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The History of David Grieve

by Mrs. Humphry Ward · English · Gutenberg #8076 · 1,606,776 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The History of David Grieve

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8076]
                Most recently updated: March 18, 2011

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8076

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Prince; HTML version created by Chuck Greif.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Prince









THE HISTORY

OF

DAVID GRIEVE



BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

AUTHOR OF 'ROBERT ELSMERE,' ETC.

TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF MY MOTHER





CONTENTS

BOOK I CHILDHOOD

BOOK II YOUTH

BOOK III STORM AND STRESS

BOOK IV MATURITY




BOOK I CHILDHOOD




CHAPTER I


'Tak your hat, Louie! Yo're allus leavin summat behind yer.'

'David, yo go for 't,' said the child addressed to a boy by her
side, nodding her head insolently towards the speaker, a tall and
bony woman, who stood on the steps the children had just descended,
holding out a battered hat.

'Yo're a careless thing, Louie,' said the boy, but he went back and
took the hat.

'Mak her tie it,' said the woman, showing an antiquated pair of
strings. 'If she loses it she needna coom cryin for anudder. She'd
lose her yead if it wor loose.'

Then she turned and went back into the house. It was a smallish
house of grey stone, three windows above, two and a door below.
Dashes of white on the stone gave, as it were, eyebrows to the
windows, and over the door there was a meagre trellised porch, up
which grew some now leafless roses and honeysuckles. To the left of
the door a scanty bit of garden was squeezed in between the hill,
against which the house was set edgeways, and the rest of the flat
space, occupied by the uneven farmyard, the cart-shed and stable,
the cow-houses and duck-pond. This garden contained two shabby
apple trees, as yet hardly touched by the spring; some currant and
gooseberry bushes, already fairly green; and a clump or two of
scattered daffodils and wallflowers. The hedge round it was broken
through in various places, and it had a casual neglected air.

The children went their way through the yard. In front of them a
flock of some forty sheep and lambs pushed along, guarded by two
black short-haired collies. The boy, brandishing a long stick,
opened a gate deplorably in want of mending, and the sheep crowded
through, keenly looked after by the dogs, who waited meanwhile on
their flanks with heads up, ears cocked, and that air of
self-restrained energy which often makes a sheep-dog more human
than his master. The field beyond led to a little larch plantation,
where a few primroses showed among the tufts of long, rich grass,
and the drifts of last year's leaves. Here the flock scattered a
little, but David and the dogs were after them in a twinkling, and
the plantation gate was soon closed on the last bleating mother.
Then there was nothing more for the boy to do than to go up to the
top of the green rising ground on which the farm stood and see if
the gate leading to the moor was safely shut. For the sheep he had
been driving were not meant for the open moorland. Their feeding
grounds lay in the stone-walled fields round the homestead, and had
they strayed on to the mountain beyond, which was reserved for a
hardier Scotch breed, David would have been answerable. So he
strode, whistling, up the hill to have a look at that top gate,
while Louie sauntered down to the stream which ran round the lower
pastures to wait for him.

The top gate was fast, but David climbed the wall and stood there a
while, hands in his pockets, legs apart, whistling and looking.

'They can't see t' Downfall from Stockport to-day,' he was saying
to himself; 'it's coomin ower like mad.'

Some distance away in front of him, beyond the undulating heather
ground at his feet, rose a magnificent curving front of moor, the
steep sides of it crowned with black edges and cliffs of grit, the
outline of the south-western end sweeping finely up on the right to
a purple peak, the king of all the moorland round. No such colour
as clothed that bronzed and reddish wall of rock, heather, and
bilberry is known to Westmoreland, hardly to Scotland; it seems to
be the peculiar property of that lonely and inaccessible district
which marks the mountainous centre of mid-England--the district of
Kinder Scout and the High Peak. Before the boy's ranging eye spread
the whole western rampart of the Peak--to the right, the highest
point, of Kinder Low, to the left, 'edge' behind 'edge,' till the
central rocky mass sank and faded towards the north into milder
forms of green and undulating hills. In the very centre of the
great curve a white and surging mass of water cleft the mountain
from top to bottom, falling straight over the edge, here some two
thousand feet above the sea, and roaring downward along an almost
precipitous bed into the stream--the Kinder--which swept round the
hill on which the boy was standing, and through the valley behind
him. In ordinary times the 'Downfall,' as the natives call it, only
makes itself visible on the mountain-side as a black ravine of
tossed and tumbled rocks. But there had been a late snowfall on the
high plateau beyond, followed by heavy rain, and the swollen stream
was to-day worthy of its grand setting of cliff and moor. On such
occasions it becomes a landmark for all the country round, for the
cotton-spinning centres of New Mills and Stockport, as well as for
the grey and scattered farms which climb the long backs of moorland
lying between the Peak and the Cheshire border.

To-day, also, after the snow and rains of early April, the air was
clear again. The sun was shining; a cold, dry wind was blowing;
there were sounds of spring in the air, and signs of it on the
thorns and larches. Far away on the boundary wall of the farmland a
cuckoo was sitting, his long tail swinging behind him, his
monotonous note filling the valley; and overhead a couple of
peewits chased each other in the pale, windy blue.

The keen air, the sun after the rain, sent life and exhilaration
through the boy's young limbs. He leapt from the wall, and raced
back down the field, his dogs streaming behind him, the sheep, with
their newly dropped lambs, shrinking timidly to either side as he
passed. He made for a corner in the wall, vaulted it on to the
moor, crossed a rough dam built in the stream for sheep-washing
purposes, jumped in and out of the two grey-walled sheep-pens
beyond, and then made leisurely for a spot in the brook--not the
Downfall stream, but the Red Brook, one of its westerly
affluents--where he had left a miniature water-wheel at work the
day before. Before him and around him spread the brown bosom of
Kinder Scout; the cultivated land was left behind; here on all
sides, as far as the eye could see, was the wild home of heather
and plashing water, of grouse and peewit, of cloud and breeze.

The little wheel, shaped from a block of firwood, was turning
merrily under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a
neighbouring fall. David went down on hands and knees to examine
it. He made some little alteration in the primitive machinery of
it, his fingers touching it lightly and neatly, and then, delighted
with the success of it, he called Louie to come and look.

Louie was sitting a few yards further up the stream, crooning to
herself as she swung to and fro, and snatching every now and then
at some tufts of primroses growing near her, which she wrenched
away with a hasty, wasteful hand, careless, apparently, whether
they reached her lap or merely strewed the turf about her with
their torn blossoms. When David called her she gathered up the
flowers anyhow in her apron, and dawdled towards him, leaving a
trail of them behind her. As she reached him, however, she was
struck by a book sticking out of his pocket, and, stooping over
him, with a sudden hawk-like gesture, as he sprawled head
downwards, she tried to get hold of it.

But he felt her movement. 'Let goo!' he said imperiously, and,
throwing himself round, while one foot slipped into the water, he
caught her hand, with its thin predatory fingers, and pulled the
book away.

'Yo just leave my books alone, Louie. Yo do 'em a mischeef whaniver
yo can--an I'll not have it.'

He turned his handsome, regular face, crimsoned by his position and
splashed by the water, towards her with an indignant air. She
laughed, and sat herself down again on the grass, looking a very
imp of provocation.

'They're stupid,' she said, shortly. 'They mak yo a stupid gonner
ony ways.'

'Oh! do they?' he retorted, angrily. 'Bit I'll be even wi yo. I'll
tell yo noa moor stories out of 'em, not if yo ast iver so.'

The girl's mouth curled contemptuously, and she began to gather her
primroses into a bunch with an air of the utmost serenity. She was
a thin, agile, lightly made creature, apparently about eleven. Her
piercing black eyes, when they lifted, seemed to overweight the
face, whereof the other features were at present small and pinched.
The mouth had a trick of remaining slightly open, showing a line of
small pearly teeth; the chin was a little sharp and shrewish. As
for the hair, it promised to be splendid; at present it was an
unkempt, tangled mass, which Hannah Grieve, the children's aunt,
for her own credit's sake at chapel, or in the public street, made
occasional violent attempts to reduce to order--to very little
purpose, so strong and stubborn was the curl of it. The whole
figure was out of keeping with the English moorside, with the
sheep, and the primroses.

But so indeed was that of the boy, whose dark colouring was more
vivacious and pronounced than his sister's, because the red of his
cheek and lip was deeper, while his features, though larger than
hers, were more finely regular, and his eyes had the same piercing
blackness, the same all-examining keenness, as hers. The yellowish
tones of his worn fustian suit and a red Tam-o'-Shanter cap
completed the general effect of brilliancy and, as it were,
_foreignness_.

Having finished his inspection of his water-mill, he scrambled
across to the other side of the stream so as to be well out of his
sister's way, and, taking out the volume which was stretching his
pocket, he began to read it. It was a brown calf-bound book, much
worn, and on its title-page it bore the title of 'The Wars of
Jerusalem,' of Flavius Josephus, translated by S. Calmet, and a
date somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century. To this
antique fare the boy settled himself down. The two collies lay
couched beside him; a stone-chat perched on one or other of the
great blocks which lay scattered over the heath gave out his
clinking note; while every now and then the loud peevish cluck of
the grouse came from the distant sides of the Scout.

Titus was now making his final assault on the Temple. The Zealots
were gathered in the innermost court, frantically beseeching Heaven
for a sign; the walls, the outer approaches of the Sanctuary were
choked with the dying and the dead. David sat absorbed, elbows on
knees, his face framed in his hands. Suddenly the descent of
something cold and clammy on his bent neck roused him with a most
unpleasant shock.

Quick as lightning he faced round, snatching at his assailant; but
Louie was off, scudding among the bilberry hillocks with peals of
laughter, while the slimy moss she had just gathered from the edges
of the brook sent cold creeping streams into the recesses of
David's neck and shoulders. He shook himself free of the mess as
best he could, and rushed after her. For a long time he chased her
in vain, then her foot tripped, and he came up with her just as she
rolled into the heather, gathered up like a hedgehog against
attack, her old hat held down over her ears and face. David fell
upon her and chastised her; but his fisticuffs probably looked more
formidable than they felt, for Louie laughed provokingly all the
time, and when he stopped out of breath she said exultantly, as she
sprang up, holding her skirts round her ready for another flight,
'It's greened aw yur neck and yur collar--luvely! Doan't yo be
nassty for nothink next time!'

And off she ran.

'If yo meddle wi me ony moor,' he shouted after her fiercely, 'yo
see what I'll do!'

But in reality the male was helpless, as usual. He went ruefully
down to the brook, and loosening his shirt and coat tried to clean
his neck and hair. Then, extremely sticky and uncomfortable, he
went back to his seat and his book, his wrathful eyes taking
careful note meanwhile of Louie's whereabouts. And thenceforward he
read, as it were, on guard, looking up every other minute.

Louie established herself some way up the further slope, in a steep
stony nook, under two black boulders, which protected her rear in
case of reprisals from David. Time passed away. David, on the other
side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the
more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by
one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the
minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness.
All her resources were for the moment at an end. She could think of
no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew that she was
observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of primroses along
the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, and thrown them
away; she had found a grouse's nest among the dead fern, and,
contrary to the most solemn injunctions of uncle and keeper,
enforced by the direst threats, had purloined and broken an egg;
and still dinner-time delayed. Perhaps, too, the cold blighting
wind, which soon made her look blue and pinched, tamed her
insensibly. At any rate, she got up after about an hour, and coolly
walked across to David.

He looked up at her with a quick frown. But she sat down, and,
clasping her hands round her knees, while the primroses she had
stuck in her hat dangled over her defiant eyes, she looked at him
with a grinning composure.

'Yo can read out if yo want to,' she remarked.

'Yo doan't deserve nowt, an I shan't,' said David, shortly.

'Then I'll tell Aunt Hannah about how yo let t' lambs stray lasst
evenin, and about yor readin at neet.'

'Yo may tell her aw t' tallydiddles yo can think on,' was the
unpromising reply.

Louie threw all the scorn possible into her forced smile, and then,
dropping full-length into the heather, she began to sing at the top
of a shrill, unpleasing voice, mainly, of course, for the sake of
harrying anyone in her neighbourhood who might wish to read.

'Stop that squealing!' David commanded, peremptorily. Whereupon
Louie sang louder than before.

David looked round in a fury, but his fury was, apparently,
instantly damped by the inward conviction, born of long experience,
that he could do nothing to help himself. He sprang up, and thrust
his book into his pocket.

'Nobory ull mak owt o' yo till yo get a bastin twice a day, wi an
odd lick extra for Sundays,' he remarked to her with grim emphasis
when he had reached what seemed to him a safe distance. Then he
turned and strode up the face of the hill, the dogs at his heels.
Louie turned on her elbow, and threw such small stones as she could
discover among the heather after him, but they fell harmlessly
about him, and did not answer their purpose of provoking him to
turn round again.

She observed that he was going up to the old smithy on the side of
Kinder Low, and in a few minutes she got up and sauntered lazily
after him.

'T' owd smithy' had been the enchanted ground of David's childhood.
It was a ruined building standing deep in heather, half-way up the
mountain-side, and ringed by scattered blocks and tabular slabs of
grit. Here in times far remote--beyond the memory of even the
oldest inhabitant--the millstones of the district, which gave their
name to the 'millstone grit' formation of the Peak, were fashioned.
High up on the dark moorside stood what remained of the primitive
workshop. The fire-marked stones of the hearth were plainly
visible; deep in the heather near lay the broken jambs of the
window; a stone doorway with its lintel was still standing; and on
the slope beneath it, hardly to be distinguished now from the great
primaeval blocks out of which they had sprung and to which they
were fast returning, reposed two or three huge millstones. Perhaps
they bordered some ancient track, climbed by the millers of the
past when they came to this remote spot to give their orders; but,
if so, the track had long since sunk out of sight in the heather,
and no visible link remained to connect the history of this high
and lonely place with that of those teeming valleys hidden to west
and north among the moors, the dwellers wherein must once have
known it well. From the old threshold the eye commanded a
wilderness of moors, rising wave-like one after another, from the
green swell just below whereon stood Reuben Grieve's farm, to the
far-distant Alderley Edge. In the hollows between, dim tall
chimneys veiled in mist and smoke showed the places of the cotton
towns--of Hayfield, New Mills, Staleybridge, Stockport; while in
the far northwest, any gazer to whom the country-side spoke
familiarly might, in any ordinary clearness of weather, look for
and find the eternal smoke-cloud of Manchester.

So the deserted smithy stood as it were spectator for ever of that
younger, busier England which wanted it no more. Human life
notwithstanding had left on it some very recent traces. On the
lintel of the ruined door two names were scratched deep into the
whitish under-grain of the black weather-beaten grit. The upper one
ran: 'David Suveret Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863;' the lower, 'Louise
Stephanie Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863.' They were written in bold
round-hand, and could be read at a considerable distance. During
the nine months they had been there, many a rustic passer-by had
been stopped by them, especially by the oddity of the name
_Suveret_, which tormented the Derbyshire mouth.

In a corner of the walls stood something more puzzling still--a
large iron pan, filled to the brim with water, and firmly bedded on
a foundation of earth and stones. So still in general was the
shining sheltered round, that the branches of the mountain ash
which leant against the crumbling wall, the tufts of hard fern
growing among the stones, the clouds which sailed overhead, were
all delicately mirrored in it. That pan was David Grieve's dearest
possession, and those reflections, so magical, and so alive, had
contrived for him many a half-hour of almost breathless pleasure.
He had carried it off from the refuse-yard of a foundry in
the valley, where he had a friend in one of the apprentices.
The farm donkey and himself had dragged it thither on a certain
never-to-be-forgotten day, when Uncle Reuben had been on the other
side of the mountain at a shepherds' meeting in the Woodlands,
while Aunt Hannah was safely up to her elbows in the washtub. Boy's
back and donkey's back had nearly broken under the task, but there
the pan stood at last, the delight of David's heart. In a crevice
of the wall beside it, hidden jealously from the passer-by, lay the
other half of that perpetual entertainment it provided--a store of
tiny boats fashioned by David, and another friend, the lame
minister of the 'Christian Brethren' congregation at Clough End,
the small factory town just below Kinder, who was a sea-captain's
son, and with a knife and a bit of deal could fashion you any craft
you pleased. These boats David only brought out on rare occasions,
very seldom admitting Louie to the show. But when he pleased they
became fleets, and sailed for new continents. Here were the ships
of Captain Cook, there the ships of Columbus. On one side of the
pan lay the Spanish main, on the other the islands of the South
Seas. A certain tattered copy of the 'Royal Magazine,' with
pictures, which lay in Uncle Reuben's cupboard at home, provided
all that for David was to be known of these names and places. But
fancy played pilot and led the way; she conjured up storms and
islands and adventures; and as he hung over his pan high on the
Derbyshire moor, the boy, like Sidney of old, 'sailed the seas where
there was never sand'--the vast and viewless oceans of romance.




CHAPTER II


Once safe in the smithy, David recovered his temper. If Louie
followed him, which was probable, he would know better how to deal
with her here, with a wall at his back and a definite area to
defend, than he did in the treacherous openness of the heath.
However, just as he was settling himself down, with a sigh of
relief, between the pan and the wall, he caught sight of something
through one of the gaps of the old ruin which made him fling down
his book and run to the doorway. There, putting his fingers to his
mouth, he blew a shrill whistle along the side of the Scout. A bent
figure on a distant path stopped at the sound. It was an old man,
with a plaid hanging from his shoulders. He raised the stick he
held, and shook it in recognition of David's signal. Then resuming
his bowed walk, he came slowly on, followed by an old hound, whose
gait seemed as feeble as his master's.

David leant against the doorway waiting. Louie, meanwhile, was
lounging in the heather just below him, having very soon caught him
up.

'What d'yo want 'im for?' she asked contemptuously, as the
new-comer approached: 'he'd owt to be in th' sylum. Aunt Hannah says
he's gone that silly, he owt to be took up.'

'Well, he woan't be, then,' retorted David. 'Theer's nobory about as
ull lay a finger on 'im. He doan't do her no harm, nor yo noather.
Women foak and gells allus want to be wooryin soomthin.'

'Aunt Hannah says he lost his wits wi fuddlin,' repeated Louie
shrilly, striking straighter still for what she knew to be one of
David's tenderest points--his friendship for 'owd 'Lias Dawson,' the
queer dreamer, who, fifteen years before, had been the schoolmaster
of Frimley Moor End, and in local esteem 't' cliverest mon abeawt
t'Peak.'

David with difficulty controlled a hot inclination to fall upon his
sister once more. Instead, however, he affected not to hear her,
and shouted a loud 'Good mornin' to the old man, who was toiling up
the knoll on which the smithy stood.

'Lias responded feebly, panting hard the while. He sank down on a
stone outside the smithy, and for a while had neither breath nor
voice. Then he began to look about him; his heaving chest subsided,
and there was a rekindling of the strange blue eyes. He wore a high
white stock and neckcloth; his plaid hung round his emaciated
shoulders with a certain antique dignity; his rusty wideawake
covered hair still abundant and even curly, but snow-white; the
face, with its white eyebrows, was long, thin, and full of an
ascetic delicacy.

'Wal, Davy, my lad,' the old man said at last, with a sort of
pompous mildness; 'I winna blame yo for 't, but yo interrupted me
sadly wi yur whistlin. I ha been occupied this day wi business o'
_graat_ importance. His Majesty King Charles has been wi me
since seven o'clock this mornin. And for th' fust time I ha been
gettin reet to th' _bottom_ o' things wi him. I ha been
_probin_ him, Davy--probin him. He couldno riddle through wi
lees; I kept him to 't, as yo mun keep a horse to a jump--straight
an tight. I had it aw out about Strafford, an t'Five Members, an
thoose dirty dealins wi th' Irish devils! Yo should ha yerd it,
Davy--yo should, I'll uphowd yo!'

And placing his stick between his knees, the old man leant his
hands upon it, with a meditative and judicial air. The boy stood
looking down at him, a broad smile lighting up the dark and vivid
face. Old 'Lias supplied him with a perpetual 'spectacle' which
never palled.

'Coe him back, 'Lias, he's soomwheer about. Yo need nobbut coe him,
an he'll coom.'

'Lias looked fatuously pleased. He lifted his head and affected to
scan the path along which he had just travelled.

'Aye, I daur say he's not far.--Yor Majesty!'

And 'Lias laid his head on one side and listened. In a few seconds
a cunning smile stole over his lips.

'Wal, Davy, yo're in luck. He's noan so onwillin, we'st ha him here
in a twinklin. Yo may coe him mony things, but yo conno coe him
proud. Noa, as I've fund him, Charles Stuart has no soart o' pride
about him. Aye, theer yo are! Sir, your Majesty's obleeged an
humble servant!'

And, raising his hand to his hat, the old man took it off and swept
it round with a courtly deliberation. Then replacing it, he sat
with his face raised, as though to one standing near, his whole
attitude full of a careful and pompous dignity.

'Now then, yor Majesty,' said 'Lias grimly,' I'st ha to put that
question to yo, yance moor, yo wor noan so well pleased wi this
mornin. But yo shouldno be soa tender, mon! Th' truth can
do yo _noa_ harm, wheer yo are, an I'm nobbut askin for
_informashun's_ sake. Soa out wi it; I'st not use it agen yo.
_That--wee--bit--o'--damned--paper,_--man, what sent poor
Strafford to his eend--yo mind it?--aye, _'at yo do!_ Well,
now'--and the old man's tone grew gently seductive--_'explain
yursel._ We'n had _their_ tale,' and he pointed away to
some imaginary accusers. 'But yo mun trust an Englishman's sense o'
fair play. Say your say. We 'st gie yo a varra patient hearin.'

And with chin thrown up, and his half-blurred eyes blinking under
their white lashes, 'Lias waited with a bland imperativeness for the
answer.

'Eh?' said 'Lias at last, frowning and hollowing his hand to his
ear.

He listened another few seconds, then he dropped his hand sharply.

