There was something abominable, unnameable, in his relish of it, and for the moment he himself seemed disconcerted by the dead silence with which his story was received. He still chuckled nervously, as if to outface some hostile impression he had created; and in a minute Monjoy said quietly, glancing towards the door, “You have an extraordinary turn of humour, Cope.”
The heavy lids drooped, and Cope’s hand patted the air away from his cheek. “La, Mr. Monjoy!” he murmured; but before the gesture was completed, Matthew Moon had advanced to the table, his brows contracted.
“See here, whatever they call ye,” he said. “‘Grim,’ ye said; but it might easy be grimmer. Now just take it on yourself that that’s the last tale o’ that sort ye tell in this house.”
And as Moon strode out, more than one man felt as if a chill hand had passed over his flesh at the thought that Sally Northrop might at any moment have entered the parlour.
Monjoy had followed Moon out. They met on the cobbles.
“Yon man heard what was said at Emmason’s about Will and Jim, didn’t he?” the merchant demanded.
“Yes,” Monjoy replied.
“And he knew that was Jim’s house, too; ay, he knew. Yon’s mind’s as misshapen as his body,” the merchant said, and he turned away.
HEwas certainly a heartless man who could, in that house, find mirth in such a matter. For five months the key had not been turned in Sally Northrop’s door, nor had an evening passed but Sally had set her husband’s slippers on the oven and laid his supper lest the door should suddenly open to his push. Week by week the slips of the pillow beside her own had been changed; and in all other particulars Jim Northrop might have left his house but for an afternoon.
When it became necessary that Sally should have help, Cicely Eastwood had left her carding-wheel and the care of her father’s new-dropped lambs and had made her home in the inn, taking on herself the ruling of the house. This arrangement had commended itself to Big Monjoy. She was big, fair, well-nourished and handsome, and so softly embrowned was her skin that her fair hair seemed of a paler yellow than it really was, and her clear eyes and the flash between her lipswere conspicuously white. Her movements were those of a free-limbed lad; her clothing seemed, in some odd way, not something to be doffed for the night, but assumed for the day; and the sight of her had filled Arthur Monjoy with an increasing trouble.
And so, apparently, it had her cousin, deaf Eastwood Ellah, who lived with her father in the house under Wadsworth Scout. He was a short-necked man, with a choleric face, prominent choleric grey eyes, and light hair so closely cropped and so nearly matching his complexion, that, save for a metallic glint on scalp and brow and chin, all would have been of one angry orange hue. His deafness had long isolated him from most society; and he went once in a while into violent “iggs” or unreasonable moods.
There were winks and glances when Cicely Eastwood came to be in Horwick with Sally Northrop. Now, instead of Monjoy’s trudges to Wadsworth in order (as they said) to “wind Jim Eastwood’s clock up,” the boot was on the other leg, and Ellah must come to the “Cross Pipes.” It was thought, too, that James Eastwood had taken to heart the parson’s parable of the fighting dogs, and that Monjoy would be like to be served before Ellah. And it puzzled folk that the rivalry of the two men should be bound up in a curious off-and-on sort of intimacy.
One of the first signs of this intimacy was thatMonjoy fashioned for Ellah an ear-trumpet of brass. Apart from his trade of engraving, he had some skill in the related crafts of metal-work, and none knew much of how he occupied himself of a night in the garret chamber of Matthew Moon’s warehouse up the Fullergate. The low houghing of a pair of bellows could sometimes be heard, and the grinding of a pestle and mortar; but from below nothing could be seen but a pair of closed crane-doors, and the crane-arm above them. When Ellah gave a grunt of thanks for the ear-trumpet, Monjoy laughed and said:
“We’ll have a finer one than that when the hazels push on a bit.”
The spring was in truth coming nicely forward, and the gardens and closes of Horwick were budding with plum and cherry and pear. The pear-tree in front of Cope’s house had begun to hide the dormers, and a sprinkling of petals lay on the grass-grown cobbles below. In yards, cloth dried on the tenter-hooks; weavers broke their work at midday to lean over walls and watch the fattening of their neighbours’ pigs or the fluffy cletches of chickens; and the primroses were out in the deans and on the scanty farms the crows and starlings followed the plough.
It was during this mild and promising weather that, almost every day, Monjoy took the road to Wadsworth, picked up Eastwood Ellah on the way, and ascended the Scout by straggling sheep-tracksto the high Causeway. Spring, spare and delicate, had touched the moors too, and in the leagues of bloomless heather the birds were nesting, and the dainty white bedstraw and the tiny yellow portantilla peeped among the grey bents. But the two men recked little of the harmonies of russet and grey and airy blue. Monjoy carried in his pocket a hammer and a short iron gavelock, and they grubbed sometimes in the choked bellpits, where the rain still trickled and whispered to the shaft below, sometimes at the dean-heads where the rills slipped down to the valleys, sometimes south over rocky Soyland and the Ridges of Brotherton and Holdsworth, and sometimes up the High Moor itself, where nothing stirred but the sheep and birds and the world seemed to end beyond the next undulation of the waist-high heather. At nightfall they would return to Horwick together, dusty and thirsty, and so lost in earth or lime-rubbings, that Sally Northrop would not have them in her kitchen till they had scraped or drenched themselves. Then they would sit for a couple of hours watching Cicely as she stitched or nursed. Monjoy often left first, and as he put on his coat the muffled knocking of stones would come from his pockets.
Sally, during her own courtship, had known how to set the lamp in the window and to go loitering long ways to the milking or the taking-in of weft; and she favoured Monjoy’s wooing scandalously. She was a merry little body still,save when a word or a look or less put her in mind of Jim; and she delighted to whisper sly words to Cicely and to watch the flush deepen on her cheek.
“A great red bear!” she would whisper. “I’ve seen him watching your foot o’ the wheel-truddle, and d’ye know what he thinks? ‘A cradle-rocker, not a truddle,’ thinks Arthur; and you dandling Jimmy as if men hadn’t eyes an’ that!”
“Nay, then, you shall dandle him yourself,” Cicely would reply, reddening; “men needs little ’ticing on in such matters.”
“Ye didn’t find that out from Arthur, I’ll be bound! Who was it?... Who was it, puss?... Ellah, I’ll swear, and I can guess when and where!”
But, though Sally knew well enough that once in a while, of a December or January night, Cicely had taken a watch at her father’s lambing-sheds on the moor, not even to Sally would Cicely speak of a certain hour of her cousin’s infirmity when, all her nature suddenly disordered and ajar, she had saved herself from his mood, blundering through the dark heather and hearing behind her in the lonely cabin the sounds by which he did violence to himself. Nothing but pure pity for his alienation had entered her heart; but from that night had dated occasional quick changes in her cheek, as if she surprised something in her ownthoughts that her modesty would not have had there.
The pack-horses that entered Back o’ th’ Mooin from the Trawden side had to pass, a mile south of Booth, a place called Noon Nick; and Noon Nick marked the horses of the Trawden pack unmistakably. This Nick was a deep stony gap in the hill where the land had slipped and settled, and the horses had to wind for a quarter of a mile along the extreme edge of a ledge scarce six foot wide, one pack overhanging the gloomy bottom. The trick they picked up from this place was that they would never approach within four foot of any wall. Sometimes a stone, dislodged from the ledge, would roll down the gap, filling the Nick with rattling echoes; and sometimes the grey stones would start and roll of themselves, with a prolonged and dreary sound.
