MALHAM HIGH MOORS.
Still nearly an hour elapsed before the tired horse stopped at the
door of the small grey dwelling which Gridley had pointed out. The
house, a rough farmstead of four rooms, stood high in a nook of the
moor, facing Ingleborough. A few yew-trees filled the narrowing dell
behind it with black shadow; a low wall of loose stones which joined
one ridge to another formed a fold before it. The clatter of hoofs, as
the horse climbed the rocky slope leading to the house, brought out a
man and woman, who, leaning on this wall, watched the couple approach.
The aspect of the man was stern, dry, and austere; in a word, at one
with the harsh and rugged scene in which he lived. His gloomy eyes and
square jaw seemed signs of a character resolute, narrow, bigoted, and
it might be cruel. At first sight the woman appeared a helpmeet well
suited to him. Her narrow forehead and thin lips, her pinched nose and
small blue eyes, seemed the reproduction in a feminine mould of his
more massive features. Despite this, she constantly produced upon
strangers a less favorable impression than he did; and though this
impression was rarely understood, it lingered long and faded slowly if
at all.
The aspect of the two as they stood side by side was so forbidding,
that the child, faint with fatigue and disappointment, had hard work
to repress his tears. Nor was the uneasiness confined to him only, for
the butler's voice, when he raised it to greet his kinsfolk, sounded
unnatural. His words tumbled over one another, and he alighted with a
fussiness which betrayed itself.
On the other side the most absolute composure existed; so that
presently the man's fulsome words died on his lips. "Why, brother," he
stammered, with something of a whine, "you are glad to see me?"
"It may be, and again it may not be," the other answered grimly.
"How so?" Gridley asked, changing countenance.
"Have you turned your back on the flesh-pots for good?" was the severe
response. "Have you come out of Egypt and away from its abominations?
For I will have no malignants here, nor those who eat their bread and
grow fat on their vices? If you have left the tents of Kedar, then you
are welcome here. But if not, pass on."
"I have left Pattenhall, if that is what you mean," the younger
brother answered sullenly.
"And its service?"
"Ay, and its service."
"Who is the lad you have with you?" Simon Gridley asked keenly.
"He is a Patten," the butler answered reluctantly; "but he has neither
house nor land, nor more in the world than the clothes he stands up
in."
The answer took both the man and the woman by surprise. They stood
gazing as with one accord at the boy, who, with his lips trembling,
changed feet and shifted his eyes from one stern face to another.
"I have heard something of that," the elder Gridley said, with a stern
smile.
"He comes of a bad brood."
"Nevertheless, you will not refuse him shelter," his brother answered.
"He is a child, and I have nowhere else to take him."
"Why take him at all?" the Puritan snarled fiercely. "What have you to
do with the children of transgression? Have you not sins enough of
your own to answer for?"
The butler did not reply, and for a moment the boy's fate seemed to
hang in the balance. Then the woman spoke. "Bring him in," she said
harshly and suddenly. "It may be that he is a brand snatched from the
burning."
She spoke with authority, and her words seemed to be accepted as a
final decision. Gridley pulled the child sharply by the arm, and,
himself wearing a somewhat hangdog expression, led him across the fold
and through the doorway, the others following. The scene outside, the
leaden sky and grey moor and falling rain, had reduced the boy to the
depth of misery; the interior to which he was introduced did little to
comfort him. The hearth was fireless, the stone floor bare and
unstrewn. A couple of great chests, a chair and two stools, formed,
with a table, a spinning-wheel, and a rude loom, the only furniture.
The rafters displayed none of the plenty which Jack was accustomed to
see in kitchens, for neither flitch nor puddings adorned them, but in
the window-seat a gaunt elderly man with a long grey beard sat reading
a large Bible. He looked up dreamily when the party entered, but said
nothing, the rapt expression of his face seeming to show that he was
virtually unconscious of their presence.
"Luke is the same as ever?" the butler said in a low voice to his
sister-in-law.
"He has his visions, if that is what you mean," she answered tartly.
"Same as he ever had, and clearer of late. Set the child there. You
are hungry, I dare say. Well, you'll have to wait. In an hour it will
be supper-time, and in an hour you will have your supper. But you will
get no Pattenhall dainties here."
The elder Gridley went to the loom and began to work, while his
brother, repressing a sigh of discontent, sat down and gazed at the
hearth, regretting already the step he had taken. Mistress Gridley
looked fixedly and with compressed lips at the boy, who sat in the
cold chimney corner, too much terrified to cry. The only sounds which
broke the dreary stillness of the house were the rattling of the loom
and the murmur of Luke Gridley's voice, as his tongue followed the
mechanical movement of his finger.