'What's 'at yo're sayin?' he asked hastily; ''at yo couldno help it,
not _whativer_--that i' truth yo had nothin to do wi't, no
moor than mysel--that yo wor _forcit_ to it--willy-nilly--by
them devils o' Parliament foak--by Mr. Pym and his loike, wi whom,
if God-amighty ha' not reckoned since, theer's no moor justice i'
His Kingdom than yo found i' yours?'

The words came out with a rush, tumbling over one another till they
suddenly broke off in a loud key of indignant scorn. Then 'Lias
fell silent a moment, and slowly shook his head over the inveterate
shuffling of the House of Stuart.

''Twinna do, man--'twinna do,' he said at last, with an air of
fine reproof. 'He wor your _friend_, wor that poor sinner
Strafford--your awn familiar friend, as t' Psalm says. I'm not
takin up a brief for him, t' Lord knows! He wor but meetin his
deserts, to _my_ thinkin, when his yed went loupin. But yo put
a black mark agen _yore_ name when yo signed that bit paper
for your awn skin's sake. Naw, naw, man, yo should ha lost your awn
yed a bit sooner fust. Eh, it wor base--it wor cooardly!'

'Lias's voice dropped, and he fell muttering to himself
indistinctly. David, bending over him, could not make out whether
it was Charles or his interlocutor speaking, and began to be afraid
that the old man's performance was over before it had well begun.
But on the contrary, 'Lias emerged with fresh energy from the gulf
of inarticulate argument in which his poor wits seemed to have lost
themselves awhile.

'But I'm no blamin yo awthegither,' he cried, raising himself, with
a protesting wave of the hand. 'Theer's naw mak o' mischief i' this
world, but t' _women_ are at t' bottom o't. Whar's that proud
foo of a wife o' yourn? Send her here, man; send her here! 'Lias
Dawson ull mak her hear reason! Now, Davy!'

And the old man drew the lad to him with one hand, while he raised
a finger softly with the other.

'Just study her, Davy, my lad,' he said in an undertone, which
swelled louder as his excitement grew, 'theer she stan's, by t' side
o' t' King. She's a gay good-lookin female, that I'll confess to,
but study her; look at her curls, Davy, an her paint, an her
nakedness. For shame, madam! Goo hide that neck o' yourn, goo hide
it, I say! An her faldaddles, an her jewles, an her ribbons. Is
that a woman--a French hizzy like that--to get a King out o'
trooble, wha's awready lost aw t' wits he wor born wi?'

And with sparkling eyes and outstretched arm 'Lias pointed sternly
into vacancy. Thrilled with involuntary awe the boy and girl looked
round them. For, in spite of herself, Louie had come closer, little
by little, and was now sitting cross-legged in front of 'Lias. Then
Louie's shrill voice broke in--

'Tell us what she's got on!' And the girl leant eagerly forward,
her magnificent eyes kindling into interest.

'What she's got on, my lassie? Eh, but I'm feart your yead, too, is
fu' o' gauds!--Wal, it's but nateral to females. She's aw in white
satin, my lassie,--an in her brown hair theer's pearls, an a blue
ribbon just howdin down t' little luve-locks on her forehead--an on
her saft neck theer's pearls again--not soa white, by a thoosand
mile, as her white skin--an t' lace fa's ower her proud shoothers,
an down her luvely arms--an she looks at me wi her angry eyes--Eh,
but she's a queen!' cried 'Lias, in a sudden outburst of
admiration. 'She hath been a persecutor o' th' saints--a varra
Jeezebel--the Lord hath put her to shame--but she's moor
sperrit--moor o't' blood o' kingship i' her little finger, nor
Charles theer in aw his body!'

And by a strange and crazy reversal of feeling, the old man sat in
a kind of ecstasy, enamoured of his own creation, looking into thin
air. As for Louie, during the description of the Queen's dress she
had drunk in every word with a greedy attention, her changing eyes
fixed on the speaker's face. When he stopped, however, she drew a
long breath.

'It's aw lees!' she said scornfully.

'Howd your tongue, Louie!' cried David, angrily.

But 'Lias took no notice. He was talking again very fast, but
incoherently. Hampden, Pym, Fairfax, Falkland--the great names
clattered past every now and then, like horsemen, through a maze of
words, but with no perceptible order or purpose. The phrases
concerning them came to nothing; and though there were apparently
many voices speaking, nothing intelligible could be made out.

When next the mists cleared a little from the old visionary's
brain, David gathered that Cromwell was close by, defending himself
with difficulty, apparently, like Charles, against 'Lias's
assaults. In his youth and middle age--until, in fact, an event of
some pathos and mystery had broken his life across, and cut him off
from his profession--'Lias had been a zealous teacher and a
voracious reader; and through the dreams of fifteen years the
didactic faculty had persisted and grown amazingly. He played
schoolmaster now to all the heroes of history. Whether it were
Elizabeth wrangling with Mary Stuart, or Cromwell marshalling his
Ironsides, or Buckingham falling under the assassin's dagger at
'Lias's feet, or Napoleon walking restlessly up and down the deck
of the 'Bellerophon,' 'Lias rated them every one. He was lord of a
shadow world, wherein he walked with kings and queens, warriors and
poets, putting them one and all superbly to rights. Yet so subtle
were the old man's wits, and so bright his fancy, even in
derangement, that he preserved through it all a considerable
measure of dramatic fitness. He gave his puppets a certain freedom;
he let them state their case; and threw almost as much ingenuity
into the pleading of it as into the refuting of it. Of late, since
he had made friends with Davy Grieve, he had contracted a curious
habit of weaving the boy into his visions.

'Davy, what's your opinion o' that?' or, 'Davy, my lad, did yo iver
hear sich clit-clat i' your life?' or again, 'Davy, yo'll not be
misled, surely, by sich a piece o' speshul-pleadin as that?'

So the appeals would run, and the boy, at first bewildered, and
even irritated by them, as by something which threw hindrances in
the way of the only dramatic entertainment the High Peak was likely
to afford him, had learnt at last to join in them with relish. Many
meetings with 'Lias on the moorside, which the old seer made alive
for both of them--the plundering of 'Lias's books, whence he had
drawn the brown 'Josephus' in his pocket--these had done more
than anything else to stock the boy's head with its present
strange jumble of knowledge and ideas. _Knowledge_, indeed, it
scarcely was, but rather the materials for a certain kind of
excitement.

'Wal, Davy, did yo hear that?' said 'Lias, presently, looking round
on the boy with a doubtful countenance, after Cromwell had given an
unctuous and highly Biblical account of the slaughter at Drogheda
and its reasons.

'How mony did he say he killed at that place?' asked the boy
sharply.

'Thoosands,' said Dawson, solemnly. 'Theer was naw mercy asked nor
gi'en. And those wha escaped knockin on t' yead were aw sold as
slaves--every mon jock o' them!'

A strong light of anger showed itself in David's face.

'Then he wor a cantin murderer! Yo mun tell him so! If I'd my way,
he'd hang for 't!'

'Eh, laddie, they were nowt but rebels an Papists,' said the old
man, complacently.

'Don't yo becall Papists!' cried David, fiercely, facing round upon
him. 'My mither wor a Papist.'

A curious change of expression appeared on 'Lias's face. He put his
hand behind his ear that he might hear better, turned a pair of
cunning eyes on David, while his lips pressed themselves together.

'Your mither wor a Papist? an your feyther wor Sandy Grieve. Ay,
ay--I've yeerd tell strange things o' Sandy Grieve's wife,' he said
slowly.

Suddenly Louie, who had been lying full length on her back in the
sun, with her hat over her face, apparently asleep, sat bolt
upright.

'Tell us what about her,' she said imperiously.

'Noa--noa,' said the old man, shaking his head, while a sort of
film seemed to gather over the eyes, and the face and features
relaxed--fell, as it were, into their natural expression of weak
senility, which so long as he was under the stress of his favourite
illusions was hardly apparent. 'But it's true--it's varra true--I've
yeerd tell strange things about Sandy Grieve's wife.'

And still aimlessly shaking his head, he sat staring at the
opposite side of the ravine, the lower jaw dropping a little.

'He knows nowt about it,' said David, roughly, the light of a
sombre, half-reluctant curiosity, which had arisen in his look,
dying down.

He threw himself on the grass by the dogs, and began teasing and
playing with them. Meanwhile Louie sat studying 'Lias with a
frowning hostility, making faces at him now and then by way of
amusement. To disappoint the impetuous will embodied in that small
frame was to commit an offence of the first order.

But one might as well make faces at a stone post as at old 'Lias
when his wandering fit was on him. When the entertainment palled,
Louie got up with a yawn, meaning to lounge back to the farm and
investigate the nearness of dinner. But, as she turned, something
caught her attention. It was the gleam of a pool, far away beyond
the Downfall, on a projecting spur of the moor.

'What d' yo coe that bit watter?' she asked David, suddenly
pointing to it.

David rolled himself round on his face, and took a look at the
bluish patch on the heather.

'It hasna got naw name,' he said, at a venture.

'Then yo're a stoopid, for it has,' replied Louie, triumphantly.
'It's t' _Mermaid_ Pool. Theer wor a Manchester mon at Wigsons'
last week, telling aw maks o' tales. Theer's a mermaid lives
in 't--a woman, I tell tha, wi' a fish's tail--it's in a book,
an he read it out, soa _theer_--an on Easter Eve neet she cooms
out, and walks about t' Scout, combin her hair--an if onybody sees
her an wishes for soomthin, they get it, sartin sure; an--'

'Mermaids is just faddle an nonsense,' interrupted David, tersely.

'Oh, is they? Then I spose books is faddle. Most on 'em are--t'
kind of books yo like--I'll uphowd yo!'

'Oh, is they?' said David, mimicking her. 'Wal, I like 'em, yo see,
aw t' same. I tell yo, mermaids is nonsense, cos I _know_ they
are. Theer was yan at Hayfield Fair, an the fellys they nearly
smashed t' booth down, cos they said it wor a cheat. Theer was just
a gell, an they'd stuffed her into a fish's skin and sewed 'er up;
an when yo went close yo could see t' stuffin runnin out of her. An
theer was a man as held 'er up by a wire roun her waist, an waggled
her i' t' watter. But t' foak as had paid sixpence to coom in, they
just took an tore down t' place, an they'd 'a dookt t' man an t'
gell boath, if th' coonstable hadn't coom. Naw, mermaids is faddle,'
he repeated contemptuously.

'Faddle?' repeated 'Lias, interrogatively.

The children started. They has supposed 'Lias was of doting and
talking gibberish for the rest of the morning. But his tone was
brisk and as David looked up he caught a queer flickering
brightness in the old man's eye, which showed him that 'Lias was
once more capable of furnishing amusement or information.

'What do they coe that bit watter, 'Lias?' he inquired, pointing to
it.

'That bit watter?' repeated 'Lias, eyeing it. A sort of vague
trouble came into his face, and his wrinkled hands lying on his
stick began to twitch nervously.

'Aye--theer's a Manchester man been cramming Wigsons wi tales--says
he gets 'em out of a book--'bout a woman 'at walks t' Scout Easter
Eve neet,--an a lot o' ninny-hommer's talk. Yo niver heer now about
it--did yo, 'Lias?'

'Yes, yo did, Mr. Dawson--now, didn't yo?' said Louis,
persuasively, enraged that David would never accept information
from her, while she was always expected to take it from him.

'A woman--'at walks t' Scout,' said 'Lias, uncertainly, flushing as
he spoke.

Then, looking tremulously from his companions to the pool, he said,
angrily raising his stick and shaking it at David, 'Davy, yo're
takin advantage--Davy, yo're doin what yo owt not. If my Margret
were here, she'd let yo know!'

The words rose into a cry of quavering passion. The children stared
at him in amazement. But as Davy, aggrieved, was defending himself,
the old man laid a violent hand on his arm and silenced him. His
eyes, which were black and keen still in the blanched face, were
riveted on the gleaming pool. His features worked as though under
the stress of some possessing force; a shiver ran through the
emaciated limbs.

'Oh! yo want to know abeawt Jenny Crum's pool, do yo?' he said at last
in a low agitated voice. 'Nobbut look, my lad!--nobbut look!--an see for
yoursen.'

He paused, his chest heaving, his eye fixed. Then, suddenly, he
broke out in a flood of passionate speech, still gripping David.

'_Passon Maine! Passon Maine!_--ha yo got her, th' owd woman?
Aye, aye--sure enough--'at's she--as yo're aw drivin afore
yo--hoontit like a wild beeast--wi her grey hair streamin, and her
hands tied--Ah!'--and the old man gave a wild cry, which startled
both the children to their feet. 'Conno yo hear her?--eh, but it's
enough to tear a body's heart out to hear an owd woman scream like
that!'

He stopped, trembling, and listened, his hand hollowed to his ear.
Louie looked at her brother and laughed nervously; but her little
hard face had paled. David laid hold of her to keep her quiet, and
shook himself free of 'Lias. But 'Lias took no notice of them now
at all, his changed seer's gaze saw nothing but the distance and
the pool.

'Are yo quite _sure_ it wor her, Passon?' he went on,
appealingly. 'She's nobbut owd, an it's a far cry fro her bit
cottage to owd Needham's Farm. An th' chilt might ha deed, and t'
cattle might ha strayed, and t' geyats might ha opened o'
theirsels! Yo'll not dare to speak agen _that_. They _might_?
Ay, ay, we aw know t' devil's strong; but she's eighty-one year
coom Christmas--an an--. Doan't, _doan't_ let t' childer see,
nor t' yoong gells! If yo let em see sich seets they'll breed
yo wolves, not babes! Ah!'

And again 'Lias gave the same cry, and stood half risen, his hands
on his staff, looking.

'What is it, 'Lias?' said David, eagerly; 'what is 't yo see?'

'Theer's my grandfeyther,' said 'Lias, almost in a whisper, 'an owd
Needham an his two brithers, an yoong Jack Needham's woife--her as
losst her babby--an yoong lads an lasses fro Clough End, childer
awmost, and t' coonstable, an Passon Maine--Ay--ay--yo've doon it!
Yo've doon it! She'll mak naw moor mischeef neets--she's gay quiet
now! T' watter's got her fasst enough!'

And, drawing himself up to his full height, the old man pointed a
quivering finger at the pool.

'Ay, it's got her--an your stones are tied fasst! Passon Maine says
she's safe--that yo'll see her naw moor--

    While holly sticks be green,
    While stone on Kinder Scoot be seen.

But _I_ tell yo, Passon Maine _lees!_ I tell yo t' witch ull
_walk_--t' witch ull _walk!_'

For several seconds 'Lias stood straining forward--out of
himself--a tragic and impressive figure. Then, in a moment, from
that distance his weird gift had been re-peopling, something else
rose towards him--some hideous memory, as it seemed, of personal
anguish, personal fear. The exalted seer's look vanished, the
tension within gave way, the old man shrank together. He fell back
heavily on the stone, hiding his face in his hands, and muttering
to himself.

The children looked at each other oddly. Then David, half afraid,
touched him.

'What's t' matter, 'Lias? Are yo bad?'

The old man did not move. They caught some disjointed words,--'cold--ay,
t' neet's cold, varra cold!'

''Lias!' shouted David.

'Lias looked up startled, and shook his head feebly.

'Are yo bad, 'Lias?'

'Ay!' said the old schoolmaster, in the voice of one speaking
through a dream--'ay, varra bad, varra cold--I mun--lig me down--a
bit.'

And he rose feebly. David instinctively caught hold of him, and led
him to a corner close by in the ruined walls, where the heather and
bilberry grew thick up to the stones. 'Lias sank down, his head fell
against the wall, and a light and restless sleep seemed to take
possession of him.

David stood studying him, his hands in his pockets. Never in all
his experience of him had 'Lias gone through such a performance as
this. What on earth did it mean? There was more in it than
appeared, clearly. He would tell Margaret, 'Lias's old wife, who
kept him and tended him like the apple of her eye. And he would
find out about the pool, anyway. _Jenny Crum's pool?_ What on
earth did that mean? The name had never reached his ears before. Of
course Uncle Reuben would know. The boy eyed it curiously, the
details of 'Lias's grim vision returning upon him. The wild
circling moor seemed suddenly to have gained a mysterious interest.

'Didn't I tell yo he wor gone silly?' said Louie, triumphantly, at
his elbow.

'He's not gone that silly, onyways, but he can freeten little
gells,' remarked David, dryly, instinctively putting out an arm,
meanwhile, to prevent her disturbing the poor sleeper.

'I worn't freetened,' insisted Louie; '_yo_ were! He may skrike
aw day if he likes--for aw I care. He'll be runnin into hedges
by dayleet soon. Owd churn-yed!'

'Howd your clatterin tongue!' said David, angrily, pushing her out
of the doorway. She lifted a loose sod of heather, which lay just
outside, flung it at him, and then took to her heels, and made for
the farm and dinner, with the speed of a wild goat.

David brushed his clothes, took a stroll with the dogs, and
recovered his temper as best he might. When he came back, pricked
by the state of his appetite, to see whether 'Lias had recovered
enough sanity to get home, he found the old man sitting up, looking
strangely white and exhausted, and fumbling, in a dazed way, for
the tobacco to which he always resorted at moments of nervous
fatigue. His good wife Margaret never sent him out without mended
clothes, spotless linen, and a paper of tobacco in his pocket. He
sat chewing it awhile in silence; David's remarks to him met with
only incoherent answers, and at last the schoolmaster got up and
with the help of his stick tottered off along the path by which he
had come. David's eyes followed the bent figure uneasily; nor did
he turn homeward till it disappeared over the brow.




CHAPTER III


Anyone opening the door of Needham Farm kitchen that night at eight
would have found the inmates at supper--a meagre supper, which
should, according to the rule of the house, have been eaten in
complete silence. Hannah Grieve, the children's aunt, and mistress
of the farm, thought it an offence to talk at meals. She had not
been so brought up.

But Louie this evening was in a state of nerves. The afternoon had
seen one of those periodical struggles between her and Hannah,
which did so much to keep life at Needham Farm from stagnating into
anything like comfort. The two combatants, however, must have taken
a certain joy in them, since they recurred with so much regularity.
Hannah had won, of course, as the grim self-importance of her
bearing amply showed. Louie had been forced to patch the
house-linen as usual, mainly by the temporary confiscation of her
Sunday hat, the one piece of decent clothing she possessed, and to
which she clung with a feverish attachment--generally, indeed,
sleeping with it beside her pillow. But, though she was beaten, she
was still seething with rebellion. Her eyes were red, but her
shaggy head was thrown back defiantly, and there was hysterical
battle in the expression of her sharply-tilted nose and chin.

'Mind yorsel,' cried Hannah angrily, as the child put down her
plate of porridge with a bang which made the housewife tremble for
her crockery.

'What's t' matter wi yo, Louie?' said Uncle Reuben, looking at her
with some discomfort. He had just finished the delivery of a long
grace, into which he had thrown much unction, and Louie's manners
made but an ill-fitting Amen.

'It's nasty!' said the child passionately. 'It's allus
porridge--porridge--porridge--porridge--an I hate it--an it's
bitter--an it's a shame! I wish I wor at Wigson's--'at I do!'

Davy glanced up at his sister under his eyebrows. Hannah scanned
her niece all over with a slow, observant scrutiny, as though she
were a dangerous animal that must be watched. Otherwise Louie might
have spoken to the wall for all the effect she produced. Reuben,
however, was more vulnerable.

'What d' yo want to be at Wigson's for?' he asked. 'Yo should
be content wi your state o' life, Louie. It's a sin to be
discontented--I've tellt yo so many times.'

'They've got scones and rhubarb jam for tea!' cried the child,
tumbling the news out as though she were bursting with it. 'Mrs.
Wigson, she's allus makin em nice things. She's kind, she is--she's
nice--she wouldn't make em eat stuff like this--she'd give it to
the pigs--'at she would!'

And all the time it was pitiful to see how the child was gobbling
up her unpalatable food, evidently from the instinctive fear, nasty
as it was, that it would be taken from her as a punishment for her
behaviour.

'Now, Louie, yo're a silly gell,' began Reuben, expostulating; but
Hannah interposed.

'I wudn't advise yo, Reuben Grieve, to go wastin your breath on
sich a minx. If I were yo, I'd keep it fur my awn eating.'

And she calmly put another slice of cold bacon on his plate, as
though reminding him of his proper business. Reuben fell silent and
munched his bacon, though he could not forbear studying his niece
every now and then uncomfortably. He was a tall, large-boned man,
with weakish eyes, sandy whiskers and beard, grown in a fringe
round his long face, and a generally clumsy and disjointed air. The
tremulous, uncertain movements of his hand as he stretched it out
for one article of food after another seemed to express the man's
character.

Louie went on gulping down her porridge. Her plate was just empty
when Hannah caught a movement of Reuben's fork. He was in the act
of furtively transferring to Louie a portion of bacon. But he could
not restrain himself from looking at Hannah as he held out the
morsel. Hannah's answering look was too much for him. The bacon
went into his mouth.

Supper over, Louie went out to sit on the steps, and Hannah
contemptuously forbore to make her come in and help clear away. Out
in the air, the child slowly quieted down. It was a clear, frosty
April night, promising a full moon. The fresh, nipping air blew on
the girl's heated temples and swollen eyes. Against her will
almost, her spirits came back. She swept Aunt Hannah out of her
mind, and began to plan something which consoled her. When would
they have their stupid prayers and let her get upstairs?

David meanwhile hung about the kitchen. He would have liked to ask
Uncle Reuben about the pool and 'Lias's story, but Hannah was
bustling about, and he never mentioned 'Lias in her hearing. To do
so would have been like handing over something weak, for which he
had a tenderness, to be worried.

But he rummaged out an old paper-covered guide to the Peak, which
he remembered to have been left at the farm one summer's day by a
passing tourist, who paid Hannah handsomely for some bread and
cheese. Turning to the part which concerned Clough End, Hayfield,
and the Scout, he found:--

'In speaking of the Mermaiden's Pool, it may be remarked that the
natives of several little hamlets surrounding Kinder Scout have
long had a tradition that there is a beautiful woman--an English
Hamadryad--lives in the side of the Scout; that she comes to bathe
every day in the Mermaid's Well, and that the man who has the good
luck to behold her bathing will become immortal and never die.'

