to its foundations, shook it so that one of the stone slates was
dislodged and fell into the water. Jeremiah leaned over the eaves and
looked again. He could make out that some piece of furniture, what he
could not distinguish, was thrust against the wall of the hut. He saw
two legs of turned mahogany, with brass castors at the ends that
glistened in the moonlight. They were about four feet and a half apart,
and supported what might be a table or secretaire. The rushing water
drove these legs against the wall, and the castors ran and felt about
the bricks as groping for a weak joint where they might knock a hole
through. Then, all at once, the legs drew or fell back, and as they did
so the upper portion of the piece of furniture opened and disclosed
white and black teeth, in fact, revealed a keyboard. This was but for a
moment, then the instrument was heaved up by a wave, the lid closed over
the keys, and the two brass-armed legs were again impelled against the
fragile wall.
It is hardly to be wondered at that the ancients attributed living souls
to streams and torrents, or peopled their waves with mischievous nixes,
for they act at times in a manner that seems fraught with intelligence.
It was so now. Here was this hut, an obstruction to the flood, feeble
in itself, yet capable of resisting its first impetus, and likely to
defy it altogether. The water alone could not dissolve it, so it had
called other means and engines of destruction to its aid. At first, in
a careless, thoughtless fashion, it had thrown a dead pig against it,
then the corpse of a woman weighted with her dead babe; and now, having
cast these away as unprofitable tools, it brought up, at great labour--a
cottage piano. A piano is perhaps the heaviest and most cumbrous piece
of furniture that the flood could have selected, and, on the whole, the
best adapted to serve its purpose, as the deceased pig was the least.
What force it must have exerted to bring up this instrument, what
judgment it must have employed in choosing it! And what malignity there
was in the flood in its persistent efforts to break down the frail
substructure on which stood the two men! The iron framework of the
instrument in the wooden back was under water, the base with the pedals
rested against the foot of the hut. The water driving at the piano thus
lodged, partially heaved it, as though a shoulder had been submitted to
the back of the instrument, and thus the feet were driven with sharp,
impatient strokes against the bricks. Moreover, every time that the
piano fell back, the lid over the keys also fell back, and the white
line of keys laughed out in the moonlight. But whenever the wave heaved
up the piano, then the lid fell over them. It was horrible to watch the
piano labouring as a willing slave to batter down the wall, as it did so
opening and shutting its mouth, as though alternately gasping for breath
and then returning to its task with grim resolution.
The moon was now disentangled from cloud; it shone with sharp brilliancy
out of a wide tract of cold gray sky, and the light was reflected by the
teeth of the keyboard every time they were disclosed. Hark! The clock
of Mergatroyd church struck three. The dawn would not break for two or
three hours.
'I say, art a minister?' suddenly asked the man in a nightshirt and
great-coat.
'No; I am not,' answered the manufacturer impatiently. 'Never mind what
I am. Help me to get rid of this confounded cottage-piano.'
'There, there!' exclaimed the man; 'now thou'rt swearing when thou ought
to be praying. Why dost'a wear a white tie and black claes if thou
ba'nt a minister? Thou might as weel wear a blue ribbon and be a
drunkard.'
Mr. Pennycomequick did not answer the fellow. The man was crouched in
squatting posture on the roof, holding up one foot after another from
the cold slates that numbed them. His nightshirt hung as a white fringe
below his great-coat. To the eye of an entomologist, he might have been
taken for a gigantic specimen of the Camberwell Beauty.
'If thou'd 'a been a minister, I'd 'a sed nowt. As thou'rt not, I knaw
by thy white necktie thou must 'a been awt to a dancing or a dining
soiree. And it were all along of them soirees that the first Flood
came. We knaws it fra' Scriptur', t'folkes were eatin' and drinkin'. If
they'd been drinkin' water, it hed never 'a come. What was t'Flood sent
for but to wash out alcohol? and it's same naaw.'
Mr. Pennycomequick paid no heed to the man; he was anxiously watching
the effect produced by the feet of the piano on the walls.
'It was o' cause o' these things the world was destroyed in the time o'
Noah, all but eight persons as wore the blue ribbon.'
Again the forelegs of the piano crashed against the bricks, and now
dislodged them, so that the water tore through the opening made.
