Back o’ the Moon

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
“THE DRAKESTONE.”
Second Edition. Price 6s.
Selection of Press Opinions.

“It is, both in construction and workmanship, very unlike the usual flimsy story which does duty as a modern novel. This book is more like the fiction of some fifty or sixty years ago, when the appearance of a novel was, to a certain extent, an event in the world of letters.”—The Spectator.

“There is much sound work in the novel; quaint local customs are conscientiously reproduced, and the characters, with the exception of a rather shadowy heroine, are living beings.”—The Athenæum.

“The book is thoughtfully as well as cleverly written, and at least maintains the promise of its forerunners.”—The Times.

“The character-drawing is strong and clear, the run of the incident perfectly natural, and the outlook kind and manly in a spirit that puts to the blush a great deal of meretricious and catchpenny work.”—Pall Mall Gazette.

“Mr. Onions’s canvas is crowded with well-drawn characters, and the whole presents a particularly lively and clever study of Yorkshire life and manners eighty years ago.”—The Academy.

“Here he is thoroughly at home, and he writes with rare insight and uncommon skill of the country folk of our dales.”—Leeds Mercury.

“The present story derives its main interest from the liveliness of its presentation of the countryside and rustic character of Yorkshire, as these appeared to the observant eye in the earlier half of the nineteenth century.”—The Scotsman.

“As we have said, the book is devoid of sensationalism of any sort; but, for all its quiet tone, it is one of the few books of the season worth careful reading, and worth also a permanent place in any library.”—The Westminster Gazette.

“Mr. Onions, who knows his Yorkshire nearly as well as any writer of the time, has improved amazingly, and ‘The Drakestone’ is of sufficiently high quality to make one anticipate with interest his next book.”—The Yorkshire Post.

“It is a strong book all round, and the culminating catastrophe—the breaking-in of the marsh upon the moorland—is well rendered and effective. The work is one which will repay study, and we have few living writers who could better it.”—The Sheffield Daily Telegraph.

“It is an olla podrida of vivid sketches of Yorkshire life, more faithfully conceived and picturesquely rendered than we have ever seen before.”—The Daily Mail.

“The humble lives of the peasant folk, their jealousies, bickerings and junkettings, take their proper place as background to the working out of the Drake prophecies, while the chief figures are limned with rare skill and insight. A clever and deeply-interesting book.”—The Liverpool Post.

Back o’ the Moon
AND OTHER STORIES

BY
OLIVER ONIONS
AUTHOR OF
“The Drakestone,” “Tales from a Far Riding,” &c.
LONDON
HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED
1906
All rights reserved
TO
Ag and Em,
MY SISTERS

PREFACE.

Halifax, Sunday, 26th August, 1778.—“Understanding there was great need of it, I preached on ‘Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’ I spoke with all plainness, and yet did not hear that anyone was offended.”

JOHN WESLEY.

Halifax, 1836.—“I am very sorry that there was a ‘great need’ for Mr. Wesley to bring (this) charge ... though unable to unravel the secret.”

URIAH WALKER
(Methodist Historian).

CONTENTS.

BACK O’ THE MOON.

INTRODUCTION.

THE first thing that the new parson noticed, as he rode up the narrow, precipitous street late in the October afternoon, was that the muffled knock-knocking that proceeded from the houses ceased as he ascended; and the next was that he had never in his life seen so many mongrel dogs as prowled and sniffed at his heels. He had left his grey galloway in Horwick Town, three miles back; he now saw the reason why they had laughed, and advised him that he might as well sell it there and then. Wadsworth Shelf had been steep; Wadsworth Street was precipitous; and at the head of the street rose Wadsworth Scout, dark and mountainous. The Scout was thinly wooded here and there with birch and mountain-ash. It overshadowed the village beneath it; and as the parson reached the small square at its foot he saw, over an irregular row of roofs, the squat belfry of the little church that was now his charge. A ramshackle inn, with a long horse-trough in front of it, occupied the lower side of the square.

As the knock-knocking ceased entirely, the parson became conscious that men and women had come softly out into the street behind him, and he knew without looking that behind every blind and shutter there was a pair of eyes. A raw-boned fellow lounged against the horse-trough of the inn, and he had taken off one of his wood-soled clogs and was peering into it as if for a stone. The parson had been warned that few in his new cure were known by their baptismal names, and had been told the name by which he must seek his own verger and bellringer. Approaching the fellow with the clog, he asked where he should find one Pim o’ Cuddy. The fellow jerked his head in the direction of the church under the dark Scout, and continued to peer into the clog. The dogs trailed after the parson as he crossed the square.

An hour later he returned. He had, apparently, learned which of the houses standing back up a stone-walled lane had been made ready for him, for he made for it without so much as a glance round him. He passed beneath the lanternless arch of wrought-iron that spanned his gateway. Very soon the old body who had made his house ready came out, sought a lad, and bade him go to Pim o’ Cuddy at the church. The lad and Pim o’ Cuddy (a wizened little man, who walked like a pair of callipers), returned across the square, carrying between them a small heavy chest. The chest contained, as the village knew, what remained of the papers and parchments that for so long had strewn the vestry. Later, the housekeeper reported that the parson had sat up with these half the night.

The weavers of Wadsworth and beyond have a sort of thwarted sense of the droll, and first they smiled sourly, and then guffawed, as the full humour of the parson’s coming broke on them. They chuckled at the looms that had been the cause of the knock-knocking, caught their fellows’ eyes in the steep street and roared again. For Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeons knew their way home through the broken louver-boards of the squat belfry by this. If sometimes a ferret refused to come out of the air-hole by the buttress into which he had been put (and the church “lifted,” as they said, with rats), well, it was cheaper to take up a floorboard or two than to pull the church down. As for the unhinged church-door, it was a wit from Booth, over the moors far beyond the mountainous Scout, who observed that doorways were made to let folk into church and not to keep them out; and for the rest—the broken windows, the hen-coops in the aisle, the parchments taken by the lads to make kites, and the single elm of the churchyard that had been cut down to furnish galley-baulks for the looms of they knew whom—the responsibility for these things rested somewhere between Pim o’ Cuddy and the bishop of the diocese.

On the first Sunday morning of his incumbency, save for a preliminary scrubbing and cleaning and moving out of the hen-coops and so forth, the parson preached in the church as it was; and then, at his own cost, he set half a dozen men to work. He paid them at the end of the week in good coin from a canvas bag. Thereupon a ripple of excitement passed through the village. The winks and amused stares ceased. The parson was favoured with nods in the square and street, and awkward greetings were passed. A man came down from a loom-loft one morning and asked him whether he had half a guinea in exchange for silver; and the parson, in his own room, made a little sound of contempt that a few round pieces of gold should thus buy civility.

Then began the parson’s observations of his new parish.

And first of all, he found that he might regard this hamlet of Wadsworth either as barbarous or civilised, and be, in a sense, right either way. It was rougher by several degrees than Horwick Town, where the Thursday cloth-market was held—the town where he had left the grey galloway; on the other hand, its manners passed as gentle and gracious by comparison with certain places away over the well-nigh impassable Scout—Holdsworth, Booth, Brotherton, Fluett, and other nooks lost in the wilds that stretched a dozen miles and more to Trawden Forest in Lancashire. This westerly district went by the name of Back o’ the Moon, or, as they had it, “Back o’ th’ Mooin” (for they put the “i” into that and similar words—the “Goose,” the Wadsworth inn, was invariably the “Gooise,” and there was scarce a long open vowel but they made a diphthong of it). This mountainous and inaccessible country was cut up into innumerable short deep valleys and Slacks, thinly-wooded Deans, stony Shelves, leagues of sweeping heather, and rocks, and Scouts and Ridges past counting. The best part of a winter might pass and a Holdsworth man would not be seen in Brotherton nor a Brotherton man in Booth; while Fluett, save for the Pack Causeway that, creeping by a roundabout route out of Horwick, gained the high land and crossed the whole district, would have been utterly isolated. One geographical fact especially impressed the parson: that was, that the nature of the country had determined the passing of special Acts of Parliament for the protection of the weavers of Back o’ th’ Mooin. A man could not, up and down such a country, carry on his back more than three or four stone of cloth. He was thus under certain disabilities as compared with those in the valleys; and it had been necessary to limit by enactment the buying-powers of the Horwick merchants, in order that the occupation of the three-and four-stone men should not be entirely gone.

Now the parson was a man of his eyes and ears, and of his tongue withal; and of one of the earliest of his observations of Back o’ th’ Mooin he had, by a witty stroke, made a sort of parable. It was a common saying that in Wadsworth they were “All Raikeses—th’ Eastwoods an’ all,” just as in Holdsworth they were all Bentleys, including the Murgatroyds, and in Brotherton Benns, not excepting the Deans. Now it happened that a Murgatroyd of Holdsworth was famous for a certain run of fighting-dogs of extraordinary tenacity, and this man (his nickname, by the way, was “Mish”) hung about Wadsworth a good deal during the summer months—after a hoyden of a girl, it was said, one of the innumerable Raikeses. He had turned up one afternoon with one of his dogs in a leash, that it might not brawl with the tag-rag of Wadsworth, and a little group of men in the square were now jesting with him about the girl and now discussing the dog.

The parson chanced to pass as they were badgering this Mish for the secret of his breeding, and to hear Mish’s reply—something about “in and in and in.” He stopped abruptly before Murgatroyd.

“Yes,” he interposed; “and in again on top of that, Murgatroyd, till they’re wrong in their heads and afraid of nothing. Look——”

He pointed to a sackless lad who lolled his tongue over by the horse-trough. “Yes,” he muttered, half to himself, “there’s little doubt it’s your Slacks and Scouts and Ridges do it; you’ll not go courting far from your firesides in the winter ... maybe your metallic water is the cause of all this goître, too ... in and in and in....”

He shook his head and passed on his way.

And though the winter that was drawing near proved afterwards to be a green and mild one, the parson seemed able to guess without knowing what these same Scouts and hills would be like when the snow lay thick on them, and the packmen went before the horses with spades, seeking for the black-topped guide-posts, and of each hamlet it became true that there was “one way in and none out.”