David shut the book and fell pondering, like many another wiser
mortal before him, on the discrepancies of evidence. What was a
Hamadryad? and why no mention of Easter Eve? and what had it all to
do with the witch and Parson Maine and 'Lias's excitement?

Meanwhile, the thump made by the big family Bible as Hannah
deposited it on the table warned both him and the truant outside
that prayer-time had come. Louie came in noisily when she was
called, and both children lounged unwillingly into their appointed
seats.

Nothing but the impatience and indifference of childhood, however,
could have grudged Reuben Grieve the half-hour which followed.
During that one half-hour in the day, the mild, effaced man, whose
absent-minded ways and complete lack of business faculty were the
perpetual torment of his wife, was master of his house. While he
was rolling out the psalm, expounding the chapter, or 'wrestling'
in prayer, he was a personality and an influence even for the wife
who, in spite of a dumb congruity of habit, regarded him generally
as incompetent and in the way. Reuben's religious sense was strong
and deep, but some very natural and pathetically human instincts
entered also into his constant pleasure in this daily function.
Hannah, with her strong and harsh features settled into repose,
with her large hands, reddened by the day's work, lying idle in her
lap, sat opposite to him in silence; for once she listened to him,
whereas all day he had listened to her; and the moment made a daily
oasis in the life of a man who, in his own dull, peasant way, knew
that he was a failure, and knew also that no one was so well aware
of it as his wife.

With David and Louie the absorbing interest was generally to see
whether the prayer would be over before the eight-day clock struck
nine, or whether the loud whirr which preceded that event would be
suddenly and deafeningly let loose upon Uncle Reuben in the middle
of his peroration, as sometimes happened when the speaker forgot
himself. To-night that catastrophe was just avoided by a somewhat
obvious hurry through the Lord's Prayer. When they rose from their
knees Hannah put away the Bible, the boy and girl raced each other
upstairs, and the elders were left alone.

An hour passed away. Reuben was dozing peacefully in the
chimney-corner; Aunt Hannah had just finished putting a patch
on a pair of Reuben's trousers, was folding up her work and
preparing to rouse her slumbering companion, when a sound
overhead caught her ear.

'What's that chilt at now?' she exclaimed angrily, getting up and
listening. 'She'd owt ta been in bed long ago. Soomthin mischeevous,
I'll be bound. And lighting a dip beside her, she went upstairs
with a treacherously quiet step. There was a sound of an opening
door, and then Reuben downstairs was startled out of his snooze by
a sudden gamut of angry cries, a scurrying of feet, and Hannah
scolding loudly--

'Coom downstairs wi yo!--coom down an show your uncle what a figure
o' foon yo'n been makkin o' yorsel! I'st teach yo to burn three
candles down awbut to nothink 'at yo may bedizen yorsel in this
way. Coom along wi yo.'

There was a scuffle on the stairs, and then Hannah burst open the
door, dragging in an extraordinary figure indeed. Struggling and
crying in her aunt's grip was Louie. White trailing folds swept
behind her; a white garment underneath, apparently her nightgown,
was festooned with an old red-and-blue striped sash of some foreign
make. Round her neck hung a necklace of that gold filigree work
which spreads from Genoa all along the Riviera; her magnificent
hair hung in masses over her shoulders, crowned by the primroses of
the morning, which had been hurriedly twisted into a wreath by a
bit of red ribbon rummaged out of some drawer of odds-and-ends;
and her thin brown arms and hands appeared under the white
cloak--nothing but a sheet--which was being now trodden underfoot
in the child's passionate efforts to get away from her aunt. Ten
minutes before she had been a happy queen flaunting over her attic
floor in a dream of joy before a broken, propped-up looking-glass
under the splendid illumination of three dips, long since secreted
for purposes of the kind. Now she was a bedraggled, tear-stained
Fury, with a fierce humiliation and a boundless hatred glaring out
of the eyes, which in Aunt Hannah's opinion were so big as to be
'right down oogly.' Poor Louie!

Uncle Reuben, startled from his snooze by this apparition, looked
at it with a sleepy bewilderment, and fumbled for his spectacles.
'Ay, yo'd better luke at her close,' said Hannah, grimly, giving
her niece a violent shake as she spoke; 'I wor set yo should just
see her fur yance at her antics. Yo say soomtimes I'm hard on her.
Well, I'd ask ony pusson aloive if they'd put up wi this soart o'
thing--dressin up like a bad hizzy that waaks t' streets, wi
three candles--_three_, I tell yo, Reuben--flarin away, and the
curtains close to, an nothink but the Lord's mussy keepin 'em from
catchin. An she peacockin an gallivantin away enough to mak a cat
laugh!'

And Aunt Hannah in her enraged scorn even undertook a grotesque and
mincing imitation of the peacocking aforesaid. 'Let goo!' muttered
Louie between her shut teeth, and with a wild strength she at last
flung off her aunt and sprang for the door. But Hannah was too
quick for her and put her back against it. 'No--yo'll not goo till
your ooncle there's gien yo a word. He _shan't_ say I'm hard
on yo for nothink, yo good-for-nowt little powsement--he shall see
yo as yo are!'

And with the bitterness of a smouldering grievance, expressed in
every feature, Hannah looked peremptorily at her husband. He, poor
man, was much perplexed. The hour of devotion was past, and outside
it he was not accustomed to be placed in important situations.

'Louie--didn't yo know yo wor a bad gell to stay up and burn t'
candles, an fret your aunt?' he said with a feeble solemnity, his
look fixed on the huddled white figure against the mahogany press.

Louie stood with eyes resolutely cast down, and a forced smile,
tremulous, but insolent to a degree, slowly lifting up the corners
of her mouth as Uncle Reuben addressed her. The tears were still
running off her face, but she meant her smile to convey the
indomitable scorn for her tormentors which not even Aunt Hannah
could shake out of her.

Hannah Grieve was exasperated by the child's expression.

'Yo little sloot!' she said, seizing her by the arm again, and
losing her temper for good and all, 'yo've got your mither's bad
blude in yo--an it ull coom out, happen what may!'

'Hannah!' exclaimed Reuben, 'Hannah--mind yoursel.'

'My mither's _dead_,' said the child, slowly raising her dark,
burning eyes. 'My mither worn't bad; an if yo say she wor, yo're a
_beast_ for sayin it! I wish it wor yo wor dead, an my mither
wor here instead o' yo!'

To convey the concentrated rage of this speech is impossible. It
seemed to Hannah that the child had the evil eye. Even she quailed
under it.

'Go 'long wi yo,' she said grimly, in a white heat, while she
opened the door--'an the less yo coom into _my_ way for t'
future, the better.'

She pushed the child out and shut the door.

'Yo _are_ hard on her, Hannah!' exclaimed Reuben, in his
perplexity--pricked, too, as usual in his conscience.

The repetition of this parrot-cry, as it seemed to her, maddened
his wife.

'She's a wanton's brat,' she said violently; 'an she's got t'
wanton's blood.'

Reuben was silent. He was afraid of his wife in these moods. Hannah
began, with trembling hands, to pick up the contents of her
work-basket, which had been overturned in the scuffle.

Meanwhile Louie rushed upstairs, stumbling over and tearing her
finery, the convulsive sobs beginning again as soon as the tension
of her aunt's hated presence was removed.

At the top she ran against something in the dark. It was David, who
had been hanging over the stairs, listening. But she flung past
him.

'What's t' matter, Louie?' he asked in a loud whisper through the
door she shut in his face; 'what's th' owd crosspatch been slangin
about?'

But he got no answer, and he was afraid of being caught by Aunt
Hannah if he forced his way in. So he went back to his own room,
and closed, without latching, his door. He had had an inch of dip
to go to bed with, and had spent that on reading. His book was a
battered copy of 'Anson's Voyages,' which also came from 'Lias's
store, and he had been straining his eyes over it with enchantment.
Then had come the sudden noise upstairs and down, and his candle
and his pleasure had gone out together. The heavy footsteps of his
uncle and aunt ascending warned him to keep quiet. They turned into
their room, and locked their door as their habit was. David
noiselessly opened his window and looked out.

A clear moonlight reigned outside. He could distinguish the rounded
shapes, the occasional movements of the sheep in their pen to the
right of the farmyard. The trees in the field threw long shadows
down the white slope; to his left was the cart-shed with its black
caverns and recesses, and the branches of the apple-trees against
the luminous sky. Owls were calling in the woods below; sometimes a
bell round the neck of one of the sheep tinkled a little, and the
river made a distant background of sound.

The boy's heart grew heavy. After the noises in the Grieves' room ceased
he listened for something which he knew must be in the air, and caught
it--the sound of a child's long, smothered sobs. On most nights they
would not have made much impression on him. Louie's ways with her
brother were no more engaging than with the rest of the world; and she
was not a creature who invited consolation from anybody. David, too,
with his power of escape at any time into a world of books and dreams or
simply into the wild shepherd life of the moors, was often inclined to a
vague irritation with Louie's state of perpetual revolt. The food was
nasty, their clothes were ugly and scanty, Aunt Hannah was as hard as
nails--at the same time Louie was enough to put anybody's back up. What
did she get by it?--that was his feeling; though, perhaps, he never
shaped it. He had never felt much pity for her. She had a way of putting
herself out of court, and he was, of course, too young to see her life
or his own as a whole. What their relationship might mean to him was
still vague--to be decided by the future. Whatever softness there was in
the boy was at this moment called out by other people--by old 'Lias and
his wife; by Mr. Ancrum, the lame minister at Clough End; by the dogs;
hardly ever by Louie. He had grown used, moreover, to her perpetual
explosions, and took them generally with a boy's natural callousness.

But to-night her woes affected him as they had never done before.
The sound of her sobbing, as he stood listening, gradually roused
in him an unbearable restlessness. An unaccountable depression
stole upon him--the reaction, perhaps, from a good deal of mental
exertion and excitement in the day. A sort of sick distaste awoke
in him for most of the incidents of existence--for Aunt Hannah, for
Uncle Reuben's incomprehensible prayers, for the thought of the
long Puritanical Sunday just coming. And, in addition, the low
vibrations of that distant sobbing stirred in him again, by
association, certain memories which were like a clutch of physical
pain, and which the healthy young animal instinctively and
passionately avoided whenever it could. But to-night, in the dark
and in solitude, there were no distractions, and as the boy put his
head down on his arms, rolling it from side to side as though to
shake them off, the same old images pursued him--the lodging-house
room, and the curtainless iron bed in which he slept with his
father: reminiscences of some long, inexplicable anguish through
which that father had passed; then of his death, and his own lonely
crying. He seemed still to _feel_ the strange sheets in that
bed upstairs, where a compassionate fellow-lodger had put him the
night after his father died; he sat up again bewildered in the cold
dawn, filled with a home-sickness too benumbing for words. He
resented these memories, tried to banish them; but the nature on
which they were impressed was deep and rich, and, once shaken,
vibrated long. The boy trembled through and through. The more he
was ordinarily shed abroad, diffused in the life of sensation and
boundless mental curiosity, the blacker were these rare moments of
self-consciousness, when all the world seemed pain, an iron vice
which pinched and tortured him.

At last he went to his door, pulled it gently open, and with bare
feet went across to Louie's room, which he entered with infinite
caution. The moonlight was streaming in on the poor gauds, which
lay wildly scattered over the floor. David looked at them with
amazement. Amongst them he saw something glittering. He picked it
up, saw it was a gold necklace which had been his mother's, and
carefully put it on the little toilet table.

Then he walked on to the bed. Louie was lying with her face turned
away from him. A certain pause in the sobbing as he came near told
him that she knew he was there. But it began again directly, being
indeed a physical relief which the child could not deny herself. He
stood beside her awkwardly. He could think of nothing to say. But
timidly he stretched out his hand and laid the back of it against
her wet cheek. He half expected she would shake it off, but she did
not. It made him feel less lonely that she let it stay; the impulse
to comfort had somehow brought himself comfort. He stood there,
feeling very cold, thinking a whirlwind of thoughts about old
'Lias, about the sheep, about Titus and Jerusalem, and about
Louie's extraordinary proceedings--till suddenly it struck him that
Louie was not crying any more. He bent over her. The sobs had
changed into the long breaths of sleep, and, gently drawing away
his hand, he crept off to bed.




CHAPTER IV


It was Sunday afternoon, still cold, nipping, and sunny. Reuben
Grieve sat at the door of the farmhouse, his pipe in his hand, a
'good book' on his knee. Beyond the wall which bounded the farmyard
he could hear occasional voices. The children were sitting there,
he supposed. It gave him a sensation of pleasure once to hear a
shrill laugh, which he knew was Louie's. For all this morning,
through the long services in the 'Christian Brethren' chapel at
Clough End, and on the walk home, he had been once more pricked in
his conscience. Hannah and Louie were not on speaking terms. At
meals the aunt assigned the child her coarse food without a word,
and on the way to chapel and back there had been a stony silence
between them. It was evident, even to his dull mind, that the girl
was white and thin, and that between her wild temper and mischief
and the mirth of other children there was a great difference.
Moreover, certain passages in the chapel prayers that morning
had come home sharply to a mind whereof the only definite gift
was a true religious sensitiveness. The text of the sermon
especially--'Whoso loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how
shall he love God, whom he hath not seen?'--vibrated like an
accusing voice within him. As he sat in the doorway, with the sun
stealing in upon him, the clock ticking loudly at his back, and the
hens scratching round the steps, he began to think with much
discomfort about his dead brother and his brother's children.

As to his memories of the past, they may perhaps be transformed
here into a short family history, with some details added which
had no place in Reuben's mind. Twenty years before this present
date Needham--once Needham's--Farm had been held by Reuben's
father, a certain James Grieve. He had originally been a kind of
farm-labourer on the Berwickshire border, who, driven southwards in
search of work by the stress of the bad years which followed the
great war, had wandered on, taking a job of work here and another
there, and tramping many a score of weary miles between, till at
last in this remote Derbyshire valley he had found a final
anchorage. Needham Farm was then occupied by a young couple of
the name of Pierson, beginning life under fairly prosperous
circumstances. James Grieve took service with them, and they valued
his strong sinews and stern Calvinistic probity as they deserved.
But he had hardly been two years on the farm when his young
employer, dozing one winter evening on the shafts of his cart
coming back from Glossop market, fell off, was run over, and
killed. The widow, a young thing, nearly lost her senses with
grief, and James, a man of dour exterior and few words, set himself
to keep things going on the farm till she was able to look life in
the face again. Her sister came to be with her, and there, was a
child born, which died. She was left better provided for than most
women of her class, and she had expectations from her parents.
After the child's death, when the widow began to go about again,
and James still managed all the work of the farm, the neighbours
naturally fell talking. James took no notice, and he was not a man
to meddle with, either in a public-house or elsewhere. But
presently a crop of suitors for the widow began to appear, and it
became necessary also to settle the destiny of the farm. No one
outside ever knew how it came about, for Jenny Pierson, who was a
soft, prettyish creature, had given no particular sign; but one
Sunday morning the banns of James Grieve, bachelor, and Jenny
Pierson, widow, were suddenly given out in the Presbyterian chapel
at Clough End, to the mingled astonishment and disgust of the
neighbourhood.

Years passed away. James held his own for a time with any farmer of
the neighbourhood. But, by the irony of fate, the prosperity which
his industry and tenacity deserved was filched from him little by
little by the ill-health of his wife. She bore him two sons, Reuben
and Alexander, and then she sank into a hopeless, fretful invalid,
tormented by the internal ailment of which she ultimately died. But
the small farmer who employs little or no labour is lost without an
active wife. If he has to pay for the milking of his cows, the
making of his butter, the cooking of his food, and the nursing of
his children, his little margin of profit is soon eaten away; and
with the disappearance of this margin, existence becomes a blind
struggle. Even James Grieve, the man of iron will and indomitable
industry, was beaten at last in the unequal contest. The life at
the farm became bitter and tragic. Jenny grew more helpless and
more peevish year by year; James was not exactly unkind to her, but
he could not but revenge upon her in some degree that ruin of his
silent ambitions which her sickliness had brought upon him.

The two sons grew up in the most depressing atmosphere conceivable.
Reuben, who was to have the farm, developed a shy and hopeless
taciturnity under the pressure of the family chagrin and
privations, and found his only relief in the emotions and
excitements of Methodism. Sandy seemed at first more fortunate.
An opening was found for him at Sheffield, where he was apprenticed
to a rope-maker, a cousin of his mother's. This man died before
Sandy was more than halfway through his time, and the youth went
through a period of hardship and hand-to-mouth living which ended
at last in the usual tramp to London. Here, after a period of
semi-starvation, he found it impossible to get work at his own
trade, and finally drifted into carpentering and cabinet-making.
The beginnings of this new line of life were incredibly difficult,
owing to the jealousy of his fellow-workmen, who had properly
served their time to the trade, and did not see why an interloper
from another trade, without qualifications, should be allowed to
take the bread out of their mouths.

One of Sandy's first successes was in what was called a
'shop-meeting,' a gathering of all the employés of the firm he
worked for, before whom the North-countryman pleaded to be allowed
to earn his bread. The tall, finely grown, famished-looking lad
spoke with a natural eloquence, and here and there with a
Biblical force of phrase--the inheritance of his Scotch blood and
training--which astonished and melted most of his hearers. He was
afterwards let alone, and even taught by the men about him, in
return for 'drinks,' which swallowed up sometimes as much as a
third of his wages.

After two or three years he was fully master of his trade, an
admirable workman, and a keen politician to boot. All this time he
had spent his evenings in self-education, buying books with every
spare penny, and turning specially to science and mathematics. His
abilities presently drew the attention of the heads of the
Shoreditch firm for which he worked, and when the post of a foreman
in a West-end shop, in which they were largely interested, fell
vacant, it was their influence which put Sandy Grieve into the
well-paid and coveted post. He could hardly believe his own good
fortune. The letter in which he announced it to his father reached
the farm just as the last phase of his mother's long martyrdom was
developing. The pair, already old--James with work and anxiety, his
wife with sickness--read it together. They shut it up without a
word. Its tone of jubilant hope seemed to have nothing to do with
them, or seemed rather to make their own narrowing prospects look
more narrow, and the approach of the King of Terrors more black and
relentless, than before. Jenny lay back on her poor bed, with the
tears of a dumb self-pity running down her cheeks, and James's only
answer to it was conveyed in a brief summons to Sandy to come and
see his mother before the end. The prosperous son, broadened out of
knowledge almost by good feeding and good clothes, arrived. He
brought money, which was accepted without much thanks; but his
mother treated him almost as a stranger, and the dour James, while
not unwilling to draw out his account of himself, would look him up
and down from under his bushy grey eyebrows, and often interpose
with some sarcasm on his 'foine' ways of speaking, or his
'gen'leman's cloos.' Sandy was ill at ease. He was really anxious
to help, and his heart was touched by his mother's state; but
perhaps there was a strain of self-importance in his manner, a
half-conscious inclination to thank God that his life was not to be
as theirs, which came out in spite of him, and dug a gulf between
him and them. Only his brother Reuben, dull, pious, affectionate
Reuben, took to him, and showed that patient and wondering
admiration of the younger's cleverness, which probably Sandy had
reckoned on as his right from his parents also.

On the last evening of his stay--he had luckily been able to make
his coming coincide with an Easter three days' holiday--he was
sitting beside his mother in the dusk, thinking, with a relief
which every now and then roused in him a pang of shame, that in
fourteen or fifteen more hours he should be back in London, in the
world which made much of him and knew what a smart fellow he was,
when his mother opened her eyes--so wide and blue they looked in
her pinched, death-stricken face--and looked at him full.

'Sandy!'

'Yes, mother!' he said, startled--for he had been sunk in his own
thoughts--and laying his hand on hers.

'You should get a wife, Sandy.'

'Well, some day, mother, I suppose I shall,' he said, with a change
of expression which the twilight concealed.

She was silent a minute, then she began again, slow and feebly, but
with a strange clearness of articulation.

'If she's sick, Sandy, _doan't grudge it her._ Women 'ud die
fasster iv they could.'

The whole story of the slow consuming bitterness of years spoke
through those fixed and filmy eyes. Her son gave a sudden
irrepressible sob. There was a faint lightening in the little
wrinkled face, and the lips made a movement. He kissed her, and in
that last moment of consciousness the mother almost forgave him his
good clothes and his superior airs.

Poor Sandy! Looking to his after story, it seems strange that any
one should ever have felt him unbearably prosperous. About six
months after his mother's death he married a milliner's assistant,
whom he met first in the pit of a theatre, and whom he was already
courting when his mother gave him the advice recorded. She was
French, from the neighbourhood of Arles, and of course a Catholic.
She had come to London originally as lady's-maid to a Russian
family settled at Nice. Shortly after their arrival, her master
shot his young wife for a supposed intrigue, and then put an end to
himself. Naturally the whole establishment was scattered, and the
pretty Louise Suveret found herself alone, with a few pounds, in
London. Thanks to the kind offices of the book-keeper in the hotel
where they had been staying, she had been introduced to a milliner
of repute in the Bond Street region, and the results of a trial
given her, in which her natural Frenchwoman's gift and her acquired
skill came out triumphant, led to her being permanently engaged.
Thenceforward her good spirits--which had been temporarily
depressed, not so much by her mistress's tragic ending as by her
own unexpected discomfort--reappeared in all their native
exuberance, and she proceeded to enjoy London. She defended herself
first against the friendly book-keeper, who became troublesome, and
had to be treated with the most decided ingratitude. Then she
gradually built herself up a store of clothes of the utmost
elegance, which were the hopeless envy of the other girls employed
at Madame Catherine's. And, finally, she looked about for
serviceable acquaintances.