'There's Scriptur' for it,' pursued the fellow. 'Oh, I'm right! but my
toes are mortal could. Don't we read that Noah and his family was saved
by water? Peter, one, two, three, twenty--answer me that. That's a poser
for thee--saved because they was teetotalers.'
At that moment part of the wall gave way, and some of the roof fell in.
'Our only chance is to reach the poplar-stump, said Jeremiah. 'Come
along with me.'
'Nay, not I,' answered the man. 'The ships o' Tarshish was saved
because Jonah was cast overboard. Go, then, and I'll stay here and be
safe. I'll no be any mair i' t' same box wi' an alcohol-drinker.'
He drew up his feet under him, and put his fingers into his mouth to
warm them.
Mr. Pennycomequick did not delay to use persuasion. If the man was fool
enough to stay, he must stay. He slipped off the top of the hut, and
planted one foot on the piano, then the other; his only chance was to
reach the broken poplar, scramble up it, and lodge in its branches till
morning. To do this he must reach it by the broken top that at present
was caught between the legs of the piano, so that the water brushed up
over the twigs. Jeremiah sprang among the boughs, and tried to scramble
along it. Probably his additional weight was all that was required to
snap the remaining fibres that held the portions together, for hardly
was Mr. Pennycomequick on it than the strands yielded, and down past the
crumbling hut rushed the tree-top, laden with its living burden,
entangled, laced about with the whip-like branches, and as he passed he
saw the frail structure dissolve like a lump of sugar in boiling water
and disappear.
*CHAPTER VII.*
*TAKING POSSESSION.*
The valley of the Keld for many miles above and below Mergatroyd
presented a piteous spectacle when day dawned. The water had abated,
but was not drained away. The fields were still submerged. Factories
stood as stranded hulls amidst shallow lagoons, and were inaccessible,
their fires extinguished, their mechanism arrested, their stores
spoiled. The houses in the 'folds' were deserted, or were being cleared
of their inhabitants.[#] From the windows of some of these houses men
and women were leaning and shouting for help. They had been caught by
the water, which invaded the lower story, locally called the 'ha'ase,'
when asleep in the bedrooms overhead, and now, hungry and cold and
imprisoned, they clamoured for release. Boats were scarce. Such as had
been possessed by manufacturers and others had been kept by the river,
and these had been broken from their moorings and carried away. Rafts
were extemporized out of doors and planks; and as the water was shallow
and still in the folds, they served better than keels. One old woman
had got into a 'peggy' tub and launched herself in it, to get stranded
in the midst of a wide expanse of water, and from her vessel she
screamed to be helped, and dared not venture to move lest she should
upset her tub and be shot out.
[#] For the enlightenment of the uninitiated it will be as well to
describe a fold. About some mills are yards, and the enclosing walls of
these yards form the backs of cottages facing inwards on the mill, which
are occupied by operatives working in the factory.
Not many lives, apparently, had been lost in the parish of Mergatroyd.
Mr. Pennycomequick was missing, and the man at the locks with his wife
had not been seen, and their cottage was still inaccessible. But great
mischief had been wrought by the water. Not only had the stores in the
mills been damaged, and the machinery injured by water and grit getting
into it, and boilers exploded by the shock, but also because the swirl
of the torrent had disturbed the subsoil of gravel and undermined the
walls. Fissures formed with explosions like the report of guns; one
chimney that had leaned before was now so inclined and overbalanced that
its fall was inevitable, and was hourly expected.
All the gas jets fed from the main that descended into the valley were
extinguished, and it was apparent that the rush of water had ploughed up
the ground to the depths of the main, and had ruptured it. Walls that
had run across the direction of the stream had been thrown over; the
communication between the two sides of the valley was interrupted. It
was uncertain whether the bridge was still in existence. The railway
had been overflowed, and the traffic stopped. The canal banks and locks
had suffered so severely that it would be useless for the barges for
many months.
Tidings arrived during the day from the upper portion of the valley, and
it appeared that the destruction of life and property had been greatest
where the wave burst out from between the confining hills, before it had
space in which to spread, and in spreading to distribute its force.
Heartrending accounts came in, some true, some exaggerated, some false,
but all believed.
That night of terror and ruin did not see the roll of death made up.
Such catastrophes have far-reaching effects. The wet, the exposure, the
shock, were sure to produce after-sickness and succeeding mortality.