The first time there came to the parson’s ears, faintly over the hills, the clanging of hammers by night, he made an inquiry, and was told that the Forge on the moor, “where they shod the pack-horses,” was at work. On a later occasion, he put himself to the trouble to climb the precipitous Scout and to walk a mile or so along the Causeway in the direction of a low glow that seemed to come from a distant fold of the moor. Two figures, rising suddenly from the dark heather, stopped him and demanded his errand; and they conducted him back in silence by the way he had come. Then, about the middle of November, when the moors grew heavy with rain, the nightly clanging ceased, and the parson had other matters to occupy him. The winter set in, cold and raw and gusty; it was the winter of 1778; and the parson had time enough on his hands to speculate on breeding-in, physical geography, goître, or whatever else pleased him. Once only during that dead time, journeying on a December afternoon to Horwick, and meeting there one of the resident magistrates, John Emmason by name, did he speak of this noise of hammers; he was counselled to confine his attention to God’s law and to leave man’s alone. The Wadsworth looms knock-knocked lazily during the short days; the Horwick Thursday was thinly attended; now and then, but rarely, a Back o’ th’ Mooiner from Holdsworth or Brotherton or Booth would appear in Wadsworth with his dog, his staff, and his budget of cloth; and of any other staple of the district than that of the weaving of kerseys and shalloons the parson knew nothing.

In that ignorance he was, however, quite alone.

CHAPTER I.
HORWICK THURSDAY.

THE hands of the Piece Hall clock still lacked twenty minutes of eight of the March morning, but already Horwick market-place was thronged with the folk who had come in for the first general cloth-market of the spring. They had come in with their oilskin budgets of grey cloth on their shoulders, and their mastiffs and terriers and lurchers at their heels; and such as had risen while it was yet night bore the lanterns that they had now extinguished. The air was misty and chill, and the hills grey, and a thin vapour of breathing lay over all the market-place; but a brightness trembled in the haze, and the hoarse calling of the Horwick cocks and the fainter crowings that answered them over the misty heights made a cheerful din. The two long pieceboards, not yet dried of the night’s damp, were stacked with the bales and budgets, and the weavers leaned against them and ate their breakfasts as they talked. On the cobbles of the “Cross Pipes,” opposite the Piece Hall, packmen were loosing the wame-tows of a string of horses. By the winding Fullergate the merchants and dyers arrived, and there mingled with the noises of the market and of the morning the incessant light pattering of wood-soled clogs on the hard earth.

Under the arches of the raised Piece Hall the fullers and dyers and merchants moved, and the arcades sounded with the shuffle of their leather shoes and the hum of their voices as they discussed the arrival of the new Supervisor of Excise, now breakfasting in the “Cross Pipes” opposite. The bailiff’s books, wherein he entered his proper market charges, lay unopened on the small table at the top of the steps, and his two clerks moved among the Back o’ th’ Mooiners at the pieceboards. The square stone pillars were placarded with lists, broadsheets, handbills and public notices, and against the pillar immediately behind the bailiff’s table Matthew Moon, the merchant, leaned.

His fists were doubled deep in his breeches pockets, and his brow was closely contracted. He was forty, heavily built, with a square and solid head. As he moved slightly, there showed over the brown homespun of his shoulder one corner of a proclamation. The royal arms were visible, and the letters, plain and heavy and black, “COIN....” He moved again, and the letters became hidden.

There advanced to the bailiff’s table and flung one leg over it, a huge red man. He was red-haired, red-faced, red-whiskered, red as a red setter, and on his head was a cap of red foxskin. The table creaked beneath his weight, and the spread-out of his buckskin-covered thigh hid half the width of it. An old coat, of a wide and flaring cut, seemed to add even more to his bulk, and it was spotted with stains of vivid orange, apparently the eating of some acid. His accent, as he spoke, was not the curt and grudging accent of those parts.

“So we’ve got William Huggins’s successor, Matthew,” he said cheerfully; “have you seen him yet?”

As Matthew Moon moved slightly again, the “....ING” of the proclamation showed.

“No,” he replied.

“Nor I. Well, we must entertain him. King’s Excise or not, William Huggins was always companionable. A fair show of the lads here. You’ll be at the meeting to-night?”

The merchant grunted. Presently he said, “What sort o’ man does Sally say he is?”

“I don’t know. Sally’s out of heart, with Jim and Haigh all these months in York. Small wonder.”

Matthew Moon frowned again, and was silent for a minute. Then he looked up and said, “Ye said entertainment, Arthur. Supervisors must take their chance o’ that. Don’t start taking it heady. Tongues tie knots that teeth can’t loose, and we don’t want the speech and confession of Arthur Monjoy yet. Two in York’s enough. Shall I be at the meeting? Yes; but don’t go and take things too headstrong.”

The big man laughed. “If I remember, they wanted to set the dogs on Huggins at first; none of that,” he said; and as the merchant moved away the whole word “COINING” showed on the stone pillar.

Under the bow-windowed shops and houses the vendors of tinware and early market-stuff and wanded chairs and wooden vessels were knocking up their light booths; but no wares were yet displayed, for in Horwick the cloth market takes precedence of all else, and it is a fine of forty shillings, all but a penny, to as much as ask the price of a piece of cloth before the first stroke of the bell in the little round-topped turret of the Piece Hall. Among these minor merchants the women moved and gossipped. The waspish wife of Pim o’ Cuddy, the Wadsworth verger, declared that she would not live with her husband another day—but she had left him at regular intervals any time this twenty years. Fat, gap-toothed Dooina Benn, who mashed herbs and distilled simples and rendered services to her sex that Mrs. Pim o’ Cuddy was now little likely ever to stand in need of, exchanged tidings of the December’s asthmas and lumbagos, and declared that she had scarce an ounce of gentian left to her name. They, too, spoke of the new resident excise officer, but their voices fell as Sally Northrop passed. Sally managed the “Cross Pipes” during her husband’s absence. Jim Northrop and Will Haigh should have been back from York months ago; and on a January afternoon, during Jim’s detention, Dooina had been sent for to Sally in haste—the innkeeper’s wife had been brought to bed of a son. Not far from the women, Mish Murgatroyd held in a leash his choicest specimen of dogflesh, a currant-eyed, brindled brute, heavy as a man, heavily muzzled and formidable. Curs and terriers and mastiffs, noses to the ground, threaded in and out across the market-place invisible scents and tracks of their own, and a group of Back o’ th’ Mooiners looked admiringly at the animal.

“Hares? Birds? Nay!” Mish said, setting his cap back from his forehead that had a bull’s-front of rough hair over his brows, but showed two great calf-licks over his temples. “Keep off him, Charley, for all he’s muzzled. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t like to slip him at a man; no, not muzzled. Sitha!” A terrier had approached the brindled dog. The ferocious creature had not growled, but the terrier crawled away, tail and belly to earth. “What d’ye think o’ that?” exclaimed Mish, exultingly.

Suddenly there was a stir under the stable-arch of the “Cross Pipes,” and the noise about the inn fell. The hush seemed to spread instantaneously, and out of every upper window heads were thrust. Then, at the entrance of the stable-arch, a pack was flung down as if by inadvertence, and somebody stumbled over it. A tall weaver turned with a heavy budget on his back and jostled somebody. A man laughed. Then the weavers fell of their own accord back to the pieceboards, and the new Supervisor of the King’s Excise was seen to be standing on the cobbles.

They have, as the Wadsworth parson had discovered, a humour of their own Horwick way. As if at a signal, there was a general catching of breath, and then a shout of laughter went up. Men clambered to the pieceboards to look over their neighbours’ shoulders at the oddity that had been sent to them for an exciseman.

He was ludicrous, half a man only, a dwarf. An ordinary flight of steps would have taxed his diminutive legs; his body and shoulders were those of an undersized lad; and, awkwardly set on them, an enormous head wagged. His complexion was floury, and looked as if, had you touched it, a mothy dust would have adhered to your finger. A pair of round, black-rimmed spectacles made a double-O under his forehead, and behind them a pair of drowsy, blinking eyelids, purple with veining, showed scarce half of the greenish irises beneath them. He made alarmed and nervous movements with his hands as a hundred dogs pressed about him.

The peal of laughter had scarce died away when a couple of weavers had an exquisite idea. They hoisted themselves on one of the pieceboards and began to clack together the wooden heels of their brass-bound clogs. Across the market-place two more men began to clack. There was a general scramble for the pieceboards.

The infection caught and spread instantaneously. The tall pieceboards became an avenue of legs regularly moving—legs in casings of hide, in wrappings of straw-band, calves and tibias in stockings of grey and white and blue and brown—and an appalling racket of sound arose. In a second they had taken their time from the original clackers; the rhythmic high noise filled the market-place, rang under the Piece Hall arches, spread in a harsh, splitting cascade to the hills, affronted the sense of hearing. A man from Booth tossed up a pigeon. The derisive, puerile noise fell to a soft beat; it rose again as if a regiment of paviors had been at work; and the villainous dogs that pressed round the preposterous exciseman seemed but to await a signal from their masters. The bell in the turret of the Piece Hall struck eight; the wooden heels accompanied it; and then, as if by magic, there came a silence. Eyes still streaming with tears of enjoyment turned towards the Piece Hall steps. The big red man was descending them.

Monjoy extended his hand and snapped his fingers.

“Call those dogs off!” he ordered; and from the indescribable short mingling of noises that followed each dog seemed to sort out his own cluck or call or whistle, just as they had threaded the invisible tracks across the market-place. The great fellow stood opposite the exciseman.

“Our new Resident Supervisor?” he said courteously, his lips twitching as if he himself had to strive not to make drollery of it.

The heavy, livid lids behind the round black spectacles lifted a little, and the dwarf gave a short nasal “Hn, hn!”

“Yes, yes; I am he; hn, hn! My name is Cope—Jeremy Cope.”

This time Big Monjoy could not resist the smile. “It is a historic name in these parts,” he said.

“Yes, yes, yes.... I should say, rather, How so, Mr. ——?”

“How so? Well, if the fellows you see about you are anything at all in politics (which I doubt), they are for—you know whom: not the Elector. A gentleman of your name made himself famous some thirty years ago, and things move slowly hereabouts. But perhaps you have heard my own name from William Huggins—Arthur Monjoy.”