One night, in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, while 'The Lady of
Lyons' was going on, Sandy Grieve found himself next to a dazzling
creature, with fine black eyes, the smooth olive skin of the South,
white teeth, and small dimpled hands, hardly spoilt at all by her
trade. She had with her a plain girl-companion, and her manner,
though conscious and provocative, had that haughtiness, that
implied readiness to take offence, which is the _grisette's_
substitute for breeding. She was, however, affable to Sandy, whose
broad shoulders and handsome, well-to-do air attracted her
attention. She allowed him to get her a programme, to beguile her
into conversation, and, finally, to offer her a cup of coffee.
Afterwards he escorted the two to the door of their lodging, in one
of the streets off Theobald's Road, and walked home in a state of
excitement which astonished him.

This happened immediately before his visit to the farm and his
mother's death. During the six months after that event Sandy knew
the 'joy of eventful living.' He was establishing his own business
position, and he was courting Louise Suveret with alternations of
despair and flattered passion, which stirred the now burly,
full-blooded North-countryman to his depths. She let him escort her
to her work in the morning and take her home in the evening, and
she allowed him to give her as many presents of gloves, ribbons,
bonbons--for which last she had a childish passion--and the like,
as he pleased. But when he pressed her to marry him she generally
laughed at him. She was, in reality, observing her world,
calculating her chances, and she had several other strings to her
bow, as Sandy shrewdly suspected, though she never allowed his
jealousy any information to feed upon. It was simply owing to the
failure of the most promising of these other strings--a failure
which roused in Louise one of those white heats of passion
which made the chief flaw in her organisation, viewed as a
pleasure-procuring machine--that Sandy found his opportunity. In a
moment of mortal chagrin and outraged vanity she consented to marry
him, and three weeks afterwards he was the blissful owner of the
black eyes, the small hands, the quick tongue, and the seductive
_chiffons_ he had so long admired more or less at a distance.

Their marriage lasted six years. At first Louise found some
pleasure in arranging the little house Sandy had taken for her
in a new suburb, and in making, wearing, and altering the
additional gowns which their joint earnings--for she still worked
intermittently at her trade--allowed her to enjoy. After the first
infatuation was a little cooled, Sandy discovered in her a paganism
so unblushing that his own Scotch and Puritan instincts reacted in
a sort of superstitious fear. It seemed impossible that God
Almighty should long allow Himself to be flouted as Louise flouted
Him. He found also that the sense of truth was almost non-existent
in her, and her vanity, her greed of dress and admiration, was so
consuming, so frenzied, that his only hope of a peaceful life--as
he quickly realised--lay in ministering to it. Her will soon got
the upper hand, and he sank into the patient servant of her
pleasures, snatching feverishly at all she gave him in return with
the instinct of a man who, having sold his soul, is determined at
least to get the last farthing he can of the price.

They had two children in four years--David Suveret and Louise
Stephanie. Louise resented the advent of the second so intensely
that poor Sandy become conscious, before the child appeared, of a
fatal and appalling change in her relation to him. She had been
proud of her first-born--an unusually handsome and precocious
child--and had taken pleasure in dressing it and parading it before
the eyes of the other mothers in their terrace, all of whom she
passionately despised. But Louie nearly died of neglect, and the
two years that followed her birth were black indeed for Sandy. His
wife, he knew, had begun to hate him; in business his energies
failed him, and his employers cooled towards him as he grew visibly
less pushing and inventive. The little household got deeper and
deeper into debt, and towards the end of the time Louise would
sometimes spend the whole day away from home without a word of
explanation. So great was his nervous terror--strong, broad fellow
that he was--of that pent-up fury in her, which a touch might have
unloosed, that he never questioned her. At last the inevitable end
came. He got home one summer evening to find the house empty and
ransacked, the children--little things of five and two--sitting
crying in the desolate kitchen, and a crowd of loud-voiced,
indignant neighbours round the door. To look for her would have
been absurd. Louise was much too clever to disappear and leave
traces behind. Besides, he had no wish to find her. The hereditary
self in him accepted his disaster as representing the natural
retribution which the canny Divine vengeance keeps in store for
those who take to themselves wives of the daughters of Heth. And
there was the sense, too, of emerging from something unclean, of
recovering his manhood.

He took his two children and went to lodgings in a decent street
near the Gray's Inn Road. There for a year things went fairly well
with him. His boy and girl, whom he paid a neighbour to look after
during the day, made something to come home to. As he helped the
boy, who was already at school, with his lesson for the next day,
or fed Louie, perched on his knee, with the bits from his plate
demanded by her covetous eyes and open mouth, he got back, little
by little, his self-respect. He returned, too, in the evenings to
some of his old pursuits, joined a Radical club near, and some
science lectures. He was aged and much more silent than of yore,
but not unhappy; his employers, too, feeling that their man had
somehow recovered himself, and hearing something of his history,
were sorry for him, and showed it.

Then one autumn evening a constable knocked at his door, and,
coming in upon the astonished group of father and children,
produced from his pocket a soaked and tattered letter, and showing
Sandy the address, asked if it was for him. Sandy, on seeing it,
stood up, put down Louie, who, half undressed, had been having a
ride on his knee, and asked his visitor to come out on to the
landing. There he read the letter under the gas-lamp, and put it
deliberately into his pocket.

'Where is she?' he asked.

'In Lambeth mortuary,' said the man briefly--'picked up two hours
ago. Nothing else found on her but this.'

Half an hour afterwards Sandy stood by a slab in the mortuary, and,
drawing back a sheet which covered the burden on it, stood face to
face with his dead wife. The black brows were drawn, the small
hands clenched. What struck Sandy with peculiar horror was that one
delicate wrist was broken, having probably struck something in
falling. She--who in life had rebelled so hotly against the least
shadow of physical pain! Thanks to the bandage which had been
passed round it, the face was not much altered. She could not have
been long in the water. Probably about the time when he was walking
home from work, she--He felt himself suffocating--the bare
whitewashed walls grew dim and wavering.

The letter found upon her was the strangest appeal to his pity. Her
seducer had apparently left her; she was in dire straits, and there
was, it seemed, no one but Sandy in all London on whose compassion
she could throw herself. She asked him, callously, for money to
take her back to some Nice relations. They need only know what she
chose to tell them, as she calmly pointed out, and, once in Nice,
she could make a living. She would like to see her children, she
said, before she left, but she supposed he would have to settle
that. How had she got his address? From his place of business
probably, in some roundabout way.

Then what had happened? Had she been seized with a sudden
persuasion that he would not answer, that it was all useless
trouble; and in one of those accesses of blind rage by which her
clear, sharp brain-life was at all times apt to be disturbed, had
she rushed out to end it all at once and for ever? It made him
forgive her that she _could_ have destroyed herself--could
have faced that awful plunge--that icy water--that death-struggle
for breath. He gauged the misery she must have gone through by what
he knew of her sensuous love for comfort, for _bien-être_. He
saw her again as she had been that night at the theatre when they
first met,--the little crisp black curls on the temples, the
dazzling eyes, the artificial pearls round the neck, the slight
traces of powder and rouge on brow and cheek, which made her all
the more attractive and tempting to his man's eye--the pretty foot,
which he first noticed as she stepped from the threshold of the
theatre into the street. Nature had made all that, to bring her
work to this grim bed at last!

He himself died eighteen months afterwards. His acquaintances never
dreamt of connecting his death with his wife's, and the connection,
if it existed, would have been difficult to trace. Still, if little
David could have put his experiences at this time into words, they
might have thrown some light on an event which was certainly a
surprise to the small world which took an interest in Sandy Grieve.

There was a certain sound which remained all through his life
firmly fixed in David's memory, and which he never thought of
without a sense of desolation, a shiver of sick dismay, such as
belonged to no other association whatever. It was the sound of a
long sigh, brought up, as it seemed, from the very depths of being,
and often, often repeated. The thought of it brought with it a
vision of a small bare room at night, with two iron bedsteads, one
for Louie, one for himself and his father; a bit of smouldering
fire in a tiny grate, and beside it a man's figure bowed over the
warmth, thrown out dark against the distempered wall, and sitting
on there hour after hour; of a child, wakened intermittently by the
light, and tormented by the recurrent sound, till it had once more
burrowed into the bed-clothes deep enough to shut out everything
but sleep. All these memories belonged to the time immediately
following on Louise's suicide. Probably, during the interval
between his wife's death and his own, Sandy suffered severely from
the effects of strong nervous shock, coupled with a certain growth
of religious melancholy, the conditions for which are rarely
wanting in the true Calvinist blood. Owing to the privations and
exposure of his early manhood, too, it is possible that he was
never in reality the strong man he looked. At any rate, his fight
for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. The second
winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold; he was overworked,
and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day struck home. He
took to his bed with a chill, which turned to peritonitis; the
system showed no power of resistance, and he died.

On the day but one before he died, when the mortal pain was gone,
but death was absolutely certain, he sent post-haste for his
brother Reuben. Reuben he believed was married to a decent woman,
and to Reuben he meant to commend his children.

Reuben arrived, looking more bewildered and stupid than ever, pure
countryman that he was, in this London which he had never seen.
Sandy looked at him with a deep inward dissatisfaction. But what
could he do? His marriage had cut him off from his old friends, and
since its wreck he had had no energy wherewith to make new ones.

'I've never seen your wife, Reuben,' he said, when they had talked
awhile.

Reuben was silent a minute, apparently collecting his thoughts.

'Naw,' he said at last; 'naw. She sent yo her luve, and she hopes iv
it's the Lord's will to tak yo, that it ull foind yo prepared.'

He said it like a lesson. A sort of nervous tremor and shrinking
overspread Sandy's face. He had suffered so much through religion
during the last few months, that in this final moment of humanity
the soul had taken refuge in numbness--apathy. Let God decide. He
could think it out no more; and in this utter feebleness his terror
of hell--the ineradicable deposit of childhood and inheritance--had
passed away. He gathered his forces for the few human and practical
things which remained to him to do.

'Did she get on comfortable with father?' he asked, fixing Reuben
with his eyes, which had the penetration of death.

Reuben looked discomposed, and cleared his throat once or twice.

'Wal, it warn't what yo may call just coomfortable atween 'em. Naw,
I'll not say it wor.'

'What was wrong?' demanded Sandy.

Reuben fidgeted.

'Wal,' he said at last, throwing up his head in desperation, 'I
spose a woman likes her house to hersel when she's fust married. He
wor childish like, an mighty trooblesome times. An she's allus
stirrin, and rootin, is Hannah. Udder foak mus look aloive too.'

The conflict in Reuben's mind between his innate truthfulness and
his desire to excuse his wife was curious to see. Sandy had a
vision of his father sitting in his dotage by his own hearth, and
ministered to by a daughter-in-law who grudged him his years and
his infirmities, as he had grudged his wife all the troublesome
incidents of her long decay. But it only affected him now as it
bore upon what was still living in him, the one feeling which still
survived amid the wreck made by circumstance and disease.

'Will she be kind to _them?_' he said sharply, which a motion
of the head towards the children, first towards David, who sat
drooping on his father's bed, where for some ten or twelve hours
now he had remained glued, refusing to touch either breakfast or
dinner, and then towards Louie, who was on the floor by the fire,
with her rag dolls, which she was dressing up with smiles and
chatter in a strange variety of finery. 'If not, she shan't have
'em. There's time yet.'

But the grey hue was already on his cheek, his feet were already
cold. The nurse in the far corner of the room, looking up as he
spoke, gave him mentally 'an hour or two.'

Reuben flushed and sat bolt upright, his gnarled and wrinkled hands
trembling on his knees.

'She _shall_ be kind to 'em,' he said with energy. 'Gie 'em to
us, Sandy. Yo wouldna send your childer to strangers?'

The clannish instinct in Sandy responded. Besides, in spite of his
last assertion, he knew very well there was nothing else to be
done.

'There's money,' he said slowly. 'She'll not need to stint them of
anything. This is a poor place,' for at the word 'money' he noticed
that Reuben's eyes travelled with an awakening shrewdness over the
barely furnished room; 'but it was the debts first, and then I had
to put by for the children. None of the shop-folk or the fellows
at the club ever came here. We lived as we liked. There's an
insurance, and there's some savings, and there's some commission
money owing from the firm, and there's a bit investment Mr. Gurney
(naming the head partner) helped me into last year. There's
altogether about six hundred pound. You'll get the interest of it
for the children; it'll go into Gurneys', and they'll give five per
cent. for it. Mr. Gurney's been very kind. He came here yesterday,
and he's got it all. You go to him.'

He stopped for weakness. Reuben's eyes were round. Six hundred
pounds! Who'd have thought it of Sandy?--after that bad lot of a
wife, and he not thirty!

'An what d' yo want Davy to be, Sandy?'

'You must settle,' said the father, with a long sigh. 'Depends on
him what he turns to. If he wants to farm, he can learn with you,
and put in his money when he sees an opening. For the bit farms in
our part there'd be enough. But I'm feeart'(the old Derbyshire word
slipped out unawares)'he'll not stay in the country. He's too
sharp, and you mustn't force him. If you see he's not the farming
sort, when he's thirteen or fourteen or so, take Mr. Gurney's
advice, and bind him to a trade. Mr. Gurney'll pay the premiums for
him and he can have the balance of the money--for I've left him to
manage it all, for himself and Louie too--when he's fit to set up
for himself.--You and Hannah'll deal honest wi 'em?'

The question was unexpected, and as he put it with a startling
energy the dying man raised himself on his elbow, and looked
sharply at his brother.

'D' yo think I'd cheat yo, or your childer, Sandy?' cried Reuben,
flushing and pricked to the heart.

Sandy sank back again, his sudden qualm appeased. 'No,' he said, his
thoughts returning painfully to his son. 'I'm feeart he'll not stay
wi you. He's cleverer than I ever was, and I was the cleverest of
us all.'

The words had in them a whole epic of human fate. Under the prick
of them Reuben found a tongue, not now for his wife, but for
himself.

'It's not cliverness as ull help yo now, Sandy, wi your Maaker! and
yo feeace t' feeace wi 'un!' he cried. 'It's nowt but satisfacshun
by t' blood o' Jesus!'

Sandy made no answer, unless, indeed, the poor heart within made
its last cry of agony to heaven at the words. The sinews of the
spiritual as well as the physical man were all spent and useless.

'Davy,' he called presently. The child, who had been sitting
motionless during this talk watching his father, slid along the bed
with alacrity, and tucking his little legs and feet well away from
Sandy's long frame, put his head down on the pillow. His father
turned his eyes to him, and with a solemn, lingering gaze took in
the childish face, the thick, tumbled hair, the expression, so
piteous, yet so intelligent. Then he put up his own large hand, and
took both the boy's into its cold and feeble grasp. His eyelids
fell, and the breathing changed. The nurse hurriedly rose, lifted
up Louie from her toys, and put her on the bed beside him. The
child, disturbed in her play and frightened by she knew not what,
set up a sudden cry. A tremor seemed to pass through the shut lids
at the sound, a slight compression of pain appeared in the grey
lips. It was Sandy Grieve's last sign of life.

Reuben Grieve remembered well the letter he had written to his
wife, with infinite difficulty, from beside his brother's dead
body. He told her that he was bringing the children back with him.
The poor bairns had got nobody in the world to look to but their
uncle and aunt. And they would not cost Hannah a penny. For Mr.
Gurney would pay thirty pounds a year for their keep and bringing
up.

With what care and labour his clumsy fingers had penned that last
sentence so that Hannah might read it plain!

Afterwards he brought the children home. As he drove his light cart
up the rough and lonely road to Needham Farm, Louie cried with the
cold and the dark, and Davy, with his hands tucked between his
knees, grew ever more and more silent, his restless little head
turning perpetually from side to side, as though he were trying to
discover something of the strange, new world to which he had been
brought, through the gloom of the February evening.

Then at the sound of wheels outside in the lane, the back door of
the farm was opened, and a dark figure stood on the threshold.

'Yo're late,' Reuben heard. It was Hannah's piercing voice that
spoke. 'Bring 'em into t'back kitchen, an let 'em take their shoes off
afore they coom ony further.'

By which Reuben knew that it had been scrubbing-day, and that her
flagstones were more in Hannah's mind than the guests he had
brought her. He obeyed, and then the barefooted trio entered the
front kitchen together. Hannah came forward and looked at the
children--at David white and blinking--at the four-year-old Louie,
bundled up in an old shawl, which dragged on the ground behind her,
and staring wildly round her at the old low-roofed kitchen with the
terror of the trapped bird.

'Hannah, they're varra cold,' said Reuben--'ha yo got summat hot?'

'Theer'll be supper bime-by,' Hannah replied with decision. 'I've
naw time scrubbin-days to be foolin about wi things out o' hours.
I've nobbut just got straight and cleaned mysel. They can sit
down and warm theirsels. I conno say they feature ony of _yor_
belongins, Reuben.' And she went to put Louie on the settle by the
fire. But as the tall woman in black approached her, the child hit
out madly with her small fists and burst into a loud howl of
crying.

'Get away, nasty woman! _Nasty_ woman--ugly woman! Take me
away--I want my daddy,--I want my daddy.' And she threw herself
kicking on the floor, while, to Hannah's exasperation, a piece of
crumbling bun she had been holding tight in her sticky little hand
escaped and littered all the new-washed stones.

'Tak yor niece oop, Reuben, an mak her behave'--the mistress of the
house commanded angrily. 'She'll want a stick takken to her, soon,
_I_ can see.'

Reuben obeyed so far as he could, but Louie's shrieks only ceased
when, by the combined efforts of husband and wife, she had been put
to bed, so exhausted with rage, excitement, and the journey, that
sleep mercifully took possession of her just after she had
performed the crowning feat of knocking the tea and bread and
butter Reuben brought her out of her uncle's hand and all over the
room.

Meanwhile, David sat perfectly still in a chair against the wall,
beside the old clock, and stared about him; at the hams and bunches
of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling; at the chiffonnier, with
its red baize doors under a brass trellis-work; at the high wooden
settle, the framed funeral cards, and the two or three coloured
prints, now brown with age, which Reuben had hung up twenty years
before, to celebrate his marriage. Hannah was propitiated by the
boy's silence, and as she got supper ready she once or twice
noticed his fine black eyes and his curly hair.

'Yo can coom an get yor supper,' she said to him, more graciously
than she had spoken yet. 'It's a mussy yo doant goo skrikin like
your sister.'

'Thank you, ma'am,' said the little fellow, with a townsman's
politeness, hardly understanding, however, a word of her
north-country dialect--' I'm not hungry.--You've got a picture of
General Washington there, ma'am;' and, raising a small hand
trembling with nervousness and fatigue, he pointed to one of the
prints opposite.

'Wal, I niver,' said Hannah, with a stare of astonishment. 'Yo're a
quare lot--the two o' yer.'

One thing more Reuben remembered with some vividness in connection
with the children's arrival. When they were both at last
asleep--Louie in an unused room at the back, on an old wooden
bedstead, which stood solitary in a wilderness of bare boards;
David in a sort of cupboard off the landing, which got most of its
light and air from a wooden trellis-work, overlooking the
staircase--Hannah said abruptly to her husband, as they two were
going to bed, 'When ull Mr. Gurney pay that money?'

'Twice a year--so his clerk towd me--Christmas an Midsummer. Praps
we shan't want to use it aw, Hannah; praps we might save soom on it
for t' childer. Their keep, iv yo feed em on parritch, is nobbut a
fleabite, an they'n got a good stock o' cloos, Sandy's nurse towd
me.'

He looked anxiously at Hannah. In his inmost heart there was a
passionate wish to do his duty to Sandy's orphans, fighting with a
dread of his wife, which was the fruit of long habit and
constitutional weakness.

Hannah faced round upon him. It was Reuben's misfortune that
dignity was at all times impossible to him. Now, as he sat in his
shirt-sleeves and stocking-feet, flushed with the exertion of
pulling off his heavy boots, the light of the tallow candle falling
on his weak eyes with their red rims, on his large open mouth with
the conspicuous gap in its front teeth, and his stubby hair, he was
more than usually grotesque. 'As slamp an wobbly as an owd
corn-boggart,' so his neighbours described him when they wished to
be disrespectful, and the simile fitted very closely with the
dishevelled, disjointed appearance which was at all times
characteristic of him, Sundays or weekdays. No one studying the
pair, especially at such a moment as this--the _malaise_ of
the husband--the wife towering above him, her grey hair hanging
loose round her black brows and sallow face instinct with a rugged
and indomitable energy--could have doubted in whose hands lay the
government of Needham Farm.

'I'll thank yo not to talk nonsense, Reuben Grieve,' said his wife
sharply. 'D'yo think they're _my_ flesh an blood, thoose
childer? An who'll ha to do for 'em but me, I should loike to know?
Who'll ha to put up wi their messin an their dirt but _me_?
Twenty year ha yo an I been married, Reuben, an niver till
this neet did I ha to goo down on my knees an sweep oop after
scrubbin-day! Iv I'm to be moidered wi em, I'll be paid for 't.
Soa I let yo know--it's little enough.'

And Hannah took her payment. As he sat in the sun, looking back on
the last seven years, with a slow and dreaming mind, Reuben
recognised, using his own phrases for the matter, that the
children's thirty pounds had been the pivot of Hannah's existence.
He was but a small sheep farmer, with very scanty capital. By dint
of hard work and painful thrift, the childless pair had earned a
sufficient living in the past--nay, even put by a bit, if the
truth of Hannah's savings-bank deposits were known. But every
fluctuation in their small profits tried them sorely--tried
Hannah especially, whose temper was of the brooding and grasping
order. The _certainty_ of Mr. Gurney's cheques made them very
soon the most cheerful facts in the farm life. On two days in the
year--the 20th of June and the 20th of December--Reuben might be
sure of finding his wife in a good temper, and he had long shrewdly
suspected, without inquiring, that Hannah's savings-bank book,
since the children came, had been very pleasant reading to her.