Such was their reception; the child, hungry and fear-stricken, thought
with a bursting heart of the home he had left, of the friends and the
very dogs of Pattenhall, its trees and sunshine, and warm kitchen. The
grim silence of the room, the woman's cruel eyes, the bareness and
greyness, seemed to crush him with an iron hand, so that it was only
by an effort, almost beyond his years, that he repressed a scream of
passionate revolt.
Nor did he suffer alone. The butler, despite the care with which he
hid his feelings, was little more at home in his company. He had no
longer anything in common with his kinsfolk. In his heart he cringed
before their rugged natures as a guilty dog crouches before its
master. But he had thoughts of his own and a purpose to serve; and
this enabled him to put a good face on the matter, or at least to
endure with a wry smile.
The scanty meal of cheese and oatmeal eaten, and Luke's long
extemporary prayer brought to an end, the strangers were taken to one
of the two upper rooms. In five minutes the tired child was asleep;
not so his companion. Gridley, fatigued as he was, lay and watched the
last glimmer of daylight die away, and then, when all the house was
dark and quiet, he sat up and listened. His wallets lay on the floor
beside him. He rose and crawled to them, and for a long time crouched
on the boards by them, thinking. He wanted a hiding-place--before
morning he must have a hiding-place; but the scanty furniture of the
room afforded none. This he had not anticipated, and the perplexity
into which it threw him was so largely mingled with fear, that he
fancied the loud beating of his heart must attract attention even
through the walls. After some minutes of misery he made up his mind,
and rising from the floor crept to the door and opened it. All was so
still in the house that he took fresh courage. He went back to his
wallets, and drawing something from them stole on tiptoe down the
stairs, each creaking board--and there were many--throwing him into a
cold perspiration. When a coward gives himself to wickedness, he pays
dearly for his fancy.
The staircase opened directly into the kitchen, where he stood awhile
listening on the hearth. Luke, the preacher, slept in the back-room,
and the door seemed to be ajar. Gridley felt his way through the
darkness to it and softly closed it. Then he peered round him. Where
could he hide what he had to hide? Memory, conjuring up the objects
round him, suggested one place after another, but in each case he
foresaw the possibility of accident. The linen-chest? Mistress Gridley
might take it into her head to inspect her store of linen. The
under-part of the sink? She might be about to clean it. The dresser
was out of the question. He decided at last on the oatmeal chest, and
groping his way to it found it, to his delight, unlocked and half
full. The objects he had to hide were small; he ran little risk, he
thought, if he buried them near the bottom of the meal.
After pausing again to listen and assure himself that he was not
watched, he plunged his treasure deep in the soft meal. Then with
trembling hands he drew the stuff over it, jealously smoothing and
patting the surface in his fear lest daylight should disclose some
signs of what he had been about. This done, and as he believed,
effectually, he heaved a sigh of relief, and laid his hand on the lid
of the chest to close it. At that moment a thin ray of light pierced
the darkness in which he stood, and falling across the floor of the
kitchen, chilled him to the heart.
Even in his panic he had sufficient presence of mind to close the lid
softly, but the act detained him so long that he had no chance of
moving away from the chest; and there Mistress Gridley found him when
she entered, with her rushlight shaded, and her small eyes gleaming
triumphantly behind it.
"Ho! ho!" she said, in a whisper; "I have caught a rat, have I?"
"I was hungry," he stammered, recoiling before her, "and came down to
see if there was any porridge left."
"You lie!" she answered contemptuously, pointing to his hands as she
spoke. They were covered with oatmeal. "I know you of old. You have
been hiding something. Let me see what it is."
For a moment, despair giving him courage, he raised his hand as if he
would have done her some injury; but the woman's eyes cowed him. "Hold
the light, fool!" she said. "Let me see what you have got here."
She rummaged an instant in the meal, and presently, with an abrupt
exclamation, drew out something which glittered as she held it up. It
was a small gold cup. As she turned it to and fro, and the light which
trembled in the man's craven hands played quiveringly on the burnished
surface of the metal, her eyes glistened with avarice. She drew a long
breath. "It is gold!" she muttered wonderingly.
The wretched Gridley murmured that it was.
Glancing at him askance, and still clutching the cup as if she feared
he might snatch it from her, she plunged her other hand into the meal,
and drew out in quick succession a flagon and a small plate of the
same precious metal. Such success, as one came forth after the other,
almost frightened her. She gazed at the spoils with all her greedy
soul in her eyes. She had never handled such things before, and
scarcely ever seen them, but with intuitive avarice she knew their
value, and loved them, and clutched them to her breast. "You stole
them!" she hissed. "They are from some church. Tell me the truth."
"They have been hidden at the Hall--since before the Squire's death,"
he stammered.