“From William—from whom?” queried the little man; and to those on the pieceboards he seemed pleased that any should take the trouble to talk to one so insignificant as he.

“Your predecessor; you did not know him? Our very good friend, Huggins was; always, in some respects, a ‘Pot o’ One’ (as they say here of a man who combs his wool alone)—that was the disability of his office. Unofficially, we counted him one of ourselves.”

“The poor fellow is—hn, hn!—dead, then?”

“One foggy evening last November, with a pot in his hand and a pipe in his mouth, like the gentleman in the ballad. Died of a Halo Punch.—But you must let me show you our market.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. A barren country hereabouts, Mr. ——”

“(Monjoy).... Barren? So-so. Yes, the hills are barren, and breed a rough homely folk. Our staple is cloth, as you see. I see you are looking at the stains on my old coat. You are right; they are of acid. I am no clothier myself; I am a seal-engraver.—What was I saying? Ah, our cloth! Our cloth goes far afield, much to Liverpool; and in return the good folk of Liverpool press on us a certain number of these metal pieces, the possession of which is vulgarly supposed to constitute wealth. But we know better than that, you and I—eh, Cope? ‘Fill me with your corn and I’ll cover you with my cloth; a third shall build us roof and hearth’—that’s the true wealth, the commonwealth, eh?—But your pardon. I carry my coals to Newcastle—that is to say, my cloth to Horwick.”

“Hn! hn! hn! You are a very pleasant gentleman, Mr. Monjoy.... I should say, now, that a great variety of saxifrages is to be found on your hills?”

“Best let the hills alone; these gentlemen at the pieceboards are not always in a merry humour. Come and see the market.”

As Monjoy passed up the square with the supervisor, talking pleasantly, and explaining that save for the cloth-staple the district would be a wilderness, cachinnations, as if at some hidden jest, passed along the pieceboards. For all the bell had rung, not a man had unstrapped his budget. Big Monjoy pointed out this feature, or that man—goîtred John Raikes, dusty with the earth of the fulling-mill; Mish, with the brindled dog squatting under the pieceboard beneath him; the pack-road winding up the Shelf to the Causeway, and so forth. And every now and then the weavers seemed to see the ludicrous figure afresh and to break into fresh chuckles.

Matthew Moon drew James Eastwood, the Wadsworth flockmaster, aside under the pillars of the Piece Hall, and took him by the sleeve.

“There’s times, James, when Arthur wants libbing of his tongue,” he growled. “Two at Ouse Bridge now ... he’s daft. He cuts our dies well enough; but look here—right in our midst!” He rapped with the back of his hand on the proclamation.

James Eastwood, a lean man, with a cracked and wrinkled and sly face, laughed softly.

“Leave the bills to John Emmason,” he said; “John knows what he’s about when he sticks bills up. The more bills the more safety.—Did ye ever see aught more like a frog nor yon?”

“That daft talk o’ Arthur’s! There’s more fox in Arthur’s cap than in all the rest of him put together. Listen to him now!” And again the voice of the big red man was heard.

“...That may be; but many of them saw Charles Edward in the ’45, in Manchester. For that matter, his drummer was a Horwick lad; there’s a tale about that I’ll tell you some time. But King or Elector, it’s small odds now, and I shouldn’t wonder (this, of course, is unofficial) but my own word carried as much weight in Back o’ th’ Mooin as another man’s.—Our Piece Hall is considered a fine building. The statue in the niche is of Queen Anne; a good piece of work, take an engraver’s word for it.—The market is very late.—Ah, let me make you known to John Emmason, one of our magistrates. You and he will doubtless work in some measure together....”

The bailiff had now opened his books, and the Back o’ th’ Mooiners were unpacking their budgets on the pieceboards. The market was opening tardily. The huge red-whiskered man in the foxskin cap continued to present the new exciseman here and there, and then the bailiff’s clerks began to pass more busily between the pieceboards. Quickly the talk and laughter fell to a low murmur of exchange; and presently Monjoy said, “Come, a morning draught at the ‘Cross Pipes.’ What say you?”

The eyes beneath the bruised-looking lids blinked up at Monjoy.

“Certainly, certainly, certainly; but I fear I must confess—hn! hn!—that I have a weakly stomach. The weakest glass of brandy and water—a very little excess—ah!” His narrow chest rose in a quick little sigh.

“Ay? Well, Huggins was the other way. ‘Four-in-Hand Huggins,’ we called him; but it beat him at the finish. Come.”

Half-way down the market-place Monjoy stopped to exchange a word with Matthew Moon. “Ay, eight o’clock, in the kitchen,” Moon grunted, and Monjoy nodded and returned to Jeremy Cope. They passed almost unnoticed into the “Cross Pipes.”

CHAPTER II.
THE EXECUTIVE.

THROUGH the wall-stones of the end of the “Cross Pipes” that abutted on the market-place the soot of the chimneys had in some mysterious way worked, so that the flues and branchings from the various chambers showed like some grimy inverted cactus. An addition had been built forward to the cobbled space, and up and down it, following the pitch of the roof, ran the name of the house, with every “S” turned the wrong way about. From this again projected the red-curtained bow-window of the parlour; and while the public entrance lay to the right within the stable-arch, the approach to the kitchen and private parts of the house lay on the other side, up a cobbled alley.

The March night had fallen, and the lights of the scattered farmhouses of the Shelf might almost have been stars, so lofty were they. The market-place was filled with the dim illumination that came through the blinds and the chinks of the shutters of the surrounding houses. A lantern that had been set down for a moment on one of the pieceboards made a dull gleam down the polished surface. The crimson square of the window of the “Pipes” was broken by the shadows of heads within the window-seat, and up the dark alleyway to the kitchen, through an ace-of-heart’s perforation in the upper part of the door, another light flickered, as of a candle guttering in a draughty passage.

In the kitchen a fire of peats smouldered on the hearth and made a rich glow on the copper kettle that bubbled before it. The lid of the kettle vibrated with a continuous sound of purring metal. Two oil-lamps hung side by side from the low ceiling; and the blur of lamp carbon on the plaster above them was patterned with concentric circles that intersected and made as it were the eyes of an enormous owl. A deep recess formed a window-seat; opposite, a niche in the wall was hidden by a curtain on a string; and the kitchen was spotlessly clean and smelt of new bread.

Matthew Moon sat on an infant’s stool by the hearth, with a quill set bit-wise between his teeth. On the floor by his side lay a ledger. Goîtred John Raikes (who, in this business that was not cloth, represented the Back o’ th’ Mooiners on the Executive) lay smoking along the window-seat. Eastwood, the flockmaster, was spinning a bright crown-piece on the table; and Arthur Monjoy bestrode the hearth colossus-wise with the back of his fox-skin cap rubbing against the high mantel.

The purring of the kettle seemed to irritate Matthew Moon; he set the lid on edge, the sound ceased, and a little cloud of vapour escaped. Presently Monjoy spoke.

“Well, say you have it so,” he said. “I’ll not deny the prudence of watching, setting an extra crow or two along the Causeway, and all that; but why do you want to shift the Forge? We were glad enough to move from Fluett; before that we were Booth way, and a pretty time we had getting there; and now you’d set it up in Brotherton Slack, the dampest, darkest hole in all the district, five miles from the Causeway—Brotherton Slack, where the ground steams like a tip and toadstools come up out o’ the bog rank as sink-strippings and red as a runner’s waistcoat——”

Matthew Moon answered earnestly.

“Do listen, Arthur. If the Causeway’s handy for us, it’s handy for others too. Fluett was different. You know why we left Fluett. Fluett was over-easy got at t’other side, Trawden side, and the lime-trade was brisk at Fluett, too, and folk about. As for toadstools, it’s safety we’re taking to the Slack for, not health.”

Monjoy brought himself to an upright posture and rubbed his hands down his scorched thighs. “Heigho!” he cried; and he was about to reply, when the door opened, and Sally Northrop entered. She was a dark-haired little body, but her brightness was faded, and weeks of anxiety had pulled her down. She stepped to the niche in the wall, lifted the curtain, and looked within.

“I thought he stirred,” she said, replacing the curtain; and then she hesitated, her hands fumbling with her apron.

“Ye’ve no word, I suppose, Arthur? Cicely hasn’t been gone an hour; she knew o’ no news, she said——”

“No word’s a good word, Sally,” Monjoy replied gently. “He has all he wants—money for garnish, ease o’ irons, and all you can think of; and the lawyers shall have every penny but he shall be back. Don’t worry. ‘No case’ is what John Emmason says.”

“What did he say o’ Jimmy?” She glanced towards the niche.

“His love he sent, and a kiss. That’ll make his home-coming glad. Keep all as tidy as a new pin for a little longer, and let Cicely help you all she can.”

“D’ye want anything now?”

“No.”

She sighed and went out. The men remained silent for a full minute, and then Moon muttered: “Thank God I bring trouble to no woman.” They resumed their discussion.

“Another thing,” said the merchant. “John there brings the silver in, and I keep the books, and bring most o’ the gold. John and me’s your outriders, that can tell the way things are going. Now ask John if this isn’t true. Though the most shuts their eyes and thinks none the worse of a guinea after we’ve had it a day or two, yet there’s others wouldn’t lend us a crown or a Portugal, no, not to have it back an hour after with interest paid safe as a bank. They’re quiet, that sort, but they’re always there. They’ve been there all along, and I know who they are.—Ay, I see this plating idea well enough; it’s good, and does away with a deal o’ borrowing; but these others is still there. So this new man has that to start wi’. He may be another Huggins, or he mayn’t; give him no advantage. He must be watched for the present from getting up to doffing his shirt again. The clogger’s shop—we’re agreed on that; and past Wadsworth Scout a crow must be set behind every whin and stone. It’s expense, but it’s the cheapest. We’re the Exec’tive, and that’s my vote; that, and shift the Forge to Brotherton, and all meetings after this at the ‘Gooise.’”

“It’s right what Matthew says about them others,” Raikes observed from the window-seat; “things has got very tight lately. Your plating-notion’s naught but just come i’ time.”

Monjoy leaned against the mantel-piece again.

“Well, I’ll not hold out; we may as well eat the devil as sup the broth he’s boiled in,” he said. “So we shift the forge. Well, what next?”

Moon glanced quickly at the door by which Sally Northrop had gone out; then he dropped his voice.