Reuben fidgeted uncomfortably as he thought of those savings.
Certainly the children had not cost what was paid for them. He
began to be oddly exercised this Sunday morning on the subject of
the porridge Louie hated so much. Was it his fault or Hannah's if
the frugal living which had been the rule for all the remoter farms
of the Peak--nay, for the whole north country--in his father's
time, and had been made doubly binding, as it were, on the dwellers
in Needham Farm by James Grieve's Scotch blood and habits, had
survived under their roof, while all about them a more luxurious
standard of food and comfort was beginning to obtain among their
neighbours? Where could you find a finer set of men than the
Berwickshire hinds, of whom his father came, and who were reared on
'parritch' from year's end to year's end?

And yet, all the same, Reuben's memory was full this morning of
disturbing pictures of a little London child, full of town
daintiness and accustomed to the spoiling of an indulgent father,
crying herself into fits over the new unpalatable food, refusing it
day after day, till the sharp, wilful face had grown pale and
pinched with famine, and caring no more apparently for her aunt's
beatings than she did for the clumsy advances by which her uncle
would sometimes try to propitiate her. There had been a great deal
of beating--whenever Reuben thought of it he had a superstitious
way of putting Sandy out of his mind as much as possible. Many
times he had gone far away from the house to avoid the sound of the
blows and shrieks he was powerless to stop.

Well, but what harm had come of it all? Louie was a strong lass
now, if she were a bit thin and overgrown. David was as fine a boy
as anyone need wish to see.

_David?_

Reuben got up from his seat at the farm door, took his pipe out of
his pocket, and went to hang over the garden-gate, that he might
unravel some very worrying thoughts at a greater distance from
Hannah.

The day before he had been overtaken coming out of Clough End by Mr.
Ancrum, the lame minister. He and Grieve liked one another. If
there had been intrigues raised against the minister within the
'Christian Brethren' congregation, Reuben Grieve had taken no part
in them.

After some general conversation, Mr. Ancrum suddenly said, 'Will you
let me have a word with you, Mr. Grieve, about your nephew
David--if you'll not think me intruding?'

'Say on, sir--say on,' said Reuben hastily, but with an inward
shrinking.

'Well, Mr. Grieve, you've got a remarkable boy there--a curious and
remarkable boy. What are you going to do with him?'

'Do wi him?--me, sir? Wal, I doan't know as I've iver thowt mich
about it,' said Reuben, but with an agitation of manner that struck
his interrogator. 'He be varra useful to me on t' farm, Mr. Ancrum.
Soom toimes i' t' year theer's a lot doin, yo knaw, sir, even on a
bit place like ours, and he ha gitten a good schoolin, he ha.'

The apologetic incoherence of the little speech was curious. Mr.
Ancrum did not exactly know how to take his man.

'I dare say he's useful. But he's not going to be the ordinary
labourer, Mr. Grieve--he's made of quite different stuff, and, if I
may say so, it will pay you very well to recognise it in good time.
That boy will read books now which hardly any grown man of his
class--about here, at any rate--would be able to read. Aye, and
talk about them, too, in a way to astonish you!'

'Yes, I know 'at he's oncommon cliver wi his books, is Davy,'
Reuben admitted.

'Oh! it's not only that. But he's got an unusual brain and a
wonderful memory. And it would be a thousand pities if he were to
make nothing of them. You say he's useful, but--excuse me, Mr.
Grieve--he seems to me to spend three parts of his time in loafing
and desultory reading. He wants more teaching--he wants steady
training. Why don't you send him to Manchester,' said the minister
boldly, 'and apprentice him? It costs money, no doubt.'

And he looked interrogatively at Reuben. Reuben, however, said
nothing. They were toiling up the steep road from Clough End to the
high farms under the Scout, a road which tried the minister's
infirm limb severely; otherwise he would have taken more notice of
his companion's awkward flush and evident discomposure.

'But it would pay you in the long run,' he said, when they stopped
to take breath; 'it would be a capital investment if the boy lives,
I promise you that, Mr. Grieve. And he could carry on his education
there, too, a bit--what with evening classes and lectures, and the
different libraries he could get the use of. It's wonderful how all
the facilities for working-class education have grown in Manchester
during the last few years.'

'Aye, sir--I spose they have--I spose they have,' said Reuben,
uncomfortably, and then seemed incapable of carrying on the
conversation any further. Mr. Ancrum talked, but nothing more was
to be got out of the farmer. At last the minister turned back,
saying, as he shook hands, 'Well, let me know if I can be of any
use. I have a good many friends in Manchester. I tell you that's a
boy to be proud of, Mr. Grieve, a boy of promise, if ever there was
one. But he wants taking the right way. He's got plenty of mixed
stuff in him, bad and good. I should feel it anxious work, the next
few years, if he were my boy.'

Now it was really this talk which was fermenting in Reuben, and
which, together with the 'rumpus' between Hannah and Louie, had led
to his singularly disturbed state of conscience this Sunday
morning. As he stood, miserably pulling at his pipe, the whole
prospect of sloping field, and steep distant moor, gradually
vanished from his eyes, and, instead, he saw the same London room
which David's memory held so tenaciously--he saw Sandy raising
himself from his deathbed with that look of sudden distrust--'Now,
you'll deal honest wi 'em, Reuben?'

Reuben groaned in spirit. 'A boy to be proud of' indeed. It seemed
to him, now that he was perforce made to think about it, that he
had never been easy in his mind since Sandy's orphans came to the
house. On the one hand, his wife had had her way--how was he to
prevent it? On the other, his religious sense had kept pricking and
tormenting--like the gadfly that it was.

Who, in the name of fortune, was to ask Hannah for money to send
the boy to Manchester and apprentice him? And who was going to
write to Mr. Gurney about it without her leave? Once upset the
system of things on which those two half-yearly cheques depended,
how many more of them would be forthcoming? And how was Hannah
going to put up with the loss of them? It made Reuben shiver to
think of it.

Shouts from the lane behind. Reuben suddenly raised himself and
made for the gate at the corner of the farmyard. He came out upon
the children, who had been to Sunday school at Clough End since
dinner, and were now in consequence in a state of restless animal
spirits. Louie was swinging violently on the gate which barred the
path on to the moor. David was shying stones at a rook's nest
opposite, the clatter of the outraged colony to which it belonged
sounding as music in his ears.

They stared when they saw Reuben cross the road, sit down on a
stone beside David, and take out his pipe. David ceased throwing,
and Louie, crossing her feet and steadying herself as she sat on
the topmost bar of the gate by a grip on either side, leant hard on
her hands and watched her uncle in silence. When caught unawares by
their elders, these two had always something of the air of captives
defending themselves in an alien country.

'Wal, Davy, did tha have Mr. Ancrum in school?' began Reuben,
affecting a brisk manner, oddly unlike him.

'Naw. It wor Brother Winterbotham from Halifax, or soom sich name.'

'Wor he edifyin, Davy?'

'He wor--he wor--a leather-yed,' said David, with sudden energy,
and, taking up a stone again, he flung it at a tree trunk opposite,
with a certain vindictiveness as though Brother Winterbotham were
sitting there.

'Now, yo're not speakin as yo owt, Davy,' said Reuben reprovingly,
as he puffed away at his pipe and felt the pleasantness of the
spring sunshine which streamed down into the lane through the still
bare but budding branches of the sycamores.

'He _wor_ a leather-yed,' David repeated with emphasis. 'He
said it wor Alexander fought t' battle o' Marathon.'

Reuben was silent for a while. When tests of this kind were going,
he could but lie low. However, David's answer, after a bit,
suggested an opening to him.

'Yo've a rare deal o' book-larnin for a farmin lad, Davy. If yo wor
at a trade now, or a mill-hand, or summat o' that soart, yo'd ha
noan so mich time for readin as yo ha now.'

The boy looked at him askance, with his keen black eyes. His uncle
puzzled him.

'Wal, I'm not a mill-hand, onyways,' he said, shortly, 'an I doan't
mean to be.'

'Noa, yo're too lazy,' said Louie shrilly, from the top of the
gate. 'Theer's heaps o' boys no bigger nor yo, arns their ten
shillins a week.'

'They're welcome,' said David laconically, throwing another stone
at the water to keep his hand in. For some years now the boy had
cherished a hatred of the mill-life on which Clough End and the
other small towns and villages in the neighbourhood existed. The
thought of the long monotonous hours at the mules or the looms was
odious to the lad whose joys lay in free moorland wanderings with
the sheep, in endless reading, in talks with 'Lias Dawson.

'Wal, now, I'm real glad to heer yo say sich things, Davy, lad,'
said Reuben, with a curious flutter of manner. 'I'm real glad. So yo
take to the farmin, Davy? Wal, it's nateral. All yor forbears--all
on em leastways, nobbut yor feyther--got their livin off t' land.
It cooms nateral to a Grieve.'

The boy made no answer--did not commit himself in any way. He went
on absently throwing stones.

'Why doan't he larn a trade?' demanded Louie. 'Theer's Harry Wigson,
he's gone to Manchester to be prenticed. He doan't goo loafin round
aw day.'

Her sharp wits disconcerted Reuben. He looked anxiously at David.
The boy coloured furiously, and cast an angry glance at his sister.

'Theer's money wanted for prenticin,' he said shortly.

Reuben felt a stab. Neither of the children knew that they
possessed a penny. A blunt word of Hannah's first of all, about
'not gien 'em ony high noshuns o' theirsels,' aided on Reuben's
side by the natural secretiveness of the peasant in money affairs,
had effectually concealed all knowledge of their own share in the
family finances from the orphans.

He reached out a soil-stained hand, shaking already with incipient
age, and laid it on David's sleeve.

'Art tha hankerin after a trade, lad?' he said hastily, nay,
harshly.

David looked at his uncle astonished. A hundred thoughts flew
through the boy's mind. Then he raised his head and caught sight of
the great peak of Kinder Low in the distance, beyond the green
swells of meadowland,--the heathery slopes running up into its
rocky breast,--the black patch on the brown, to the left, which
marked the site of the smithy.

'No,' he said decidedly. 'No; I can't say as I am. I like t' farmin
well enough.'

And then, boy-like, hating to be talked to about himself, he shook
himself free of his uncle and walked away. Reuben fell to his pipe
again with a beaming countenance.

'Louie, my gell,' he said.

'Yes,' said the child, not moving.

'Coom yo heer, Louie.'

She unwillingly got down and came up to him. Reuben put down his
pipe, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket. Out of it, with
difficulty, he produced a sixpence.

'Art tha partial to goodies, Louie?' he said, dropping his voice
almost to a whisper, and holding up the coin before her.

Louie nodded, her eyes glistening at the magnitude of the coin.
Uncle Reuben might be counted on for a certain number of pennies
during the year, but silver was unheard of.

'Tak it then, child, an welcome. If yo have a sweet tooth--an it's
t' way wi moast gells--I conno see as it can be onythin else but
Providence as gave it yo. So get yorsel soom bull's-eyes, Louie,
an--an'--he looked a little conscious as he slipped the coin into
her eager hand--'doan't let on ti your aunt! She'd think mebbe I
wor spoilin your teeth, or summat,--an, Louie--'

Was Uncle Reuben gone mad? For the first time in her life, as it
seemed to Louie, he was looking at what she had on, nay, was even
taking up her dress between his finger and thumb.

'Is thissen your Sunday frock, chilt?'

'Yes,' said the girl, flushing scarlet, 'bean't it a dishclout?'

And she stood looking down at it with passionate scorn. It was a
worn and patched garment of brown alpaca, made out of an ancient
gown of Hannah's.

'Wal, I'm naw judge i' these matters,' said Reuben, dubiously,
drawing out his spectacles. 'It's got naw holes 'at I can see, but
it's not varra smart, perhaps. Satan's varra active wi gells on
this pint o' dress--yo mun tak noatice o' that, Louie--but--listen
heer--'

And he drew her nearer to him by her skirt, looking cautiously up
and down the lane and across to the farm.

'If I get a good price for t' wool this year--an theer's a new
merchant coomin round, yan moor o' t' buyin soart nor owd Croker,
soa they say, I'st save yo five shillin for a frock, chilt. Yo can
goo an buy it, an I'st mak it straight wi yor aunt. But I mun get a
good price, yo know, or your aunt ull be fearfu' bad to manage.'

And he gazed up at her as though appealing to her common sense in
the matter, and to her understanding of both his and her situation.
Louie's cheeks were red, her eyes did not meet his. They looked
away, down towards Clough End.

'Theer's a blue cotton at Hinton's,' she said, hurriedly--'a
light-blue cotton. They want sixpence farthin,--but Annie Wigson
says yo could bate 'em a bit. But what's t' use?' she added, with a
sudden savage darkening of her bright look--'she'd tak it away.'

The tone gave Reuben a shock. But he did not rebuke it. For the
first time he and Louie were conspirators in the same plot.

'No, no, I'd see to 'at. But how ud yo get it made?' He was
beginning to feel a childish interest in his scheme.

'Me an Annie Wigson ud mak it oop fast enough. Theer are things I
can do for her; she'd not want no payin, an she's fearfu' good at
dressmakin. She wor prenticed two years afore she took ill.'

'Gie me a kiss then, my gell; doan't yo gie naw trooble, an we'st
see. But I mun get a good price, yo know.'

And rising, Reuben bent towards his niece. She rose on tiptoe, and
just touched his rough cheek. There was no natural childish
effusiveness in the action. For the seven years since she left her
father, Louie had quite unlearnt kissing.

Reuben proceeded up the lane to the gate leading to the moor. He
was in the highest spirits. What a mercy he had not bothered Hannah
with Mr. Ancrum's remarks! Why, the boy wouldn't go to a trade, not
if he were sent!

At the gate he ran against David, who came hastily out of the
farmyard to intercept him.

'Uncle Reuben, what do they coe that bit watter up theer?' and he
pointed up the lane towards the main ridge of the Peak. 'Yo
know--that bit pool on t' way to th' Downfall?'

The farmer stopped bewildered.

'That bit watter? What they coe that bit watter? Why, they coe it
t' Witch's Pool, or used to i' my yoong days. An for varra good
reason too. They drownded an owd witch theer i' my grand-feyther's
time--I've heerd my grandmither tell th' tale on't scores o' times.
An theer's aw mak o' tales about it, or used to be. I hannot yeerd
mony words about it o' late years. Who's been talkin to yo, Davy?'

Louie came running up and listened.

'I doan't know,' said the boy,--'what soart o' tales?'

'Why, they'd use to say th' witch walked, on soom neets i' th'
year--Easter Eve, most pertickerlerly--an foak wor feeart to goo
onywhere near it on those neets. But doan't yo goo listenin to
tales, Davy,' said Reuben, with a paternal effusion most rare with
him, and born of his recent proceedings; 'yo'll only freeten yorsel
o' neets for nothin.'

'What are witches?' demanded Louie, scornfully. 'I doan't bleeve in
'em.'

Reuben frowned a little.

'Theer wor witches yance, my gell, becos it's in th' Bible, an
whativer's in th' Bible's _true_,' and the farmer brought his
hand down on the top bar of the gate. 'I'm no gien ony judgment
about 'em nowadays. Theer wor aw mak o' queer things said
about Jenny Crum an Needham Farm i' th' owd days. I've heerd
my grandmither say it worn't worth a Christian man's while to
live in Needham Farm when Jenny Crum wor about. She meddled wi
everythin--wi his lambs, an his coos, an his childer. I niver seed
nothin mysel, so I doan't say nowt--not o' my awn knowledge. But I
doan't soomhow bleeve as it's th' Awmighty's will to freeten a
Christian coontry wi witches, _i' th' present dispensation_.
An murderin's a graat sin, wheder it's witches or oother foak.'

'In t' books they doan't coe it t' Witch's Pool at aw,' said Louie,
obstinately. 'They coe it t' _Mermaid's_ Pool.'

'An anoother book coes it a "Hammer-dry-ad,"' said David,
mockingly, 'soa theer yo are.'

'Aye, soom faddlin kind of a name they gie it--I know--those
Manchester chaps, as cooms trespassin ower t' Scout wheer they
aren't wanted. To hear ony yan o' _them_ talk, yo'd think
theer wor only three fellows like 'im cam ower i' three ships, an
two were drownded. T'aint ov ony account what they an their books
coe it.'

And Reuben, as he leant against the gate, blew his smoke
contemptuously in the air. It was not often that Reuben Grieve
allowed himself, or was allowed by his world, to use airs of
superiority towards any other human being whatever. But in the case
of the Manchester clerks and warehousemen, who came tramping over
the grouse moors which Reuben rented for his sheep, and were always
being turned back by keepers or himself--and in their case
only--did he exercise, once in a while, the commonest privilege of
humanity.

'Did yo iver know onybody 'at went up on Easter Eve?' asked David.

Both children hung on the answer.

Reuben scratched his head. The tales of Jenny Crum, once well known
to him, had sunk deep into the waves of memory of late years, and
his slow mind had some difficulty in recovering them. But at last
he said with the sudden brightening of recollection:

'Aye--of _coorse!_--I knew theer wor soom one. Yo know 'im,
Davy, owd 'Lias o' Frimley Moor? He wor allus a foo'hardy sort o'
creetur. But if he wor short o' wits when he gan up, he wor mich
shorter when he cam down. That wor a rum skit!--now I think on 't.
Sich a seet he wor! He came by here six o'clock i' th' mornin. I
found him hangin ower t' yard gate theer, as white an slamp as a
puddin cloth oop on eend; an I browt him in, an was for gien him
soom tay. An yor aunt, she gien him a warld o' good advice about
his gooins on. But bless yo, he didn't tak in a word o' 't. An for
th' tay, he'd naw sooner swallowed it than he runs out, as quick as
leetnin, an browt it aw up. He wor fairly clemmed wi' t' cold,--'at
he wor. I put in th' horse, an I took him down to t' Frimley
carrier, an we packed him i' soom rugs an straw, an soa he got
home. But they put him out o' t' school, an he wor months in his
bed. An they do tell me, as nobory can mak owt o' 'Lias Dawson
these mony years, i' th' matter o' brains. Eh, but yo shudno meddle
wi Satan.'

'What d'yo think he saw?' asked David, eagerly, his black eyes all
aglow.

'He saw t' woman wi t' fish's tail--'at's what he saw,' said Louie,
shrilly.

Reuben took no notice. He was sunk in silent reverie poking at his
pipe. In spite of his confidence in the Almighty's increased
goodwill towards the present dispensation, he was not prepared to
say for certain what 'Lias Dawson did or didn't see.

'Nobory should goo an meddle wi Satan,' he repeated slowly after an
interval; and then opening the yard gate he went off on his usual
Sunday walk over the moors to have a look at his more distant
sheep.

Davy stood intently looking after him; so did Louie. She had
clasped her hands behind her head, her eyes were wide, her look and
attitude all eagerness. She was putting two and two together--her
uncle's promise and the mermaid story as the Manchester man had
delivered it. You had but to see her and wish, and, according to
the Manchester man and his book, you got your wish. The child's
hatred of sermons and ministers had not touched her capacity for
belief of this sort in the least. She believed feverishly, and was
enraged with David for setting up a rival creed, and with her uncle
for endorsing it.

David turned and walked towards the farmyard. Louie followed him,
and tapped him peremptorily on the arm. 'I'm gooin up theer Easter
Eve--Saturday week'--and she pointed over her shoulder to the
Scout.

'Gells conno be out neets,' said David firmly; 'if I goo I can tell
yo.'

'Yo'll not goo without me--I'd tell Aunt Hannah!'

'Yo've naw moor sense nor rotten sticks!' said David, angrily.
'Yo'll get your death, an Aunt Hannah 'll be stick stock mad wi
boath on us. If I goo she'll niver find out.'

Louie hesitated a moment. To provoke Aunt Hannah too much might,
indeed, endanger the blue frock. But daring and curiosity
triumphed.

'I doan't care!' she said, tossing her head; 'I'm gooin.'

David slammed the yard gate, and, hiding himself in a corner of the
cowhouse, fell into moody meditations. It took all the tragic and
mysterious edge off an adventure he had set his heart on that Louie
should insist on going too. But there was no help for it. Next day
they planned it together.




CHAPTER V


'Reuben, ha yo seen t' childer?' inquired Aunt Hannah, poking her
head round the door, so as to be heard by her husband, who was
sitting outside cobbling at a bit of broken harness.

'Noa; niver seed un since dinner.'

'They went down to Clough End, two o'clock about, for t' bread, an
I've yerd nothin ov em since. Coom in to your tay, Reuben! I'll
keep nothin waitin for them! They may goo empty if they conno keep
time!'

Reuben went in. An hour later the husband and wife came out
together, and stood looking down the steep road leading to the
town.

'Just cast your eye on aw them stockins waitin to be mended,' said
Hannah, angrily, turning back to the kitchen, and pointing to a
chair piled with various garments. 'That's why she doon it, I spose.
I'll be even wi her! It's a poor soart of a supper she'll get this
neet, or he noather. An her stomach aw she cares for!'

Reuben wandered down into the road, strolled up and down for nearly
an hour, while the sun set and the light waned, went as far as the
corner by Wigson's farm, asked a passer-by, saw and heard nothing,
and came back, shaking his head in answer to his wife's shrill
interrogations.

'Wal, if I doan't gie Louie a good smackin,' ejaculated Hannah,
exasperated; and she was just going back into the house when an
exclamation from Reuben stopped her; instead, she ran out to him,
holding on her cap against the east wind.

'Look theer,' he said, pointing; 'what iver is them two up to?'

For suddenly he had noticed outside the gate leading into the field
a basket lying on the ground against the wall. The two peered at it
with amazement, for it was their own basket, and in it reposed the
loaves David had been told to bring back from Clough End, while on
the top lay a couple of cotton reels and a card of mending which
Louie had been instructed to buy for her aunt.

After a moment Reuben looked up, his face working.

'I'm thinkin, Hannah, they'n roon away!'

It seemed to him as he spoke that such a possibility had been
always in his mind. And during the past week there had been much
bad blood between aunt and niece. Twice had the child gone to bed
supperless, and yesterday, for some impertinence, Hannah had given
her a blow, the marks of which on her cheek Reuben had watched
guiltily all day. At night he had dreamed of Sandy. Since Mr.
Ancrum had set him thinking, and so stirred his conscience in
various indirect and unforeseen ways, Sandy had been a terror to
him; the dead man had gained a mysterious hold on the living.