She held them out again and looked lovingly at them. When she turned
to him again, it was to wave him off. "Go!" she said fiercely, "they
are not yours. I shall take them. I shall give them to--"
"Your husband?" he retorted desperately, moved to boldness and action
by the imminence of the danger. "Your husband? He would call them the
accursed thing, and grind them to powder and strew them on Malham
Tarn. What would you gain by that?"
She scowled at him, knowing that what he said was true; and so they
stood a moment gazing breathlessly at one another. Before he spoke
again their eyes had made an unholy compact. "Let them remain here,
and do you play fair," he said slowly, "and I will give you the large
one."
"I might take all," she muttered jealously.
"No," he snarled, showing his teeth; "I should tell him."
Her eyes fell at that, so that it scarcely needed the slight shiver
which passed over her to assure him that he had touched the right
chord. Smooth and hypocritical, and, like all hypocrites, afraid of
some one, she feared above all things her husband's stern and pitiless
code; knowing that no offence could seem more heinous or less
pardonable in his eyes than this dallying with the accursed thing,
this sin of Achan.
So the compact was made. The larger vessel was hidden at one end of
the meal-tub, the two smaller vessels at the other end. Each
accomplice showed the same reluctance to trust the other, the same
unwillingness to take leave of the spoil; but at last the chest was
closed, and the two prepared to retire. Then a thought seemed to
strike Mistress Gridley. "Why have you brought that brat here?" she
whispered, as they prepared to mount the stairs. "Don't talk to me of
gratitude, man! Tell me the truth."
He shifted his feet, and would have fenced with her, but she knew him,
and he gave way. "Times may change," he said. "The land and the house
may come back. Then it will be well to know where the lad is."
"Umph!" she said. "I see."
Perhaps her knowledge of the butler's plan prevented her being
actively cruel to the child. On the other hand, neither she nor any
one gave him a word or look of kindness. He had no place among them.
Luke was wrapt in visions. Simon was too sternly self-contained, too
completely under the mastery of his cold and ascetic faith, to give
thought or word to the boy.
The other two had the meal chest to guard and each other to watch.
He was left to feel the full influence of the grey moorland life. The
dismal stillness of the house, the lengthy prayers and repellent
faces, drove him out of doors; the silence and solitude of the fells,
which even in sunshine, when the peewits screamed and flew in circles,
and the sky was blue above, were dreary and lonesome, scared him
back to the house. Once a week the family went four miles to a
meeting-house, where Luke Gridley and a Bradford weaver preached by
turns. But this was the only break in his life, if a break it could be
called. In Simon's creed boyhood and youth held no place.
Rumors of trouble and war, moreover, diverted from the child some of
the attention which the elder people might otherwise have paid him.
Sir Marmaduke Langdale's riders, scouting in front of the army which
Duke Hamilton had raised in Scotland, were reported to be no farther
off than Appleby. Any day they might descend on Settle, or a handful
of them pass the farmstead, and levy contributions in the old
high-handed Royalist fashion. Simon and Luke, wearing grimmer faces
than usual, cleaned their pikes, and got out the old buff-coats which
had lain by since Naseby, and held long conferences with their friends
at Settle. The boy, aimless and without companions, acquired a habit
of wandering in and out during these preparations, and more than once
his pale face and dwarfish form appearing suddenly in their midst gave
Luke Gridley, who was apt to weave what he saw into the unsubstantial
texture of his dreams, a start beyond the ordinary.
"Who is that child?" he said one day, looking after him with a
troubled face. "There used to be no child here."
"The child?" Simon exclaimed, glancing at him impatiently. "What has
the child to do with us? Let it be."
"Let it be?" said the other, softly. "Ay, for a season. For a season.
Yet remember that it is written, 'A child shall discover the matter.'"
"Tush!" Simon answered angrily. "This is folly. Isn't it written also,
resist the devil, and he will fly from you!"
"Ay, the devil--and his angels," Luke repeated gently.
Simon shrugged his shoulders. Nevertheless he too, when he next met
the lad wandering aimlessly about, looked at him with new eyes. Though
he was subject to no active delusions himself, he had a strong and
superstitious respect for his brother's fantasies. He began to watch
the boy about, and surprising him one day in a solitary place in the
act of forming patterns on the turf with stones, noted with a feeling
of dread that these took the shape of a circle and a triangle, with
other cabalistic figures as odd as they were unfamiliar. He would not
at another time have given such a trifle a second thought. But we see
things through the glasses of our own prepossessions. The morose and
rugged fanatic, who feared no odds, and whom no persecution could
bend, looked askance at the child playing unconsciously before him,
looked dubiously at the grey moor strewn with monoliths, and finally
with a shiver turned and walked homewards.