“This next, that I was saying to James this morning, Arthur,” he said. “Ye give too much away wi’ your tongue. It’s folly to talk as ye did this morning. They say ye told him ye’d thought o’ copying the Queen Anne yonder i’ metal.”

“I never said so,” cried Monjoy.

“Well, you talk o’ Charles Edwards and Commonwealths. Remember, there’s a bairn i’ yon niche that his father hasn’t seen yet——”

James Eastwood interposed quickly.

“Let me speak,” he said. “John Emmason’s sent this Cope word to sup wi’ him next week. Now mark; afore Cope can do anything—and that’s supposing he isn’t another Huggins, and Huggins got bedsore sooner nor footsore—afore he can do anything, he must see John, or else John Leedes, or else Hemstead, the solicitor. Very well; what is it he wants? Information, ye say: now listen. He can have it. Let him come to this very Horwick Thursday. Let one of us say this: ‘Yon’s Red Monjoy, that engraves the dies; plating’s his next move! Yon’s Matthew Moon, a cloth-merchant by trade, that keeps the books, every crown and Portugal entered up this dozen year and more. Mish yonder, and Dick o’ Dean, they do most o’ th’ striking; and for clipping and lending and so on, there’s three or four hundred here, and ye can tak’ your pick.’ Tch! All that isn’t worth a tick o’ one o’ my sheep! It’s like he knew all that afore he came. Hear what John Emmason says, mumbling in his sleep in an armchair (ye know John’s ways): It’s evidence he’ll want, evidence to base a case on. They’d ha’ hanged Jim and Haigh months ago if they’d had evidence. They’re bound by th’ Law, same as us, and John—well, if John hasn’t, telled me th’ Law, he can leave a book open, can’t he? and I can read what’s marked in it wi’ a pen, can’t I? It’s treason, by Edward Third; four hundred pound and branding for having clippings, William; a search-warrant on complaint, George; but all’s ta’en on evidence.—But I’m for moving the Forge too, for it wadn’t be such bad evidence to catch us wi’ our fingers in it.”

“To be sure,” murmured John Raikes.

“That’s agreed,” said Monjoy, curtly. He had not ceased to frown since Matthew Moon’s rebuke.

The infant in the niche gave a feeble cry, and Moon rose to call Sally. Sally took up babe and bedclothes in a bundle.

“Send us some ale in, Sally,” Monjoy said; and he added to his companions; “When the ale comes I have something to say to the Executive.”

Presently the ale was brought. Monjoy took a deep draught, and bestrode the hearth again.

“Tell me, Matthew—tell me, John and James,” he said slowly, “what d’ye think this trade of ours, as it stands, is worth? (Wait a minute and let me finish.) Is it worth a deal? Reckon the risk. Reckon the cost, time and money. Reckon we’ve to dodge about with the Forge, Fluett, Booth, Brotherton, and so on. Reckon what I could make at engraving; John at the stocks and teazels; James with his flocks; Matthew at the pieceboards and his warehouse. Is it a deal better than honesty?”

The amazed faces of the three told how deeply they were committed to the traffic; for a minute they were motionless. Then Moon said, “Ye haven’t finished.”

“I say, as it stands, it’s poor wages,” Monjoy said.

There was no chair to his hand; he drew up the infant’s stool that the merchant had vacated. His chin was just above the edge of the table, and he took the bright crown-piece and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand. After a minute’s pondering he continued:

“This—the plating—is well enough; but suppose there’s better to be done?—Tell me, which of you’ve heard of Bulmer’s workings, Trawden side?”

“Eh?” said Moon. “Nobody, since their mother dandled them.”

“Of course, of course; my tongue will be running away with me, I suppose. Never mind Bulmer, then. Instead, what about the bellpits all along the Causeway, and the alum mine still working a mile or two over the Edge?”

“Come to something, Arthur,” Eastwood interposed.

“By and by.—Lead has been found hereabouts, and some of it’s been shipped to Holland, and worked over again, and a tithe of it lost in the working, but a profit made even then. How, think you?” He advanced his chin along the table, flipped away the crown-piece, and quietly pronounced the word “Silver.”

By and by he continued.

“I’ve had a busyish winter in that garret over your warehouse, Matthew. This is our first meeting since last November, and perhaps I’m over-shooting myself a little. Never mind. At Rimington in Craven, and on Brunghill Moor in Craven, they’ve had it. Lead ore it is, and a test-master has assayed it (Basby, they called him), and it worked out at sixty pounds more or less to the ton.”

“In Craven,” observed Matthew Moon, drily.

“Well, I’ve been to see it,” Monjoy retorted; “but let me finish. Here, alum and coal we know about. For iron, Holdsworth Dyke is red as a haw with canker-water any day you care to go and look. Noon Nick stones, they’re pure pyrites. Kick up the heather, and all Back o’ th’ Mooin’s red and blue and grey with mineral. Whether it would pay’s another matter; the Dutchmen made it pay.”

“It were me closed up th’ last bellpit,” John Raikes remarked; “go on, Arthur; it’s grand hearing.”

“Very well; and you’ll laugh at this; Matthew will, because it isn’t business-like. What else d’you think I’ve studied this winter? Why, a ballad-book. Hugh Pudsay’s ballad. You’ve heard of Pudsay’s cockleshell-shillings (when you were dandled, maybe), and so had I; but I thought twice. I’m not talking now of his making silver dilly-spoons and selling them for a shilling, and then waking up to it that he might just as well make the shilling. Perhaps he didn’t work a silver mine without patent, and get tripped by some Cope or other, and set off on horse-back for London to save his neck. Perhaps that’s only a song about his getting patent and pardon and meeting the exciseman coming in ten minutes after the fair. But that cockleshell he stamped his shillings with—follow me—it was an escallop, and a mint-mark for that very year of Elizabeth. D’you take me?”

James Eastwood was tilted back in his chair, watching the intersecting rings of light on the ceiling; he let the chair slowly down.

“D’ye mean, Arthur, you’d mine Back o’ th’ Mooin on th’ chance o’ finding silver?”

“We haven’t got quite so far yet,” Monjoy replied, rising from the low stool; and James Eastwood gave a low whistle.

Presently Matthew Moon shoved out his lip.

“Pshaw! It’s a ballad, Arthur, a ballad,” he said.

“What do you say, John?” Monjoy demanded of Raikes in the window-seat.

“Tell us some more; it’s grand,” murmured Raikes.

“Very well; now take this in. Within this ten years money’s been put up in Lancashire to open Bulmer’s workings again. Reason they didn’t do it, it was blabbed, and the excise pricked up its ears. They prayed for a patent for lead, but that wasn’t what they wanted. They’d have mixed their ores and done the Dutchmen’s trick; but as soon as that pays and the excise wakes up, pff!—it’s a Mine Royal at once.”

“If they stopped it in Lancashire, they’d stop it here,” Eastwood said thoughtfully.

“In Back o’ th’ Mooin?” said Monjoy, meaningly; and there was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the leaves of the ledger that Matthew Moon turned over at arms-length.

Suddenly he closed the ledger with a flap.

“Ah, well!” he observed, “then we’ve only to walk there and get it.”

Monjoy spoke composedly, ignoring the irony.

“I wonder what Matthew would say if he heard my plan for finding it,” he said. “Phew! He’d call that madness!”

“Tell us, Arthur,” said Raikes.

“Not I! If I don’t find it, I’m fool enough already without that.”

Raikes and Eastwood were plainly engaged by the idea, and soon Eastwood ejaculated under his breath: “My God! the risk!”

At that Monjoy flung out his arms, displaying his vast chest.

“Risk?” he cried. “What can you risk more than you’re risking now—a white cap and the mortal push? You’ve risked that this dozen years; and for what? Clippings and scrapings and filings! You’ve risked Ouse Bridge for that! Now by ——, there are those in Back o’ th’ Mooin ready to call Arthur Monjoy king, but I’ll kick my shoes off at the end of a tow for the chance of being a king in truth!... Risk? Could an army rout us out o’ that wilderness? Who gets far over Wadsworth Scout without a ‘by-your-leave’? The country’s made for it!—To Pudsay and the ballad, Matthew!” He drank.

“To the gold they find i’ partridges’ heads and hares’ bellies,” quoth the merchant, rising. “Well, I suppose we go on the old way while Arthur’s looking for his silver? A new way o’ finding it, too; happen it’ll be a new sort o’ silver. We’ll have to wait for the plating-plant too, now. Ah, well!—The next meeting’s at the ‘Gooise’.... Nay, if we’re all stirring I’ll turn the lamps down; there’s no sense in wasting oil; we aren’t kings yet——”

He turned low the lamps that made on the ceiling the rings that intersected like the eyes of an owl.

CHAPTER III.
“JOHNNY COPE.”

THE house occupied by the new supervisor of excise lay up a narrow cobbled croft, turning sharp from the Fullergate by the “Fullers’ Arms.” It was, in reality, half of what had once been a considerable house, extending along the top of the croft; but the right-hand portion had for long been boarded and shuttered, and a pear-tree, planted by design or lack of thought close to the wall, divided the two portions. The lower part of the tree grew of necessity outwards; but at the eaves it spread back and embowered in its branches two dormer windows. Between the cobbles of the croft grass grew; the place was retired and quiet; and on the roof-flags pigeons crooned and flirted and made white droppings.

The shop of Cole the clogger was in the extreme corner, adjoining the supervisor’s house. It lay in the basement, reached by half a dozen stone steps down a sort of well, and its window was flush with the grass and the cobbles. Thus, appropriately enough, the clogger was able to recognise his visitors by that portion of their attire that was in many cases his own handiwork. There was no mistaking the calliper-legs of Pim o’ Cuddy, the darned blue worsted that cased Mish Murgatroyd’s shins, the vast calf-muscles of Big Monjoy, nor the pudding ankles of fat Dooina Benn, the clogger’s sister.

A facetious soul, Cole the clogger was, and apparently a well-beloved by his neighbours. He was seldom without visitors, on his steps, on the bench within his door, or supporting his outer wall. As he shaped the wooden soles in his vice, or with his cobbler’s knife carved the stiff uppers, Cole ever declared that the odour of the leather that soaked in his tubs of black water was as good for the lungs as his sister’s gentian, and none who wore his clogs (he vowed) suffered from toothache or neuralgia.

