THE CAVE IN SOYLAND.
Day was breaking when the parson returned from Horwick. As he passed
beneath the wrought-iron arch of his gate he looked wearily at his own
drawn curtains, and thought of the two charges under his roof. But the
living must come before the dead, and he had opened his door and was
passing to his study when he all but fell over the legs of a sentry who
slept on a chair in the passage. He had forgotten that the man was
there. The sentry started up, still half asleep, and grunted apologies.
“Has your captain returned?” the parson asked.
He was sleeping at the inn, the man replied. Nothing had happened during
the night, he added, except that he had thought he heard movements in
the house.
“You were mistaken. I live alone, and have been to Horwick,” the parson
replied, and passed to his study.
He entered it with his finger on his lips. Monjoy, who was sitting awake
in a chair, nodded, and the parson drew a chair close to him and spoke
in a low whisper.
“You are to join your wife two days from now,” he said; and Monjoy
needed no further informing that Sally had passed away--for victim had
followed hunter within a very few hours.
“The man outside thinks he heard you,” the parson continued by and by.
Monjoy frowned. “Then that drags you into the business,” he muttered.
“Yes, I’m in it,” the parson sighed, passing his hand over his harassed
brow.--“When your wife joins you, she will bring her friend’s child.”
Monjoy frowned again. “Oh, why couldn’t she meet me somewhere over the
Edge!” he murmured.
“The district is almost enclosed by soldiers by this.”
“Ah!... Then together will be safer than singly, with one a woman and
certain to be watched. The child!----”
“Another thing; I was to tell you they’d found Ellah.”
“I didn’t know they’d lost him.”
“Ah, of course not....”
And though the parson whispered no more than a word or two, the finish
of Eastwood Ellah had best be related here. They say that doctors have
a name for that disease of the mind of his, that shunning of light and
air and space and creeping into holes. Narrower than the niche in the
kitchen of the “Cross Pipes,” or than the chimney of the “Fullers’
Arms,” was the space in which, the day before, at eight in the evening,
they had found him. He had not left Sally Northrop’s inn. An old well,
covered with loose boards, lay in one corner of the cellar in which the
ale-casks were kept; maybe Ellah had seen this well in times past; at
what hour of the day or night he had sought it none knew. It had
occurred to somebody to search there, and, lowering a lantern by a
string, they had seen his feet.
Monjoy sighed, and then roused himself a little.
“Now one word,” he said. “I may have compromised you to-night. It’s
up-kedge-and-cut now, for they’re wanting three or four of us; so if you
wish to be rid of me, I’ll thank you for what you’ve done and take my
chance.”
“God knows I do, and I don’t!” the parson groaned. “Hush!... I’ll leave
you now; I need rest. I’ll lock you in--I’ll lock £200 in--that’s your
figure on a handbill I’ve seen----”
He passed heavily out. The sentry was nodding again in the chair.
That morning Cope was taken to his own house at the top of the croft in
Horwick.
The captain, Captain Ritchie, was in sole command now. Certain
scrupulous limitations inherent in the man, of which his acceptance of
the parson’s word had been one, made him a less useful instrument than
the late Jeremy Cope had been; but these apart, he did his work
thoroughly. The district was immense, but as far as possible he
encircled it. The Edge into Lancashire, ten miles away, was a
sentry-beat, sentry meeting sentry every furlong. The Causeway was
picketed three men to the mile, passing and returning; guards were
changed four times a day; and on every Shelf and Scout and Ridge
throughout Back o’ th’ Mooin men were posted as if for war. It took two
days to enclose the country for beating; and the midday of the second
day was the time appointed for the funeral of Sally Northrop, which was
to take place in Wadsworth.
Only a dozen folk saw Sally laid to rest; among them were Cicely and
Dooina Benn. All the morning the bell tolled in the squat belfry that
had baffled Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeon, and at midday the parson came out of
his house. All was over in an hour. There was no “arvill,” or funeral
drinking; and those who had followed the bier set on back immediately
for Horwick. Cicely and Dooina, both in their blacks, carried little
Jimmy between them, and at a turn at the foot of the street, where for a
moment the rest could not see them, Dooina kissed Cicely quickly and
wiped her eyes.
“So it won’t be me ’at does for ye, love,” she sobbed, and she carried
Jimmy yet a little further. The road turned to pass down round
Wadsworth Shelf, and again the two women dropped behind. In a few
minutes Dooina rejoined the little party alone; and when a lad asked
after Cicely, she sobbed and laughed and choked all at once, and
answered him that he’d know more o’ women and life th’ longer he lived.
