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.