With ready hospitality, the parsonage, the inns, the houses of the
well-to-do, were thrown open to receive those temporarily homeless, and
food, warmth and clothing were forced upon them. But such as were
received felt that they could not protract their stay and burden unduly
their hosts, and insisted on returning prematurely to their sodden
houses, there to contract rheumatic fevers and inflammations.
Twenty years ago, the author of this story wrote an account of such a
disaster in a novel, the first on which he essayed his pen. Time has
rolled away, and like the flood, has buried much; and amongst the things
it has swept off and sunk in oblivion is that book. Probably not a dozen
copies of it exist. He may now be permitted to repeat what was there
written, when the impression produced by the cataclysm was fresh and
vivid; and let not the rare possessor of the lost novel charge him with
plagiarism if he repeats something of his former description.
Near the spot where the Keld left the hills had stood a public-house
called the Horse and Jockey. The full violence of the descending wave
fell on it and effaced it utterly. The innkeeper's body was never
found; the child's cradle, with the child in it, had gone down the
stream, kept from overbalancing by the kitchen cat, and so escaped
destruction. The beer casks floated ashore some miles down, were never
claimed, and were tapped and drunk dry by some roughs. The sign of
Horse and Jockey came to land twenty miles away, unhurt; it was the most
worthless article the house had possessed. About a mile and a half
above Mergatroyd was a row of new cottages, lately erected on money
borrowed from a building society. They were of staring red brick, with
sandstone heads to doors and windows; the flood carried away three out
of the four.
In the first lived a respectable wool-picker with wife and children, all
Wesleyans. He and his wife and child were swept from life in a moment,
and supplied the preacher at their chapel with a topic for his next
Sunday's discourse.
In the second lived a widow, who sold 'spice,' that is to say, sweets,
together with sundry articles in the grocery line; a mighty woman,
rotund and red, with a laugh and a joke for everyone; a useful woman to
mothers in their troubles, and to children with the toothache, whooping
cough, and other maladies. Black bottle and peppermint drops, Mother
Bunch's syrup, soothing powders, porous plasters, embrocations, and
heal-alls various, and of various degrees of mischievousness, were her
specifics, and when the doses were nasty her lemon-drops and sugar-candy
were freely given to cleanse the mouth of the taste of medicine. Now,
she was gone down the river, her lollipops dissolved, her medicines
dispersed. Away she had gone, floundering and spluttering, till her
lungs were filled with the fluid she involuntarily imbibed, and then she
sank and was caught among some sunken tree-snags, and her body was
afterwards recovered from among them.
In the third cottage resided a musical shoemaker, a man with one love,
and that the love of his bass viol. A wiry, solemn man, greatly in
request at all concerts, able to conduct a band, or take almost any
instrument himself, but loving best--a viol.
Now, he was gone, and grit had been washed into the sacred case of the
cherished instrument, ruined along with its master.
In the last cottage of the row lived a drunken, good-for-nothing fellow,
who did odd jobs of work; a fellow who had driven his own wife with her
bairns from the house, and lived with another woman, as intemperate as
himself, and with a mouth as foul as his own. This house and those
within were spared.
'Well, now,' said an elder to the preacher, after the sermon at
Providence Chapel next Sunday, 'ah, did think thou wer't boun' to
justify the ways o' Providence.'
'So I would if I could,' answered the preacher, 'but they b'aint
justifiable.'
Where the folds and fields were not too deep in water, lads waded,
collecting various articles that had drifted no one knew whence. Some
oranges lodged in a corner were greedily secured and sucked. One man
ran about displaying a laced lady's boot at the end of a walking-stick,
which boot had been carried into his kitchen, and was useless unless he
could discover the fellow. There was much merriment in spite of
disaster. Yorkshire folk must laugh whatever happens, and jokes were
bandied to and fro between those who rowed and waded and those who were
prisoners in their upper chambers.
The pariahs of society were alive to their opportunities, and were
descending the stream, claiming everything of value that was found as
being their own lost property. In many cases their claims were allowed;
in others the finder of some article, rather than surrender it to a man
whom he suspected, would cast it back into the water and bid him go
further to recover it.
A higher type of pariah started subscriptions for the sufferers, and
took many a toll on the sums accumulated for the purpose of relieving
the distress.
