Only a dozen folk saw Sally laid to rest; among them were Cicely and Dooina Benn. All the morning the bell tolled in the squat belfry that had baffled Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeon, and at midday the parson came out of his house. All was over in an hour. There was no “arvill,” or funeral drinking; and those who had followed the bier set on back immediately for Horwick. Cicely and Dooina, both in their blacks, carried little Jimmy between them, and at a turn at the foot of the street, where for a moment the rest could not see them, Dooina kissed Cicely quickly and wiped her eyes.
“So it won’t be me ’at does for ye, love,” she sobbed, and she carried Jimmy yet a little further.The road turned to pass down round Wadsworth Shelf, and again the two women dropped behind. In a few minutes Dooina rejoined the little party alone; and when a lad asked after Cicely, she sobbed and laughed and choked all at once, and answered him that he’d know more o’ women and life th’ longer he lived. They dropped to the Horwick valley.
Cicely had left the road at the mouth of a narrow grassy gully that turned behind a fold of the hill to a small dean half a mile away. Far away a glimpse of the distant Holdsworth moors and rocky Soyland showed. Cicely had known the dean from her infancy; there was a hollow cavity in the sandy bank of a beck, overgrown with scrubby alder, that long ago had been her playing-hole, and it was there that she was to wait for Arthur. If possible, too, she was to sleep, for they would have to foot it during the night.
In twenty minutes she was ascending the bleached stones of the dry bed of the stream, stepping carefully so as to make as little noise as possible; and then she found the alder, drew it aside, and crept into her retreat. She unburdened herself of a basket and a jar of milk, and stretched herself on the sand, Jimmy asleep in her arms.
The curtains of the parson’s house had been flung back again, and the sentry had disappeared from the passage. The parson and Monjoy could nowtalk freely. As much as a merry word had passed between them, for a year of Back o’ th’ Mooin had set the parson longing for the conversation of his own kind; and then his brow had become clouded again. He had taken to this great red bear of a guest of his, as he had taken immediately to Cicely; but that did not excuse his lapse from rectitude; and, moreover, it appalled him to find that he was, for the time being, at any rate, no longer capable of prayer. He envied the beguiled captain his peace of mind. He sighed; but he was too fully occupied just then for remorse to stay long. His bad hour was yet to come.
“Monjoy,” he said suddenly, on the afternoon of Sally’s funeral, “you owe me something.”
“I haven’t forgotten it yet,” Monjoy replied.
“You owe it to me to let me do now what I refrained from before—to improve the occasion.”
“I’d like to repay you in a better sort than that,” Monjoy replied.
“Ah, you can’t; and even that will not clear me of my fault. You see how reluctant I am to speak—this cloth of ours is more often than not a disadvantage, for none but professional words are expected from it——”
“Go ahead,” said Monjoy.
“Very well.—Leave it alone after this, my good fellow.”
Monjoy made a little brusque gesture with his hand.
“Oh, that’s all settled,” he replied. “That was settled before—but humph! Perhaps not; I’m hanged if I know!” A whimsical smile crossed his face. “I was going to say—I should have liked to be able to say—that that was all settled before the smash-up began; but frankly, I don’t know.... Give me the benefit of the doubt of it.”
“And after this, what are your plans?”
“Why, if (thanks to you) I am able to get through to Liverpool—the sea. Boston, perhaps—anywhere. If you mean my livelihood, well, I’m a good engraver.... I see you don’t want to exact a promise from me; let me offer it myself. Here and now, I promise you all—all you are thinking. Will you take that as my part of a Jesuitical sort of bargain?”
They shook hands for the first time.
“Have you any money?” the parson asked, by and by.
Monjoy shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve two furnaces over the Slack; not a stiver besides.”
“Will you let me lend you a little?”
“Hm!—I might even have asked it. But let’s get something to eat first. I’m hungry.”
At ten o’clock that night they shook hands again, and with a God-speed, the delinquent parson closed his kitchen door behind Arthur Monjoy. Before eleven, by dark hillsides and pasture-paths, that none would have seen who had not knownthem, Monjoy had come to the dry stream bed. He found the alder; his name was called softly, and, entering, he folded Cicely in his arms.
In ten minutes they bestirred themselves.
“It’s up and away now for our wedding-trip,” he said. “We must be in Soyland by dawn. I know a place there. Are you well shod? Milk and bread we have; give them to me, and give me Jimmy. Now, Jimmy, my man.—Kiss me again, dear.”
And so, with their kiss, begins the story of their flight.
Could they have gone direct, they were but ten miles from Trawden Edge. The Causeway, three miles to the north of them, and running away like the side of a triangle, crossed the high undulating plateau that was formed by the joining of a dozen Shelves and Ridges; their own course lay up and over each Ridge as they came to it. They began to breast the first Ridge, that that shuts in the hamlet of Holdsworth, at half-past eleven of a hot and moonless night, with Arcturus peeping over a distant crest for their guide.
They struck knee-deep heather in twenty minutes, and their progress was a plunging and floundering through it. It snapped and crackled loudly. “Kilt yourself up as much as you can, dear; there’s none to see,” Monjoy muttered; but her gathering up of her skirts made little difference, and in the absence of moon the winding tracksbetween the thickest of it could not be seen. They flushed a covey of birds, that rose with harsh cries, and Monjoy, with the provisions on his back and Jimmy sleeping on his arm, went a little ahead, seeking such choice of tracks as he could. Cicely’s hair made a dim and ghostly shape in the darkness.
The ascent grew steep, and Monjoy assisted Cicely constantly. She began to breathe short; and ever as they toiled upwards the sharp snapping of the dry heather accompanied them. They gained the top of the Ridge, crossed it, descended again, and set forth up the next. In an hour they were across the Holdsworth valley, nearing the second top. They had not seen a sentry.
They raised another slope of the hill, and a dimness less black showed, a shorn crest of grey bents among the heather. “Courage—it will be easier there,” Monjoy murmured in Cicely’s ear; and they crossed a hollow slack of heather that lay between them and the short grass. Over the faraway moor to the north the Polestar had lifted, and the tail of the Plough, and Monjoy passed his arm about Cicely and helped her to the bents.
A dozen yards within the patch he seized her shoulder and drew her sharply back into the heather again. A voice fifty yards away had challenged them, and they had heard the cocking of a musket. They dropped flat into the heather, and Jimmy gave a little whimper. Again the voice challenged,nearer; and then fortune came to their aid. A ewe, with a couple of lambs, lifted up her woody voice in the night and scampered past them down the slope they had ascended. They saw the dark form of the sentry turn after the ewe and disappear.
“What clothes have you got on, Cicely?” Monjoy whispered.
“My blacks—for Sally,” she whispered back.
“Ah! You showed like a shadow-shape on the bents. The moon will be up soon; it must be the heather again, lass. Bear up; the next Ridge is the beginning of Soyland. Put your arm in mine, and stoop.”
They skirted the patch of bents stooping. As they began the next descent they heard voices behind them and a soft laugh; there were two sentries. They took to the heather again.
At three o’clock the moon rose, a great half-round over the dark hillside. Cut out against her disc, a quarter of a mile away, a third sentry showed; but the light revealed a little more clearly the divisions of the tortuous heather bushes, and they went with less noise and more quickly. There did not seem to be sentries in the bottoms, and they were unchallenged as they crossed the lower slopes of Soyland. They began the ascent of Soyland.