On a sunny May afternoon there moved down in this bottom Eastwood Ellah and Arthur Monjoy. The grey boulders were bright under the blue sky, and their shadows harshly defined, and near at hand the fractured pieces glinted with tiny metallic pin-points. A few pewits wheeled and piped; save for them, only the crunch and rattle of the stones underfoot broke the stillness.
Eastwood Ellah’s appearance was extraordinary. He was hatless and unbraced, and his feet were bare and cut and covered with blood. His face was crimson, and his prominent glassy eyes staredunnaturally before him. From out of his pocket peeped his brass ear-trumpet. He perspired violently; the whole of his scalp twitched with the corrugation of his brows. One hand was outstretched to balance his painful steps; and in the other he bore that of which Arthur Monjoy, at the meeting of the Executive, had refused to speak—(for the methodical Matthew, who scoffed at ballads, would have ranked this as mere full-moon madness)—the fork of green hazel, thevirgula divina, the rod that will curl and turn in a man’s hands and drip out its sap over the spot where silver lies.
All at once Ellah gave an inarticulate cry, shrill as the crying of the wheeling pewits, and shouted hoarsely: “I can’t—I can’t—I tell ye I can’t bide it!”
“Can’t bide what?” Monjoy demanded, turning in an ill humour.
“The sight o’ my own blood. I say I can’t—’twill madden me——”
Monjoy led him to a grey boulder, bade him turn his face away, and made such a cleansing of his wounded feet as he was able with a handkerchief. Ellah moaned miserably the while. Monjoy drew on his stockings for him and flung him his boots; then he began to stride frowning up and down on the harshly grating stones. Presently he returned, plucked the trumpet from Ellah’s pocket, and thrust it into his hand.
“I’ll not quarrel,” he shouted curtly, “but theLord made a womanish piece when He made you!”
Ellah, the trumpet at his ear, chewed at his lip and whimpered:
“You know I ha’ my iggs—you ought to pity me, same as others; the sight of my own blood’s like a flame i’ my brain——”
“Pity you!” Monjoy said contemptuously; “you’d have more pity from me if your iggs didn’t always suit your own ends so pat. I know your head-knocking on walls; how much of it do you do when there’s nobody watching you? It goes down with women and fools that Ellah’s iggs must be humoured, but in two words, Ellah, my man, you’re a lazy devil, and if you can contrive it to live without working you will. I know your iggs; you’re the sort that shapes to drown themselves and puts their hands in the water first.”
Ellah, crouched on the boulder, looked stupidly at the stones at his feet. Saliva bubbled at his lips.
“The rod turned my stomach an’ all,” he complained.
“Would I ask you to do it if I could do it myself? Didn’t it twist nearly out of your hands over Holdsworth Head?”
“That was me—I made it,” Ellah moaned.
“You’re a liar, and you lie now. Will you tell me you vomited on purpose?—(That’s it, clutch at your face and make as if you were mad!)—Here are hills that ring with metal to your tread, riddled with old workings, chambers and veins and galleries of it, and only a lazy rogue that’s trying to make himself out mad to find it!”
“I can’t abide moors,” murmured Ellah, monotonously. “And th’ rod ought to ha’ been cut afore sunrise, o’ Ladyday, wi’ prayers and such. And ye can find it wi’out it, for the grass won’t grow over metal, and the trees has blue leaves——” He put the trumpet into his pocket and rocked himself on the boulder.
Monjoy began to stride up and down again. He himself understood nothing of the virtues of the mystic twig save that its operation was not fruitless, and for the rest he had gone to work methodically enough. He knew that the thing had been done before. Patents had been prayed for and granted. Already, by the cunning letting-down of noble ores with inferior, not every mine that was royal in quality had become a Mine Royal; there was history for it as well as tradition. This was Back o’ th’ Mooin, too, that had already mulcted the king in his most jealously-guarded prerogative.—Back o’ th’ Mooin? A Peru, for all he knew; and for much less than that his desperate fortunes already involved the stricture of his neck by the hangman’s halter. And had he not already proofs in his garret over the warehouse in the Fullergate?... He thrust the trumpet into the deaf man’s hand again.
“See!” he bawled; “we’re going home now. We’re going home, and I’ll show you whether we’ve wasted our time. I’ll show you how I’ve passed my nights this many a month. Do charcoal fumes give you iggs, too? Up!—And mind, it’s little more than chance-found stuff so far, poor ore; but poor stuff as it is, with the setting up of crushers and stampers in caves and holes and tunnels, and a furnace sunk in a deep shaft.... Up! You shall be the first to see it. Cram these stones into your pockets.—Let me once get going, and Bloody Cumberland himself couldn’t rout me out!”
He thrust Ellah roughly down the ravine. They climbed to the Causeway beyond the Nick, and the sheep scampered before them and stood to watch them as they passed. When they reached the bellpits, Monjoy flung out his arm as if he would have spoken, then muttered to himself instead; and he almost carried Ellah along in his haste. It was clear evening before they descended the Scout and passed through Wadsworth; and when they reached Horwick they strode past the “Cross Pipes” and passed quickly up the Fullergate. At the door of Matthew Moon’s warehouse Monjoy produced a key.
The cautious merchant had allowed Monjoy the use of the garret at the top of the winding stairs only on certain conditions, the first of which became apparent as soon as the two men enteredthe chamber. In the middle of the floor lay what seemed to be a broken bench, for it was without legs at one end, had a couple of strong hooked angle-irons instead, and lay tilted up on the floor. The garret was dark, without window, fireplace, cupboard or shelves. Two sets of double crane-doors only, the one set towards the Fullergate, and the other towards the crofts and gardens and waste ground at the back of the building, made the place anything but four bare walls; but on a sheet of iron opposite the door a hearth of bricks and a small furnace had been built, and from this proceeded fumes of charcoal for which there was no outlet. Ellah choked immediately; and Monjoy barred the door.
It was the broken table that was the first of Matthew’s precautions. Monjoy dragged it to the door and set the angle-hooks over the heavy bar, making it apparent that he himself could under no circumstances leave the garret without first clearing away the table and all that might lie on it. Monjoy lighted a candle; then, binding a handkerchief over his own mouth and another over Ellah’s, he gave the deaf man to understand that for a few minutes he must submit to have his eyes bandaged. Ellah heard him moving about; and when, in a few minutes, the bandage was removed again, Ellah saw that the bench that secured and was secured by the door was spread with various appliances, obtained he knew not whence. No engraver’ssandbag, no water globe and burins, however, were there. First, there was a delicate balance; then a number of test-rings of iron and calcined bone; then a pestle and mortar; and after these, pipkins and crucibles, a bowl of quicksilver, a number of small leaden cubes like badly-made dice, and other things. Monjoy emptied his pockets of stones; then he stripped to his shirt and breeches, and, passing to his hearth, began to revive it with a pair of bellows. The coughing of the bellows and a red glow began to fill the chamber, and Ellah, for all the tight, stifling breathing, watched sharply and eagerly.