What had become of Mr. Pennycomequick? That was the question in every
mouth in Mergatroyd. Salome knew that he had left the house just after
midnight to take a walk by the canal, and the watchman had seen him a
little later on the towpath. Since then he had not been seen at all. It
was probable that, hearing the alarm signals, he might have taken refuge
somewhere; but where? That depended on where he was when the alarm was
given. If he had ascended the canal he might have made his way into
Mitchell's mill; that was a hope soon dispelled, for news came that he
had not been seen there. If he had descended the canal it was
inconceivable that he could have escaped, as there was no place of
refuge to which he could have flown.
Mrs. Sidebottom had not a shadow of doubt that Jeremiah was dead. Not
dead! Fiddlesticks! Of course he was dead. She acted on this
conviction. She moved into her half-brother's house. It would not do,
she argued, to leave it unprotected to be pillaged by those Cusworths.
A death demoralized a house. It was like the fall of a general, all
order, respect for property, sense of duty, ceased. Lambert should
remain at home, where he had his comforts, his own room, and his
clothes. There was no necessity for his moving.
'Besides,' said Mrs. Sidebottom, 'I could never trust a man, especially
with women. Talk of men as lords of creation! Why, they are wheedled
and humbugged by women with the greatest facility. If Lambert were
here, the Cusworths, the maids, would sack the house under his nose, and
he perceive nothing. I know how it was when I was newly married. Then,
if anything went wrong among my domestics I sent Sidebottom down the
kitchen-stairs to them. He returned crestfallen and penitent, convinced
that he had wrongfully accused them, and that he was himself, in some
obscure manner, to blame.'
Mrs. Sidebottom gave orders that her brother's room should be made ready
for her.
'Uncle Jeremiah's room, mother!' exclaimed Lambert, in astonishment.
'Of course,' answered she. 'I am not going to leave that unwatched;
why, that is the focus and centre of everything. What do I care if they
steal the sugar, and pull some of the French plums out of the bag in the
store-closet? I must sit at my post, keep my hand on the strong box and
the bureau.'
'But suppose Uncle Jeremiah were to return?'
'He won't return. He cannot. He is drowned.'
'But the body has not been recovered.'
'Nor will it be; it has been washed down into the ocean.'
'Rather you than I sleep in his room,' said Lambert.
After a slight hesitation Mrs. Sidebottom said, in a low, confiding
tone, 'I have found his keys. He left them in his dress-coat pocket.
Now you see the necessity there is for me to be on the spot. I must
have a search for the will.' Then she drew a long breath, and said,
'Now, Lamb, there is some chance of my heart's desire being
accomplished. You will be able to drop one of your _n_'s.'
'Drop what, mother?'
'Drop one of the _n_'s in the spelling of your name. I have never liked
the double _n_ in Pennycomequick. It will seem more distinguished to
spell the name with one _n_.'
The captain yawned and walked to the door.
'That is all one to me. I don't suppose that one _n_ will bring me more
money than two. By the way, have you written to Philip?'
'Philip!' echoed Mrs. Sidebottom. 'Of course not. This is no concern of
his. If he grumbles, we can say that we hoped against hope, and did not
like to summon him till we were sure poor Jeremiah was no more. No,
Lamb, we do not want Philip here, and if he comes he will find nothing
to his advantage. Jeremiah very properly would not forgive his father,
and he set us all an example, for in this nineteenth century we are all
too disposed to leniency. I shall certainly not write to Philip.'
'I beg your pardon,' said Salome, who at this juncture appeared at the
door. 'Were you mentioning Mr. Philip Pennycomequick?'
'Yes, I was,' answered Mrs. Sidebottom shortly.
Salome stood in the doorway, pale, with dark hollows about her eyes, and
looking worn and harassed. She had been up and about all the night and
following day.
'Were you speaking about sending for Mr. Philip Pennycomequick?' she
asked.
'We were mentioning him; hardly yet considering about sending for him,'
said Mrs. Sidebottom.
'Because,' said Salome, 'I have telegraphed for him. I thought he ought
to be here.'