By half-past four o’clock they were five hundred feet up the rocky hill, a thousand above the sea, among enormous grey boulders that studded theheather. Cliffs rose towering above them like an eaves. Bidding Cicely remain at the foot of a narrow rocky gorge, Monjoy started away under these eaves. Presently he returned. Two score yards farther on he pulled aside a great mass of heather; behind the heather was a crack scarce a foot high.
“Let me go in first; take Jimmy,” he said; and he forced himself through the crack, and presently received Cicely in his arms. The cavern was black as pitch, but it had a floor of dry sand. Cicely, exhausted, stretched herself upon it with Jimmy at her bosom, and Monjoy lifted her head and pillowed it on his breast.
It was ten o’clock and a brilliant morning when they awoke. Monjoy stepped at once up the sandy slope and put aside the screen of heather from the opening. Across the valley, against the sky, four red dots moved; and the like, he knew, would be moving on the hill over their heads. But he was on his own ground in Soyland. There was not a nook nor corner of it that he had not rummaged for ore, and of the very cavern in which they were he had one day thought jestingly how carefully Matthew Moon would have taken its bearings against an unforeseen hour when he might have need of it. He could venture out, too, as, indeed, he must, no less for information than for milk for the infant and sustenance for themselves. The cave was of rock; it glowed with a soft and pleasant morning light;but it was not more than a dozen yards deep, and led nowhere.
Cicely had spread bread in her lap and opened the jar of milk, and they breakfasted cheek against cheek, Cicely rising once to still Jimmy’s crowing as he rolled and tumbled on the sandy floor. After breakfast Arthur kissed Cicely, a smacking, business-like buss on the mouth, spied for a while through the opening, and went out.
It was two o’clock when he returned, and gave Cicely such news as he had. The furnaces were only a couple of miles away; there was a camp there, and Soyland was picketed. But the soldiers could not keep the Holdsworth and Brotherton men from their own hills, and from behind a rock he had seen one or two by whom he did not especially want to be seen. On the Ridge to the westward of them, too, red spots were marching and counter-marching; but they were busiest behind them and to the north-east, Wadsworth way. “I’ll go out later in the afternoon,” he said. “I may run across a man I may speak to, for all the £200. Did you know your husband was worth £200, love?...”
At four o’clock he went out again. It was past seven when he returned, and something in his cheerfulness seemed to alarm Cicely.
“Tell me what’s the matter, dear,” she asked gently.
“What matter, Cis?”
“You’re putting it on, your lightness. What have you seen or heard?”
“Nothing I didn’t know before, dear. I saw little Crutchie of Fluett, and he’s bringing us food to-night. It seems £200 tempts some of them; but that’s no news.”
She pressed closer to him. “It would be kinder to tell me, dear; there’s no secrecy between us now, not like before.”
He was silent for a long time.
“Very well,” he said at last. “They’re flag-flapping. They began flag-flapping on Wadsworth Shelf when you turned off into the dean. They’ve seen you, or, maybe, both of us. It couldn’t be helped, for they’d have missed you in any case. Never mind.”
It did not take her an instant to come to her decision. She sat up, suddenly very pale.
“Arthur, you must leave me,” she said. “They can do nothing to me, and I’ll meet you somewhere in a week or two—a month or two—oh, Arthur!”
“What’s that?” he said, with infinite gentleness. “No, dear. It would be just the same in a week or a month; they’d follow you. We’ll take our wedding-trip together, I think; won’t we, Jim?—No, darling; I decide this. It’s three quarters through to get to Soyland; another hill, then the Edge, and down into Ratchet, and over Chat Moss to Liverpool ... now say ‘Yes’—say it at once——”
She made a lovely little murmuring against his shoulder, and he laughed.
“That’s my lass. Now let’s talk.—I like your parson, Cis. Why, you’ve never asked me how I got along with him yet!...”
At ten o’clock he went out again, and met Crutchie of Fluett at the appointed place. He was back by eleven.
“Is it time to push on?” she asked.
“No, dear,” he replied quietly; “I’ve brought food for another day here.”
“Oh!...” she cried, tortured with apprehension; “what is it?”
“Ssh! It makes no difference. I know ways they wouldn’t find in a year. It’s ten to one they’re mostly town men. Come and lie down, and trust your husband. Come....”
It was long before she had sobbed herself to sleep in his arms, and he, his own brain busily working, heard her murmuring in her sleep from time to time through the night.
They awoke at seven o’clock, and he passed to the opening. As it had happened, seven o’clock was not a minute too early for them to have awakened. A fresh morning breeze stirred, and the ridge they had passed showed through a sunny haze, shot with gold and grey and tender purple. Down the hillside moved slowly a party of redcoats, and, their heads visible from time to time and again hidden in the heather, four dogs tugged at their leashes.
“Why don’t the fools loose ’em?” Monjoy muttered grimly. “Ay, they’re town-bred.—Come, Cis, we’ll not stay for breakfast.”
He patted his pockets as if to make sure of something, and then looked to the priming of a pair of pistols that Cicely did not know he carried.
“CIS,” he said, anxiously, his hand at the screen of heather that closed the mouth of their retreat, “you’ve got to get over Soyland alone, and unseen. I’m going to show you a crack that will take you nearly to the top. Except at the very top, there are stones enough and heather enough to cover you, but you may have to creep. You’ll have to watch both behind and ahead, for you mustn’t be seen and you mustn’t walk into the arms of a sentry. They’re a good quarter of a mile apart—they can’t cover a hundred miles of country—you can get through easily. I’m going south a little way: listen where you’re to wait for me. You’ll cross Soyland, sighting by a large cairn you’ll see on Brotherton Head. Under it, among the heather, there’s an old square stone shaft and some birches. I’ll be there in an hour. I’ll take Jimmy with me.—Now repeat that after me.”
He could scarce hear her faint reply, and he shook her gently.
“Come now; I know you can be a brave and clever girl. I’ll tell you again....”
She repeated the instructions after him, and then he said, “Quick, a kiss ... now out you go!” He helped her through the opening and saw her immediately and swiftly take the shelter of a large boulder.
“Yes, that’s the way,” he said approvingly; “yonder’s the foot of the nick. Go quickly up it—take the risk—and then forward. Now....”
He dropped on his knees, marked the position of the bloodhounds across the valley, noted their pace, and was off.
He had packed Jimmy in the breast of his coat and secured him with the strap from which the provisions had been slung. His way lay south, round the precipitous eaves of Soyland towards the falling moorland below. He moistened his finger to the fresh wind, dodged again to a spot whence he could see the bloodhounds, glanced at the rocks above him, and began to move from rock to rock, making all the cover he might. Now and then he murmured to Jimmy, who was restless with the shaking and close confinement. “Be a man, Jimmy,” he kept saying; “across to this big boulder now—now over this heather—we must keep an eye above us, too—good! We’ll double here; never do to cross that open space, eh, Jimmy?...” He made fair progress, and presently gave an “Ah!” of satisfaction. Apath of slippery bents ran up from below among the rocks and heather, as a wave washes up a steep beach; unhesitatingly he crouched and crawled towards it.
“Now hold tight for a slide, Jimmy!” he muttered.
He lay flat on his back and started himself down the slippery way. His speed increased, and he clutched at heather roots to check himself, using his heel also as a brake. That was dangerous, for it lifted his whole body. The heather rocked and swept past him in a blur; he plunged dizzily downwards, jolted and breathless; and sixty yards down he clutched desperately at another bush and lifted twice clear over, his body taking a heather bush at each bound. He lay in a deep gutter between two purple clumps, scratched and bruised and panting, his body arched over the child; then he was up again. His first glance was at the rocky eaves; their line was sharp against the sky and unoccupied; and between himself and the men with the hounds he had now set a low roll of moorland.