Fond of animals Cole was, too. On his bench a profligate magpie harped on the wires of his cage, and over the leather thong that held his knives and awls and pincers there were always three or four pigeons in wicker cages—plain homers, that knew their way to Holdsworth and Brotherton and Booth. Should a man from one of these places be interested in (say) the Horwick weather, it was easily arranged that the tossing up of a blue or black or mixed bird should mean that there was thunder about, or that rain was likely; while if you were able to write, you could convey, with as much detail as you pleased, the state of the atmosphere or the set of the wind. The pigeons were frequently changed. The clogger’s shop was known as “The Gazette.”

Cole the clogger had one gift that endeared him to his gossiping neighbours, and to Back o’ th’ Mooin especially—that of mimicry; and Cole vowed that no such pair of legs as the supervisor’s had ever passed his window. The clogger recognised the chance of his lifetime.

“Eh!” he cried one day, to one or two laughter-loving souls gathered in his basement, “but he pods down th’ croft like I can’t tell ye what—sitha!” He ducked his head into his fat shoulders, crooked his knees, and began to make a little creeping perambulation among his tubs of soaking leather. “Pit, pat, pit, pat—like a cat on a hot bak’stone—and his laugh—a sort of whinney—‘Hn! hn!’ like summat snapping i’ th’ bridge of his nose. A haw on his eyes an’ all——”

Then the clogger was seized with a rare idea.

“By Gow! I can just show ye! Pass me my coat!” he cried.

He got them to button the coat about his shoulders, with his arms inside and the sleeves empty and dangling. Then on his hands he thrust a pair of clogs. He puffed his cheeks out, blinked rapidly with his eyes, and began to waddle with his hands up and down his bench.

Roars of laughter broke out. That, to be sure, was just Cope—Cope to a T! It was a’most worth sending a pigeon off for. Cole would never beat that!—And Cole, in an artist’s transport, practised little variations.

There was free ale for a month for Cole.

Scarcely less capable of burlesque than the exciseman’s gait was the manner in which, coming out of his house, he was wont to bid those about the clogger’s shop good-morning. (There was always somebody to bid good-morning to). His wont was to repeat the greeting over and over again, running off into a little diminuendo of “good-mornings,” and ending with his “Hn! hn!” or a little nervous catch of his breath; and of this, also, the merry clogger made a travesty. Taking the name of his magpie, Jacko Macacco, he practised a string of Macacco—cacco—caccos, until the bird himself caught the trick, and the magpie’s final “Hn!” convulsed all who heard it. Then Cole began habitually to double and repeat terminations, often achieving ludicrous accidental results. This again (being a conscientious artist) he developed; and certain combinations were arrived at of which the syllables, run together and reiterated, made new disreputable words and meanings. On Thursdays the Back o’ th’ Mooiners would gather in the clogger’s shop after the market. Cole would mark spectacles of soot about his eyes, making the resemblance startling. He would button up his coat and draw on the clogs, and Mish Murgatroyd would laugh till the veins started out on his calf-licked forehead. Once, with clog-soles, they repeated the rhythmic racket of the pieceboards, and the clogger was a little sheep-faced next morning when the exciseman passed; but Cope greeted him as usual, and stumped down the croft, murmuring his refrain of “Good-morning—morning, morning, morning—ah!”

Thus the Gazette. Elsewhere the new-comer, if less derisively taken, was not accepted much more seriously. He had confessed to a weakly stomach for liquor; but he was not averse to sitting for an hour of an evening in the “Cross Pipes,” sipping his weak brandy and water, entering once in a while deferentially into the general conversation, and so ready with the hospitality of his snuffbox (though he himself did not snuff), that he seemed a little cringingly desirous of conciliating all the world. That the disproportion of his stature should be less apparent, he invariably sat with his chair drawn close up to the table; but the presence of dogs beneath the board always disturbed him. On one occasion, when it was jestingly remarked that something must ail his snuff that he did not use it himself, he gave a little snigger, took snuff, sneezed immoderately, and at each sneeze his short legs gave an absurd little kick on the seat of his chair, almost as if a pair of legs should hiccough. They did not roar in his face, as the Gazette would have done; but it was tickling all the same. He invariably addressed even the humblest as “Mr.”

Once, and once only (if the drawing of his chair up to the table be excepted), he showed sensitiveness, and of that Arthur Monjoy was unwittingly the cause.

They were leaving the “Cross Pipes” one evening together, and had passed to the outer door; and Monjoy, who was a couple of paces in front, held open the heavy door (which else would have swung to again) in such a manner that Jeremy Cope was compelled to walk under his outstretched arm. It was dark in the entry, but Monjoy heard a little sound as of teeth gritted together, and the exciseman passed under his arm with a foot or so to spare. On the steps he turned to Monjoy.

“That—that, Mr. Monjoy,” he stammered, “that was a little gratuitous, was it not? I think you will agree, Mr. Monjoy——”

“Eh?” said Monjoy, and suddenly he took his meaning. “Oh, the devil!—Nay, hang me, Cope, if I meant to pain you!”

“You must pardon me, Mr. Monjoy, if I suggest that you, as compared with most men, are as exceptional as I. I—I—I——”

“Nay, you shall not say another word about it. I was to blame——”

Cope sniggered.

“There, there, there! Perhaps I was foolish to notice it; let it pass, Mr. Monjoy——”

And, as the dwarf became conciliatory again, and seemed to dread nothing so much as that the other should renew his apologies, it was odd that what in another man might have been dignity seemed, somehow, something less in him.

At the supper, to which John Emmason, as a magistrate, had been in courtesy bound to invite the new supervisor, there were present, besides three of the Executive (Raikes being left out), John Leedes (a fellow magistrate), and Hemstead, the solicitor. This Emmason was a long-nosed, horse-faced, pompous spoken man, who delivered his opinions with his eyes all but closed, and, when interrupted, waited and resumed again at his own last word. The supper was remarkable on the official, rather than on the social side, and after supper the conversation turned to the subject of certain transferences recently made from the Customs to the Excise. In this connection it would have been neither feasible nor advisable to avoid mention of the proclamation on the pillar of the Piece Hall; and on this Emmason delivered himself sententiously.

“For the two foolish fellows now in York,” he pronounced, “although the warrant for their arrest was not of my making out——”

“Parker, of Ford, made it,” Hemstead interrupted; “they were seized at the ‘Sun Inn’——”

“—of my making out, yet I doubt if a conviction will be obtained. Misguided fellows!—Taken in most compromising circumstances, Mr. Cope. But the solicitor to His Majesty’s Mint informs me ... hum! hum!... I can acquaint you with all you may desire to know of that case, Mr. Cope.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you—silly, silly fellows!” Cope murmured.

“Most nefarious!” Emmason assented. “I desire that you will not hesitate to come to me in your need. In regard, now, to any possible line of action you might elect to pursue....”

But he could get nothing from the blinking image in the black spectacles. He failed, also, in his hospitable intention of making his guest drunk, and if anybody made a profit out of the occasion, it was not the magistrate.

Before long the company at the “Cross Pipes” had nicknamed the supervisor “Johnny Cope.” The name had its rise in certain idle, daffing discussions which the big seal-engraver started, and in which Cope began to bear a share. These topics are of no present moment, save that they were directed humorously at the exciseman, and included the events of thirty years before (in which many had taken part, and all were familiar with). Monjoy usually took the whimsical side in such debates as whether laws were anything more than customs sanctioned; whether a guinea would be of much use to you in a desert; whether it would not be a thing patriotic, rather than otherwise, to counterfeit the image of a foreign king (this referred to the twenty-seven and thirty-six shilling Portugals, current in this country by consent, but not by proclamation), and a deal of similar stuff. These idle pastimes were the means of discovering a new quirk of humour in the puny exciseman. This was to close his eyes, wag his heavy head, pat the air gently away from him with his hand, and say, “La, Mr. Monjoy!”

Whenever the engraver turned up the croft to the shop of Cole the clogger, he took with him some morsel for Jacko Macacco, the magpie—a biscuit, a hard-boiled egg, or a bit of sugar. The bird knew his coming, and, indeed, would answer nobody’s whistle but his; and Monjoy had taught it scraps of songs. Among these was an air of which the words began, “I don’t like a Dutchman, I’m damned if I do”; and he would cry, “No more we do, Jacko; we may as well have it as they, eh?”

One morning he came into the shop, not thinking of the magpie, but whistling the air of Johnny Cope. The bird took to it, and after a couple of days (the merry clogger saw to that) the diminutive step of the supervisor down the croft was accompanied by a shrilly whistled, “Hey, Johnny Cope, are ye waukin yet?”

One Wednesday evening, nearing the end of March, when the weavers had “felled” for the morrow’s market, and Sally Northrop was run nearly on her feet getting ready beef and bread and cheese, a company sat in the red-curtained parlour of the “Pipes.” Every time the door opened the rich smell and crackling of a roasting joint came along the passage from the kitchen, and it had been remarked that the care of the inn was work for more than one pair of hands. Arthur Monjoy, a-straddle on a bench in the middle of the parlour, fanned his face with his foxskin cap, for the room had grown hot and he had been laughing. Matthew Moon, in a corner of the fireplace, was reading bills and letters at arm’s-length. John Raikes smoked stolidly opposite him. Some nine or ten others sat round on benches, or in the recess of the window, and Cope’s chair was drawn, as usual, up to the table.

As they talked in desultory fashion, there came along the passage a whistled stave of Johnny Cope. Cole the clogger entered, and he stood for a moment wondering at the laughter that greeted him. Then he bethought him and laughed also.

“Nay, I must ha’ picked it up from th’ bird,” he said, as he took his seat; and then, somebody else remarking that it was a good song for all that, the talk drifted to the never-stale subject of the ’45. (By the way, Scotland itself did not contain a more rampant Jacobite than Dooina Benn. Not that she knew politics from a crow’s nest, but because Charles Edward, passing through Carlisle, had stilled his bagpipes opposite the house of a lady brought to bed, and had sent her his salutations and compliments. “When did yon t’other piece o’ pork ever do aught like that?” Dooina would demand.)