Monjoy went about his work in silence, pressing now and then the muffler more closely about his mouth. When the hearth glowed brightly, he set a beam of wood across it, shaped a place in the ashes underneath the billet, and introduced an empty test-ring. He made signs for Ellah to take a turn at the bellows. He began to busy himself at his bench, now grinding small stones with the pestle and mortar muffled in a cloth, now seeing to other matters. The garret became bright as the bellows roared, and unbearably hot, and Ellah dropped the bellows and made for the door, through the chink of which a little air entered. By and by, into the test-ring in the glowing furnace Monjoy introduced one of the little leaden cubes, and plied the bellows more gently. He paid no heed when Ellah stooped over him, and presentlyEllah returned to the door again. Half an hour passed; Monjoy’s face streamed, and his eyes were drowsy; and Ellah nodded against the bench by the door. Monjoy roused himself, and with a pair of tongs drew the test from the furnace, setting it to cool. Ellah dozed, and Monjoy crossed over and listened to his breathing. Then he weighed out from his mortar a pound or so of crushed ore, added iron filings to it, set it in a melting-pot in the furnace, and began with the bellows again. An hour passed. The air was well nigh insupportable. He rose again, tottered to his bench, took a deep gulp of water, and stripped off even his shirt. He returned to the bellows; rivulets ran down his giant back; he blundered heavily to the table with the crucible in a pair of tongs and began to dig out the slag; and with the small residue in another ring he crossed again to the furnace and continued mechanically with the bellows. Ellah had fallen across the bench, and slept among the tests and crucibles.
* * * * *
By two o’clock in the morning Monjoy had allowed the furnace to die down again, had extinguished his candle for a few minutes, and had flung open the double doors at the back for air. The cool night restored him, and presently he closed the doors and lighted the candle again. He shook Ellah, who opened his eyes sluggishly, andMonjoy’s voice wheezed as he handed him his trumpet and bade him draw near the candle.
Ranged along the end of the bench were six test-rings. In the little hollow that had been scraped in the bone of each a bead of grey metal lay. The smallest was no more than a sparrow-pellet; two of them would weigh perhaps a couple of pennyweights each; but one dull globule could hardly have drawn on a balance less than half an ounce, while another was only a grain or two smaller. Monjoy’s hand was tapping with a regular movement on the first of the rings.
“This,” he whispered—for his constricted throat barely emitted a sound, “this—listen your best, for I can’t speak louder—this was that blackish clay with the flints, Fluett way, a pound of it—they’re all pounds. This one—this is that red earth with pyrites, a mile below the bellpits—I had to get that out with quicksilver—we can throw both those away.... Wait a minute.... Throw this away, too—that’s from Booth—no, Soyland. They’re nothing—not one in a hundred, you understand.... But this, that’s three and more in the hundred, is what we picked up to-day—three in the hundred, with all the lead consumed too—you scratched your feet a bit getting this.... And the biggest of all, eighty pounds to the ton—Holdsworth Head, where your stomach turned—take it....”
He was utterly exhausted, but Ellah had drawnso near to the candle that his cropped hair singed. His prominent eyes gleamed with an avaricious light.
“Have ye made these to-night?” he said hoarsely.
“No—weeks—weeks—I’ll build a furnace, two furnaces, in the Slack ... a mill to crush it ... for fuel we’ll open up the coal again....”
“And is Holdsworth Head made o’ this? Did ye say Holdsworth Head?—Ay, lie down a bit.”
Monjoy had stretched himself, half-naked as he was, on the floor; he broke immediately into loud snoring. Ellah continued to look, now at him, and now at the beads of silver.
After a while he blew out the candle and stretched himself on the floor by the side of his companion.
FORone thing above all others Wadsworth is even yet renowned—its famous wedding. This memorable event came to pass about that time, and it began with the procuring by the new parson from John Emmason, the Horwick magistrate, the list of the King’s Hearth Tax.
You have heard of the state in which the parson had found his church, and of the repairs which he had undertaken at his own cost. These repairs had not been effected in a day, nor for that matter in a couple of months; and Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeons still fluttered against the new louver-boards of the belfry, seeking entrance. But the parson had contrived to instil such a fear into his bandy-legged clerk that Pim went in an extreme of penitence and humility; and for the humours of Pim’s re-conversion and of his vacillating conscience—well, Cole the clogger was the man to hear on that.
From the magistrate, then, the parson procured this list. His church being at last ready, maybehe judged it expedient to make the nearer acquaintance of his parishioners. He set forth on a round of visits.
Then followed something that puzzled the weavers of Wadsworth exceedingly.
At ten o’clock in the morning the parson had begun, and from house to house he had passed during the greater part of the day, talking now with the women in the yards and kitchens, now with the men in the loom-lofts. At five o’clock he had passed quickly up the street, and had been seen to enter his own house almost at a run. That evening he sent for his verger. He asked him this and that, cried aloud on his God, and went to his room without preparing his supper—for he had got rid of his housekeeper and now fended for himself. He came out the next morning still fasting, and was seen to ascend the Scout, and to disappear in the direction of the Causeway; and about midday a packman, leaving his string of horses with lime from Fluett at the top of the Scout, came down into Wadsworth, and reported that beyond Holdsworth Head he had heard lamentations, and, stepping aside, had seen a man on his knees in prayer.
That was on the Friday. On the following Sunday morning, in the renovated church, the parson made an announcement. Only half a dozen women and a lad or two heard it, but hardly was the Benediction out of his mouth, before, with incredible speed, it was all over the village,and already on its way to Horwick. It was this: That, to make (in effect) the best of a very bad job, thenceforward all marriage fees would be remitted, and the clerk’s proper perquisite would be paid out of the same canvas bag that had already provided the money for the new floorboards and windows and the rest of the repairs to the fabric of the church.
Well, the first thought of all that entered folks’ heads was: What did the parson stand to gain? They screwed up their eyes knowingly; you couldn’t catch Wadsworth folk napping; as sure as a club, there was something in it. A few incredulous ones shook their heads. It couldn’t be right! A crown piece for Pim o’ Cuddy for each wedding? Parsons were not much readier than other folk to part with crown pieces for nothing, not they! More would appear by and by. The parson might be deep, but——
And so forth, measuring the parson’s peck out of their own bushel. It was decided to await events.
But as time went on it did not become much clearer what profit could accrue to the parson, and the fact remained that, body or soul, something was offered for nothing. One couple only had taken the parson at his word, and had had the spurrins read; and when, a little later, they were safely married, it was in the presence of all Wadsworth, half Holdsworth, and more than a few fromHorwick, assembled as if for a sign and wonder. The swain was not required to put his hand into his pocket, and, journeying to Horwick next day, Pim o’ Cuddy passed his new crown piece round a company gathered in the shop of Cole the clogger.
“It’s a right eniff crown,” Cole remarked, half convinced of the parson’s disinterestedness, but wholly persuaded of his folly; and John Raikes, who had dropped in from the fulling-mill, took the coin.
“I suppose I can keep it while to-morrow?” he said, making a movement of his hand towards his pocket.
An extraordinary agitation became apparent in Pim o’ Cuddy’s face, and his voice faltered.
“Sich wark belongs to th’ Devil, ’at I’ve put at th’ back o’ me, John,” he said uneasily, and Cole the clogger winked at the goîtred fuller.
“To be sure it does, Pim,” he said solemnly. “For an extra sixpence, who’d loss th’ ease o’ his conscience? Give it him back, John, and don’t tempt him. Sixpence? Nay, it might naughbut be fourpence. Give it him back.”
“He hasn’t asked for it yet,” said Raikes, grinning; and Pim o’ Cuddy, in his misery, reckoned up that probably other couples would get married; that a few weddings would soon make the difference of another crown; that after all, he had no precise knowledge of what John Raikes would do with the coin....
“Here, tak’ it,” said John, grinning again; and involuntarily Pim made a gesture of refusal.
“Nay, John—” he stammered, “if ye want a crown while to-morrow—for some godly purpose—it isn’t neighbourly to refuse it—but al’ays tak’ heed to your steps, John!... Now I’ve wondered many a time if a sixpence wad go down th’ spout o’ that little brass kettle o’ mine o’ th’ chimley-piece—I think a sixpence wad a’most go down....”
The magpie joined in the roar of laughter with a shrill cackle.