It was now he who must take a risk—the risk of a sentry appearing suddenly on the eaves. He ran twenty yards ahead, glanced up again at the grey rocks, ran forward again, and continued to run, his head constantly over his shoulder. Jimmy’s face puckered, and again Monjoy hushed him.
“Ssh! Jimmy boy; we’ll manage yet, you andI; the farther south the less chance they have of rounding us—but not too far, Jimmy, or we shan’t catch those damned dogs. What fools they are to keep ’em leashed, Jimmy! They’re lazy rascals.... Now just a little farther——”
The child became quiet again, and by and by a further fall of the land gave them a moment’s breathing-space.
He was now far down in the valley, with nothing but the rolling heather about him. “Do you think this’ll do?” he said to the child; and again he moistened his finger to the wind. He drew out a pistol. He found a flat stone, knocked the priming from the pan, and began to work up a little tinder and tow with more powder from his flask. He set the stone down under the heather and drew the trigger over it.
He had to draw thrice before the spark of flint and standard ignited the charge on the stone; then it caught, and he drew the heather close over it. A bright little flame licked and crackled; it spread; and a thin smoke and the pungent smell of burning heather arose. Monjoy tore up a smaller bush and held it for a moment in the blaze.
“Now we begin, Jimmy,” he said. “This is very bad for the birds, and you’re not to do it when you get older, remember; but once in a while——”
A few yards on he fired another bush. After the weeks of drought a spark sufficed; and headvanced at a quick walk trailing his brand. When it burnt out he took another. Already from the first point of firing, the flames, of an orange scarce visible, were advancing up the hillside before the light breeze. “Variable; but there’ll be more wind higher up,” he assured Jimmy; “whew, but it’s dry! Too dry; we want some damp to make a smoke—a nice dense smoke to hide us. What, Jim?—There, I think that’ll do.”
He flung his brand from him and turned north again and a little west.
Cicely had mounted the rocky cleft in pitiful trepidation. “Brave and clever,” she told herself she must be; she repeated the words over and over, but they did not stop the painful thumping of her heart. This increased as she neared the head of the ravine, and she felt that a crisis of nerves was seizing her. It came, and she sank in a huddle under a rock, stifling hysterical sobs in a fold of her skirt. She could see the open space at the top of the ravine; she dared not approach it. For nearly twenty minutes she lay, her sobs gradually subsiding, but her will gone from her; and then there chanced something that brought her round like vinegar. A stone’s-toss away she saw appear the red back of a soldier.
What kind of being her fears had raised for her she did not know; what she saw was a rather undersized man with sloping shoulders and ahandkerchief tucked into the back of his neck. He was eating bread and cheese, and walking aimlessly a little way and back again. He half turned his face—a red, foolish, timid face—but it was the bread and cheese that steadied Cicely completely. If there was only an eater of bread and cheese to elude she thought she could do it, and she waited, no longer trembling. Even then she noticed, but was not aware that she noticed, a light odour of burning; and soon she saw the soldier stroll away to the left, or north. He did not reappear; she advanced cautiously and looked round the boulder at the head of the ravine; he was forty yards away, still walking. The bare top before her was no wider than Horwick market-place; she could run it or creep ... she crept, having control of herself again. With a little wary run she was across and crouching behind another rock. A little way before her Soyland seemed to end where the top of a mountain-ash showed over an edge, and on the purple sunlit hill across the next valley she could see the grey cairn against the sky. As she dropped over the rocky verge there came again the smell of burning ling, but again she was hardly aware of it. The wide basin beneath her was a sea of blooming heather, and almost lost in it was the small cluster of birches and the stone shaft where she was to wait for Arthur. She began the most difficult task of all—the descent with her back to the rocky, sentinelled skyline.
Suddenly, as if some obstruction had fallen from her senses, she identified the half-noticed, familiar smell, and in a flash it came to her what Arthur was about. A light vapour crept up the valley below her. A cliff of rock blocked her view to the south; she hastened towards it and looked beyond. As she did so she heard a soft, deep, distant bay.
No flame was visible; a long, low, rolling line of grey smoke hid all beyond it. It was advancing the whole width of Soyland and more, and its under surface seemed to drag in the heather like shreds and wisps of grey wool. Listening, she could hear the subdued low roaring and hissing; and then a wandering breeze made for a moment a breach in the dense grey roll. It showed a glimpse of ragged, orange, murky flame, that was blotted out again; and then, as the smoke took the lower slopes, the sky became veiled, the day began to fall to a filthy brownish twilight, and the sun dipped to a dull and bloody red. From behind her, over Soyland, the roaring sounded more loudly.
Cicely knew enough of burning moorland to be aware that, once you were caught in that smoke, the flame was like to appear suddenly, leaping all about you. Already the pungent smell filled her nostrils and lungs, and all at once, somewhere behind her, a gun was discharged. As if it had been a signal to herself, she sprang forward down the hillside.
The shaft among the birches was clearly visible, but the grey smoke was creeping towards it, and here and there, in advance of the general line, detached puffs smouldered, like sheep-fleece caught in briars. The smoke from these points veered with the variable wind, and a minute’s longer delay might cut her off. She took no thought for cover now. A sheep-track threaded the heather, leading far to the north of the cairn; its direction was of less consequence than the chance of being lost in blinding, stifling smoke with flame behind it; and she sped down the sheep-track, away from the fire and across its path. As she did so she muttered, as folk repeat before going to sleep something they desire to wake up with in the morning, “Keep out o’ the smoke—keep out o’ the smoke——”
Very soon the birches became shrouded, then blotted out.
When flame comes along damp heather, the bushes in advance pour out a thick white smoke and then burst into flame of themselves; with dry, the flames run forward yards at a time, with outriders of flying sparks. Both dry and damp were there, for even the long drought had not dried up the hidden rills and heavy marshy patches. Among the grey there rose from these compact white spiral columns that twisted and rolled, terrifying in the enveloping twilight. She could hear the clamour of the birds, and even then there came toher a thankfulness that the nesting was long past, and that all were on the wing. A score of bleating sheep rushed past her; the light penetrating mist began to enwrap her; and she turned to the north again, looking ever for the westernmost point at which the moor burned.
She saw it, or thought she did, when she was half-way across the hollow. Still she kept away from it; and then, for the first time, she glanced behind her. Above her head the sky still showed, its blue only partially embrowned; but the rocky hill she had descended was completely obliterated, and through the dreadful curtain that hid it there glared dull copper-coloured tracts. Swiftly she looked north; scarlet knots and clusters of soldiers had gathered on the heights; she forgot that they stuffed handkerchiefs into their necks and ate bread and cheese; she turned hurriedly southward again. The cairn on the hill crest above the shaft and the birches was now far to her left instead of in front of her; the course that, but for her delay, would have led straight towards it was a mile-long pall of smoke.
Suddenly a panic took her. A high ceaseless crackling now filled the valley, and behind it was an ominous roar. She turned again, almost direct for the cairn; the smoke was now shrouding it. She had seen the redcoats on the heights moving round as if to cut her off, and her one thought was to make for the birches where Arthur would be—they could not be very far away. She fancied that the smoke had changed a little in direction, too, and was falling more behind her. She coughed and choked as she tore forwards towards the point that she had judged to be the limit of the fire.