All at once, when, among other matters, mention had been made of Hawley’s misadventure at Falkirk, the excise officer was seen to be chuckling extraordinarily to himself. His narrow shoulders heaved, he sobbed with his private mirth, and the whole parlour watched in amazement his soft convulsion of delight.

“Come, out with it, Cope!” Monjoy cried, and the exciseman gave a sigh, took off and wiped his glasses, and the edges of his battered purple lids shone with tears.

“Hn! hn! hn! hn! It must seem extraordinary to you, gentlemen, but—hn! hn!—once in a while I cannot resist these attacks. When you spoke of General Hawley—hn! hn!—I was put in mind of a very droll circumstance when he was in France. I will relate it. One day, being among certain of his officers, he said—just as I might have said that our friend who came in whistling was at the door—he said, ‘There is a spy coming in from the French army’—no more than that; hn! hn! And so the officers formed themselves into a hasty court-martial, and in a very little while (this is what made me laugh) the man was brought in—on a gallows! Hn! hn! he! he! ho! ho! ho!... A little grim, to be sure, grim and droll at the same time, eh? ‘Came in!’ Yes, he came in ... ah!”

There was something abominable, unnameable, in his relish of it, and for the moment he himself seemed disconcerted by the dead silence with which his story was received. He still chuckled nervously, as if to outface some hostile impression he had created; and in a minute Monjoy said quietly, glancing towards the door, “You have an extraordinary turn of humour, Cope.”

The heavy lids drooped, and Cope’s hand patted the air away from his cheek. “La, Mr. Monjoy!” he murmured; but before the gesture was completed, Matthew Moon had advanced to the table, his brows contracted.

“See here, whatever they call ye,” he said. “‘Grim,’ ye said; but it might easy be grimmer. Now just take it on yourself that that’s the last tale o’ that sort ye tell in this house.”

And as Moon strode out, more than one man felt as if a chill hand had passed over his flesh at the thought that Sally Northrop might at any moment have entered the parlour.

Monjoy had followed Moon out. They met on the cobbles.

“Yon man heard what was said at Emmason’s about Will and Jim, didn’t he?” the merchant demanded.

“Yes,” Monjoy replied.

“And he knew that was Jim’s house, too; ay, he knew. Yon’s mind’s as misshapen as his body,” the merchant said, and he turned away.

CHAPTER IV.
EASTWOOD ELLAH.

HE was certainly a heartless man who could, in that house, find mirth in such a matter. For five months the key had not been turned in Sally Northrop’s door, nor had an evening passed but Sally had set her husband’s slippers on the oven and laid his supper lest the door should suddenly open to his push. Week by week the slips of the pillow beside her own had been changed; and in all other particulars Jim Northrop might have left his house but for an afternoon.

When it became necessary that Sally should have help, Cicely Eastwood had left her carding-wheel and the care of her father’s new-dropped lambs and had made her home in the inn, taking on herself the ruling of the house. This arrangement had commended itself to Big Monjoy. She was big, fair, well-nourished and handsome, and so softly embrowned was her skin that her fair hair seemed of a paler yellow than it really was, and her clear eyes and the flash between her lips were conspicuously white. Her movements were those of a free-limbed lad; her clothing seemed, in some odd way, not something to be doffed for the night, but assumed for the day; and the sight of her had filled Arthur Monjoy with an increasing trouble.

And so, apparently, it had her cousin, deaf Eastwood Ellah, who lived with her father in the house under Wadsworth Scout. He was a short-necked man, with a choleric face, prominent choleric grey eyes, and light hair so closely cropped and so nearly matching his complexion, that, save for a metallic glint on scalp and brow and chin, all would have been of one angry orange hue. His deafness had long isolated him from most society; and he went once in a while into violent “iggs” or unreasonable moods.

There were winks and glances when Cicely Eastwood came to be in Horwick with Sally Northrop. Now, instead of Monjoy’s trudges to Wadsworth in order (as they said) to “wind Jim Eastwood’s clock up,” the boot was on the other leg, and Ellah must come to the “Cross Pipes.” It was thought, too, that James Eastwood had taken to heart the parson’s parable of the fighting dogs, and that Monjoy would be like to be served before Ellah. And it puzzled folk that the rivalry of the two men should be bound up in a curious off-and-on sort of intimacy.

One of the first signs of this intimacy was that Monjoy fashioned for Ellah an ear-trumpet of brass. Apart from his trade of engraving, he had some skill in the related crafts of metal-work, and none knew much of how he occupied himself of a night in the garret chamber of Matthew Moon’s warehouse up the Fullergate. The low houghing of a pair of bellows could sometimes be heard, and the grinding of a pestle and mortar; but from below nothing could be seen but a pair of closed crane-doors, and the crane-arm above them. When Ellah gave a grunt of thanks for the ear-trumpet, Monjoy laughed and said:

“We’ll have a finer one than that when the hazels push on a bit.”

The spring was in truth coming nicely forward, and the gardens and closes of Horwick were budding with plum and cherry and pear. The pear-tree in front of Cope’s house had begun to hide the dormers, and a sprinkling of petals lay on the grass-grown cobbles below. In yards, cloth dried on the tenter-hooks; weavers broke their work at midday to lean over walls and watch the fattening of their neighbours’ pigs or the fluffy cletches of chickens; and the primroses were out in the deans and on the scanty farms the crows and starlings followed the plough.

It was during this mild and promising weather that, almost every day, Monjoy took the road to Wadsworth, picked up Eastwood Ellah on the way, and ascended the Scout by straggling sheep-tracks to the high Causeway. Spring, spare and delicate, had touched the moors too, and in the leagues of bloomless heather the birds were nesting, and the dainty white bedstraw and the tiny yellow portantilla peeped among the grey bents. But the two men recked little of the harmonies of russet and grey and airy blue. Monjoy carried in his pocket a hammer and a short iron gavelock, and they grubbed sometimes in the choked bellpits, where the rain still trickled and whispered to the shaft below, sometimes at the dean-heads where the rills slipped down to the valleys, sometimes south over rocky Soyland and the Ridges of Brotherton and Holdsworth, and sometimes up the High Moor itself, where nothing stirred but the sheep and birds and the world seemed to end beyond the next undulation of the waist-high heather. At nightfall they would return to Horwick together, dusty and thirsty, and so lost in earth or lime-rubbings, that Sally Northrop would not have them in her kitchen till they had scraped or drenched themselves. Then they would sit for a couple of hours watching Cicely as she stitched or nursed. Monjoy often left first, and as he put on his coat the muffled knocking of stones would come from his pockets.

Sally, during her own courtship, had known how to set the lamp in the window and to go loitering long ways to the milking or the taking-in of weft; and she favoured Monjoy’s wooing scandalously. She was a merry little body still, save when a word or a look or less put her in mind of Jim; and she delighted to whisper sly words to Cicely and to watch the flush deepen on her cheek.

“A great red bear!” she would whisper. “I’ve seen him watching your foot o’ the wheel-truddle, and d’ye know what he thinks? ‘A cradle-rocker, not a truddle,’ thinks Arthur; and you dandling Jimmy as if men hadn’t eyes an’ that!”

“Nay, then, you shall dandle him yourself,” Cicely would reply, reddening; “men needs little ’ticing on in such matters.”

“Ye didn’t find that out from Arthur, I’ll be bound! Who was it?... Who was it, puss?... Ellah, I’ll swear, and I can guess when and where!”

But, though Sally knew well enough that once in a while, of a December or January night, Cicely had taken a watch at her father’s lambing-sheds on the moor, not even to Sally would Cicely speak of a certain hour of her cousin’s infirmity when, all her nature suddenly disordered and ajar, she had saved herself from his mood, blundering through the dark heather and hearing behind her in the lonely cabin the sounds by which he did violence to himself. Nothing but pure pity for his alienation had entered her heart; but from that night had dated occasional quick changes in her cheek, as if she surprised something in her own thoughts that her modesty would not have had there.

The pack-horses that entered Back o’ th’ Mooin from the Trawden side had to pass, a mile south of Booth, a place called Noon Nick; and Noon Nick marked the horses of the Trawden pack unmistakably. This Nick was a deep stony gap in the hill where the land had slipped and settled, and the horses had to wind for a quarter of a mile along the extreme edge of a ledge scarce six foot wide, one pack overhanging the gloomy bottom. The trick they picked up from this place was that they would never approach within four foot of any wall. Sometimes a stone, dislodged from the ledge, would roll down the gap, filling the Nick with rattling echoes; and sometimes the grey stones would start and roll of themselves, with a prolonged and dreary sound.

On a sunny May afternoon there moved down in this bottom Eastwood Ellah and Arthur Monjoy. The grey boulders were bright under the blue sky, and their shadows harshly defined, and near at hand the fractured pieces glinted with tiny metallic pin-points. A few pewits wheeled and piped; save for them, only the crunch and rattle of the stones underfoot broke the stillness.

Eastwood Ellah’s appearance was extraordinary. He was hatless and unbraced, and his feet were bare and cut and covered with blood. His face was crimson, and his prominent glassy eyes stared unnaturally before him. From out of his pocket peeped his brass ear-trumpet. He perspired violently; the whole of his scalp twitched with the corrugation of his brows. One hand was outstretched to balance his painful steps; and in the other he bore that of which Arthur Monjoy, at the meeting of the Executive, had refused to speak—(for the methodical Matthew, who scoffed at ballads, would have ranked this as mere full-moon madness)—the fork of green hazel, the virgula divina, the rod that will curl and turn in a man’s hands and drip out its sap over the spot where silver lies.

All at once Ellah gave an inarticulate cry, shrill as the crying of the wheeling pewits, and shouted hoarsely: “I can’t—I can’t—I tell ye I can’t bide it!”

“Can’t bide what?” Monjoy demanded, turning in an ill humour.

“The sight o’ my own blood. I say I can’t—’twill madden me——”

Monjoy led him to a grey boulder, bade him turn his face away, and made such a cleansing of his wounded feet as he was able with a handkerchief. Ellah moaned miserably the while. Monjoy drew on his stockings for him and flung him his boots; then he began to stride frowning up and down on the harshly grating stones. Presently he returned, plucked the trumpet from Ellah’s pocket, and thrust it into his hand.