Another couple (at the parson’s urgent request) had the spurrins read; and the event that shortly followed coming to Cole’s ears, the clogger made as much of it (while all who heard him writhed in fits and convulsions of laughter) as if in the mere ceremony and solemnization of a union there lay some miraculous virtue and speed and efficacy. Again Pim o’ Cuddy temporised with the Adam within him, and again it was suggested by John Raikes that in order to introduce a sixpence into the brass kettle it was not necessary to remove the lid. And then, nobody volunteering for a full week to put a third crown into his pocket, Pim himself began to experience qualms lest his own marriage, a score of years ago, should not have been regularly blessed and sanctioned.
“I doubt if him ’at wed us were ever right ordained a parson,” he said, troubled in spirit:“I ha’ it on my mind he were no better nor one o’ these broomstick chaps—and th’ wife can’t think on——”
“I should wed a fresh ’un next time,” they advised him.
“Don’t mak’ droll wi’ holy things,” Pim adjured them. “I feel as if I couldn’t live another day wi’out making sure——”
And on the following Sunday he hung his head, shamefast, in the clerk’s desk, while the parson, at the other end of the church, required of those who knew of any impediment why Pim o’ Cuddy and the woman called Mrs. Pim o’ Cuddy should not be joined in matrimony that they should declare the same. The parson was past niceties now.
After that, half the village flocked to be married.
The end of May is always a stirring time Horwick and Wadsworth way, for on the 29th there falls due the Horwick Spring Fair, and within a fortnight or so the sheep-shearing begins. Strangers come to Horwick for the fair, and for three days the pieceboards are converted into stalls for all manner of merchandise, and a big field off the Fullergate is given over to clowns and vagabond players and tumblers, who perform in tents or on wooden stages. All is noise and bustle and gaiety; and that spring, in addition, these weddings were being celebrated almost every day, each with its private feast. Sweethearts and mothers and grandmothers, young men from the looms and old men from the pasturesand scanty farms, all were for the churching; there was never anything like it. For the women, some of them had wedding-rings that, nevertheless, had not been put on their fingers in the presence of any priest; some wore rings of their mothers’, or of their mothers’ mothers; and for another batch Pim o’ Cuddy (now very well married indeed, and, moreover, living in intimacy with his wife again) was despatched for the new key of the church door. They stood in the building that their dogs and fowls and ferrets had made profane for them; they shuffled their feet on the new floor-boards; they glanced uneasily at the scratched and disfigured pillars; and children stood up the mountainous Scout to peer in at the windows. Their neighbours gave them in marriage, or they received the service at the hands of Pim o’ Cuddy; and men took to be their wedded wives and to live together the women whose sons and daughters awaited the same Ordinance and their turn to take on themselves the same solemn vows. And all the time the Horwick streets were thronged, and the inns filled to overflowing, and the Back o’ th’ Mooiners, coming down on the Wednesday or Thursday, did not return to their hills till the Saturday or Sunday.
It was worth something, in those days, to hear Cole the clogger make sport of Dooina Benn. For Dooina, with her times and seasons, was utterly lost and bewildered. The clogger, winking at thoseabout him, gave her the news of the marriage of a couple whose ages together totted up to a hundred and twenty or thereabouts, and bade her mark it on her calendar; and poor Dooina could hardly have told plantain from ivy-berries, which are the best and worst things wedded folk can make use of. During this comedy the supervisor of excise came out of his door at the top of the croft; with all this marrying, the supervisor could not be left out; and the Back o’ th’ Mooiners writhed on Cole’s bench and clicked their clogs feebly with delight when Cole suggested that no fitter mate could be found for the dwarf than fat Dooina herself. The jest became current within an hour.
On the second day of the feast Arthur Monjoy came upon Cope in the fair-field; the exciseman was talking to a couple of strangers behind a tent.
“Ah, Cope,” Monjoy cried; “what’s this news I hear of you and Mrs. Benn?”
“Ah, Monjoy!” Cope replied absently, as a man answers to an interruption he has scarce heard. “Eh?... Yes, yes; hn! hn! You are such a one for your jest, Mr. Monjoy!” He patted the air softly away from him again, and Monjoy passed on without noticing that he had for once omitted the deferential “Mr.”
The big engraver, too, was not untouched by this gale of universal espousals. Cicely Eastwood was a Wadsworth lass, eligible to be married in Wadsworth. Not all these amazing nuptials were offlesh so fair and fresh as hers; and a Wadsworth wedding that left Cicely single and a maid would have been like to break Dooina Benn’s heart. Arthur Monjoy sought an occasion.
Cicely was to have left Sally a fortnight before, but the fair had so crowded the “Pipes” every evening that even with a couple of extra men her help was no more than was needed. She was in and out of the parlour, and her colour was brighter and deeper, as, indeed, that of every marriageable lass seemed to be. The parlour discussed her openly, almost before the door had closed behind her; and when one man, speaking of her two suitors, remarked that “a loom only wanted one shuttle,” it was pretty well settled among them that Monjoy was like to be the shuttle.
He found her in the kitchen one evening cutting up great loaves and cheese, and breaking on every minute to answer a knock or shout. He flung his cap into the window-seat, and she looked up and smiled, but did not speak. He perched himself on the end of the table, watching her housewifely occupation, and thinking, maybe, that her hand was as much made to divide a loaf as her foot to press a rocker. A call summoned her to the parlour; and when she returned it was to find him cutting clumsily at the cheese—for he had lately burnt his hand. Sally was upstairs, and they were singing in the parlour.
“Nay, let me do it,” she said, putting forth herhand for the knife; and Monjoy took her hand as if it were quite a natural thing to do. She seemed as little constrained.
“Where’s Ellah?” he asked.
“He was here an hour ago. Oh, let me get on, Arthur!”
“Do you want him here—now?” he said, drawing her nearer to him.
“I don’t want any of you, this busy,” she replied; but as she became suddenly conscious, her colour deepened, and her hair seemed startlingly fair against it. There was a rising hubbub outside in the market-place.
“Listen!” she cried; “here are more coming!” She drew away her hand swiftly and ran out. She returned with a pile of platters, and pushed at the door with her knee, steadied the platters, and guided the closing of the door with her foot, all in one busy gesture.
“They’re on from the ‘Fullers,’ shouting for supper.—Nay, not now, Arthur!—”
But he did not withdraw the arm he had placed about her, and his great red bear’s head was close to her cheek. “Will you, Cis?” he said, huskily.
“Oh, reach me that butter! Nay, I’ve knocked your hand.—Will I what?”
“Marry me——”
“Yes, yes—reach me another loaf from yon pot——”
“And when, dear?”
“Oh, go, go! They’ll be in here in a minute. Another time—in the morning—go, and send Harry——”
The noise of steps was heard along the passage. He caught up his cap and started for the door, not wishing her to be found with him. Suddenly she stepped backward to the passage door, pushed the bolt, and lifted her head. He darted towards her. She gave him her cheek, pushed back the bolt at the same instant, and he disappeared as the door opened.
Thus hurriedly, for Cicely Eastwood, came and went her delicious moment.
After that, not the clogger’s shop only, but half Horwick and all Back o’ th’ Mooin were abuzz with the news. The strict three days of the spring fair were over, but Horwick seemed as if it would never know the sober traffic of a Thursday again. Far into the warm nights lads and men sat on the pieceboards and drank ale. James Eastwood was boisterously complimented on the winding up of his clock. The jest of Cope and fat Dooina was renewed, and Eastwood Ellah, it was said, had been seized with another igg and had talked loudly and disjointedly in the middle of the Fullergate. The wedding was fixed for the second week in June; that was also the appointed time for the shearing of Eastwood’s sheep, and one supper was to celebrate both events.