'Roon away!' repeated Hannah scornfully; 'whar ud they roon to?
They're just at soom o' their divilments, 'at's what they are. An if
yo doan't tak a stick to boath on them when they coom back, _I
will_, soa theer, Reuben Grieve. Yo niver had no sperrit wi
'em--niver--and that's yan reason why they've grown up soa ramjam
full o' wickedness.'

It relieved her to abuse her husband. Reuben said nothing, but hung
over the wall, straining his eyes into the gathering darkness. The
wooded sides of the great moor which enclosed the valley to the
north were fading into dimness, and to the east, above the ridge of
Kinder Low, a young moon was rising. The black steep wall of the
Scout was swiftly taking to itself that majesty which all mountains
win from the approach of night. Involuntarily, Reuben held his
breath, listening, hungering for the sound of children's voices on
the still air. Nothing--but a few intermittent bird notes and the
eternal hurry of water from the moorland to the plain.

There was a step on the road, and a man passed whistling.

'Jim Wigson!' shouted Hannah, 'is that yo, Jim?'

The man opened the yard gate, and came through to them. Jim was the
eldest son of the neighbouring farmer, whose girls were Louie's
only companions. He was a full-blooded swaggering youth, with whom
David was generally on bad terms. David despised him for an oaf who
could neither read nor write, and hated him for a bully.

He grinned when Hannah asked him questions about the truants.

'Why, they're gone to Edale, th' yoong rascots, I'll uphowd yo!
There's a parcel o' gipsies there tellin fortunes, an lots o' foak
ha gone ower there to-day. You may mak your mind up they've gone to
Edale. That Louie's a limb, she is. She's got spunk enough to waak
to Lunnon if she'd a mind. Oh, they'll be back here soon enough,
trust 'em.'

I shut _my_ door at nine o'clock,' said Hannah, grimly. 'Them
as cooms after that, may sleep as they can.'

'Well, that'll be sharp wark for th' eyes if they're gone to Edale,'
said Jim, with a laugh. 'Its a good step fro here to Edale.'

'Aye, an soom o' 't bad ground,' said Reuben uneasily--'vara bad
ground.'

'Aye, it's not good walkin, neets. If they conno see their way when
they get to the top o' t' Downfall, they'll stay theer till it gets
mornin, if they've ony sort o' gumption. But, bless yo, it bean't
gooin to be a dark neet, '--and he pointed to the moon. 'They'll be
here afore yoo goo to bed. An if yo want onybody to help yo gie
Davy a bastin, just coo me, Mr. Grieve. Good neet to yo.'

Reuben fidgeted restlessly all the evening. Towards nine he went
out on the pretext of seeing to a cow that had lately calved and
was in a weakly state. He gave the animal her food and clean
litter, doing everything more clumsily than usual. Then he went
into the stable and groped about for a lantern that stood in the
corner.

He found it, slipped through the farmyard into the lane, and then
lit it out of sight of the house.

'It's bad ground top o' t' Downfall,' he said to himself,
apologetically, as he guiltily opened the gate on to the
moor--'varra bad ground.'

Hanna shut her door that night neither at nine nor at ten. For by
the latter hour the master of the house was still absent, and
nowhere to be found, in spite of repeated calls from the door and
up the lane. Hannah guessed where he had gone without much
difficulty; but her guess only raised her wrath to a white heat.
Troublesome brats Sandy's children had always been--Louie more
especially--but they had never perpetrated any such overt act of
rebellion as this before, and the dour, tyrannical woman was filled
with a kind of silent frenzy as she thought of her husband going
out to welcome the wanderers.

'It's a quare kind o' fatted calf they'll get when _I_ lay
hands on 'em,' she thought to herself as she stood at the front
door, in the cold darkness, listening.

Meanwhile David and Louie, high up on the side of Kinder Scout,
were speculating with a fearful joy as to what might be happening
at the farm. The manner of their escape had cost them much thought.
Should they slip out of the front door instead of going to bed? But
the woodwork of the farm was old and creaking, and the bolts and
bars heavy. They were generally secured before supper by Hannah
herself, and, though they might be surreptitiously oiled, the
children despaired--considering how close the kitchen was to the
front door--of getting out without rousing Hannah's sharp ears.
Other projects, in which windows and ropes played a part, were
discussed. David held strongly that he alone could have managed any
one of them, but he declined flatly to attempt them with a 'gell.'
In the same way he alone could have made his way up the Scout and
over the river in the dark. But who'd try it with a 'gell'?

The boy's natural conviction of the uselessness of 'gells' was
never more disagreeably expressed than on this occasion. But he
could not shake Louie off. She pinched him when he enraged her
beyond bounds, but she never wavered in her determination to go
too.

Finally they decided to brave Aunt Hannah and take the
consequences. They meant to be out all night in hiding, and in the
morning they would come back and take their beatings. David
comfortably reflected that Uncle Reuben couldn't do him much harm,
and, though Louie could hardly flatter herself so far, her tone,
also, in the matter was philosophical.

'Theer's soom bits o' owd books i' th' top-attic,' she said to
David; 'I'll leave 'em in t' stable, an when we coom home, I'll tie
'em on my back--under my dress--an she may leather away till
Christmas.'

So on their return from Clough End with the bread--about five
o'clock--they slipped into the field, crouching under the wall, so
as to escape Hannah's observation, deposited their basket by the
gate, took up a bundle and tin box which David had hidden that
morning under the hedge, and, creeping back again into the road,
passed noiselessly through the gate on to the moor, just as Aunt
Hannah was lifting the kettle off the fire for tea.

Then came a wild and leaping flight over the hill, down to the main
Kinder stream, across it, and up the face of the Scout--up, and up,
with smothered laughter, and tumbles and scratches at every step,
and a glee of revolt and adventure swelling every vein.

It was then a somewhat stormy afternoon, with alternate gusts of
wind and gleams of sun playing on the black boulders, the red-brown
slopes of the mountain. The air was really cold and cutting,
promising a frosty night. But the children took no notice of it.
Up, and on, through the elastic carpet of heather and bilberry, and
across bogs which showed like veins of vivid green on the dark
surface of the moor; under circling peewits, who fled before them,
crying with plaintive shrillness to each other, as though in
protest; and past grouse-nests, whence the startled mothers soared
precipitately with angry duckings, each leaving behind her a loose
gathering of eggs lying wide and open on the heather, those newly
laid gleaming a brighter red beside their fellows. The tin box and
its contents rattled under David's arm as he leapt and straddled
across the bogs, choosing always the widest jump and the stiffest
bit of climb, out of sheer wantonness of life and energy. Louie's
thin figure, in its skimp cotton dress and red crossover, her long
legs in their blue worsted stockings, seemed to fly over the moor,
winged, as it were, by an ecstasy of freedom. If one could but be
in two places at once--on the Scout--and peeping from some safe
corner at Aunt Hannah's wrath!

Presently they came to the shoulder whereon--gleaming under the
level light--lay the Mermaid's Pool. David had sufficiently
verified the fact that the tarn did indeed bear this name in the
modern guide-book parlance of the district. Young men and women,
out on a holiday from the big towns near, and carrying little red
or green 'guides,' spoke of the 'Mermaid's Pool' with the accent of
romantic interest. But the boy had also discovered that no
native-born farmer or shepherd about had ever heard of the name, or
would have a word to say to it. And for the first time he had
stumbled full into the deep deposit of witch-lore and belief still
surviving in the Kinder Scout district, as in all the remoter
moorland of the North. Especially had he won the confidence of a
certain 'owd Matt,' a shepherd from a farm high on Mardale Moor;
and the tales 'owd Matt' had told him--of mysterious hares coursed
at night by angry farmers enraged by the 'bedivilment' of their
stock, shot at with silver slugs, and identified next morning with
some dreaded hag or other lying groaning and wounded in her bed--of
calves' hearts burnt at midnight with awful ceremonies, while the
baffled witch outside flung herself in rage and agony against the
close-barred doors and windows--of spells and wise men--these
things had sent chills of pleasing horror through the boy's frame.
They were altogether new to him, in this vivid personal guise at
least, and mixed up with all the familiar names and places of the
district; for his childish life had been singularly solitary,
giving to books the part which half a century ago would have been
taken by tradition; and, moreover, the witch-belief in general had
now little foothold among the younger generation of the Scout, and
was only spoken of with reserve and discretion among the older men.

But the stories once heard had struck deep into the lad's quick and
pondering mind. Jenny Crum seemed to have been the latest of all
the great witches of Kinder Scout. The memory of her as a real and
awful personage was still fresh in the mind of many a grey-haired
farmer; the history of her death was well known; and most of the
local inhabitants, even the boys and girls, turned out, when you
came to inquire, to be familiar with the later legends of the Pool,
and, as David presently discovered, with one or more tales--for the
stories were discrepant--of 'Lias Dawson's meeting with the witch,
now fifteen years ago.

'_What_ had 'Lias seen? What would they see?' His flesh crept
deliciously.

'Wal, owd Mermaid!' shouted Louie, defiantly, as soon as she had
got her breath again. 'Are yo coomin out to-night? Yo'll ha coompany
if yo do.'

David smiled contemptuously and did not condescend to argue.

'Are yo coomin on?' he said, shouldering his box and bundle again.
'They'st be up after us if we doan't look out.'

And on they went, climbing a steep boulder-strewn slope above the
pool till they came to the 'edge' itself, a tossed and broken
battlement of stone, running along the top of the Scout. Here the
great black slabs of grit were lying fantastically piled upon each
other at every angle and in every possible combination. The path
which leads from the Hayfield side across the desolate tableland of
the Scout to the Snake Inn on the eastern side of the ridge, ran
among them, and many a wayfarer, benighted or mist-bound on the
moor, had taken refuge before now in their caverns and recesses,
waiting for the light, and dreading to find himself on the cliffs
of the Downfall.

But David pushed on past many hiding-places well known to him, till
the two reached the point where the mountain face sweeps backward
in the curve of which the Downfall makes the centre. At the outward
edge of the curve a great buttress of ragged and jutting rocks
descends perpendicularly towards the valley, like a ruined
staircase with displaced and gigantic steps.

Down this David began to make his way, and Louie jumped, and slid,
and swung after him, as lithe and sure-footed as a cat. Presently
David stopped. 'This ull do,' he said, surveying the place with a
critical eye.

They had just slid down a sloping chimney of rock, and were now
standing on a flat block, over which hung another like a penthouse
roof. On the side of the Downfall there was a projecting stone, on
which David stepped out to look about him.

Holding on to a rock above for precaution's sake, he reconnoitred
their position. To his left was the black and semicircular cliff,
down the centre of which the Downfall stream, now tamed and thinned
by the dry spring winds, was trickling. The course of the stream
was marked by a vivid orange colour, produced, apparently, in the
grit by the action of water; and about halfway down the fall a mass
of rock had recently slipped, leaving a bright scar, through which
one saw, as it were, the inner mass of the Peak, the rectangular
blocks, now thick, now thin, as of some Cyclopean masonry,
wherewith the earth-forces had built it up in days before a single
alp had yet risen on the face of Europe. Below the boy's feet a
precipice, which his projecting stone overhung, fell to the bed of
the stream. On this side at least they were abundantly protected.

On the moorside the steep broken ground of the hill came up to the
rocky line they had been descending, and offered no difficulty to
any sure-footed person. But no path ran anywhere near them, and
from the path up above they were screened by the grit 'edge'
already spoken of. Moreover, their penthouse, or half-gable, had
towards the Downfall a tolerably wide opening; but towards the moor
and the north there was but a narrow hole, which David soon saw
could be stopped by a stone. When he crept back into their
hiding-place, it pleased him extremely.

'They'll niver find us, if they look till next week!' he exclaimed
exultantly, and, slipping off the heavy bundle strapped on his
back, he undid its contents. Two old woollen rugs appeared--one a
blanket, the other a horse-rug--and wrapped up in the middle of
them a jagged piece of tarpaulin, a hammer, some wooden pegs, and
two or three pieces of tallow dip. Louie, sitting cross-legged in
the other corner, with her chin in her hands, looked on with her
usual detached and critical air. David had not allowed her much of
a voice in the preparations, and she felt an instinctive aversion
towards other people's ingenuities. All she had contributed was
something to while away the time, in the shape of a bag of
bull's-eyes, bought with some of the sixpence Uncle Reuben had
given her.

Having laid out his stores, David went to work. Getting out on the
projecting stone again, he laid the bit of tarpaulin along the
sloping edge of the rock which roofed them, pegged it down into
crevices at either end, and laid a stone to hold it in the middle.
Then he slipped back again, and, behold, there was a curtain
between them and the Downfall, which, as the dusk was fast
advancing, made the little den inside almost completely dark.

'What's t' good o' that?' inquired Louie, scornfully, more than
half inclined to put out a mischievous hand and pull it down again.

'Doan't worrit, an yo'll see,' returned David, and Louie's
curiosity got the better of her malice.

Stooping down beside her, he looked through the hole which opened
to the moor. His eye travelled down the hillside to the path far
below, just visible in the twilight to a practised eye, to the
river, to the pasture-fields on the hill beyond, and to the smoke,
rising above the tops of some unseen trees, which marked the site
of the farmhouse. No one in sight. The boy crawled out, and
searched the moor till he found a large flattish stone, which he
brought and placed against the opening, ready to be drawn quite
across it from inside.

Then he slipped back again, and in the glimmer of light which
remained groped for his tin box. Louie stooped over and eagerly
watched him open it. Out came a bottle of milk, some large slices
of bread, some oatcake, and some cheese. In the corner, recklessly
near the cheese, lurked a grease-bespattered lantern and a box of
matches. David had borrowed the lantern that afternoon from a
Clough End friend under the most solemn vows of secrecy, and he
drew it out now with a deliberate and special relish. When he had
driven a peg into a cranny of the rock, trimmed half a dip
carefully, lighted it, put it into the lantern, and hung the
lantern on the peg, he fell back on his heels to study the effect,
with a beaming countenance, filled all through with the essentially
human joy of contrivance.

'Now, then, d'yo see what that tarpaulin's for?' he inquired
triumphantly of Louie.

But Louie's mouth was conveniently occupied with a bull's-eye, and
she only sucked it the more vigorously in answer.

'Why, yo little silly, if it worn't for that we couldno ha no leet.
They'd see us from t' fields even, as soon as it's real dark.'

'Doan't bleeve it,' said Louie, laconically, in a voice much
muffled by bull's-eyes.

'Wal, yo needn't; I'm gooin to have my tea.'

And David, diving into the tin, brought out a hunch of bread and a
knob of cheese. The voracity with which he fell on them, soon, with
him also, stopped up the channels of speech. Louie, alarmed perhaps
by the rapidity with which the mouthfuls disappeared, slid up on
her heels and claimed her share. Never was there a more savoury
meal than that! Their little den with its curtain felt warm for the
moment after the keen air of the moor; the lantern light seemed to
shut them in from the world, gave them the sense of settlers
carving a home out of the desert, and milk which had been filched
from Aunt Hannah lay like nectar in the mouth.

After their meal both children crept out on to the moor to see what
might be going on in the world outside. Darkness was fast
advancing. A rising wind swept through the dead bracken, whirled
round the great grit boulders, and sent a shiver through Louie's
thin body.

'It's cowd,' she said pettishly; 'I'm gooin back.'

'Did yo spose it wor gooin to be warm, yo little silly? That's why
I browt t' rugs, of course. Gells never think o' nothin. It's
parishin cowd here, neets--fit to tie yo up in knots wi th'
rheumatics, like Jim Spedding, if yo doan't mind yorsel. It wor
only laying out a neet on Frimley Moor--poachin, I guess--'at
twisted Jim that way.'

Louie's countenance fell. Jim Spedding was a little crooked
greengrocer in Clough End, of whom she had a horror. The biting
hostile wind, which obliged her to hold her hat on against it with
both hands, the black moor at their feet, the grey sweep of sky,
the pale cloudy moon, the darkness which was fast enveloping
them--blotting out the distant waves of hill, and fusing the great
blocks of grit above them into one threatening mass--all these
became suddenly hateful to her. She went back into their den,
wrapped herself up in one of the tattered rugs, and crept sulkily
into a corner. The lantern gleamed on the child's huddled form, the
frowning brow, the great vixenish eyes. She had half a mind to run
home, in spite of Aunt Hannah. Hours to wait! and she loathed
waiting.

But gradually, as the rug warmed her, the passion for adventure and
mystery--the vision of the mermaid--the hope of the blue
cotton--reasserted themselves, and the little sharp face relaxed.
She began to amuse herself with hunting the spiders and beetles
which ran across the rocky roof above her head, or crept in and out
of the crevices of stone, wondering, no doubt, at this unbidden and
tormenting daylight. She caught one or two small blackbeetles in a
dirty rag of a handkerchief--for she would not touch them if she
could help it--and then it delighted her to push aside the curtain,
stretch her hand out into the void darkness, and let them fall into
the gulf below. Even if they could fly, she reflected, it must 'gie
'em a good start.'

Meanwhile, David had charged up the hill, filled with a sudden
curiosity to see what the top of the Scout might look like by
night. He made his way through the battlement of grit, found the
little path behind, gleaming white in the moonlight, because of the
quartz sheddings which wind and weather are forever teasing out of
the grit, and which drift into the open spaces; and at last, guided
by the sound and the gleam of water, he made out the top of the
Downfall, climbed a high peat bank, and the illimitable plateau of
the Scout lay wide and vast before him.

Here, on the mountain-top, there seemed to be more daylight left
than on its rocky sides, and the moon among the parting clouds
shone intermittently over the primeval waste. The top of the Peak
is, so to speak, a vast black glacier, whereof the crevasses are
great fissures, ebon-black in colour, sometimes ten feet deep, and
with ten feet more of black water at the bottom. For miles on
either side the ground is seamed and torn with these crevasses, now
shallower, now deeper, succeeding each other at intervals of a yard
or two, and it is they which make the crossing of the Peak in the
dark or in mist a matter of danger sometimes even for the native.
David, high on his bank, from which the black overhanging eaves
curled inwards beneath his feet to a sullen depth of water, could
see against the moonlit sky the posts which marked the track from
the Downfall to the Snake Inn on the Glossop Road. Miss that
track--a matter of some fifteen minutes' walk for the sturdy farmer
who knows it well--and you find yourself lost in a region which has
no features and no landmarks, where the earth lays snares for you
and the mists betray you, and where even in bright sunshine there
reigns an eternal and indescribable melancholy. The strangeness and
wildness of the scene entered the boy's consciousness, and brought
with them a kind of exaltation. He stood gazing; that inner life of
his, of which Louie, his constant companion, knew as good as
nothing, asserting itself.

For the real companions of his heart were not Louie or the boys
with whom he had joked and sparred at school; they were ideas,
images, sounds, imaginations, caught from books or from the talk of
old 'Lias and Mr. Ancrum. He had but to stand still a moment, as it
were, to listen, and the voices and sights of another world came
out before him like players on to a stage. Spaces of shining water,
crossed by ships with decks manned by heroes for whom the blue
distance was for ever revealing new lands to conquer, new
adventures to affront; the plumed Indian in his forest divining the
track of his enemy from a displaced leaf or twig; the Zealots of
Jehovah urging a last frenzied defence of Jehovah's Sanctuary
against the Roman host; and now, last of all, the gloom and flames,
the infernal palaces, the towering fiends, the grandiose and
lumbering war of 'Paradise Lost': these things, together with the
names and suggestions of 'Lias's talk--that whole crew of shining,
fighting, haranguing men and women whom the old dreamer was for
ever bringing into weird action on the moorside--lived in the boy's
mind, and in any pause of silence, as we have said, emerged and
took possession.

It was only that morning, in an old meal-chest which had belonged
to his grandfather, James Grieve, he had discovered the old
calf-bound copy of 'Paradise Lost,' which was now in one of his
pockets, balanced by 'Anson's Voyages' in the other. All the
morning he had been lying hidden in a corner of the sheepfold
devouring it, the rolling verse imprinting itself on the boy's
plastic memory by a sort of enchantment--

         Yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
    The seat of desolation, void of light,
    Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
    Casts pale and dreadful.

He chanted the words aloud, flinging them out in an ecstasy
of pleasure. Before him, as it seemed, there stretched that very
plain 'forlorn and wild,' with its black fissures and its
impenetrable horizons; the fitful moonlight stood for the
glimmering of the Tartarean flames; the remembered words and the
actual sights played into and fused with each other, till in the
cold and darkness the boy thrilled all through with that mingling
of joy and terror which is only possible to the creature of fine
gifts and high imagination.

Jenny Crum, too! A few more hours and he might see her face to
face--as 'Lias had seen her. He quaked a little at the thought, but
he would not have flinched for the world. _He_ was not going
to lose his wits, as 'Lias did; and as for Louie, if she were
frightened it would do her good to be afraid of something.

Hark! He turned, stooped, put his hand to his ear.

The sound he heard had startled him, turned him pale. But he soon
recovered himself. It was the sound of heavy boots on stones, and
it was brought to him by the wind, as it seemed, from far below.
Some one was coming after them--perhaps more than one. He thought
he heard a voice.

He leapt fissure after fissure like a young roe, fled to the top of
the Downfall and looked over. Did the light show through the
tarpaulin? Alack!--there must be a rent somewhere--for he saw a dim
glow-worm light beyond the cliff, on the dark rib of the mountain.
It was invisible from below, but any roving eye from the top would
be caught by it in an instant. In a second he had raced along the
edge, dived in and out of the blocks, guiding his way by a sort of
bat's instinct, till he reached the rocky stairway, which he
descended at imminent risk of his neck.

'Put your hand ower t'leet, Louie, till I move t'stone!'

The light disappeared, David crept in, and the two children
crouched together in a glow of excitement.

'Is't Uncle Reuben?' whispered Louie, pressing her face against the
side of the rocks, and trying to look through the chink between it
and the covering stone.

'Aye--wi a lantern. But there's talkin--theer's someone else. Jim
Wigson, mebbe.'