“I’ll not quarrel,” he shouted curtly, “but the Lord made a womanish piece when He made you!”

Ellah, the trumpet at his ear, chewed at his lip and whimpered:

“You know I ha’ my iggs—you ought to pity me, same as others; the sight of my own blood’s like a flame i’ my brain——”

“Pity you!” Monjoy said contemptuously; “you’d have more pity from me if your iggs didn’t always suit your own ends so pat. I know your head-knocking on walls; how much of it do you do when there’s nobody watching you? It goes down with women and fools that Ellah’s iggs must be humoured, but in two words, Ellah, my man, you’re a lazy devil, and if you can contrive it to live without working you will. I know your iggs; you’re the sort that shapes to drown themselves and puts their hands in the water first.”

Ellah, crouched on the boulder, looked stupidly at the stones at his feet. Saliva bubbled at his lips.

“The rod turned my stomach an’ all,” he complained.

“Would I ask you to do it if I could do it myself? Didn’t it twist nearly out of your hands over Holdsworth Head?”

“That was me—I made it,” Ellah moaned.

“You’re a liar, and you lie now. Will you tell me you vomited on purpose?—(That’s it, clutch at your face and make as if you were mad!)—Here are hills that ring with metal to your tread, riddled with old workings, chambers and veins and galleries of it, and only a lazy rogue that’s trying to make himself out mad to find it!”

“I can’t abide moors,” murmured Ellah, monotonously. “And th’ rod ought to ha’ been cut afore sunrise, o’ Ladyday, wi’ prayers and such. And ye can find it wi’out it, for the grass won’t grow over metal, and the trees has blue leaves——” He put the trumpet into his pocket and rocked himself on the boulder.

Monjoy began to stride up and down again. He himself understood nothing of the virtues of the mystic twig save that its operation was not fruitless, and for the rest he had gone to work methodically enough. He knew that the thing had been done before. Patents had been prayed for and granted. Already, by the cunning letting-down of noble ores with inferior, not every mine that was royal in quality had become a Mine Royal; there was history for it as well as tradition. This was Back o’ th’ Mooin, too, that had already mulcted the king in his most jealously-guarded prerogative.—Back o’ th’ Mooin? A Peru, for all he knew; and for much less than that his desperate fortunes already involved the stricture of his neck by the hangman’s halter. And had he not already proofs in his garret over the warehouse in the Fullergate?... He thrust the trumpet into the deaf man’s hand again.

“See!” he bawled; “we’re going home now. We’re going home, and I’ll show you whether we’ve wasted our time. I’ll show you how I’ve passed my nights this many a month. Do charcoal fumes give you iggs, too? Up!—And mind, it’s little more than chance-found stuff so far, poor ore; but poor stuff as it is, with the setting up of crushers and stampers in caves and holes and tunnels, and a furnace sunk in a deep shaft.... Up! You shall be the first to see it. Cram these stones into your pockets.—Let me once get going, and Bloody Cumberland himself couldn’t rout me out!”

He thrust Ellah roughly down the ravine. They climbed to the Causeway beyond the Nick, and the sheep scampered before them and stood to watch them as they passed. When they reached the bellpits, Monjoy flung out his arm as if he would have spoken, then muttered to himself instead; and he almost carried Ellah along in his haste. It was clear evening before they descended the Scout and passed through Wadsworth; and when they reached Horwick they strode past the “Cross Pipes” and passed quickly up the Fullergate. At the door of Matthew Moon’s warehouse Monjoy produced a key.

The cautious merchant had allowed Monjoy the use of the garret at the top of the winding stairs only on certain conditions, the first of which became apparent as soon as the two men entered the chamber. In the middle of the floor lay what seemed to be a broken bench, for it was without legs at one end, had a couple of strong hooked angle-irons instead, and lay tilted up on the floor. The garret was dark, without window, fireplace, cupboard or shelves. Two sets of double crane-doors only, the one set towards the Fullergate, and the other towards the crofts and gardens and waste ground at the back of the building, made the place anything but four bare walls; but on a sheet of iron opposite the door a hearth of bricks and a small furnace had been built, and from this proceeded fumes of charcoal for which there was no outlet. Ellah choked immediately; and Monjoy barred the door.

It was the broken table that was the first of Matthew’s precautions. Monjoy dragged it to the door and set the angle-hooks over the heavy bar, making it apparent that he himself could under no circumstances leave the garret without first clearing away the table and all that might lie on it. Monjoy lighted a candle; then, binding a handkerchief over his own mouth and another over Ellah’s, he gave the deaf man to understand that for a few minutes he must submit to have his eyes bandaged. Ellah heard him moving about; and when, in a few minutes, the bandage was removed again, Ellah saw that the bench that secured and was secured by the door was spread with various appliances, obtained he knew not whence. No engraver’s sandbag, no water globe and burins, however, were there. First, there was a delicate balance; then a number of test-rings of iron and calcined bone; then a pestle and mortar; and after these, pipkins and crucibles, a bowl of quicksilver, a number of small leaden cubes like badly-made dice, and other things. Monjoy emptied his pockets of stones; then he stripped to his shirt and breeches, and, passing to his hearth, began to revive it with a pair of bellows. The coughing of the bellows and a red glow began to fill the chamber, and Ellah, for all the tight, stifling breathing, watched sharply and eagerly.

Monjoy went about his work in silence, pressing now and then the muffler more closely about his mouth. When the hearth glowed brightly, he set a beam of wood across it, shaped a place in the ashes underneath the billet, and introduced an empty test-ring. He made signs for Ellah to take a turn at the bellows. He began to busy himself at his bench, now grinding small stones with the pestle and mortar muffled in a cloth, now seeing to other matters. The garret became bright as the bellows roared, and unbearably hot, and Ellah dropped the bellows and made for the door, through the chink of which a little air entered. By and by, into the test-ring in the glowing furnace Monjoy introduced one of the little leaden cubes, and plied the bellows more gently. He paid no heed when Ellah stooped over him, and presently Ellah returned to the door again. Half an hour passed; Monjoy’s face streamed, and his eyes were drowsy; and Ellah nodded against the bench by the door. Monjoy roused himself, and with a pair of tongs drew the test from the furnace, setting it to cool. Ellah dozed, and Monjoy crossed over and listened to his breathing. Then he weighed out from his mortar a pound or so of crushed ore, added iron filings to it, set it in a melting-pot in the furnace, and began with the bellows again. An hour passed. The air was well nigh insupportable. He rose again, tottered to his bench, took a deep gulp of water, and stripped off even his shirt. He returned to the bellows; rivulets ran down his giant back; he blundered heavily to the table with the crucible in a pair of tongs and began to dig out the slag; and with the small residue in another ring he crossed again to the furnace and continued mechanically with the bellows. Ellah had fallen across the bench, and slept among the tests and crucibles.

* * * * *

By two o’clock in the morning Monjoy had allowed the furnace to die down again, had extinguished his candle for a few minutes, and had flung open the double doors at the back for air. The cool night restored him, and presently he closed the doors and lighted the candle again. He shook Ellah, who opened his eyes sluggishly, and Monjoy’s voice wheezed as he handed him his trumpet and bade him draw near the candle.

Ranged along the end of the bench were six test-rings. In the little hollow that had been scraped in the bone of each a bead of grey metal lay. The smallest was no more than a sparrow-pellet; two of them would weigh perhaps a couple of pennyweights each; but one dull globule could hardly have drawn on a balance less than half an ounce, while another was only a grain or two smaller. Monjoy’s hand was tapping with a regular movement on the first of the rings.

“This,” he whispered—for his constricted throat barely emitted a sound, “this—listen your best, for I can’t speak louder—this was that blackish clay with the flints, Fluett way, a pound of it—they’re all pounds. This one—this is that red earth with pyrites, a mile below the bellpits—I had to get that out with quicksilver—we can throw both those away.... Wait a minute.... Throw this away, too—that’s from Booth—no, Soyland. They’re nothing—not one in a hundred, you understand.... But this, that’s three and more in the hundred, is what we picked up to-day—three in the hundred, with all the lead consumed too—you scratched your feet a bit getting this.... And the biggest of all, eighty pounds to the ton—Holdsworth Head, where your stomach turned—take it....”

He was utterly exhausted, but Ellah had drawn so near to the candle that his cropped hair singed. His prominent eyes gleamed with an avaricious light.

“Have ye made these to-night?” he said hoarsely.

“No—weeks—weeks—I’ll build a furnace, two furnaces, in the Slack ... a mill to crush it ... for fuel we’ll open up the coal again....”

“And is Holdsworth Head made o’ this? Did ye say Holdsworth Head?—Ay, lie down a bit.”

Monjoy had stretched himself, half-naked as he was, on the floor; he broke immediately into loud snoring. Ellah continued to look, now at him, and now at the beads of silver.

After a while he blew out the candle and stretched himself on the floor by the side of his companion.

CHAPTER V.
THE WADSWORTH WEDDING.

FOR one thing above all others Wadsworth is even yet renowned—its famous wedding. This memorable event came to pass about that time, and it began with the procuring by the new parson from John Emmason, the Horwick magistrate, the list of the King’s Hearth Tax.

You have heard of the state in which the parson had found his church, and of the repairs which he had undertaken at his own cost. These repairs had not been effected in a day, nor for that matter in a couple of months; and Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeons still fluttered against the new louver-boards of the belfry, seeking entrance. But the parson had contrived to instil such a fear into his bandy-legged clerk that Pim went in an extreme of penitence and humility; and for the humours of Pim’s re-conversion and of his vacillating conscience—well, Cole the clogger was the man to hear on that.

From the magistrate, then, the parson procured this list. His church being at last ready, maybe he judged it expedient to make the nearer acquaintance of his parishioners. He set forth on a round of visits.

Then followed something that puzzled the weavers of Wadsworth exceedingly.

At ten o’clock in the morning the parson had begun, and from house to house he had passed during the greater part of the day, talking now with the women in the yards and kitchens, now with the men in the loom-lofts. At five o’clock he had passed quickly up the street, and had been seen to enter his own house almost at a run. That evening he sent for his verger. He asked him this and that, cried aloud on his God, and went to his room without preparing his supper—for he had got rid of his housekeeper and now fended for himself. He came out the next morning still fasting, and was seen to ascend the Scout, and to disappear in the direction of the Causeway; and about midday a packman, leaving his string of horses with lime from Fluett at the top of the Scout, came down into Wadsworth, and reported that beyond Holdsworth Head he had heard lamentations, and, stepping aside, had seen a man on his knees in prayer.