*CHAPTER VIII.*
*IN ONE COMPARTMENT.*
In a second-class carriage on the Midland line sat a gentleman and a
lady opposite each other. He was a tall man, and was dressed in a dark
suit with a black tie. His face had that set controlled look which
denotes self-restraint and reserve. The lips were thin and closed, and
the cast of the features was stern. The eyes, large and hazel, were the
only apparently expressive features he possessed. There is nothing that
so radically distinguishes those who belong to the upper and cultured
classes from such as move in the lower walks of life as this restraint
of the facial muscles. It is not the roughness of the hand that marks
off the manual worker from the man who walks in the primrose path of
ease, but the cast of face, and that is due in the latter to the
constant inexorable enforcement of self-control. In the complexity of
social life it is not tolerable that the face should be the index of the
mind. Social intercourse demands disguise, forbids frankness, which it
resents as brusquerie, and the child from infancy is taught to acquire a
mastery over expression. As the delicate hand-artificer has to obtain
complete control over every nerve of his hand, so as to make no slurs or
shakes, so also has the man admitted into the social guild to hold every
muscle of his face in rigid discipline. This is specially the case with
the priest and the lawyer and the doctor. Conceive what a hitch would
ensue in conversation should the lady of the house allow a visitor to
discern in the countenance that she was unwelcome, or for a man of taste
to allow his contempt to transpire when shown by an amateur his artistic
failures, or for the host to wince when an incautious guest has exposed
the family skeleton! It is said that the late Lady Beaconsfield endured
her finger to be jammed in the carriage-door without wince or cry, and
continued listening or pretending to listen to her husband's
conversation whilst driving to the House. All members of the cultured
classes are similarly trained to smile and not change colour, to listen,
perhaps to sing, when pinched and crushed and trodden on and in torture.
Would a priest be endured in his parish if he did not receive every
insult with a smile, or a barrister gain his cause if he suffered his
face to proclaim his disbelief in its justice, or a doctor keep his
patients if his countenance revealed what he thought of their
complaints?
If we turn over the Holbein collection of portraits of the Court of
Henry VIII. we see among princes and nobles the same faces that we find
now in farmhouses and factories. The Wars of the Roses had dissolved
all restraints, and men of the first Tudor reigns were the undisciplined
children of an age of domestic anarchy. But it was otherwise later.
The portraits of Van Dyck and Lely show us gentlemen and ladies of
perfect dignity and self-restraint.
What is also remarkable is that each age in the past seems to have had
its typal cast of countenance and form of expression. The cavaliers of
Charles I. have their special characteristics that distinguish them as
much from the courtiers of Elizabeth as from those of Charles II. With
Queen Anne another phase of portraiture set in, because the faces were
different. and again in the Hanoverian period how unlike were the
gentlemen of the Regency from those of the first Georges! Difference in
dress does not explain this difference of face. The men and women in
each epoch had their distinct mode of thought, fashion in morals and
manners, and the face accommodated itself to these.
And at the present day that which cleaves class from class is the mode
of thought in each, the rule of association that governs intercourse in
their several planes; and these affect the character of face in each, so
that the classes are distinguished by their countenances as they were by
ages in the past.
When collier Jack calls bargee Jim a blackguard, Jim replies with a
curse on the collier's eyes, which he damns to perdition. But if
collier Jack says the same thing to gentleman Percy, the latter raises
his hat, bows, and passes on.
Education, if complete, does not merely sharpen the intellect and refine
the manners, but it gives such a complete polish that affronts do not
dint or adhere; they glide off instead, leaving no perceptible trace of
impact. To the outward appearance, Christianity and culture produce an
identical result, but only in outward appearance, for the former teaches
the control of the emotions, whereas the latter merely forbids their
expression.
The face of the gentleman who sat opposite this lady in the carriage was
an intelligent, even clever face, but was somewhat hard. He looked at
his companion once when he entered the carriage, hesitating whether to
enter, and then glanced round to see whether there was another passenger
in the compartment before he took a seat. There was at the time an
elderly gentleman in the carriage, and this decided him to set his
valise and rugs on the seat, and finally to take his place in the
corner. If he had not seen that elderly man, with the repugnance single
gentlemen so generally entertain against being shut in with a lady
unattended, especially if young and pretty, he would have gone
elsewhere. Where the carcase is there will the vultures gather. That
is inevitable; but no sane dromedary will voluntarily cast himself into
a cage with vultures.
The old gentleman left after a couple of stages, and then, for the rest
of the journey, these two were enclosed together. As the man left,
Philip looked out after him, with intent to descend, remove his baggage,
and enter the next compartment, before or behind; but saw that one was
full of sailor boys romping, and the other with a family that numbered
among it a wailing baby. He therefore drew back, with discontent at
heart, and all his quills ready to bristle at the smallest attempt of
the lady to draw him into conversation.