In a few minutes the smoke had filled her throat and she had fled choking before it. It advanced almost as quickly as she, but she found easier breathing, and by and by came slanting towards it again. Again she retreated, baffled and half-blinded. The heat was all about her, and she tore at the band of her skirt. She pulled the skirt off and wound it about her head. This darkness of her own making seemed all at once to terrify her, and, with muffled shouts of “Arthur! Arthur!” she plunged forward. She fell back again. She advanced again, and again had to fall back.
She now knew not in what direction she was going, save that it was away from the brown, murky night that was engulfing her and towards the remnant of livid day that, through a fold of her wrapping, still showed ahead. Not forty yards from her was a glare as of red copper. It broke into a frightful bright flame, and was smothered again; and its roaring filled her ears. That glimpse of hell appalled her; she gave a shriek and fled from it in a straight line, as the sheep and birds had fled.
Then from behind the dark curtain of smoke there came suddenly a shriller noise and a succession ofloud cracks, an indescribable mingling. A bright and lurid light towered high over her, and yellow flame twisted upwards shrieking. Something—she knew not what—so different was happening there that all at once an intelligence broke on her—she was close to the birches, which were ablaze. Arthur would be there—would be there, as he had promised—though her own courage had failed. Arthur would be there waiting ... again she began to utter piercing cries.
Through the tempest of roaring came another short crack, as if of a pistol; smoke and fierce heat suffocated her; and she gave one last lost cry.
An “Ahoy!” answered her. She was seized, by whom she knew not, and the skirt was pressed closer about her head. Somebody hurried her forward, lifting her from time to time completely off her feet; and her head was so completely enwrapped that she did not know that twenty yards away the breathing was easier. She was scarce conscious that her feet were taking steep rising ground; she only knew that the heat was abated. She was borne swiftly forward; presently her head was partly uncovered; but there was no respite from the lifting and climbing.
Actually, it was not more than five minutes before they were well up the hillside, with the conflagration sweeping away from them below. She heard a gasping voice: “Not yet—more into the wind!” and she was helped forward until afreshening breeze fanned her face. She was placed on a bed of heather; she remembered afterwards that either she saw Jimmy or dreamed she did; but Arthur was far up the hillside, firing the heather again.
She lay for a quarter of an hour before he returned; then he flung himself beside her and broke suddenly into sobs that shook his frame.
“Oh, my darling!” he cried heart-brokenly; “where had you been?”
She murmured something, her own eyes closing; and then he seized her as if even yet some horror strove to part them.
“Oh, I waited—waited—all Soyland blazed—and the wind turned and still you didn’t come; but I knew you were clever and brave, though I couldn’t see you.... Ah! This won’t do.”
He stood up and began to walk about. Presently he was calmer, and sat down again.
“That’s better,” he said. He took her in his arms and looked down at her grimed and swollen eyes. “Yes, I knew you were clever and brave; and you must be clever and brave again in a few minutes, dear. The next few hours are our opportunity.... What do you say?”
Gathered against his bosom, she had murmured something.
“Yes, yes; you can have five minutes; you shall have that if I have to fire all the ling in Lancashire. Yes, we’re better now....See, Jimmy’s putting out his arms to you, Cis——”
Softly he gave her the child.
Below them, the spectacle was one of infernal magnificence. They were now in the rear of the flames that ran devouringly forward, rank on rank, with a red courier springing up wherever a spark alighted. On the level ground the flame had spread swiftly; it now reached the foot of Brotherton Head. It took the whole of the slope above it in one terrific red lick. With a short dull roar, as if of an explosion, the hill sprang into a sheet of flame. All smoke was lost in an upward spouting of fire. At three or four points of the hill, taller spouts—gorse, likely—screamed upward and passed; and then came short bents, and for a moment smoke could be seen far away, rolling over the whole of Back o’ th’ Mooin. To the south, for a mile and more, all was a desert of ash, white and black and grey, with patches still smouldering; and a dancing mesh of sparks and short flames and glowing embers formed the rear-guard of the advance.
“Put your skirt on and come now,” said Monjoy, bending over his wife and taking her blackened hands.
In a few minutes she was ready to set forth. He took Jimmy again, and, still a little tremulous, he talked to the child as he supported Cicely up the hill.
“Forward now, Jimmy; we’ve a day’s start of those men with the pretty red coats. Forward to the Edge now, you and I and Cicely, and then down into Ratchet, Jimmy. This is our good-bye to Back o’ th’ Mooin. When you’re older I’ll tell you a tale about Back o’ th’ Mooin; come, take a look at it now—you may chance to remember.... Look, Cis, how it’s raging over yonder! That’s—yes—that’s at the furnaces—my furnaces—and that white steaming’s Brotherton Bog. Whew!... This is a most sinful thing, Jimmy; the poor birds are homeless now, as we are; but our home’s near Cicely, wherever she is, eh? (Heislike his mother, Cis!)—Come, dear; you shall rest again at the top....”
It was between afternoon and evening when, far to the south, they reached the Edge. They could not yet see the great western plain, but the land fell away steadily, and soon there was nothing but the immediate foreground and the far distance. The sun sank as they rested and walked again, and the heather and the sheep were dyed and flooded with gold. The light grew richer and quieter and more serene; vapours turned the sun to crimson; and suddenly, appearing beyond a last gradual rise, the breadth of Lancashire lay spread out below them.
Three miles away, among broken hills, lay Ratchet, one or two of its roof-windows still shining brightly. Far beyond it lay a russet patch ofsmoke—the chimneys of a great town. Violet vapours crept over all the plain. They could not see the sea in the gathering twilight. The rim of the sun dipped into a bank of cloud; it lost its light and grew rusty and died.
Faintly from Ratchet came the ringing of a bell, and Monjoy’s eyes turned from the quiet vale to his wife.
“Tell me, dear—when you have kissed me—do you dread to leave and to begin with me again in a new land?”
“No, no; let’s go quickly,” she replied.
“Forward, Jimmy,” Monjoy said; and they dropped down the winding path to Ratchet.
OFthe written records on which this tale has partly depended, neither Matthew Moon’s books nor the voluminous official documents, all criss-crossed with signatures and stamps and seals and arms, make mention of the departure of Arthur Monjoy from Liverpool. After he had (according to one description) “most feloniously fired and consumed the moor,” he ceased, officially, to exist. But word of mouth, that, with scarce more husks and wrappings, holds now and then as good a kernel of truth, goes a little further. To be sure, for dates and suchlike the documents are the safer authority; for while it was said by some that he sailed within a week, others had it that not until the month of October did he set foot on the deck of a merchant brig bound for Boston, the reason for the delay being the illness of his wife. But documents and tradition together make a pretty tangle, and he who would get at the truth of the matter must dip his cup at both sources. Partaking, perhaps, alittle of both was the letter that arrived for the Wadsworth parson from Boston some time in the following spring, informing him of their settling in the new-made Republic and of the birth of a little foster-sister for Jimmy Northrop.