That was on the Friday. On the following Sunday morning, in the renovated church, the parson made an announcement. Only half a dozen women and a lad or two heard it, but hardly was the Benediction out of his mouth, before, with incredible speed, it was all over the village, and already on its way to Horwick. It was this: That, to make (in effect) the best of a very bad job, thenceforward all marriage fees would be remitted, and the clerk’s proper perquisite would be paid out of the same canvas bag that had already provided the money for the new floorboards and windows and the rest of the repairs to the fabric of the church.

Well, the first thought of all that entered folks’ heads was: What did the parson stand to gain? They screwed up their eyes knowingly; you couldn’t catch Wadsworth folk napping; as sure as a club, there was something in it. A few incredulous ones shook their heads. It couldn’t be right! A crown piece for Pim o’ Cuddy for each wedding? Parsons were not much readier than other folk to part with crown pieces for nothing, not they! More would appear by and by. The parson might be deep, but——

And so forth, measuring the parson’s peck out of their own bushel. It was decided to await events.

But as time went on it did not become much clearer what profit could accrue to the parson, and the fact remained that, body or soul, something was offered for nothing. One couple only had taken the parson at his word, and had had the spurrins read; and when, a little later, they were safely married, it was in the presence of all Wadsworth, half Holdsworth, and more than a few from Horwick, assembled as if for a sign and wonder. The swain was not required to put his hand into his pocket, and, journeying to Horwick next day, Pim o’ Cuddy passed his new crown piece round a company gathered in the shop of Cole the clogger.

“It’s a right eniff crown,” Cole remarked, half convinced of the parson’s disinterestedness, but wholly persuaded of his folly; and John Raikes, who had dropped in from the fulling-mill, took the coin.

“I suppose I can keep it while to-morrow?” he said, making a movement of his hand towards his pocket.

An extraordinary agitation became apparent in Pim o’ Cuddy’s face, and his voice faltered.

“Sich wark belongs to th’ Devil, ’at I’ve put at th’ back o’ me, John,” he said uneasily, and Cole the clogger winked at the goîtred fuller.

“To be sure it does, Pim,” he said solemnly. “For an extra sixpence, who’d loss th’ ease o’ his conscience? Give it him back, John, and don’t tempt him. Sixpence? Nay, it might naughbut be fourpence. Give it him back.”

“He hasn’t asked for it yet,” said Raikes, grinning; and Pim o’ Cuddy, in his misery, reckoned up that probably other couples would get married; that a few weddings would soon make the difference of another crown; that after all, he had no precise knowledge of what John Raikes would do with the coin....

“Here, tak’ it,” said John, grinning again; and involuntarily Pim made a gesture of refusal.

“Nay, John—” he stammered, “if ye want a crown while to-morrow—for some godly purpose—it isn’t neighbourly to refuse it—but al’ays tak’ heed to your steps, John!... Now I’ve wondered many a time if a sixpence wad go down th’ spout o’ that little brass kettle o’ mine o’ th’ chimley-piece—I think a sixpence wad a’most go down....”

The magpie joined in the roar of laughter with a shrill cackle.

Another couple (at the parson’s urgent request) had the spurrins read; and the event that shortly followed coming to Cole’s ears, the clogger made as much of it (while all who heard him writhed in fits and convulsions of laughter) as if in the mere ceremony and solemnization of a union there lay some miraculous virtue and speed and efficacy. Again Pim o’ Cuddy temporised with the Adam within him, and again it was suggested by John Raikes that in order to introduce a sixpence into the brass kettle it was not necessary to remove the lid. And then, nobody volunteering for a full week to put a third crown into his pocket, Pim himself began to experience qualms lest his own marriage, a score of years ago, should not have been regularly blessed and sanctioned.

“I doubt if him ’at wed us were ever right ordained a parson,” he said, troubled in spirit: “I ha’ it on my mind he were no better nor one o’ these broomstick chaps—and th’ wife can’t think on——”

“I should wed a fresh ’un next time,” they advised him.

“Don’t mak’ droll wi’ holy things,” Pim adjured them. “I feel as if I couldn’t live another day wi’out making sure——”

And on the following Sunday he hung his head, shamefast, in the clerk’s desk, while the parson, at the other end of the church, required of those who knew of any impediment why Pim o’ Cuddy and the woman called Mrs. Pim o’ Cuddy should not be joined in matrimony that they should declare the same. The parson was past niceties now.

After that, half the village flocked to be married.

The end of May is always a stirring time Horwick and Wadsworth way, for on the 29th there falls due the Horwick Spring Fair, and within a fortnight or so the sheep-shearing begins. Strangers come to Horwick for the fair, and for three days the pieceboards are converted into stalls for all manner of merchandise, and a big field off the Fullergate is given over to clowns and vagabond players and tumblers, who perform in tents or on wooden stages. All is noise and bustle and gaiety; and that spring, in addition, these weddings were being celebrated almost every day, each with its private feast. Sweethearts and mothers and grandmothers, young men from the looms and old men from the pastures and scanty farms, all were for the churching; there was never anything like it. For the women, some of them had wedding-rings that, nevertheless, had not been put on their fingers in the presence of any priest; some wore rings of their mothers’, or of their mothers’ mothers; and for another batch Pim o’ Cuddy (now very well married indeed, and, moreover, living in intimacy with his wife again) was despatched for the new key of the church door. They stood in the building that their dogs and fowls and ferrets had made profane for them; they shuffled their feet on the new floor-boards; they glanced uneasily at the scratched and disfigured pillars; and children stood up the mountainous Scout to peer in at the windows. Their neighbours gave them in marriage, or they received the service at the hands of Pim o’ Cuddy; and men took to be their wedded wives and to live together the women whose sons and daughters awaited the same Ordinance and their turn to take on themselves the same solemn vows. And all the time the Horwick streets were thronged, and the inns filled to overflowing, and the Back o’ th’ Mooiners, coming down on the Wednesday or Thursday, did not return to their hills till the Saturday or Sunday.

It was worth something, in those days, to hear Cole the clogger make sport of Dooina Benn. For Dooina, with her times and seasons, was utterly lost and bewildered. The clogger, winking at those about him, gave her the news of the marriage of a couple whose ages together totted up to a hundred and twenty or thereabouts, and bade her mark it on her calendar; and poor Dooina could hardly have told plantain from ivy-berries, which are the best and worst things wedded folk can make use of. During this comedy the supervisor of excise came out of his door at the top of the croft; with all this marrying, the supervisor could not be left out; and the Back o’ th’ Mooiners writhed on Cole’s bench and clicked their clogs feebly with delight when Cole suggested that no fitter mate could be found for the dwarf than fat Dooina herself. The jest became current within an hour.

On the second day of the feast Arthur Monjoy came upon Cope in the fair-field; the exciseman was talking to a couple of strangers behind a tent.

“Ah, Cope,” Monjoy cried; “what’s this news I hear of you and Mrs. Benn?”

“Ah, Monjoy!” Cope replied absently, as a man answers to an interruption he has scarce heard. “Eh?... Yes, yes; hn! hn! You are such a one for your jest, Mr. Monjoy!” He patted the air softly away from him again, and Monjoy passed on without noticing that he had for once omitted the deferential “Mr.”

The big engraver, too, was not untouched by this gale of universal espousals. Cicely Eastwood was a Wadsworth lass, eligible to be married in Wadsworth. Not all these amazing nuptials were of flesh so fair and fresh as hers; and a Wadsworth wedding that left Cicely single and a maid would have been like to break Dooina Benn’s heart. Arthur Monjoy sought an occasion.

Cicely was to have left Sally a fortnight before, but the fair had so crowded the “Pipes” every evening that even with a couple of extra men her help was no more than was needed. She was in and out of the parlour, and her colour was brighter and deeper, as, indeed, that of every marriageable lass seemed to be. The parlour discussed her openly, almost before the door had closed behind her; and when one man, speaking of her two suitors, remarked that “a loom only wanted one shuttle,” it was pretty well settled among them that Monjoy was like to be the shuttle.

He found her in the kitchen one evening cutting up great loaves and cheese, and breaking on every minute to answer a knock or shout. He flung his cap into the window-seat, and she looked up and smiled, but did not speak. He perched himself on the end of the table, watching her housewifely occupation, and thinking, maybe, that her hand was as much made to divide a loaf as her foot to press a rocker. A call summoned her to the parlour; and when she returned it was to find him cutting clumsily at the cheese—for he had lately burnt his hand. Sally was upstairs, and they were singing in the parlour.

“Nay, let me do it,” she said, putting forth her hand for the knife; and Monjoy took her hand as if it were quite a natural thing to do. She seemed as little constrained.

“Where’s Ellah?” he asked.

“He was here an hour ago. Oh, let me get on, Arthur!”

“Do you want him here—now?” he said, drawing her nearer to him.

“I don’t want any of you, this busy,” she replied; but as she became suddenly conscious, her colour deepened, and her hair seemed startlingly fair against it. There was a rising hubbub outside in the market-place.

“Listen!” she cried; “here are more coming!” She drew away her hand swiftly and ran out. She returned with a pile of platters, and pushed at the door with her knee, steadied the platters, and guided the closing of the door with her foot, all in one busy gesture.

“They’re on from the ‘Fullers,’ shouting for supper.—Nay, not now, Arthur!—”

But he did not withdraw the arm he had placed about her, and his great red bear’s head was close to her cheek. “Will you, Cis?” he said, huskily.

“Oh, reach me that butter! Nay, I’ve knocked your hand.—Will I what?”

“Marry me——”

“Yes, yes—reach me another loaf from yon pot——”

“And when, dear?”

“Oh, go, go! They’ll be in here in a minute. Another time—in the morning—go, and send Harry——”

The noise of steps was heard along the passage. He caught up his cap and started for the door, not wishing her to be found with him. Suddenly she stepped backward to the passage door, pushed the bolt, and lifted her head. He darted towards her. She gave him her cheek, pushed back the bolt at the same instant, and he disappeared as the door opened.