The wedding morning broke hot and cloudless,with a sky of midsummer blue and larks invisible in it singing tirelessly. The bell in the squat belfry at Wadsworth began to ring at eight o’clock in the morning, and up the Shelf from Horwick and down the Scout from Back o’ th’ Mooin hundreds of people poured. From behind the houses at the top of the village, where a stream had been dammed for the washing that had taken place the day before, came the constant calling of penned sheep; and now and then a man passed up the street with a bucket of tar or ruddle for marking. You could hardly get into the “Gooise” for drinkers and merrymakers, and a throng as dense filled James Eastwood’s yard, where three tables were already set up. Matthew Moon had come, little in his way as were women and weddings; and to top all, Monjoy had taken no refusal but Jeremy Cope must come also.
The parson passed from his house at a quarter-past eleven; but no sooner had he set foot in the church but out he came again, beside himself with indignation. The church was a tumult of laughing and shouting and hilarity. Pim o’ Cuddy was fetched from the bellrope and sternly bidden to announce that there would be no wedding, and Pim fled from the ire in the parson’s face. His appearance in the clerk’s desk was the signal for a shout; and in consternation, Arthur Monjoy, who had but just arrived, sought the parson. The parson was already half way to his own house.
“Be off, if you are he!” the parson cried; “or bow your back to the pillars, as Samson did, that God’s defiled house may overwhelm you all together!”
But Monjoy’s own rage and remorse were so apparent, and he besought the parson so movingly for one minute in which he himself might restore order, that the parson cried, “I give you three minutes, then; but if so much as a whisper reaches my ears——” Monjoy was gone. Before the parson had fairly turned back, the engraver, coiner, forger, unlicensed smelter of metals, was in the clerk’s desk and Pim o’ Cuddy was pitched into the arms of the horde below. As he stood there, it was hardly too much to say of him that he looked a king, a barbarian king of some older time, who made laws with his eye and executed them with his hand.
“Have you done?” he roared.
At his wrathful voice the tumult fell.
“Take those caps off!”
There was a movement, every cap was removed, and Monjoy’s head moved arrogantly from side to side.
“Now. He who moves hand or foot settles with me. When the words ‘Let us pray’ are pronounced, you will kneel, and you will remain kneeling till the Amen. There’s none here who doesn’t know me; he doesn’t know me who doesn’t do this. Whenmyhead bows andmyknee bends, by this house and its Master, yours shall!”
A moment longer he stood in the desk, and then left it amid such a silence that the calling of the sheep away by the dam could be heard. They fell from before him as he passed out of the church again; he reappeared alone at the altar, his back to the congregation. Presently Cicely and James Eastwood appeared, the parson following.
The now familiar service was brief. Obediently as children, docile and uncomprehending as children, Back o’ th’ Mooin knelt for the prayer. An Amen or two, well-nigh forgotten, rose to lips as the parson ceased; and then they rose again. The parson gave out a couple of verses of a hymn; only Pim o’ Cuddy and a few others sang it, but all stood in imitative attitudes of reverence, just as at the pieceboards they had imitated gestures of ridicule and derision. They passed out of the church and put on their caps again, and the chief actors entered the vestry where the registers were.
In the afternoon the sheep were shorn and turned off again up the Scout, where they bleated continually. The grey fleeces were stacked in James Eastwood’s yard, and a great drinking and carousing was toward in the “Gooise,” where the parlours and passages were so packed that the ale for the shearers had to be passed out of a window. The noise increased as the afternoon wore on. Mish Murgatroyd, Dick o’ Dean, and certain others, wishing to know what Cope the supervisor weighed,set him on a pair of wool-scales amid uproarious applause—six and a half stone—“six for th’ body and th’ odd half for his legs.” You could have told where Monjoy was by the cheers that rose from time to time. Cicely and Sally and Dooina Benn appeared at an upper window, and there was more cheering; but the biggest cheer of all came when Cicely and Arthur rose hand in hand at the supper-board and Arthur tried to thank them all. But there was no hearing him for the din, and he sat down again. The parson, still in righteous dudgeon (and, maybe, having his own opinion of the big bridegroom’s method of obtaining order in the church), had looked in for a minute and withdrawn again; but as he passed the gate of the yard there arose another tow-row, and half a dozen Back o’ th’ Mooiners brought in Jeremy Cope on a hurdle, as if for a stang-riding, and shuttered him off on to a pile of fleeces. “Fotch Dooina tul him!” they cried; and Cope mopped and mowed and blinked his purple lids. Monjoy rescued him from Dooina’s arms. It grew late. Over the Scout the moon rose mild and yellow, and they began to leave Eastwood’s yard and to assemble in the square outside the “Gooise.” Some began to ascend the sheep-tracks of the Scout, but the most remained till morning, when there was a great swilling and sousing and freshening-up at the horse-troughs. During all the following day they straggled homewards, to celebrate Red Monjoy’s wedding in theirown fastnesses; and two days later there came word of rejoicings still continued at Booth, where, with fantastic rites, the effigies of Monjoy and Cicely had been crowned and enthroned, King and Queen of Back o’ th’ Mooin.
FROMJohn Emmason, the magistrate, circuitously through James Eastwood (who, better than anyone else, had the magistrate’s humour), came a word that set Matthew Moon’s brows a-pucker and started him pacing with his fists doubled deep in his breeches pockets. Emmason, meeting the flockmaster near the Piece Hall, had put it after his own fashion.
“Willis is looking very well,” he had remarked, allowing his eyelids to flutter and fall.
Eastwood’s own eyes had narrowed suddenly. “Who is?” he had asked.
“Willis. Parker’s clerk at Ford. I saw him in conversation with our supervisor on one of the feast days.”
“Oh, aye?” Eastwood had replied. “Well, your health’s a grand thing to keep.... How if me and Matthew was to look in for a bit of a chat this evening, John?”
“You’d be very welcome, James,” the magistrate had answered; and Eastwood had straightway sought Matthew Moon.
They repaired to the magistrate’s house at eight that evening; they found him in his blandest mood. His lids drooped more than ever; his finger-tips met silkily; and he rang for wine.
“We must have wine,” he remarked. “You, James, or your daughter, or our good friend Monjoy (or all three), are to be congratulated, I believe? We must drink their healths. A happy event! I should have liked well to assist at the ceremony, but business—His Majesty’s business——”
“To be sure; I thank ye, John. Ay, there were stirrings; ye’d ha’ laughed to see Cope o’ th’ pile o’ fleeces——”
“Ah, Cope was there? An oddity, that man; a crooked sort of personage; a man, I should say, not readily understood.”
Matthew Moon was frowning at his untasted wine. He looked up.
“What’s that you told James about Cope?” he demanded; and again the magistrate’s horse-face grew bland.
“I told James? Surely not!... Ah! I remember; I did mention that Willis seemed in excellent health and spirits. A very capable fellow, that Willis—zealous. I wish I had his like for a clerk. A clerk who can be trusted on a delicate errand——”
“What sort o’ delicate errand?” Moon demanded again; and the magistrate’s brows rose.
“—who can be trusted on a delicate errand, why, I’ve been looking for one this five years!”
James Eastwood nudged the merchant that he should hold his peace; and by and by the magistrate hummed softly, as if at something interior to himself, and punctuated his remarks with delicate touchings of his fingers.
“Hum, hum! Do you happen, James (but possibly you won’t)—do you happen to remember a conversation we had a little while ago, about saying Yes when No is meant?—Surely it was to you I was speaking of that?”