The official records had best be taken first. There is still extant a letter of William Chamberlayne, Solicitor to His Majesty’s Mint, in which oath is made, and it is said, that he and the Solicitor for the Crown in this particular prosecution “are not prepared to proceed further in the trials of Raikes, Dean and Thomas, or any of them, at the assize now being held at the Castle of York, by reason, as he, this deponent, has been informed, of the lack of clear and certain information and the great difficulties in the coming at evidence material to the prosecution;” and, with an extra quirk and pomposity or two, you may read the same of Matthew Moon. Moreover, certain persons were now to be brought to book on a more serious count than clipping and coining, or even the unlicensed smelting of ores (though it is difficult to see how, the penalty being the same, the distinction in guilt is drawn), and that was the murder of Jeremy Cope, Supervisor of Excise when it suited his purpose, Chief of the Bow Street Eight, and a good deal besides—an officer whose lustre was only eclipsed a quarter of a century later by that of the famous Townshend. There is yet to be seen a proclamation in theLondon Gazette, wherein HisMajesty declares himself pleased to promise his most gracious pardon to anyone (save the person who actually shot the said Mr. Cope) who shall declare his or her accomplice or accomplices therein, so that he, she, or they may be apprehended and convicted thereof—ending with an offer of a reward to be paid by the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury, and signed, “Weymouth.” The reward was supplemented by a similar one on the part of “the gentlemen and merchants of the Town and Parish of Horwick, to be paid by the Constables.” And for the account of how these rewards were never paid we must leave the documents for a moment, and turn to the fireside gossip of the weavers and sheepmasters in the ingles on winter nights.
From that source, and similar ones, we learn how Mish Murgatroyd lay hidden in the bellpit until after the advancing fire had roared away above his head, and the soldiers had retired before the flames. Three days in all (so the story went) he stayed there, and, effecting his escape at the end of that time, he returned to his home and followed his ordinary calling—which, to be sure, was little enough good. Maybe he did not know they were provided with his name; if he did, he showed uncommon coolness; for shortly afterwards he went to Horwick Thursday market, got rather more than market-drunk, and set off at six o’clock in the evening with (however he came by them) two heavybudgets of cloth, one under either arm, the straps about his neck. He reached Wadsworth, and took a sheep-track up the Scout; but near the top his foot, or the drink, or both, betrayed him. He slipped and rolled down. He did not roll any great distance, for he lodged against two mountain-ash trees, already reddening with berries. His fetching up against them was the end of Mish Murgatroyd. The heavy budgets bounded forward over an edge; they stopped with a horrible jerk; Mish was hanged at his own cost instead of at that of his country; and the hangman himself could not have done the job more neatly. That was a stroke of luck for the country, for there is no sense in wasting money.
Dick o’ Dean’s end was, too, in its way, remarkable. Of the blood-money that had been subscribed in the loom-loft of the “Fullers’ Arms,” only forty-five pound odd had been actually collected, and the three lucky wolves had taken fifteen pound apiece. When he heard of the hanging of Mish, Dick o’ Dean had the effrontery to go to his widow and to demand the unspent balance of Mish’s fifteen pounds, averring that he had incurred certain expenses on Mish’s behalf that had included a bribe to a sergeant to permit of Mish’s escape from the bellpit. The tale was thin enough, but it seems to have sufficed for Mrs. Mish. By that time, however, Parker of Ford was very busy in Horwick, straightening up certain matters with Captain Ritchie; and this exploit of Dick o’ Dean’s came tohis ears. (Dick had already found it an easy matter to get fifteen pounds out of the distracted Charley.) Proceedings for blackmail were promptly instituted, and Dick was laid by the heels. Blackmail or what you like, once they had him they were little likely to let him go again, and they made short work of him in York. His end was not as satisfactory as Mish’s, costing more. The youth Charley was suffered to enjoy such peace as his conscience would allow him; and the parson shrugged his shoulders, but could do little more, when, in course of time, Charley and Pim o’ Cuddy became stalwart pillars of the Church.
For a matter of some significance, we have to return again to the documents. It is obvious that if you are permitted to select such documents as you require, and to ignore the rest, they may be made very serviceable things; but you will be prudent to make away entirely with such as do not tally with the case you have thus conveniently proved. It was an odd thing that there should have come to light, years afterwards, a paper that in all decency should have been destroyed, namely, another deposition of Eastwood Ellah’s. This deposition flatly contradicted the one which Cope had put with a chuckle into his pocket. Cope may or may not have seen this paper; of its existence he must have known, from the circumstances under which it was found; and it is always possible that orders he may have given for its destructionwere disregarded. The suppression of it made some difference to Northrop and Haigh, but Cope was not the first, or last, who disregarded what was inconvenient, and, each in our different way, most of us do it. As Cope himself had said, the Law’s a queer thing; all’s past now, and they didn’t get Big Monjoy.
The parson of Wadsworth, too, had his cross to bear, and he reddened when, meeting Captain Ritchie one day in Horwick, the captain looked straight through him, ignoring his existence. Explanation was impossible; the matter must be let go at that; and for long afterwards that hot blush mounted into the parson’s cheek, often at inopportune moments. So, the horse being gone, he locked the stable door to save the harness; and the vows of amends that his praying presently gave him strength to make he kept as well as, or, maybe, a trifle better than, most of us. Then one fine day it suddenly occurred to him that he was getting rather sentimentally fond of his delinquency and making quite the most of it. “Hallo,” he thought, “this’ll never do!” and a laugh shook him.—“A good thing too!” he declared roundly. “The fellow was a man, anyway, and his wife a treasure, and I’d do it again rather than he should be stretched!”
There was very little hope of the parson after that.
Such parts of Back o’ th’ Mooin as had beenheather were a sad sight for long enough to come. The fire burned here and there for a fortnight, and then there came a light shower or two that set the hills a-steam with opaque white smoke. For days after the apparent extinction of the blaze, you could, by stamping your foot on the consumed patches, set sparks glowing and little flames flickering; and then all died down. It had swept clear over the Slack to the Causeway, and there its progress had only been arrested by the tearing up of stretches of heather, in which work both soldiers and Back o’ th’ Mooiners had joined.—But a good deal of heather has grown on the hills since then, and Back o’ th’ Mooin is not very different to look at. In the villages they gradually returned to the weaving of kerseys and shalloons, and some hold that the saw,
“Three great ills come out o’ the north—A cold wind, a cunning knave, and a shrinking cloth”
“Three great ills come out o’ the north—A cold wind, a cunning knave, and a shrinking cloth”
“Three great ills come out o’ the north—A cold wind, a cunning knave, and a shrinking cloth”
had its rise somewhere between Horwick Town and Trawden Edge.
One particular may be added, that, when all’s said, is very like Back o’ th’ Mooin. A little grisly it is, but things are to be valued according to the store you set by them, and the atlas-bone of a king went the same way. It is this: Bit by bit, the two bodies hanging in chains on Wadsworth Shelf began to disappear by other agency than the crows and the weather. A man began it by taking a phalange, then another took a metatarsal bone.Others, seeing the mementoes brought from pockets or placed on the chimney-pieces of their neighbours, followed their example; and so it went on, just as they had bought the rope at sixpence an inch. The things were prized; more than a few in Horwick joined in the filching; and one November nightfall the remains were taken in a lump in a cart by a party of Back o’ th’ Mooiners returning from the last Thursday market of the year. For long the relics were treasured; then they began to lie about the cottages, and to be lost sight of during a succession of dustings and cleanings. One only, a dorsal vertebra, probably the seventh or eighth, is now known to exist; and it may be added to the documents and the fireside tradition that is testimony to the truth of this tale.
THE END.
SINCEthe first cuckoo, weeks ago, their talk had been of little but the coming of the anemones and bluebells, the pairing of the birds in hedgerow and brake and copse, and all the merry bustle of the spring of the year; so that you might have imagined that, hale men and buxom women as well as the younger sort, the posy-verses of the last Valentine’s Day had left them all poetical crazy. But a little acquaintance with the good folk and their business would have instructed you how much hung for them on the chances of air and wind and dew; and you would then have watched as jealously as they for that half-hour’s frost of an April night that will stiffen the sap of trees, and set wood and bark together past the power of any pilling-iron to part them.