'If it's Jim Wigson,' said Louie, between her small, shut teeth,
'I'll bite him!'

'Cos yo're a gell! Gells and cats bite--they can't do nowt else!'

Whereupon Louie pinched him, and David, giving an involuntary kick
as he felt the nip, went into first a fit of smothered laughter,
and then seized her arm in a tight grip.

'Keep quiet, conno yo? Now they're coomin, an I bleeve they're
coomin this way!'

But after another minute's waiting, he was quite unable to obey his
own injunction and he crept out on the stone overlooking the
precipice to look.

'Coom back! They'll see yo.' cried Louie, in a shrill whisper; and
she caught him by the ankle.

David gave a kick. 'Let goo; if yo do 'at I shall fall an be kilt!'

She held her breath. Presently, with an exclamation, he knelt down
and looked over the edge of the great sloping block which served
them for roof.

'Wal, I niver! Theer's nobory but Uncle Reuben, an he's talkin to
hissel. Wal, this is a rum skit!'

And he stayed outside watching, in spite of Louie's angry commands
to him to come back into the den. David had no fears of being
discovered by Uncle Reuben. If it had been Jim Wigson it would have
been different.

Presently, on the path some sixty feet above them, but hidden from
them by the mass of tumbled rocks through which they had descended,
they heard someone puffing and blowing, a stick striking and
slipping on the stones, and weird rays of light stole down the
mountain-side, and in and out of the vast blocks with which it was
overstrewn.

'He's stopt up theer,' said David, creeping in under the gable, 'an
I mun hear what he's sayin. I'm gooin up nearer. If yo coom we'll
be caught.'

'Yo stoopid!' cried Louie. But he had crawled up the narrow chimney
they had come down by in a moment, and she was left alone. Her
spirit failed her a little. She daren't climb after him in the
dark.

David clambered in and out, the fierce wind that beat the side of
the mountain masking whatever sounds he may have made, till he
found himself directly under the place where Reuben Grieve sat,
slowly recovering his breath.

_'O Lord! O Lord!_ They're aw reet, Sandy--they're aw reet!'

The boy crouched down sharply under an overhanging stone, arrested
by the name--Sandy--his father's name.

Once or twice since he came to Kinder he had heard it on Uncle
Reuben's lips, once or twice from neighbours who had known James
Grieve's sons in their youth. But Sandy had left the farm early and
was little remembered, and the true story of Sandy's life was
unknown in the valley, though there were many rumours. What the
close and timid Reuben heard from Mr. Gurney, the head of Sandy's
firm, after Sandy's death, he told to no one but Hannah. The
children knew generally, from what Hannah often let fall when she
was in a temper, that their mother was a disgrace to them, but they
knew no more, and, with the natural instinct of forlorn creatures
on the defensive, studiously avoided the subject within the walls
of Needham Farm. They might question old 'Lias; they would suffer
many things rather than question their uncle and aunt.

But David especially had had many secret thoughts he could not put
away, of late, about his parents. And to hear his father's name
dropped like this into the night moved the lad strangely. He lay
close, listening with all his ears, expecting passionately, he knew
not what.

But nothing came--or the wind carried it away. When he was rested,
Reuben got up and began to move about with the lantern, apparently
throwing its light from side to side.

'David! Louie!'

The hoarse, weak voice, strained to its utmost pitch, died away on
the night wind, and a weird echo came back from the cliffs of the
Downfall.

There was no menace in the cry--rather a piteous entreaty. The
truant below had a strange momentary impulse to answer--to disclose
himself. But it was soon past, and instead, he crept well out of
reach of the rays which flashed over the precipitous ground about
him. As he did so he noticed the Mermaid's Pool, gleaming in a pale
ray of moonlight, some two hundred feet below. A sudden alarm
seized him, lest Reuben should be caught by it, put two and two
together and understand.

But Reuben was absorbed in a discomfort, half moral, half
superstitious, and nothing else reached the slow brain--which was
besides preoccupied by Jim Wigson's suggestion. After a bit he
picked up his stick and went on again. David, eagerly watching,
tracked him along the path which follows the ridge, and saw the
light pause once more close to the Downfall.

So far as the boy could see, his uncle made a long stay at a point
beyond the stream, the bed of which was just discernible, as a sort
of paler streak on the darkness.

'Why, that's about whar th' Edale path cooms in,' thought David,
wondering. 'What ud he think we'd be doin theer?'

Faint sounds came to him in a lull of the wind, as though Reuben
were shouting again--shouting many times. Then the light went
wavering on, defining in its course the curved ridge of the further
moor, till at last it made a long circuit downwards, disappearing
for a minute somewhere in the dark bosom of Kinder Low, about
midway between earth and sky. David guessed that Uncle Reuben must
be searching the smithy. Then it descended rapidly, till finally it
vanished behind the hill far below, which was just distinguishable
in the cloudy moonshine. Uncle Reuben had gone home.

David drew a long breath. But that patient quest in the dark--the
tone of the farmer's call--that mysterious word _Sandy_, had
touched the boy, made him restless. His mood grew a little flat,
even a little remorseful. The joy of their great adventure ebbed a
little.

However, he climbed down again to Louie, and found a dark elfish
figure standing outside their den, and dancing with excitement.

'Wouldn't yo like to ketch us--wouldn't yo?--wouldn't yo?'
screeched the child, beside herself. She too had been watching, had
seen the light vanish.

'Yo'll have t' parish up after yo if yo doan't howd your tongue,'
said David roughly.

And creeping into their den he relit the lantern. Then he pulled
out a watch, borrowed from the same friend who had provided the
lantern. Past nine. Two hours and more before they need think of
starting downwards for the Pool.

Louie condescended to come in again, and the stone was drawn close.
But how fierce the wind had grown, and how nipping was the air!
David shivered, and looked about for the rugs. He wrapt Louie in
the horse-rug, which was heaviest, and tucked the blanket round
himself.

'Howd that tight round yo,' he commanded, struck with an uneasy
sense of responsibility, as he happened to notice how starved she
looked, 'an goo to sleep if yo want to. I'll wake yo--I'm gooin to
read.'

Louie rolled the rug round her chrysalis-like, and then, disdaining
the rest of David's advice, sat bolt upright against the rock, her
wide-open eyes staring defiantly at all within their ken.

The minutes went by. David sat close up against the lantern,
bitterly cold, but reading voraciously. At last, however, a sharper
gust than usual made him look up and turn restive. Louie still sat
in the opposite corner as stiffly as before, but over the great
staring eyes the lids had just fallen, sorely against their owner's
will; the head was dropping against the rock; the child was fast
asleep. It occurred to David she looked odd; the face seemed so
grey and white. He instinctively took his own blanket and put it
over her. The silence and helplessness of her sleep seemed to
appeal to him, to change his mood towards her, for the action was
brotherly and tender. Then he pushed the stone aside and crept out
on to the moor.

There he stood for a while, with his hands in his pockets, marking
time to warm himself. How the wind bit to be sure!--and it would be
colder still by dawn.

The pool showed dimly beneath him, and the gruesome hour was
stealing on them fast. His heart beat quick. The weirdness and
loneliness of the night came home to him more than they had done
yet. The old woman dragged to her death, the hooting crowd, the
inexorable parson, the struggle in the water, the last gurgling
cry--the vision rose before him on the dark with an ever ghastlier
plainness than a while ago on the mountain-top. _How_ had 'Lias
seen her that the sight had changed him so? Did she come to him
with her drowned face and floating grey hair--grip him with her
cold hands? David, beginning to thrill in good earnest, obstinately
filled in the picture with all the horrible detail he could think
of, so as to harden himself. Only now he wished with all his heart
that Louie were safe at home.

An idea occurred to him. He smiled at it, turned it over, gradually
resolved upon it. She would lead him a life afterward, but what
matter?--let her!

From the far depths of the unseen valley a sound struck upwards,
piercing through the noises of river and wind. It was the clock of
Clough End church, tolling eleven.

Well, one could not stand perishing there another hour. He stooped
down and crawled in beside Louie. She was sleeping heavily, the
added warmth of David's blanket conducing thereto. He hung over
her, watching her breathing with a merry look, which gradually
became a broad grin. It was a real shame--she would be just mad
when she woke up. But mermaids were all stuff, and Jenny Crum would
'skeer' her to death. Just in proportion as the adventure became
more awesome and more real did the boy's better self awake. He grew
soft for his sister, while, as he proudly imagined, iron for
himself.

He crept in under the blanket carefully so as not to disturb her.
He was too tired and excited to read. He would think the hour out.
So he lay staring at the opposite wall of rock, at its crevices,
and creeping ants, at the odd lights and shadows thrown by the
lantern, straining his eyes every now and then, that he might be
the more sure how wide awake they were.

Louie stretched herself. What was the matter? Where was she? What
was that smell? She leant forward on her elbow. The lantern was
just going out, and smelt intolerably. A cold grey light was in the
little den. What? Where?

A loud wail broke the morning silence, and David, sleeping
profoundly, his open mouth just showing above the horse-rug, was
roused by a shower of blows from Louie's fists. He stirred
uneasily, tried to escape them by plunging deeper into the folds,
but they pursued him vindictively.

'Give ower!' he said at last, striking back at random, and then
sitting up he rubbed his eyes. There was Louie sitting opposite to
him, crying great tears of rage and pain, now rocking her ankle as
if it hurt her, and now dealing cuffs at him.

He hastily pulled out his watch. Half-past four o'clock!

'Yo great gonner, yo!' sobbed Louie, her eyes blazing at him
through her tears. 'Yo good-for-nowt, yo muffin-yed, yo donkey!' And
so on through all the words of reviling known to the Derbyshire
child. David looked extremely sheepish under them.

Then suddenly he put his head down on his knees and shook with
laughter. The absurdity of it all--of their preparations, of his
own terrors, of the disturbance they had made, all to end in this
flat and futile over-sleeping, seized upon him so that he could not
control himself. He laughed till he cried, while Louie hit and
abused him and cried too. But her crying had a different note, and
at last he looked up at her, sobered.

'Howd your tongue!--an doan't keep bully-raggin like 'at! What's t'
matter wi yo?'

For answer, she rolled over on the rock and lay on her face,
howling with pain. David sprang up and bent over her.

'What _iver's_ t' matter wi yo, Louie?'

But she kept him off like a wild cat, and he could make nothing of
her till her passion had spent itself and she was quiet again, from
sheer exhaustion.

Then David, who had been standing near, shivering, with his hands
in his pockets, tried again.

'Now, Louie, do coom home,' he said appealingly. 'I can find yo a
place in t' stable ull be warmer nor this. You be parished if yo
stay here.' For, ignorant as he was, her looks began to frighten
him.

Louie would have liked never to speak to him again. The thought of
the blue cotton and of her own lost chance seemed to be burning a
hole in her. But the stress of his miserable look drew her eyes
open whether she would or no, and when she saw him her self-pity
overcame her.

'I conno walk,' she said, with a sudden loud sob. 'It's my leg.'

'What's wrong wi't?' said David, inspecting it anxiously. 'It's got
th' cowd in't, that's what it is; it's th' rheumatics, I speck. Yak
howd on me, I'll help yo down.'

And with much coaxing on his part and many cries and outbursts on
hers he got her up at last, and out of the den. He had tied his tin
box across his back, and Louie, with the rugs wrapped about her,
clung, limping, and with teeth chattering, on to his arm. The child
was in the first throes of a sharp attack of rheumatism, and half
her joints were painful.

That was a humiliating descent! A cold grey morning was breaking
over the moor; the chimneys of the distant cotton-towns rose out of
mists, under a sky streaked with windy cloud. The Mermaid's Pool,
as they passed it, looked chill and mocking; and the world
altogether felt so raw and lonely that David welcomed the first
sheep they came across with a leap of the heart, and positively
hungered for a first sight of the farm. How he got Louie--in whose
cheeks the fever-spots were rising--over the river he never quite
remembered. But at last he had dragged her up the hill, through the
fields close to the house, where the lambs were huddling in the
nipping dawn beside their mothers, and into the farmyard.

The house rose before them grey and frowning. The lower windows
were shuttered; in the upper ones the blinds were pulled closely
down; not a sign of life anywhere. Yes; the dogs had heard them!
Such a barking as began! Jock, in his kennel by the front door,
nearly burst his chain in his joyful efforts to get at them; while
Tib, jumping the half-door of the out-house in the back yard, where
he had been curled up in a heap of bracken, leapt about them and
barked like mad.

Louie sank down crying and deathly pale on a stone by the stable
door.

'They'll hear that fast enoof,' said David, looking anxiously up at
the shut windows.

But the dogs went on barking, and nothing happened. Ten minutes of
chilly waiting passed away.

'Tak him away, _do!_' she cried, as Tib jumped up at her. 'No,
I woan't!--I woan't!'

The last words rose to a shriek, as David tried to persuade her to
go into the stable, and let him make her a bed in the straw. He
stood looking at her in despair. They had always supposed they
would be locked out; but surely the sleepers inside must hear the
dogs. He turned and stared at the house, hungering for some sign of
life in it. Uncle Reuben would hear them--Uncle Reuben would let
them in!

But the blinds of the top room never budged. Louie, with her head
against the stable-door, and her eyes shut, went on convulsively
sobbing, while Tibby sniffed about her for sympathy. And the bitter
wind coming from the Scout whistled through the yard and seemed to
cut the shivering child like a knife.

'I'll mak a clunter agen th' window wi some gravel,' said David at
last, in desperation. And he picked up a handful and threw it,
first cautiously, then recklessly. Yes!--at last a hand moved the
blind--a hand the children knew well, and a face appeared to one
side of it. Hannah Grieve had never looked so forbidding as at that
moment. The boy caught one glance of a countenance pale with wrath
and sleeplessness; of eyes that seemed to blaze at them through the
window; then the blind fell. He waited breathlessly for minute
after minute. Not a sound.

Furiously he stooped for more gravel, and flung it again and again.
For an age, as it seemed to him, no more notice was taken. At last,
there was an agitation in the blind, as though more than one person
was behind it. It was Hannah who lifted it again; but David thought
he caught a motion of her arm as though she were holding some one
else back. The lad pointed excitedly to Louie.

'She's took bad!' he shouted. 'Uncle Reuben!--Uncle Reuben!--coom
down an see for yorsel. If yo let her in, yo can keep me out as
long as yo like!'

Hannah looked at him, and at the figure huddled against the
stable-door--looked deliberately, and then, as deliberately, pulled
the blind down lower than before, and not a sign of Reuben
anywhere.

A crimson flame sprang to David's cheek. He rushed at the door, and
while with one hand he banged away at the old knocker, he thumped
with the other, kicking lustily the while at the panels, till
Louie, almost forgetting her pains in the fierce excitement of the
moment, thought he would kick them in. In the intervals of his
blows, David could hear voices inside in angry debate.

'Uncle Reuben!' he shouted, stopping the noise for a moment, 'Uncle
Reuben, Louie's turned sick! She's clemmed wi t' cold. If yo doan't
open th' door, I'll go across to Wigson's, and tell 'em as Louie's
parishin, an yo're bein th' death on her.'

The bolt shot back, and there stood Reuben, his red hair sticking
up wildly from his head, his frame shaking with unusual excitement.

'What are yo makin that roompus for, Davy?' began Reuben, with
would-be severity. 'Ha done wi yo, or I'll have to tak a stick to
yo.'

But the boy stood akimbo on the steps, and the old farmer shrank
before him, as David's black eye travelled past him to a gaunt
figure on the stairs.

'Yo'll tak noa stick to me, Uncle Reuben. I'll not put up wi it,
and yo know it. I'm goin to bring Louie in. We've bin on t' moor by
t' Pool lookin for th' owd witch, an we both on us fell asleep, an
Louie's took the rheumatics.--Soa theer.--Stan out o' t' way.'

And running back to Louie, who cried out as he lifted her up, he
half carried, half dragged her in.

'Why, she's like death,' cried Reuben. 'Hannah! summat hot--at
woonst.'

But Hannah did not move. She stood at the foot of the stairs,
barring the way, the chill morning light falling on her threatening
attitude, her grey dishevelled hair and all the squalid disarray of
her dress.

'Them as doos like beggar's brats,' she said grimly, 'may fare like
'em. _I_'ll do nowt for 'em.'

The lad came up to her, his look all daring and resolution--his
sister on his arm. But as he met the woman's expression, his lips
trembled, he suddenly broke down.

'Now, look here,' he cried, with a sob in his throat. 'I know we're
beggar's brats. I know yo hate th' seet on us. But I wor t' worst.
I'm t' biggest. Tak Louie in, and bully-rag me as mich as yo like.
Louie--_Louie_!' and he hung over her in a frenzy, 'wake up,
Louie!'

But the child was insensible. Fatigue, the excitement of the
struggle, the anguish of movement had done their work--she lay like
a log upon his arm.

'She's fainted,' said Hannah, recognising the fact with a sort of
fierce reluctance. 'Tak her up, an doan't stan blatherin theer.'

And she moved out of the way.

The boy gathered up the thin figure, and, stumbling over the
tattered rugs, carried her up by a superhuman effort.

Reuben leant against the passage wall, staring at his wife.

'Yo're a hard woman, Hannah--a hard woman,' he said to her under
his breath, in a low, shaken voice. 'An yo coed 'em beggar's
brats--oh Lord--Lord!'

'Howd your tongue, an blow up t' fire,' was all the reply she
vouchsafed him, and Reuben obeyed.

Meanwhile upstairs Louie had been laid on her bed. Consciousness
had come back, and she was moaning.

David stood beside her in utter despair. He thought she was going
to die, and he had done it. At last he sank down beside her, and
flinging an arm round her, he laid his hot cheek to her icy one.

'Louie, doan't--doan't--I'll tak yo away from here, Louie, when I
can. I'll tak care on yo, Louie. Doan't, Louie,--doan't!'

His whole being seemed rent asunder by sympathy and remorse. Uncle
Reuben, coming up with some hot gruel, found him sitting on the bed
beside his sister, on whom he had heaped all the clothing he could
find, the tears running down his cheeks.




CHAPTER VI


From that night forward, David looked upon the farm and all his
life there with other eyes.

Up till now, in spite of the perennial pressure of Hannah's
tyrannies, which, however, weighed much less upon him than upon
Louie, he had been--as he had let Reuben see--happy enough. The
open-air life, the animals, his books, out of all of them he
managed to extract a very fair daily sum of enjoyment. And he had
been content enough with his daily tasks--herding the sheep, doing
the rough work of the stable and cow-house, running Aunt Hannah's
errands with the donkey-cart to Clough End, helping in the
haymaking and the sheep-shearing, or the driving of stock to and
from the various markets Reuben frequented. All these things he had
done with a curious placidity, a detachment and yet readiness of
mind, as one who lends himself, without reluctance, to a life not
his own. It was this temper mainly, helped, no doubt, by his
unusual tastes and his share of foreign blood and looks, which had
set him apart from the other lads of his own class in the
neighbourhood. He had few friends of his own age, yet he was not
unpopular, except, perhaps, with an overbearing animal like Jim
Wigson, who instinctively looked upon other people's brains as an
offence to his own muscular pretensions.

But his Easter Eve struggle with Hannah closed, as it were, a
childhood, which, though hard and loveless, had been full of
compensations and ignorant of its own worst wants. It woke in him
the bitterness of the orphan dependant, who feels himself a burden
and loathes his dependence. That utter lack of the commonest
natural affection, in which he and Louie had been brought up--for
Reuben's timorous advances had done but little to redress the
balance--had not troubled him much, till suddenly it was writ so
monstrous large in Hannah's refusal to take pity on the fainting
and agonised Louie. Thenceforward every morsel of food he took at
her hands seemed to go against him. They were paupers, and Aunt
Hannah hated them. The fact had been always there, but it had never
meant anything substantial to him till now. Now, at last, that
complete dearth of love, in which he had lived since his father
died, began to react in revolt and discontent.

The crisis may have been long preparing, those words of his uncle
as to his future, as well as the incident of their locking out, may
have had something to say to it. Anyway, a new reflective temper
set in. The young immature creature became self-conscious, began to
feel the ferments of growth. The ambition and the restlessness his
father had foreseen, with dying eyes, began to stir.

Reuben's qualms returned upon him. On the 15th of May, he and David
went to Woodhead, some sixteen or seventeen miles off, to receive
the young stock from the Yorkshire breeders, which were to be
grazed on the farm during the summer. In general, David had taken
the liveliest interest in the animals, in the number and quality of
them, in the tariff to be paid for them, and the long road there
and back had been cheered for the farmer by the lad's chatter, and
by the athletic antics he was always playing with any handy gate or
tree which crossed their path.

'Them heifers ull want a deal o' grass puttin into 'em afoor
they'll be wuth onybody's buyin, Davy,' said Reuben, inspecting his
mixed herd with a critical eye from a roadside bank, as they
climbed the first hill on their return journey.

'Aye, they're a poor lot,' returned David, shortly, and walked on
as far in front of his uncle as might be, with his head in the air
and his moody look fixed on the distance.

'T' Wigsons ull be late gettin whoam,' began Reuben again, with an
uneasy look at the boy. 'Owd Wigson wor that full up wi yell when I
last seed him they'll ha a job to get him started straight this
neet.'

To this remark David had nothing at all to say, though in general
he had a keen neighbourly relish for the misdeeds of the Wigsons.
Reuben did not know what to make of him. However, a mile further on
he made another attempt:

'Lord, how those Yorkshire breeders did talk! Yo'd ha thowt they'd
throw their jaws off the hinges. An a lot o' gimcrack notions as
iver wor--wi their new foods, an their pills an strengthening
mixtures--messin wi cows as though they wor humans. Why conno they
leave God Awmighty alone? He can bring a calvin cow through beawt
ony o' their meddlin, I'll uphowd yo!'

But still not a word from the lad in front. Reuben might as well
have talked to the wall beside him. He had grown used to the boy's
companionship, and the obstinate silence which David still
preserved from hour to hour as they drove their stock homewards
made a sensible impression on him.