“To be sure,” said Eastwood (though he remembered no such thing). “It’s odd ye should mention it, for I was thinking of it to-day. I’ve oft noticed that to speak o’ things seems in a way to bring ’em about a’most.”
“Ah! I thought my memory had not failed me! Well, I had an instance only this morning, a trifle of business; briefly, it was this: Among my many letters was one from the solicitor to the Mint; two letters, to be precise, and they come pat on that conversation of ours. I was struck by the way in which these highly-placed law-officers can talk (so to put it), and say nothing. You will excuse me that I do not show you the letters themselves; and certainly I expected news in them. Perfectly formal, courteous letters—” he musedlong, “—and yet so entirely superfluous as almost to seem blinds—puttings-off——” His eyes closed; he seemed to be tasting something delicate on his tongue; and Matthew Moon opened his mouth to speak. Again Eastwood nudged him.
“Ay,” said the flockmaster unctuously, “when letters doesn’t say anything ye ha’ to be sharpish to understand ’em.”
“Yes—yes and no,” mused the magistrate. “Ah, this Law!—You make a full confession of a thing, the Law finds it insufficient; you deny, and the Law murmurs ‘Indeed?’ and presently takes you by the heels. I have long letters sometimes, full of words, and all they say is this ‘Indeed?’—And so much for our recent conversation, James.”
This time Matthew Moon struck bluntly in.
“Do ye mean, i’ plain words, that they’re setting ye aside?” he said; and at that moment an accident befell the magistrate’s glass of wine. It overturned at his elbow, and Emmason rose hastily for a napkin. He dabbed up the spilt liquid, and then crossed to the window, putting his hand against the crack of the shutter.
“I think the wind is north, for this room is uncommonly draughty,” he muttered. “You will pardon me, I’m sure, but I am just recovering from an ear-ache——” He took some morsels of cotton-wool from his pocket and stuffed them into his ears.
The merchant made a little exclamation of contempt, and turned to Eastwood.
“Is that it, James?” he asked, while the magistrate inspected the cornice of the room.
“Nay, if ye will come in like that——”
“Does he mean Cope’s trafficking wi’ Ford magistrates and leaving ours alone?”
“Why won’t ye leave John to me?”
“No need; it’s plain enough. We’ve been looking west instead o’ east, that’s all.” (The magistrate nodded, and immediately seemed to doze, nodding again twice or thrice.) “There’s the Gazette at the clogger’s, with its pigeons and creeping about and all that, that’s all west; and east, there’s them I warned ye o’ before, that’ll ha’ nothing to do with us, and Ford, and a Ford magistrate’s clerk i’ Horwick.—His legs don’t amount to much, but he can get letters, and sit in the ‘Pipes’ all ears, and set fools sniggering with his ‘La, Mr. Monjoy!’”
“Well, let me get what I can out o’ John.”
“Ay, let’s have the clever work.”
Eastwood rose, set his hand for a moment to the crack of the door, and returned to Emmason.
“Ye’re wrong, John; it’s from the door, not the window. Come and sit between us,” he said.
The magistrate took the wool from his ears and changed his place, and while the others rested their elbows on the table he leaned back between them. Eastwood began the farce slowly.
“It’s come over me this bit back, John,” he said deliberatively, “that there’s a deal o’ queerwork goes on i’ Horwick that folk knows little about.”
“Ay?” murmured the magistrate. “And in what sort?”
“Well, say there’s poaching. A man i’ your position doesn’t hear tell of it, but it’s spoken of openly among us. Magistrates can’t be everywhere.”
“No, no; we occupy a difficult position,” Emmason assented; but the slow shake of his head said a good deal more. It said (for instance) that, if in truth he were officially discredited, zeal against poachers would hardly reinstate him.
“Then, there’s more nor a bit o’ smuggling along th’ Causeway, fro’ the Lancashire ports,” Eastwood suggested, tentatively; and again Emmason shook his head.
“The person to inform of that is Cope,” he said.
“True, true,” said Eastwood; and when again he spoke it was very slowly indeed.
“The Law, ye say, doesn’t al’ays take plain speech; well, there’s another thing, that ye’d best not take official till ye know more.—Now and then th’ coin’s been tampered wi’.”
“Are you sure the draught was from the door?”
“Ay, ay; come a bit closer this way.—Now, if that’s so, ye ought to be informed; and supposing ye were to show some knowledge, as Imight say, to the authorities—to interest ’em, like—then happen there’d be fewer letters wi’ this ‘Indeed?’ in ’em.”
Emmason sat suddenly upright in his chair.
“You cannot mean to suggest to me, James, that in the event of any evidence being produced against such person or persons and so forth—that I should ever think of disregarding such evidence?”
Eastwood spoke with indescribable dryness—“I said information, not evidence,” he murmured; “it’s a rum thing, is th’ Law.”
Emmason leaned slowly back again. He ceased to set his finger-tips together, and his eyes gazed steadily at the reflection of the candles in the polished table. Eastwood watched him furtively; Moon had not moved. The magistrate began to murmur, neither quite aloud nor quite to himself; and the expression on Eastwood’s face became one of deep abstraction. All the world is agreed that when a man’s musings are overheard the secrecy of them remains inviolable; it is a nicer point whether or not you may rule your conduct by the light of any information they may contain. Only by the acutest attention could John Emmason’s murmurings have been overheard; but they were something like this: “If it isn’t too late—if they’ll still listen to me—I could approach Cope before he gets too deep with Parker—yes, to show a little knowledge—ah!...”
* * * * *
Between Matthew Moon and the flagitious magistrate little love was lost, and Moon’s view of the case was laid before the Executive two days later, at a meeting in an upper room of the “Gooise” at Wadsworth.
“I was jealous of it at first; I am more than jealous now. Listen,” he said with great earnestness. “A gauger without legs, that can’t knock about and keep an eye on things, what good is he? And that’s the sort they’ve sent to Horwick. Why, think ye? I’ve a wit o’ my own, with the fancy-work left out, and I know what itmightbe.—Suppose hewantsus to make light of him, and to be the jest of every lad in the market-place, till we say, ‘Tut, it’s only Cope’; and then suppose he’s listening and hedge-creeping, and setting a knot here and a knot there, like poachers wi’ pheasants—what then?”
“You go too fast,” said Monjoy. “It may be that Emmason’s being passed over; we’re not sure of that yet; but even to think it would cast John down a bit.”
“John’s as cast down as you’re set up, Arthur, wi’ the pomp o’ this grand scheme o’ yours. You’re not the fittest man for a counsellor just now—leaving out ye’re newly wed.”
“No?” said Monjoy with a laugh. “Fit or not, I’ve got a hillside of ore to go at, and laid out the foundations of two furnaces, and got the fire-brick made and the stone to the spot and men juststarting to work day and night. That was a ballad, if I remember; but never mind that. You’re out o’ health, Matthew; perhaps you’ve some trouble we know nothing of.”
“Finish your say.”
“Here’s Emmason going over to give Parker a neighbourly call. If all Emmason wants is to put up a show of zeal, we can manage that for him. An old die or two planted here and there won’t do any harm, and he can give Cope a search-warrant, all as fair as the day. That’ll amuse Cope in Horwick, and we’re not going to invite him this side of Wadsworth.”
“Have you finished?” Moon asked.
“Why, what ails you, Matthew?”
“Because if ye have, I’ll ask ye this: Who’s been watching Cope lately?”
“I’ve been watching something better worth while,” Monjoy returned.