Every year, as early as the middle of April or as late as the middle of May, they set forth in a band, and the whole village assembled to see them off. The two great waggons, packed the day before,and the pole-wain on which the long ladders trailed almost to the ground, would be had out of the sheds at the town end; and the talk and laughter of the villagers would mingle with the singing of the larks and the bleating of the lambs on the bare hillsides and all the noises of the morning. The horses would be brought out and backed into the shafts with a great clatter and stamping, and the brass discs and buckles of the harness would flash and jangle in the sun. The manes of the horses had been decked with red, blue, and white ribbons, and straw had been trimmed and plaited into their tails; and while lads frolicked and ran in and out, the smallest of the children would be held up to tie rosettes and favours to the whips. The foremost waggon was always hung round with crocks and kettles like a tinker’s caravan, and to this the three or four women who were to accompany the men would mount. Good-byes would be said, handkerchiefs waved, and a man would take the head of the leading horse. The crocks and kettles would set up a clangour; the second waggon, that carried the saws and axes and boiling-irons, would fall in; and the lads would run behind the long wain, swinging on the ladders that rocked up and down like a rantipole. So they would pass between the dewy hawthorn hedges, and at the turn of the road, where the wheels were clogged to drop down the hill, the village would lose sight of them for maybe three weeks or a month.
Sometimes they pilled (or “barked,” as some call it) for others, being then paid by the day or contract, sometimes they bought the bark themselves to sell again to the tanners; and when the timber was not to come down at once they left the stripped trees, naked and white and ghostly, to stand for another year that the sap might retire and the tree season as it stood. While the men worked in the woods, the women cooked and mended, plied the pilling-irons on the smaller branches, stacked the bark into light sheds, and perchance plaited osiers or wove straw basses for beehives meanwhile. Sometimes they slept in inns and farm-kitchens, and sometimes barns and sheds were prepared against their coming.
After this fashion they came, on a May afternoon, to the Ladyshaws Wood, that belongs to the township of Portsannet under the headland; and from the height several of them saw, for the first time in their lives, the sea. The warden of Portsannet and his bailiff grow the oaks of the Ladyshaws wide and spreading, for tough, crooked pieces for the knees and ribs of ships; and in the higher wood the columns of the pines are crowded together to make the taller masts. Two score of them, oaks and pines, had been marked to come down, and the placid bailiff, red-faced, and smoking very strong tobacco, had first taken the Pillers round the woods, and then shown them their accommodation, a small cluster of barns and a penthouse that had once beena smithy. They made a fire that night on the disused forge-hearth; and as they sat about it they told one another how fair and settled the air was, and how grandly the Ladyshaws were golding, and spoke of the sea and ships, and of the sea-worm that bores the oak, and of bark and tanning and markets and prices. Soft clouds lay low to the earth; scents and odours, now from the pine woods, now from the hawthorn hedges, and again the whiff of Portsannet and the sea, drifted in tracts on the mild air; and if now and then a man winked at his neighbour and said something about a pheasant or an egg, it was no such great matter after all. They sought their blankets early; the retriever bitch and the two terriers stretched themselves across the thresholds of the sheds; and the whole company slept long before moonrise.
* * * * *
High in the dark laithe the four women lay on the top of a half-cut stack; and Jessie Wheeler had avoided the corner immediately under the great square hole that yawned in the floor of the loft overhead. Instead, she had spread her blanket near a small vent-hole that had been made by the leaving out of a wall-stone. Against this aperture she could barely distinguish the shape of her arm as the tips of her fingers touched the floor only a couple of feet above her. The women had taken off only their upper garments; and the niche where theylay smelt of stale hay, and the trusses crackled and whispered with each of their movements.
A short harsh call outside startled her, and she raised herself on her elbow to listen. The call was repeated; and then there stole on the May night a series of long liquid notes. A nightingale had begun to sing in the thorn hedge. The sound ceased, and the notes seemed to take flight and diminish and die away. She waited. Again came the low liquid call, and broke into trills that increased in volume. Another long pause left the air trembling; and then, as if by the giving way of some barrier, the full flood of song gushed like a torrent from the bird’s throat. The piercing melody filled the night; it mounted and hovered and rang under the low clouds, as if under rafters; it spread to the woods and out over the headland; and Jessie’s heart lifted, and her lips shaped the name of Willie Ramsey.
To poets the nightingale might sing of unattainable things; to Jessie it sang only of Willie—Willie had all. The torrent of melody filled the dark loft where she lay with memories and images only of Willie; and she closed her eyes in bliss as the bird sang ever louder and clearer.
What the beginning had been she could hardly have told. They had sought the nuts and blackberries together, and watched the trout in the shallow brook, and popped the bags of the foxgloves. They had played and kissed and wrangled; and he, too, with the other lads, hadtwisted the stalks of the pulling-grass into her hair, and pointed at her for her outbursts of passion.... Perhaps her hair had been the beginning. Once the children had plaited chaplets of green leaves for their hair, and on hers Willie had set the leaves of the copper beech, and laughed that hair and leaves should be of one colour. Long after, she had set her hair in a coil above her white nape; and when someone had again made sport of this, in place of the fit of temper had come quick tears.... The memories came faster as the bird sang ecstatically—of the season when their companionship had seemed, like Willie’s calf-voice, all broken and here and there; of the day when she had fashioned the straw mell-doll for the corner of the last stack, and the farm men had laughed, and jested at her “babe,” and Willie had seen her miserable flush ... and then of the evening in the milking-shed when he had so kissed her that it had seemed wonderful they could ever have kissed before as boy and girl. In spite of her passionateness, then, he had loved her.... From the yard came the sound of a horse’s stamping, and the dragging of the chain and the munching at the crib; she heard it even through the song. A faint light glimmered in the vent-hole—the moon had broken for a moment through the soft clouds, and the nightingale sang as though the hand of a man had seized him and were crushing the heart within him....
And so they had become lovers, and had been so for well-nigh a year. The moon became clouded again; the bird’s song changed to lovely aching notes, that somehow Jessie could hardly bear; and her hand stole to her breast and sought the little gold locket that contained the tiny ring of hair that Willie’s mother had cut from him while yet he was scarcely bigger than the mell-doll.
* * * * *
The morning star shone over the sea, and the first cock crowed down in Portsannet. The nightingale ceased to sing. The moon still rode high among the clouds; but a breeze came from the east, and a greyness and lifting altered the air. The cocks made an increasing din. A splendour of rose and gold, in the midst of which the sun burned like a brazier, turned the vault to an ineffable blue, and flushed the tops of the Ladyshaws. And as the earliest of the Pillers to rise trudged down the meadows for water, he saw that a man-o’-war, under half canvas, stood motionless beyond the headland. He stopped to watch the men who moved about her like ants, and saw the little fleck of white as she dropped anchor.
THEwoods resounded with the calling of the men, the hacking of the grub-axe at roots, the clash of irons flung down, and the ceaseless snapping and crackle of the undergrowth. The wide spaces that had been cleared for the fall of the oaks were trampled and trodden, mould and bluebells and the dead brown bracken; and hazel and thorn and dark holly were speckled white as if with cuckoo-spit where the bill-hooks had shorn through them. Now and then men, stacking the brushwood about the clearings, peered into it for eggs and nests; and the frightened birds fluttered continually here and there, refusing to leave their young.
