The Shadow of a Crime Part 20

The girls turned towards the Fornside Fell on an errand which both understood and neither needed to explain.

"Do the words of a song ever torment you, Liza, rising up in your mind again and again, and refusing to go away?"

"No--why?" said Liza, simply.

"Nothing--only I can't get a song out of my head today. It comes back and back--

One lonely foot sounds on the keep, And that's the warder's tread."

The girls had not gone far when they saw the object of their search leaning over a low wall, and holding his hands to his eyes as though straining his sight to catch a view of some object in the distance.

Simeon Stagg was already acquiring the abandoned look of the man who is outlawed from his fellows. His hair and beard were growing long, s.h.a.ggy, and unkempt. They were beginning to be frosted with gray. His dress was loose; he wore no belt. The haggard expression, natural to his thin face, had become more marked.

Sim had not seen the girls, and in the prevailing wind his quick ear had not caught the sound of their footsteps until they were nearly abreast of him. When he became fully conscious of their presence, Rotha was standing by his side, with her hand on his arm. Liza was a pace or two behind.

"Father," said Rotha, "are you strong enough to make a long journey?"

Sim had turned his face full on his daughter's with an expression of mingled shame, contrition, and pride. It was as though his heart yearned for that love which he thought he had forfeited the right to claim.

In a few words Rotha explained the turn of events. Sim's agitation overpowered him. He walked to and fro in short, fitful steps, crying that there was no help, no help.

"I thought I saw three men leading three horses up High Seat from behind the smithy. It must have been those very taistrels, it must. I was looking at them the minute you came up. See, there they are--there beyond the ghyll on the mere side of yon big bowder. But they'll be at the top in a crack, that they will--and the best man in Wythburn will be taken--and there's no help, no help."

The little man strode up and down, his long, nervous fingers twitching at his beard.

"Yes, but there _is_ help," said Rotha; "there _must_ be."

"How? How? Tell me--you're like your mother, you are--that was the very look she had."

"Tell _me_, first, if Ralph intended to be on Stye Head or Wastdale Head."

"He did--Stye Head--he left me to go there at daybreak this morning."

"Then he can be saved," said the girl firmly. "The mourners must follow the path. They have the body and they will go slowly. It will take them an hour and a half more to reach the foot of the pa.s.s. In that time Liza and I can cross the fell by Harrop Tarn and Glaramara and reach the foot, or perhaps the head, of the pa.s.s. But this is not enough. The constables will not follow the road taken by the funeral.

They know that if Ralph is at the top of Stye Head he will be on the lookout for the procession, and must see them as well as it."

"It's true, it is," said Sim.

"They will, as the blacksmith said, go through Honister and Scarf Gap and over the Black Sail to Wastdale. They will ride fast, and, returning to Stye Head, hope to come upon Ralph from behind and capture him unawares. Father," continued Rotha,--and the girl spoke with the determination of a strong man,--"if you go over High Seat, cross the dale, walk past Dale Head, and keep on the far side of the Great Gable, you will cut off half the journey and be there as soon as the constables, and you may keep them in sight most of the way. Can you do this? Have you the strength? You look worn and weak."

"I can--I have--I'll go at once. It's life or death to the best man in the world, that it is."

"There's not a moment to be lost. Liza, we must not delay an instant longer."

II. Long before the funeral train had reached the top of the alt.i.tude.

Ralph had walked over the more rugged parts of the pa.s.s, and had satisfied himself that there was no danger to be apprehended on this score. The ghyll was swollen by the thaw. The waters fell heavily over the great stones, and sent up clouds of spray, which were quickly dissipated by the wind. Huge hillocks of yellow foam gathered in every sheltered covelet. The roar of the cataract in the ravine silenced the voice of the tempest that raged above it.

From the heights of the Great Gable the wind came in all but overpowering gusts across the top of the pa.s.s. Ralph had been thrown off his feet at one moment by the fierceness of a terrific blast. It was the same terrible storm that began on the night of his father's death. Ralph had at first been anxious for the safety of the procession that was coming, but he had found a more sheltered pathway under a deep line of furze bushes, and through this he meant to pioneer the procession when it arrived. There was one gap in the furze at the mouth of a tributary ghyll. The wind was strong in this gap, which seemed like a natural channel to carry it southward; but the gap was narrow, it would soon be crossed.