“Maybe; but I’ll tell ye what I’ve seen, that won’t hurt ye to know. I said before yon’s mind was as ill-shapen as his body; listen: he’s a man-eater, and hyænas laugh like him. There’s no man’s blood in yon. He lets ye shoot your spittle at him, and laughs just the same. What was it he laughed at first in the ‘Pipes’? I see ye remember. I began to watch him after that, and I’ll back my own wits against Emmason’s clot o’ sized warps, for all the fancy-work. I’ve seen him licking round at ye all with his filthyeyes, choosing men to fit the white cap wi’ the black strings on and reckoning how many widows there’d be. Ay, I’ve seen his eyes feeding onthat!—” He pointed suddenly to John Raikes’s great neck.
“What!” cried Raikes, with a hoarse oath, starting suddenly up, while his chair tumbled behind him.
“Ay, and he’s leered at Sally bringing in ale, and at Cicely, too, by God!—We’ve no grand new furnaces in Horwick, but there’s odds and ends to watch. They weighed him at the shearing: how many of us has he weighed, and measured the rope for, with his watch in his hand?”
John Raikes gave a cry to drown his words. “Whisht, whisht!” he shouted.
“Ay, I’ve touched ye, have I? That’s Cope. Don’t trust my eyes; come and see. Come and see the busiest man in Horwick. Ye’re going to bide what happens, are ye? See ye don’t bide too long. What Emmason’s going to do he must do quick, and James, that can talk his daft talk, must see to it. Don’t tell me I’ve troubles ye know nothing about; ye’ve heard my trouble.”
John Raikes was pale, and he was clenching and unclenching his hands. Eastwood’s crafty face was anxious and drawn into corrugations. Monjoy fiddled with his russet whiskers. Moon’s speech had set a load on their spirits. But soon Monjoy began to come round. He remembered the merchant’shabitual caution and lack of enterprise, his attachment to filing and clipping and sweating and such small matters, and quickly his own hazardous venture filled his mind again.—It was the obtaining of fuel that troubled him chiefly. Ore he had, and labour, and the security of the hills, but unless fuel was to be had near at hand ... but there must be coal still unworked ... there would be much to do before the furnaces were finished that did not need his immediate supervision, and he would see about the coal.... He was as thoughtful as the others, tapping his fingers on the table; but the merchant’s words were already out of his mind.
“Give me two months, if this weather holds,” he cried suddenly, “and Johnny Cope shall think we’ve coined the big blessed silver moon herself! By heaven! if we stick for fuel, the lads shall bring their loom-timbers for the first fire! We’ll weave a shalloon with a ring and music in it! What?—Then, some Horwick way, some Trawden, and we’ll run it, rund and bar, down the Pennine to Sheffield, and Nottingham, and Derby, where Charlie turned back.... An ilion-end for the Elector! What, lads?”
He was on his feet, his arms extended, and the three looked at his red radiant countenance as if it had suddenly become unfamiliar.—“What, lads?” he cried again; and Matthew Moon rose.
“I’ve said my say,” he said. “There’s notalking to Arthur; but you, John, keep in mind what I told you. I’ll stand by the Exec’tive as long as I’m on it, and now I’ll go and look after these things that doesn’t matter so much in Horwick. Good night.”
The door closed behind him, and his heavy tread was heard on the stairs. Soon the others were deep in the discussion of the details of Big Monjoy’s dangerous undertaking.
THEsummer grew hot and rainless, and the Horwick mills stood for want of water. In Wadsworth you could no longer tell the day of the week by the knocking of the looms—the lazy throw of the shuttle that began the week from the frantic clatter of “felling” on the eve of the Thursday market—for the weavers worked only early in the mornings and late into the night, and dozed during the afternoons. Not a breath stirred the birches and mountain-ash of the Scout; and the blue-flowering teazel-thistles, that the fullers set in iron frames for the raising of a nap on their cloth, stretched up the steep hillside like a dusty, slaty, ethereal bloom.
Arthur Monjoy had taken a small house in Horwick, but every night he was over the moor, and, until he should cease his setting out at nightfall and returning at daybreak, Cicely remained in her father’s house. Eastwood Ellah, who for a weekafter the wedding had slept none knew where, had returned. He sat in his old place by the chimney corner, watching Cicely as before; and sometimes, when he went upstairs, the jarring of his loom would sound through the greater part of the night. Once or twice only had he gone forth with Monjoy; he now seemed to dislike the moor, and, indeed, open spaces generally; and when he was not in the chimney corner he was usually in bed sleeping the clock round.
Cicely, at the time when the parson, with the list of the Hearth Tax in his hand, had made his famous round of visits, had been with Sally in Horwick, and she had scarcely his acquaintance. But she was now so frequently passing up the street, or across the square, that an acquaintance grew of itself, and he often stood in conversation with her. He usually asked after her husband; and one broiling afternoon he suggested to her that there was no cooler place than the church to which he was going. She accompanied him, and they sat down on the hindermost bench.
Again he asked after her husband. “I trust he is not one of those who think that a churchgoing on their wedding-day is once too often,” he said, frankly admiring her.
“He doesn’t talk to me about it,” Cicely replied reservedly, and the parson kneaded his knuckles and gazed thoughtfully at one of the floor-boards.
“He seems to have extraordinary authorityover a class of people not exactly his own,” he remarked by and by.
“Ay, they think a lot of him,” she answered evasively.
“Yes.... If he could be persuaded to come to church, a good many others would follow, I imagine. It is what I intended to ask you this afternoon. Do you think he could be persuaded?”
Cicely smiled a little. “It’s all what sort of a persuader ye are,” she said.
“Or you yourself are?” he suggested. “Suppose you were to come; he might come with you.”
“He might; ye’d better put it to him.”
“I should like you to do that. Think: you, a young wife, can do much with a word; what he does, others will do; and in your hands more than in anybody’s it rests to turn this barbarous parish to the fear of God. Or, let me put it another way....”
He talked earnestly, but Cicely shook her head from time to time. He asked her questions—he was exceedingly curious regarding her husband; she allowed him to remain so. She displayed no great fervour about attending church herself; but to that he half persuaded her. In half an hour she rose; again he noted her handsome colour and magnificent carriage, and he knew that if his end was to be gained, he was beginning in the right quarter. They left the church together.
Thereafter they had many conversations, and Cicely attended church intermittently; but she refused to attempt to influence her husband.
Ellah never used now the ear-trumpet that Monjoy had given him, and there were symptoms that his moroseness was bringing on another igg. It came, a flood of excited babbling that all the world was against him, and so forth, and Cicely put him into his chair and smoothed his brow with her hands. The touch seemed to bring him relief, and once, when she pressed his hot temples, he seemed to sleep, but opened his eyes and muttered when she ceased. He was persuaded that he was spied on, that the most unlikely folk had malign influence over him, and that half the village had gone off their heads; and one afternoon, as Cicely bathed his throbbing temple-arteries with water, he suddenly said, “I wouldn’t lay a finger on ye, lass, not ever so.” He recovered, and began to show a passionate fondness for roast pork.
The heat continued, so that paint blistered on wood and the tar glistened and bubbled on the roofs of sheds; and, maybe, the heat was the cause of the softening of moral fibre that became apparent in Pim o’ Cuddy, the verger and bellringer. More than once he was caught hugging to his breast the little brass kettle, under the lid of which he slipped the crown-pieces and down the spout the sixpences of usury; and then one night Arthur Monjoy took him over the moor. That marked a sad period.Thenceforward two men struggled within him. The clerk contemned worldly riches, but Pim o’ Cuddy chuckled “Ho! ho!” to himself at odd moments, rubbed his palm against wood, and made no secret of the dilly-spoons and weaving-candlesticks he would have, all of heavy silver, at no distant date. “A silver wedding too, Pim—don’t forget that,” they rallied him.