At the gnarled oak that stood lowest down the slope of the wood Willie Ramsey and Jerry Holmes were already at work with the great-axe. They swung alternately, and the white chips lay thick over their boots, and the deep notch, that was rapidly becoming deeper, made the tree look as if it was balanced on a blunt apex. A few yards beyond the flying chips lay the great double saw, a tin of grease for easing it, and a coil of rope; and Jerry’s wrinkled face twitched into wonderful folds andcreases as he delivered each blow. As again, for the tenth time, the thought of the forenoon drinking that the women would bring occurred to him, he grunted “Spell,” dropped the head of his axe, and leaned on the heft to recover his breath.
“Ye look thirsty, too, my lad,” he observed by and by, glancing up at Willie.
Willie passed his fingers across his brow and looked at them all wet. He was tall, black-browed, and black-haired, and his neck lifted at his chest with his breathing, and the muscles of his forearm started sharply as his fingers played on the heft of his axe.
“Ay, this ought to be grand stuff for ribs, if th’ chopping of it’s aught to reckon by,” he answered.
“Nay, ye’re limber enow; ’tis owd bones like me it finds out,” quoth Jerry, grinning. “’Tis th’ season o’ life wi’ ye to think more o’ th’ women nor th’ drink they bring. I ken your ways; but me, I’m naughbut rare and thirsty.”
“Well, maybe I’se mend o’ that.”
“Ay, Jessie ’ll mend ye, if ye’re mendable. Ye may laugh; ginger’s for game, and al’ays was——”
“They ken best where th’ shoe pinches that has it on, Jerry.”
“Ay, when they get it on; thou’rt not shod yet, lad.—Well, wisdom’s wasted o’ youth; let’s to th’ ribs an’ knees again—— Spell——”
They turned to with the axes again.
Somewhere up the wood a man was setting ahone to a bill-hook, and away to the right they had begun to chop at another tree. Willie and Jerry were well ahead, and nowhere were they sawing yet; and as the chips started and flew, and the keen axes cut deeper and deeper into the bole, and Jerry’s mouth and eyebrow flickered and dipped, they began to pass round the tree and to cut more carefully here and there. A whiff of strong tobacco came down the glade, and the placid bailiff stood and watched them.
“Ye’ll be almost ready for th’ ropes and cross-cut,” he remarked, “and then there’ll beoneon ’em down.—Eh, they must ha’ seen some scenes, must these oaks! Ay, they must.—Are ye acquainted wi’ these parts? No, say ye? Eh, things has happened i’ this neighbourhood, hundreds o’ years back. It were off th’ Head, yonder, that Paul Jones fought, that ye ’ll ha’ heard tell of.—No! Well, that’s surprising!”
He continued to talk in his mild, easy way, telling them his story of Paul Jones; and, by and by, Willie shouted out loud, “Skipjack!” A call up the wood answered him.
“Skipjack” was Charlie Dodd. He came, an ungainly youth with a long neck, a back shaped like a lad’s kite by reason of his sloping shoulders, and enormous hands and wrists.
“Nay, don’t hang yoursel’,” the bailiff observed as Charlie passed a loop of rope about his neck; and Jerry and Willie hoisted him up to a bough.
Dead bark and twigs and tree-scurf came down as the Skipjack swung from branch to branch; and he made fast the loop to a high fork, gave a grimace and shout, and came down it in three perilous-looking swings, his especial feat. Jerry smeared the great cross-cut with grease, and they set it into the notch. The sun shone warmly through the bare branches, and the ruddy oak-apples made a rich colour against the sky. Sawdust lodged in the folds of the clothing of the two men as they bent their backs to the cross-cut, and the birds cried more and more loudly. They were chopping in several places at once now, and from the top of another tree the Skipjack gave another shout. Now and then Willie and Jerry loosened the saw and rested, their faces crimson; and the bailiff mused among the oaks and told over again the story of Paul Jones. Then Willie and Jerry set the saw aside; the tree was ready for the fall; and men ran from here and there, and gathered round the oak, and took the rope and set the huge tree gently rocking on its base. The tree-scurf descended on them, and the birds made a piteous clamour. Willie ran in with a wedge; the tree tottered, hung for a moment beyond its point of balance, and then gave a long groan and twisted slowly. Men sprang for safety as it came over. There was a rushing and breaking of branches, the fibres burst with a loud crack, the boughs whipped out dangerously, and the tree left a great whiteblade like that of a sword standing a yard up from the butt. They stood back for a minute, as men stand back from the dying body of a formidable beast; then they ran in and set to work with saws and axes in half a dozen places at once. While some sawed and lopped its branches, Willie and Jerry marked the trunk into six-foot lengths and took the cross-cut again. Soon the women brought the morning ale; and then the pilling and bolling irons, like spoons with a solid bowl, were got out.
Fat Maggie had brought a straw hassock, and as she sat wide-lapped on it and worked her pilling-iron the points of her elbows were redder than her red arms. Nan and Jennie Holmes, Jerry’s wife and daughter, sat in a litter of brushwood, and Jennie’s face worked like her father’s as she cut the slashes with a knife and thrust in the iron. The sun caught Jessie Wheeler’s hair as she sat in the brown bracken with her skirts tucked close about her ankles; and now and then she glanced across to where Willie thrust at the noisy cross-cut. The air became fragrant with the smell of sawdust and the sharp odour of the new green timber, and the sap glistened in bright films and webs as the bark parted from the white wood. The piles of the smaller bark accumulated about the women, and the white-stripped twigs and billets turned a pale buff in an hour. The creak and rush of another falling tree came from up the wood. Fat Maggie clapped her black hands to her ears as a man beganto set a saw immediately behind her; and Willie’s oak lay in three great sections, the middle one of which had rolled to one side.
The easy-going bailiff came up again as Jerry stooped to examine the face of the butt section. “What is it?” he said; and Jerry pointed at something. Willie took a bar and rolled the middle section away; and all three of them stooped again to the cut.
“If that’s a ring-shake——” Jerry began; but the bailiff rubbed his hands and beamed.
“It isn’t a ring-shake; I’ll lay I know what it is. Look you! saw this slice clean out, here.”
Other men gathered round and watched them saw a three-inch slice out of the tree. The saw polished the heart of the oak like marble, and a foot or so within the bark, and three or four inches in length, a curious mark showed. The bailiff took an axe and chopped into the flat disc; then he took up the disc and one of the fragments.
“Well!” he said, his mild face radiant, “I wouldn’t ha’ missed that for a crown! I’ve heard tell of ’em, too! D’ye see?”
Buried in the heart of the tree, and fitting together like a die and matrix, were two letters, an M and a V. They had been cut long ago in the wood itself, and had become overgrown with the newer wood, but had never healed. Men called to one another, and all pressed for a sight of the marvel. Jessie’s head rested for a moment against Willie’sshoulder, and his hand sought hers as the pieces were passed from hand to hand; and soon the bailiff said, “I’se take these home,” and put them into his pocket.
The women fetched the dinner at midday, and, after it, Willie and Jessie sat apart in a little copse of hazels. A lean-to of thick base-bark screened them from the others, and the green tassels of the hazels dangled over them. His fingers strayed in her rich hair; as she smiled up at him the corners of her mouth were dewy as the sap that glistened under the rind of the great oaks. Nellie, the retriever bitch, blinked drowsily at them both.
“It’s no deeper nor I ha’ for thee,” she whispered by and by, as if he knew without telling what she spoke of.
“What, dear?”
“Th’ tree,” she murmured; and again he caressed her burnished hair.
“Only ten days and we’se be home,” he said, presently; “shall ye be glad, Jess?”