Inside the house there was a constant, though in general a silent,
struggle going on between the boy and Hannah on the subject of
Louie. Louie, after the escapade of Easter Eve, was visited with a
sharp attack of inflammatory rheumatism, only just stopping
short of rheumatic fever. Hannah got a doctor, and tended her
sufficiently while the worst lasted, partly because she was, after
all, no monster, but only a commonly sordid and hard-natured woman,
and partly because for a day or two Louie's state set her
pondering, perforce, what might be the effect on Mr. Gurney's
remittances if the child incontinently died. This thought
undoubtedly quickened whatever natural instincts might be left in
Hannah Grieve; and the child had her doctor, and the doctor's
orders were more or less followed.

But when she came downstairs again--a lanky, ghostly creature, much
grown, her fierce black eyes more noticeable than ever in her
pinched face--Hannah's appetite for 'snipin'--to use the expressive
Derbyshire word--returned upon her. The child was almost bullied
into her bed again--or would have been if David had not found ways
of preventing it. He realised for the first time that, as the young
and active male of the household, he was extremely necessary to
Hannah's convenience, and now whenever Hannah ill-treated Louie her
convenience suffered. David disappeared. Her errands were undone,
the wood uncut, and coals and water had to be carried as they best
could. As to reprisals, with a strong boy of fourteen, grown very
nearly to a man's height, Hannah found herself a good deal at a
loss. 'Bully-raggin' he took no more account of than of a shower of
rain; blows she instinctively felt it would have been dangerous to
attempt; and as to deprivation of food, the lad seemed to thrive on
hunger, and never whistled so loudly as when, according to Hannah's
calculations, he must have been as 'keen-bitten as a hawk.' For the
first time in her life Hannah was to some extent tamed. When there
was business about she generally felt it expedient to let Louie
alone.

But this sturdy protection was more really a matter of roused pride
and irritation on David's part than of brotherly love. It was the
tragedy of Louie Grieve's fate--whether as child or woman--that she
was not made to be loved. Whether _she_ could love, her story
will show; but to love her when you were close to her was always
hard. How different the days would have been for the moody lad, who
had at last learnt to champion her, if their common isolation and
dependence had but brought out in her towards him anything
clinging--anything confidential, any true spirit of comradeship! On
the contrary, while she was still ill in bed, and almost absolutely
dependent on what he might choose to do for her, she gibed and
flouted him past bearing, mainly, no doubt, for the sake of
breaking the tedium of her confinement a little. And when she was
about again, and he was defending her weakness from Aunt Hannah, it
seemed to him that she viewed his proceedings rather with a
malicious than a grateful eye. It amused and excited her to see him
stand up to Hannah, but he got little reward from her for his
pains.

She was, as it were, always watching him with a sort of secret
discontent. He did not suit her--was not congenial to her.
Especially was she exasperated now more than ever by his bookish
tastes. Possibly she was doubly jealous of his books; at any rate,
unless he had been constantly on his guard, she would have hidden
them, or done them a mischief whenever she could, in her teasing,
magpie way.

One morning, in the grey summer dawn, Louie had just wakened, and
was staring sleepily at the door, when, all of a sudden, it
opened--very quietly, as though pushed by some one anxious not to
make a noise--and Reuben's head looked round it. Louie, amazed,
woke up in earnest, and Reuben came stealthily in. He had his hat
and stick under his arm, and one hand held his boots, while he
stepped noiselessly in his stocking feet across the room to where
Louie lay--'Louie, are yo awake?'

The child stared up at him, seeing mostly his stubble of red hair,
which came like a grotesque halo between her and the wall. Then she
nodded.

'Doan't let yor aunt hear nothin, Louie. She thinks I'm gone out to
th' calves. But, Louie, that merchant I towd yo on came yesterday,
an he wor a hard un, he wor--as tough as nails, a sight worse nor
owd Croker to deal wi, ony day in th' week. I could mak nowt on
him--an he gan me sich a poor price. I darn't tak a penny on 't
from your aunt--noa, I darn't, Louie,--not if it wor iver so.
She'll be reet down mad when she knaws--an I'm real sorry about
that bit dress o' yourn, Louie.'

He stood looking down at her, his spectacles falling forward on his
nose, the corners of his mouth drooping--a big ungainly culprit.

For a second or two the child was quite still, nothing but the
black eyes and tossed masses of hair showing above the sheet. Then
the eyes blinked suddenly, and flinging out her hand at him with a
passionate gesture, as though to push him away, she turned on her
face and drew the bedclothes over her head.

'Louie!' he said--'Louie!'

But she made no sign, and, at last, with a grotesquely concerned
face, he went out of the room and downstairs, hanging his head.

Out of doors, he found David already at work in the cowhouse, but
as surly and uncommunicative as before when he was spoken to. That
the lad had turned 'agen his wark,' and was on his way to hate the
farm and all it contained, was plain even to Reuben. Why was he so
glum and silent--why didn't he speak up? Perhaps he would, Reuben's
conscience replied, if it were conveyed to him that he possessed a
substantial portion of six hundred pounds!

The boy knew that his uncle watched him--anxiously, as one watches
something explosive and incalculable--and felt a sort of contempt
for himself that nothing practical came of his own revolt and
discontent. But he was torn with indecision. How to leave
Louie--what to do with himself without a farthing in the
world--whom to go to for advice? He thought often of Mr. Ancrum,
but a fierce distaste for chapels and ministers had been growing on
him, and he had gradually seen less and less of the man who had
been the kind comrade and teacher of his early childhood. His only
real companions during this year of moody adolescence were his
books. From the forgotten deposit in the old meal-ark upstairs,
which had yielded 'Paradise Lost,' he drew other treasures by
degrees. He found there, in all, some tattered leaves--three or
four books altogether--of Pope's 'Iliad,' about half of Foxe's
'Martyrs'--the rest having been used apparently by the casual
nurses, who came to tend Reuben's poor mother in her last days,
to light the fire--a complete copy of Locke 'On the Human
Understanding,' and various volumes of old Calvinist sermons, which
he read, partly because his reading appetite was insatiable, partly
from a half-contemptuous desire to find out what it might be that
Uncle Reuben was always troubling his head about.

As to 'Lias Dawson, David saw nothing of him for many long weeks
after the scene which had led to the adventure of the Pool. He
heard only that 'Lias was 'bad,' and mostly in his bed, and feeling
a little guilty, he hardly knew why, the lad kept away from his old
friend.

Summer and the early autumn passed away. October brought a spell of
wintry weather; and one day, as he was bringing the sheep home, he
met old Margaret, 'Lias's wife. She stopped and accosted him.

'Why doan't yo coom and see 'Lias sometimes, Davy, my lad? Yo might
leeten him up a bit, an' he wants it, t' Lord knows. He's been
fearfu' bad in his sperrits this summer.'

The lad stammered out some sheepish excuses, and soon made his way
over to Frimley Moor. But the visits were not so much pleasure as
usual. 'Lias was very feeble, and David had a constant temptation to
struggle with. He understood that to excite 'Lias, to throw him
again into the frenzy which had begotten the vision of the Pool,
would be a cruel act. But all the same he found it more and more
difficult to restrain himself, to keep back the questions which
burnt on his tongue.

As for 'Lias, his half-shut eye would brighten whenever David
showed himself at the door, and he would point to a wooden stool on
the other side of the fire.

'Sit tha down, lad. Margret, gie him soom tay,' or 'Margret, yo'll
just find him a bit oatcake.'

And then the two would fall upon their books together, and the
conversation would glide imperceptibly into one of those scenes of
half-dramatic impersonation, for which David's relish was still
unimpaired.

But the old man was growing much weaker; his inventions had less
felicity, less range than of old; and the watchful Margaret, at her
loom in the corner, kept an eye on any signs of an undue
excitement, and turned out David or any other visitor, neck and
crop, without scruple, as soon as it seemed to her that her
crippled seer was doing himself a mischief. Poor soul! she had
lived in this tumult of 'Lias's fancies year after year, till the
solid world often turned about her. And she, all the while, so
simple, so sane--the ordinary good woman, with the ordinary woman's
hunger for the common blessings of life--a little love, a little
chat, a little prosaic well-being! She had had two sons--they were
gone. She had been the proud wife 'o' t' cliverest mon atwixt
Sheffield an Manchester,' as Frimley and the adjacent villages had
once expressed it, when every mother that respected herself sent
her children to 'Lias Dawson's school. And the mysterious chances
of a summer night had sent home upon her hands a poor incapable,
ruined in mind and body, who was to live henceforward upon her
charity, wandering amid the chaotic wreck and debris of his former
self.

Well, she took up her burden!

The straggling village on Frimley Moor was mainly inhabited by a
colony of silk hand-loom weavers--the descendants of French
prisoners in the great war, and employed for the most part by a
firm at Leck. Very dainty work was done at Frimley, and very
beautiful stuffs made. The craft went from father to son. All
Margaret's belongings had been weavers; but 'Lias, in the pride of
his schoolmaster's position, would never allow his wife to use the
trade of her youth. When he became dependent on her, Margaret
bought a disused loom from a cousin, had it mended and repaired,
and set to work. Her fingers had not forgotten their old cunning;
and when she was paid for her first 'cut,' she hurried home to
'Lias with a reviving joy in her crushed heart. Thenceforward, she
lived at her loom; she became a skilled and favoured worker, and
the work grew dear to her--first, because 'Lias lived on it, and,
next, because the bright roses and ribbon-patterns she wove into
her costly stuffs were a perpetual cheer to her. The moors might
frown outside, the snow might drift against the cottage walls:
Margaret had always something gay under her fingers, and threw her
shuttle with the more zest the darker and colder grew the
Derbyshire world without.

Naturally the result of this long concentration of effort had been
to make the poor soul, for whom each day was lived and fought, the
apple of Margaret's eye. So long as that bent, white form sat
beside her fire, Margaret was happy. Her heart sank with every
fresh sign of age and weakness, revived with every brighter hour.
He still lorded it over her often, as he had done in the days of
their prosperity, and whenever this old mood came back upon him,
Margaret could have cried for pleasure.

The natural correlative of such devotion was a drying up of
interest in all the world beside. Margaret had the selfishness of
the angelic woman--everything was judged as it affected her idol.
So at first she took no individual interest in David--he cheered up
'Lias--she had no other thought about him.

On a certain November day David was sitting opposite to 'Lias. The
fire burnt between them, and on the fire was a griddle, whereon
Margaret had just deposited some oatcakes for tea. The old man was
sitting drooped in his chair, his chin on his breast, his black
eyes staring beyond David at the wall. David was seized with
curiosity--what was he thinking about?--what did he see? There was
a mystery, a weirdness about the figure, about that hungry gaze,
which tormented him. His temptation returned upon him irresistibly.

'Lias,' he said, bending forward, his dark cheek flushing with
excitement, 'Louie and I went up, Easter Eve, to t' Pool, but we
went to sleep an saw nowt. What was't yo saw, 'Lias? Did yo see her
for sure?'

The old man raised his head frowning, and looked at the boy. But
the frown was merely nervous, he had heard nothing. On the other
hand, Margaret, whom David had supposed to be in the back kitchen,
but who was in reality a few steps behind him, mending something
which had gone wrong in her loom, ran forward suddenly to the fire,
and bending over her griddle somehow promptly threw down the tongs,
making a clatter and commotion, in the midst of which the cakes
caught, and old 'Lias moved from the fender, saying fretfully,

'Yo're that orkard wi things, Margret, yo're like a dog dancin.'

But in the bustle Margaret had managed to say to David, 'Howd your
tongue, noddle-yed, will yo?'

And so unexpected was the lightning from her usually mild blue eyes
that David sat dumbfounded, and presently sulkily got up to go.
Margaret followed him out and down the bit of garden.

And at the gate, when they were well out of hearing of 'Lias, she
fell on the boy with a torrent of words, gripping him the while
with her long thin hand, so that only violence could have released
him. Her eyes flamed at him under the brown woollen shawl she wore
pinned under her chin; the little emaciated creature became a fury.
What did he come there for, 'moiderin 'Lias wi his divilments'? If
he ever said a word of such things again, she'd lock the door on
him, and he might go to Jenny Crum for his tea. Not a bite or a sup
should he ever have in her house again.

'I meant no harm,' said the boy doggedly. 'It wor he towd me about
t' witch--it wor he as put it into our yeds--Louie an me.'

Margaret exclaimed. So it was he that got 'Lias talking about the
Pool in the spring! Some one had been 'cankin wi him about things
they didn't owt'--that she knew--'and she might ha thowt it wor'
Davy. For that one day's 'worritin ov him' she had had him on her
hands for weeks--off his sleep, and off his feed, and like a
blighted thing. 'Aye, it's aw play to yo,' she said, trembling all
through in her passion, as she held the boy--'it's aw play to yo
and your minx of a sister. An if it means deein to the old man
hissel, _yo_ don't care! "Margaret," says the doctor to me
last week, "if you can keep his mind quiet he may hang on a bit.
But you munna let him excite hissel about owt--he mun tak things
varra easy. He's like a wilted leaf--nobbut t'least thing will
bring it down. He's worn varra thin like, heart an lungs, and aw t'
rest of him." An d' yo think I'st sit still an see yo _murder_
him--the poor lamb--afore my eyes--me as ha got nowt else but him
i' t' wide warld? No--yo yoong varlet--goo an ast soom one else
about Jenny Crum if yo 're just set on meddlin wi divil's wark--but
yo'll no trouble my 'Lias.'

She took her hands off him, and the boy was going away in a
half-sullen silence, when she caught him again.

'Who towd yo about 'Lias an t' Pool, nobbut 'Lias hissel?'

'Uncle Reuben towd me summat.'

'Aye, Reuben Grieve--he put him in t' carrier's cart, an behaved
moor like a Christian nor his wife--I allus mind that o' Reuben
Grieve, when foak coe him a foo. Wal, I'st tell yo, Davy, an if
iver yo want to say a word about Jenny Crum in our house
afterwards, yo mun ha a gritstone whar your heart owt to be--that's
aw.'

And she leant over the wall of the little garden, twisting her
apron in her old, tremulous hands, and choking down the tears which
had begun to rise. Then, looking straight before her, and in a low,
plaintive voice, which seemed to float on hidden depths of grief,
she told her story.

It appeared that 'Lias had been 'queer' a good while before the
adventure of the Pool. But, according to his wife, 'he wor that
cliver on his good days, foak could mak shift wi him on his bad
days;' the school still prospered, and money was still plentiful.
Then, all of a sudden, the moorland villages round were overtaken
by an epidemic of spirit-rapping and table-turning. 'It wor sperrits
here, sperrits there, sperrits everywhere--t' warld wor gradely
swarmin wi 'em,' said Margaret bitterly. It was all started,
apparently, by a worthless 'felly' from Castleton, who had a great
reputation as a medium, and would come over on summer evenings to
conduct seances at Frimley and the places near. 'Lias, already in an
excitable, overworked state, was bitten by the new mania, and could
think of nothing else.

One night he and the Castleton medium fell talking about Jenny
Crum, the witch of Kinder Scout, and her Easter Eve performances.
The medium bet 'Lias a handsome sum that he would not dare face
her. 'Lias, piqued and wrathful, and 'wi moor yell on board nor he
could reetly stan,' took the bet. Margaret heard nothing of it. He
announced on Easter Eve that he was going to a brother in Edale for
the Sunday, and gave her the slip. She saw no more of him till the
carrier brought home to her, on the Sunday morning, a starved and
pallid object--'gone clean silly, an hutched thegither like an owd
man o' seventy--he bein fifty-six by his reet years.' With woe and
terror she helped him to his bed, and in that bed he stayed for
more than a year, while everything went from them--school and
savings, and all the joys of life.

'An yo'll be wantin to know, like t' rest o' 'em, what he saw!'
cried Margaret angrily, facing round upon the boy, whose face was,
indeed, one question.' "Margaret, did he tell tha what t' witch
said to un?"--every blatherin idiot i' th' parish asked me that, wi
his mouth open, till I cud ha stopped my ears an run wheniver I
seed a livin creetur. What do I keer?--what doos it matter to me
what he saw? I doan't bleeve he saw owt, if yo ast _me_. He
wor skeert wi his own thinkins, an th' cowd gripped him i' th'
in'ards, an twisted him as yo may twist a withe of hay--Aye! it wor
a _cruel_ neet. When I opened t' door i' t' early mornin, t'
garden wor aw black--th' ice on t' reservoir wor inches thick. Mony
a year afterwards t' foak round here ud talk o' that for an April
frost. An my poor 'Lias--lost on that fearfu Scout--sleepin out
wi'out a rag to cover him, an skeert soomhow--t'Lord or t'Devil
knows how! And then foak ud have me mak a good tale out o'
it--soomthin to gie 'em a ticklin down their backbane--soomthin to
pass an evenin--_Lord!'_

The wife's voice paused abruptly on this word of imprecation, or
appeal, as though her own passion choked her. David stood beside
her awkwardly, his eyes fixed on the gravel, wherewith one foot was
playing. There was no more sullenness in his expression.

Margaret's hand still played restlessly with the handkerchief. Her
eyes were far away, her mind absorbed by the story of her own fate.
Round the moorside, on which the cottage was built, there bent a
circling edge of wood, now aflame with all the colour of late
autumn. Against its deep reds and browns, Margaret's small profile
was thrown out--the profile already of the old woman, with the
meeting nose and chin, the hollow cheek, the maze of wrinkles round
the eyes. Into that face, worn by the labour and the grief of the
poor--into that bending figure, with the peasant shawl folded round
the head and shoulders--there had passed all the tragic dignity
which belongs to the simple and heartfelt things of human life, to
the pain of helpless affection, to the yearning of irremediable
loss.

The boy beside her was too young to feel this. But he felt more,
perhaps, than any other lad of the moorside could have felt. There
was, at all times, a natural responsiveness in him of a strange
kind, vibrating rather to pain than joy. He stood by her,
embarrassed, yet drawn to her--waiting, too, as it seemed to him,
for something more that must be coming.

'An then,' said Margaret at last, turning to him, and speaking more
quietly, but still in a kind of tense way, 'then, when 'Lias wor
took bad, yo know, Davy, I had my boys. Did yo ever hear tell o'
what came to 'em, Davy?'

The boy shook his head.

'Ah!' she said, catching her breath painfully, 'they're moast
forgotten, is my boys. 'Lias had been seven weeks i' his bed, an I
wor noan so mich cast down--i' those days I had a sperrit more 'n
most. I thowt th' boys ud keer for us--we'd gien em a good bringin
up, an they wor boath on 'em larnin trades i' Manchester. Yan
evenin--it wor that hot we had aw t' doors an windows open--theer
came a man runnin up fro t' railway. An my boys were kilt,
Davy--boath on 'em--i' Duley Moor Tunnel. They wor coomin to spend
Sunday wi us, an it wor an excursion train--I niver knew t' reets
on 't!'

She paused and gently wiped away her tears. Her passion had all
ebbed.

'An I thowt if I cud ha got 'em home an buried 'em, Davy, I could
ha borne it better. But they wor aw crushed, an cut about, an
riddlet to bits--they wudna let me ha em. And so we kep it fro
'Lias. Soomtimes I think he knows t' boys are dead--an then
soomtimes he frets 'at they doan't coom an see him. Fourteen year
ago! An I goo on tellin him they'll coom soon. An last week, when I
towd him it, I thowt to mysel it wor just th' naked truth!'

David leant over the gate, pulling at some withered hollyhocks
beside it. But when, after a minute of choking silence, Margaret
caught his look, she saw, though he tried to hide it, that his
black eyes were swimming. Her full heart melted altogether.

'Oh, Davy, I meant naw offence!' she said, catching him by the arm
again. 'Yo're a good lad, an yo're allus a welcome seet to that poor
creetur. But yo'll not say owt to trouble him again, laddie--will
yo? If he'd yeerd yo just now--but, by t' Lord's blessin, he did
na--he'd ha worked himsel up fearfu'! I'd ha had naw sleep wi him
for neets--like it wor i' th' spring. Yo munna--yo munna! He's all
I ha--his livin 's my livin, Davy--an when he's took away--why,
I'll mak shift soomhow to dee too!'

She let him go, and, with a long sigh, she lifted her trembling
hands to her head, put her frilled cap straight and her shawl. She
was just moving away, when something of a different sort struck her
sensitive soul, and she turned again. She lived for 'Lias, but she
lived for her religion too, and it seemed to her she had been
sinning in her piteous talk.

'Dinna think, Davy,' she said hurriedly, 'as I'm complainin o' th'
Lord's judgments. They're aw mercies, if we did but know. An He
tempers th' wind--He sends us help when we're droppin for sorrow.
It worn't for nothin He made us all o' a piece. Theer's good foak
i' th' warld--aye, theer is! An what's moor, theer's soom o' th'
best mak o' foak gooin about dressed i' th' worst mak o' clothes.
Yo'll find it out when yo want 'em.'

And with a clearing face, as of one who takes up a burden again and
adjusts it anew more easily, she walked back to the house.

David went down the lane homewards, whistling hard. But once, as he
climbed a stile and sat dangling his legs a moment on the top, he
felt his eyes wet again. He dashed his hand impatiently across
them. At this stage of youth he was constantly falling out with and
resenting his own faculty of pity, of emotion. The attitude of mind
had in it a sort of secret half-conscious terror of what feeling
might do with him did he but give it head. He did not want to
feel--feeling only hurt and stabbed--he wanted to enjoy, to take
in, to discover--to fling the wild energies of mind and body into
some action worthy of them. And because he had no knowledge to show
him how, and a wavering will, he suffered and deteriorated.

The Dawsons, indeed, became his close friends. In Margaret there
had sprung up a motherly affection for the handsome lonely lad; and
he was grateful. He took her 'cuts' down to the Clough End office
for her; when the snow was deep on the Scout, and Reuben and David
and the dogs were out after their sheep night and day, the boy
still found time to shovel the snow from Margaret's roof and cut a
passage for her to the road. The hours he spent this winter by her
kitchen fire, chat

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