They dropped to the Horwick valley.
Cicely had left the road at the mouth of a narrow grassy gully that
turned behind a fold of the hill to a small dean half a mile away. Far
away a glimpse of the distant Holdsworth moors and rocky Soyland showed.
Cicely had known the dean from her infancy; there was a hollow cavity in
the sandy bank of a beck, overgrown with scrubby alder, that long ago
had been her playing-hole, and it was there that she was to wait for
Arthur. If possible, too, she was to sleep, for they would have to foot
it during the night.
In twenty minutes she was ascending the bleached stones of the dry bed
of the stream, stepping carefully so as to make as little noise as
possible; and then she found the alder, drew it aside, and crept into
her retreat. She unburdened herself of a basket and a jar of milk, and
stretched herself on the sand, Jimmy asleep in her arms.
The curtains of the parson’s house had been flung back again, and the
sentry had disappeared from the passage. The parson and Monjoy could
now talk freely. As much as a merry word had passed between them, for a
year of Back o’ th’ Mooin had set the parson longing for the
conversation of his own kind; and then his brow had become clouded
again. He had taken to this great red bear of a guest of his, as he had
taken immediately to Cicely; but that did not excuse his lapse from
rectitude; and, moreover, it appalled him to find that he was, for the
time being, at any rate, no longer capable of prayer. He envied the
beguiled captain his peace of mind. He sighed; but he was too fully
occupied just then for remorse to stay long. His bad hour was yet to
come.
“Monjoy,” he said suddenly, on the afternoon of Sally’s funeral, “you
owe me something.”
“I haven’t forgotten it yet,” Monjoy replied.
“You owe it to me to let me do now what I refrained from before--to
improve the occasion.”
“I’d like to repay you in a better sort than that,” Monjoy replied.
“Ah, you can’t; and even that will not clear me of my fault. You see how
reluctant I am to speak--this cloth of ours is more often than not a
disadvantage, for none but professional words are expected from it----”
“Go ahead,” said Monjoy.
“Very well.--Leave it alone after this, my good fellow.”
Monjoy made a little brusque gesture with his hand.
“Oh, that’s all settled,” he replied. “That was settled before--but
humph! Perhaps not; I’m hanged if I know!” A whimsical smile crossed his
face. “I was going to say--I should have liked to be able to say--that
that was all settled before the smash-up began; but frankly, I don’t
know.... Give me the benefit of the doubt of it.”
“And after this, what are your plans?”
“Why, if (thanks to you) I am able to get through to Liverpool--the sea.
Boston, perhaps--anywhere. If you mean my livelihood, well, I’m a good
engraver.... I see you don’t want to exact a promise from me; let me
offer it myself. Here and now, I promise you all--all you are thinking.
Will you take that as my part of a Jesuitical sort of bargain?”
They shook hands for the first time.
“Have you any money?” the parson asked, by and by.
Monjoy shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve two furnaces over the Slack; not a
stiver besides.”
“Will you let me lend you a little?”
“Hm!--I might even have asked it. But let’s get something to eat first.
I’m hungry.”
At ten o’clock that night they shook hands again, and with a God-speed,
the delinquent parson closed his kitchen door behind Arthur Monjoy.
Before eleven, by dark hillsides and pasture-paths, that none would have
seen who had not known them, Monjoy had come to the dry stream bed. He
found the alder; his name was called softly, and, entering, he folded
Cicely in his arms.
In ten minutes they bestirred themselves.
“It’s up and away now for our wedding-trip,” he said. “We must be in
Soyland by dawn. I know a place there. Are you well shod? Milk and bread
we have; give them to me, and give me Jimmy. Now, Jimmy, my man.--Kiss
me again, dear.”
And so, with their kiss, begins the story of their flight.
Could they have gone direct, they were but ten miles from Trawden Edge.
The Causeway, three miles to the north of them, and running away like
the side of a triangle, crossed the high undulating plateau that was
formed by the joining of a dozen Shelves and Ridges; their own course
lay up and over each Ridge as they came to it. They began to breast the
first Ridge, that that shuts in the hamlet of Holdsworth, at half-past
eleven of a hot and moonless night, with Arcturus peeping over a distant
crest for their guide.
They struck knee-deep heather in twenty minutes, and their progress was
a plunging and floundering through it. It snapped and crackled loudly.