“Yes, love; there’s no comfort wi’ yon sea all about ye, like as if something were al’ays watching ye. I’d sooner meet thee aback o’ th’ little lambing-shed at home o’ th’ hill. An’ when we’re back I’se mak’ thee a dozen shirts wi’ my wages, dear——”
Willie laughed. “And what shall we gi’e her, Nellie?” he asked the retriever; and the animal moved her tail lazily, hearing her name. Soonthey heard stirrings behind the hazel copse; the women began to pack up tins and dishes; and Jerry’s voice called, “Where’s my mate?” The men scattered again about the clearings. Again the wood became noisy with the chop of the axe, the knock of the iron, and the hoarse voice of the saw. The huge sections, stripped of their thick rinds, lay white on the bracken. White faggots gleamed against the tan of the inner bark, against the pink-budding thorn and the slate-purple brambles and the quick green of the hazels and elders. The men made another spell of half-an-hour late in the afternoon; and when the sunset gun boomed sullenly from the ship off the Head, they covered the irons and saws and axes with sacking, hid them under a stack of brushwood, and turned their faces towards the sheds for supper.
DIMriding-lights twinkled down in Portsannet Harbour, and a few swinging oil lanterns crowded the narrow streets with dense shadows. Threads of light came through cracks of barred and shuttered windows, and the rusty glimmerings of the horn lanterns that hung in antique iron brackets on the angles of houses showed the short flights of cobbled steps and the precipitous ladders of wood that seemed to tumble from one level of the streets to another. The strong odour of dead fish, brine, tarred nets, and groynes and timbers half rotted by the sea-worms, lay over the town; and incessant tuggings and gruntings, with over all the sigh and rustle of the sea, came from the smacks and keels and cobles that moved at their moorings.
From an alley down by the bridge a harsh clamour broke out, and half a mile away you could distinguish the shouts and oaths and cries. It was down by the bridge that the sailors’ taverns and kitchens lay, and the men who sat snug by their own firesides nodded, as much as to say they had expected it. They knew that Portsannet was not a quota-port;but they knew also that the lieutenants of His Majesty’s ships did not stick at niceties when the gun-deck complement ran low, and they had been wary of a press as soon as the ship had dropped anchor. And so the bolts had been shot, and the cumbrous bars set into the staples; as for the “Mermaid” and the “Anchor,” the press was welcome to the tinkers and rogues and gipsies they would find there with the women.
Jews and water-side men and sellers of old copper and iron and cordage kept the shops adjacent to the “Mermaid” and “Anchor,” and such among them as had no dread of the press were gathered with three or four women about the closed door of the “Mermaid.” Half a dozen unkempt sailors, with cudgels and stretchers, thrust them back, keeping the door; and the shrill cries of the women and the gruff voices of the men filled the narrow alley. From an upper window opposite the inn a ship’s chandler shook his fist; and a score of yards away a few men peered round corners, ready to take to their heels. A bony virago, who had been cast half drunk from the tavern, screamed at the men-o’-war’s men in the fishwives’ tongue; and a coxswain with a tarred hat pushed her back continually as she ever advanced.
“See you’re not taken, you scald trull!” he menaced her; “you lack little but a beard o’ being a man, and we have two bonnie Lord-Mayor’s men you could berth between!”
“Ay, ye damned tarrybreeks, ye women i’ petticoats; what th’ jails turns out th’ gun-deck doesn’t mak’ dainty wi’, ye——!”
“Dainty, ho, ho!” another bawled; “chuck, chuck, come wi’ me, dainty——!”
“Yah, ye rascals!” the chandler shouted from his window, “ye rotten mast-greasing rogues—ye captain’s chicken-crammers—wi’ a red-checked shirt at th’ gratings once a month——”
He cursed them, and they taunted him for his stolen tallow and canvas, and bade him stop hammering the King’s arrow out of copper bolts and untwisting the coloured strand that marked his cordage as filched from the King’s dockyards. The rakish woman broke a window with a stone, and cried through the opening, “Ned! Ned!” and the coxswain thrust her back with his hand on her flat breast, and took her a rap over the knuckles. The men handled their stretchers as if they would as lief have broken a head or two as not.
Suddenly the inn door opened, and there was a press forward. A lieutenant appeared in the entrance, his cocked hat athwart like a half-moon and his hooked nose sticking out scarcely less prominently as he turned his profile. Other men could be seen behind him, and the woman darted forward with a cry of “Ned!”
“Turn that slut off!” the lieutenant ordered curtly; and he grumbled to himself: “A pretty lot o’ cattle to pink! I want men with bodies!—We’lltry the Wood, then.... Here, you long rascal: in case you’re deceiving me, do you know what they keep on a ship in a red-baize bag?”
The fellow the woman had addressed as Ned snivelled, and the chandler across the alley cried, “That’s him that robs th’ roosts! Feel in his pocket for handkerchiefs——!”
“You don’t, eh? Well, it makes your back black—black, like dead liver, d’you hear? And some have chosen hanging before a flogging with it. If it isn’t as you say in the Wood, that’s your choice, too, my man!”
The man blubbered in his fear: “It’s so, captain. There’s one fellow swings down a tree on a rope, a right sailor for you—Skipjack they call him—there’s a two-three sheds, wi’ a long pole-wain——”
“Bring those other tinkers out, coxswain; they shall go with us. Which way?—Back, you woman!”
The chandler screamed, hanging half out of his window: “Yah, ye walking fever! Ye’d sell a real man to save your skin, would ye? But ye’ll go yet for a sessions-bird! Choose th’ hanging afore th’ red check—save up your rum and tak’ it drunk——”
“Fling a stone at that man, somebody,” the officer said.
The “Mermaid” emptied itself into the street—a score or so of the men of the press, sevenor eight wretched vagrants, and one or two of the sailors’ doxies who had remained in hiding. A few of the seamen slung their lanterns on their cudgels; the whole company moved; and, as they passed to the harbour front, candles and heads appeared in windows, and groans and hootings followed them. They turned up the main street; the sailors thwacked their miserable captives as they failed to make haste enough up the cobbled steps and timber stairways; one or two of the women dropped behind, breathless; and at the top of the street the Portsannet folk stayed and watched the men of the press take the road that led to the Ladyshaws.
* * * * *
Jessie Wheeler slept soundly in the niche on top of the hay. The nightingale on the thorn was silent, and the embers of the fire on the hearth in the penthouse had sunk to a grey wood ash, that only now and then the light breeze fanned to a faint pink glow. The clouds were close folded overhead; hardly a whisper came from the Ladyshaws. Nellie and the two terriers slept across the thresholds, and with a last soft settling the fire itself seemed to go to sleep.
The retriever heard the noise first, and, suddenly alert, dropped to the down-charge. The terriers set their heads and fore feet low, and growled softly. A man asleep in a shed muttered mechanically, “Quiet!” and turned over. From the brow at thebottom of the meadows came the sound of voices and of a moving company; and then the voices dropped, but the moving came nearer. The terriers broke suddenly into a hubbub of barking; and Jessie woke, and started and trembled.
Jerry Holmes, without his boots, came out of the shed with a lantern; it showed the furrows of his own face, but not the forms that were approaching. They had muffled their lanterns about with coats and handkerchiefs, and the shrouding of one had been done with a spotted neckerchief that showed dabbled with a dusky pattern. Jerry knew no more than that honest men do not wander about the country at night, a score in a band, with doused lanterns; and he gave a shout of “Up, lads!” The terriers barked furiously; the shout was answered by a score of voices; the cloths were twitched off the lanterns; and the press and the seven or eight pressed rushed forward. Jerry, for all he was inland, knew what it was, and his hand tightened on a mattock that all at once he seemed to find in his grasp without being able to tell how he had come by it.