that he would relieve Robbie Anderson of his duty at the top of the Stye Head Pa.s.s.

Having heard this, Liza had heard enough, and she was not unwilling that the blacksmith should make what speed he could out of her sight, so that she in turn might make what speed she could out of his sight, and, returning to the Moss without delay, communicate her fearful burden of intelligence to Rotha.

CHAPTER XII. THE FLIGHT ON THE FELLS.

I. After going a few paces in order to sustain the appearance of continuing the journey on which she had set out, Liza waited until the blacksmith was far enough away to admit of retracing her steps to the bridge. There she climbed the wooden fence, and ran with all speed across the fields to Shoulthwaite. She entered the house in a fever of excitement, but was drawn back to the porch by Rotha, who experienced serious difficulty in restraining her from a more public exposition of the facts with which she was full to the throat than seemed well for the tranquillity of the household. With quick-coming breath she blurted out the main part of her revelations, and then paused, as much from physical exhaustion as from an overwhelming sense of the threatened calamity.

Rotha was quick to catch the significance of the message communicated in Liza's disjointed words. Her pale face became paler, the sidelong look that haunted her eyes came back to them at this moment, her tremulous lips trembled visibly, and for a few minutes she stood apparently powerless and irresolute.

Then the light of determination returned to the young girl's face.

Leaving Liza in the porch, she went into the house for her cloak and hood. When she rejoined her companion her mind was made up to a daring enterprise.

"The men of Wythburn, such of them as we can trust," she said, "are in the funeral train. We must go ourselves; at least I must go."

"Do let me go, too," said Liza; "but where are you going?"

"To cross the fell to Stye Head."

"We can't go there, Rotha--two girls."

"What of that? But you need not go. It's eight miles across, and I may run most of the way. They've been gone nearly an hour; they are out of sight. I must make the short cut through the heather."

The prospect of the inevitable excitement of the adventure, amounting, in Liza's mind, to a sensation equivalent to sport, prevailed over her dread of the difficulties and dangers of a perilous mountain journey, and she again begged to be permitted to go.

"Are you quite sure you wish it?" said Rotha, not without an underlying reluctance to accept of her companions.h.i.+p. "It's a rugged journey. We must walk under Glaramara." She spoke as though she had the right of maturity of years to warn her friend against a hazardous project.

Liza protested that nothing would please her but to go. She accepted without a twinge the implication of superiority of will and physique which the young daleswoman arrogated. If social advantages had counted for anything, they must have been all in Liza's favor; but they were less than nothing in the person of this ruddy girl against the natural strength of the pale-faced young woman, the days of whose years scarcely numbered more than her own.

"We must set off at once," said Rotha; "but first I must go to Fornside."

To go round by the tailor's desolate cottage did not sensibly impede their progress. Rotha had paid hurried visits daily to her forlorn little home since the terrible night of the death of the master of Shoulthwaite. She had done what she could to make the cheerless house less cheerless. She had built a fire on the hearth and spread out her father's tools on the table before the window at which he worked.

Nothing had tempted him to return. Each morning she found everything exactly as she had left it the morning before.

When the girls reached the cottage, Liza instinctively dropped back.

Rotha's susceptible spirit perceived the restraint, and suffered from the sentiment of dread which it implied.

"Stay here, then," she said, in reply to her companion's unspoken reluctance to go farther. In less than a minute Rotha had returned.

Her eyes were wet.

"He is not here," she said, without other explanation. "Could we not go up the fell?"