From the desultory labor of such investigations Ralph returned again and again to the head of the great cleft and looked out into the distance of hills and dales. The long coat he wore fell below his knees, and was strapped tightly with a girdle. He wore a close-fitting cap, from beneath which his thick hair fell in short wavelets that were tossed by the wind. His dog, Laddie, was with him.

Ralph took up a position within the shelter of a bowlder, and waited long, his eyes fixed on the fell six miles down the dale.

The procession emerged at length. The chill and cheerless morning seemed at once to break into a spring brightness--there at least, if not here. Through the leaden wintry sky the sun broke down the hilltop at that instant in a shaft of bright light. It fell like an oasis over the solemn company walking there. Then the shaft widened and stretched into the dale, and then the mists that rolled midway between him and it pa.s.sed away, and a blue sky was over all.

III. "Which way now?"

"Well, I reckon there be two roads; maybe you'd like--"

"Which way now? Quick, and no clatter!"

"Then gang your gate down between Dale Head and Grey Knotts as far as Honister."

"Let's hope you're a better guide than constable, young man, or, as that old fellow said in the road this morning, we'll fley the bird and not grip him. Your clattering tongue had served us a scurvy trick, my man; let your head serve us in better stead, or mayhap you'll lose both--who knows?"

The three men rode as fast as the uncertain pathway between the mountains would allow. Mr. Garth mumbled something beneath his breath.

He was beginning to wish himself well out of an ungracious business.

Not even revenge sweetened by profit could sustain his spirits under the battery of the combined ridicule and contempt of the men he had undertaken to serve.

"A fine wild-goose chase this," said one of the constables. He had not spoken before, but had toiled along on his horse at the obvious expenditure of much physical energy and more temper.

"Grumbling again, Jonathan; when will you be content?" The speaker was a little man with keen eyes, a supercilious smile, a shrill sharp voice, and peevish manners.

"Not while I'm in danger of breaking my neck every step, or being lost on a moor nearly as trackless as an ocean, or swallowed up in mists like the clouds of steam in a century of was.h.i.+ng days, or drowned in the soapsuds of ugly, gaping pits,--tarns you call them, I believe.

And all for nothing, too,--not so much as the glint of a bad guinea will we get out of this fine job."

"Don't be too sure of that," said the little man. "If this blockhead here," with a lurch of the head backwards to where the blacksmith rode behind, "hasn't blundered in his 'reckonings,' we'll bag the game yet."

"That you never will, mark my words. I've taken the measure of our man before to-day. He's enough for fifty such as our precious guide. I knew what I was doing when I went back last time and left him."

"Ah, they rather laughed at you then, didn't they?--hinted you were a bit afraid," said the little man, with a cynical smile.

"They may laugh again, David, if they like; and the man that laughs loudest, let him be the first to come in my place next bout; he'll be welcome."

"Well, I must say, this is strange language. I never talked like that, never. It's in contempt of duty, nothing less," said Constable David.

"Oh, you're the sort of man that sticks the thing you call duty above everything else--above wife, life, and all the rest of it--and when duty's done with you it generally sticks you below everything else.

I've been a fool in my time, David, but I was never a fool of that sort. I've never been the dog to drop a good jawful of solids to snap at its shadow. When I've been that dog I've quietly put my meat down on the plank, and then--There's another break-neck paving-stone--'bowders' you call them. No horse alive could keep its feet in such country."

The three men rode some distance in silence. Then the little man, who kept a few yards in front, drew up and said,--

"You say the warrant was not on Wilson's body when you searched it. Is it likely that some of these dalesmen removed it before you came down?"

"Yes, one dalesman. But that job must have been done when another bigger job was done. It wasn't done afterwards. I was down next morning. I was sent after the old Scotchman."

"Didn't it occur to you that the man to whose interest it was to have that warrant had probably got hold of it?"