Many now took the pack-causeway by night. Probably the only man in the village who was ignorant of what was toward was the parson; but they laughed, and said that parsons were all alike in that. Eastwood Ellah’s iggs were treated with a sort of respect; there was something in an igg like that; and one or two were by no means sure that he could not, if he had wished, have produced not silver, but gold.
Whether from her conversations with the parson or not, Cicely became thoughtful, and sat sometimes for half an hour at her roving-wheel, not working, but turning her wedding-ring round and round on her finger. Arthur had made the ring himself; whence the gold, she knew very well; and as she turned it, an uneasiness seemed to communicate itself to her from the gold hoop. One afternoon she spoke of this to him.
He had just risen, not having gone to bed till broad day, and she sat on the edge of his unmade bed, turning the ring again. Presently, without looking up, she said, “Arthur, dear—” He tookher on his knee, and she made herself small against his breast.
“What is it, Cis?” he asked, his great hand wandering in her bright hair; and she drew the ring slowly back and forth to the end of her finger.
“I don’t feel, somehow, right wed, Arthur,” she said timorously.
“What!” he exclaimed, trying to see her face. “But there’s many a lass would like to be as well wed as this! What’s the matter, Cis?”
“I don’t know ... ’tis the ring.... Do you love me a deal, Arthur?”
“Kiss me.... Do I what?”
“And would you get me another ring if I was to want it very much?”
“Why, what ails this one?”
“I don’t know.... Buy me another, Arthur. Buy me one of a right goldsmith, paid for wi’ earned money. ’Tis silly, but I shall do many silly things afore we’re old together.”
Again he raised her chin. “Tut! I’ve left you too much alone, dear; but in another week or two—— Open your mouth....”
She did so, adorably, and he put such a noisy kiss there as a mother gives to her babe. But she persisted.
“Will you, love? ’Tis very little!”
“You shall have all the rings you want by and by.”
“Ah, I don’t want that, not that way.—Well,I’ll pay you for it now, with a kiss: then I shall have it, shan’t I?”
“Rogue!” he answered, enfolding her.
But within a couple of days she had another request to make of him, and that was that they might go to their own house in Horwick at the earliest moment. She gave as her reason for this that she might be helpful to Sally Northrop, and he frowned.
“Sally’s managing well enough, and you can’t go alone. Are you unhappy here?”
She answered looking away. “I’m happy where my husband is.”
“Has anything upset you?”
“No, no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she replied; “but oh, I could like to see you in our little house, engraving your seals and plates again!”
“That you shall see soon—the little house, at all events.”
“Not to-morrow, Arthur, nor this week, for I’m going to cut the teazels; but very soon we’ll go, won’t we?” she pleaded.
“So soon, Cis, that the time will seem like nothing. And now I must be off—they’ll be waiting. Say good-bye to your husband....”
It seemed as if hot weather or hot pork, or both, had wrought deleteriously again on Eastwood Ellah. Whether these iggs of his were (as Monjoyhad upbraided him) assumed or not made very little difference in the result; for you may reckon a man crazed who is crazy enough to desire to appear so. What Cicely had not told Arthur was of another of these attacks, in which, soothing his head with her hands, she had found herself suddenly laid hold of again; and she now went in fear of him, and barred the door of her chamber at night. Once, though she had not heard him ascend, she had seen, from the inside, the sneck of the door lift noiselessly of itself; and for hours, lying awake and clothed and trembling, she had listened to the furious racket of his loom in the adjoining chamber.
About that time there befell a sequel to the parson’s wedding of which Pim o’ Cuddy, none other, was the hero. The renewal of lease (so to speak) that his second wedding had given to his connubial bliss lapsed, and again his wife left him. But this leaving was different.
That is to say, the leaving itself was much the same, for Pim carried her basket as far as her mother’s doorstep and there bade her a dejected farewell; but this occasion was remarkable for what followed after Pim had returned home, locked his door, and betaken him to his reft couch.
He had not closed his eyes before he heard a soft whistle outside. It was the whistle of a neighbour, who, through the keyhole, informed him of something that had taken place down the street.
“What!” cried Pim hoarsely, and the neighbour repeated his tidings. It seemed that there had been words between Mrs. Pim and her mother, and for temper, the choice of the pair of them was between vinegar and vinegar.
“Tell me again what shoo said,” whispered Pim, incredulously through the keyhole.
“Shoo said, shoo could pack off back. Shoo were fooil eniff to wed him th’ first time, shoo said, but th’ second, shoo’d ha’ to stand tul it. ‘Trot,’ shoo said, and slammed th’ window down. Shoo’s sitting on her basket now.”
Pim returned to bed.
Never had sheets seemed so delicious nor pillows so downy-soft. Pim hugged and loved himself in his glee. Twice he heard soft steps approach beneath his window—his wife was struggling with the humiliation of return; and the bed shook with his silent merriment. “Shoo were fooil eniff th’ first time, shoo can stand tul it now!” Pim o’ Cuddy had to gag himself with a pillow. It is not often we have the chance to live a score of years over again with everything come to pass exactly as we would have had it.
There came a soft tapping at the door, not too loud, for fear of neighbours. Pim whinnied under the bedclothes with delight. The knocking grew louder, and a familiar voice called in suppressed tones. Pim stifled. Then, at an unguardedly loud knock, a neighbouring window opened.Further concealment was useless. Mrs. Pim o’ Cuddy began to knock indeed, using a stone for the purpose. Neighbours began to join in the clamour. Cole the clogger would have given stock and goodwill to have been there.
Further feigning of sleep on Pim’s part would have been preposterous. He cogitated desperately; the jest could not be relinquished yet; and then there came to him the choicest idea of all. He lighted a candle, descended to the door, and again called through the keyhole.
“Who is it?” he cried.
“I’ll learn ye who it is, ye offald-looking church ratten!” came Mrs. Pim’s reply; and then Pim lifted up his voice on high.
“What do I hear? A woman’s voice?” he cried. “A woman’s voice, and at my own door! Be off, ye baggage; be off wi’ your nasty merchandise, d’ye hear? Be off, ye wicked light woman! Be off, and leave saints and godly men i’ peace! Be off!...”
—And, in whatever kind Pim o’ Cuddy subsequently paid for his prank, it remained doubtful whether at the bottom of his erring and naughty heart he ever really rued it.
Word came that John Raikes was short of teazel-heads, and Cicely prepared to cut them. She armed her legs with a pair of leggings of raw hide, and covered her fair hair and neck against the sun with a kerchief. She hung a basket about her neck witha strap and put into it two old buckskin gloves and a pair of sheep-shears. She timed herself so as to be up the Scout about the time Arthur was due to return along the Causeway, and set off.
Save for herself, the whole village seemed to slumber. The blue-flowering tracts, of a blue so uncertain that of itself you could hardly have told whether it was near or distant, lay high up the sheep-tracks, and as she mounted grasshoppers filled the air with their dry rapid noise. The grass and yellow bents of the lower slopes were slippery as glass; and she rose slowly until she could look down on both slopes of the roof of the little church and see into the square beyond it. Three miles away in the slumbrous heat lay Horwick, its roof-windows making piercing little points of light, and the vista beyond that was a grey shimmer, somewhere in which lay Ford Town and parts she knew nothing of. She tucked her skirt into the tops of her leggings, drew on the gloves, and began to move slowly along the Scout, snipping the slaty-blue teazel-heads as she went.