“Kilt yourself up as much as you can, dear; there’s none to see,” Monjoy
muttered; but her gathering up of her skirts made little difference, and
in the absence of moon the winding tracks between the thickest of it
could not be seen. They flushed a covey of birds, that rose with harsh
cries, and Monjoy, with the provisions on his back and Jimmy sleeping on
his arm, went a little ahead, seeking such choice of tracks as he could.
Cicely’s hair made a dim and ghostly shape in the darkness.
The ascent grew steep, and Monjoy assisted Cicely constantly. She began
to breathe short; and ever as they toiled upwards the sharp snapping of
the dry heather accompanied them. They gained the top of the Ridge,
crossed it, descended again, and set forth up the next. In an hour they
were across the Holdsworth valley, nearing the second top. They had not
seen a sentry.
They raised another slope of the hill, and a dimness less black showed,
a shorn crest of grey bents among the heather. “Courage--it will be
easier there,” Monjoy murmured in Cicely’s ear; and they crossed a
hollow slack of heather that lay between them and the short grass. Over
the faraway moor to the north the Polestar had lifted, and the tail of
the Plough, and Monjoy passed his arm about Cicely and helped her to the
bents.
A dozen yards within the patch he seized her shoulder and drew her
sharply back into the heather again. A voice fifty yards away had
challenged them, and they had heard the cocking of a musket. They
dropped flat into the heather, and Jimmy gave a little whimper. Again
the voice challenged, nearer; and then fortune came to their aid. A
ewe, with a couple of lambs, lifted up her woody voice in the night and
scampered past them down the slope they had ascended. They saw the dark
form of the sentry turn after the ewe and disappear.
“What clothes have you got on, Cicely?” Monjoy whispered.
“My blacks--for Sally,” she whispered back.
“Ah! You showed like a shadow-shape on the bents. The moon will be up
soon; it must be the heather again, lass. Bear up; the next Ridge is the
beginning of Soyland. Put your arm in mine, and stoop.”
They skirted the patch of bents stooping. As they began the next descent
they heard voices behind them and a soft laugh; there were two sentries.
They took to the heather again.
At three o’clock the moon rose, a great half-round over the dark
hillside. Cut out against her disc, a quarter of a mile away, a third
sentry showed; but the light revealed a little more clearly the
divisions of the tortuous heather bushes, and they went with less noise
and more quickly. There did not seem to be sentries in the bottoms, and
they were unchallenged as they crossed the lower slopes of Soyland. They
began the ascent of Soyland.
By half-past four o’clock they were five hundred feet up the rocky hill,
a thousand above the sea, among enormous grey boulders that studded the
heather. Cliffs rose towering above them like an eaves. Bidding Cicely
remain at the foot of a narrow rocky gorge, Monjoy started away under
these eaves. Presently he returned. Two score yards farther on he pulled
aside a great mass of heather; behind the heather was a crack scarce a
foot high.
“Let me go in first; take Jimmy,” he said; and he forced himself through
the crack, and presently received Cicely in his arms. The cavern was
black as pitch, but it had a floor of dry sand. Cicely, exhausted,
stretched herself upon it with Jimmy at her bosom, and Monjoy lifted her
head and pillowed it on his breast.
It was ten o’clock and a brilliant morning when they awoke. Monjoy
stepped at once up the sandy slope and put aside the screen of heather
from the opening. Across the valley, against the sky, four red dots
moved; and the like, he knew, would be moving on the hill over their
heads. But he was on his own ground in Soyland. There was not a nook nor
corner of it that he had not rummaged for ore, and of the very cavern in
which they were he had one day thought jestingly how carefully Matthew
Moon would have taken its bearings against an unforeseen hour when he
might have need of it. He could venture out, too, as, indeed, he must,
no less for information than for milk for the infant and sustenance for
themselves. The cave was of rock; it glowed with a soft and pleasant
morning light; but it was not more than a dozen yards deep, and led
nowhere.
Cicely had spread bread in her lap and opened the jar of milk, and they
breakfasted cheek against cheek, Cicely rising once to still Jimmy’s
crowing as he rolled and tumbled on the sandy floor. After breakfast
Arthur kissed Cicely, a smacking, business-like buss on the mouth, spied
for a while through the opening, and went out.
It was two o’clock when he returned, and gave Cicely such news as he
had. The furnaces were only a couple of miles away; there was a camp
there, and Soyland was picketed. But the soldiers could not keep the
Holdsworth and Brotherton men from their own hills, and from behind a
rock he had seen one or two by whom he did not especially want to be
seen. On the Ridge to the westward of them, too, red spots were marching
and counter-marching; but they were busiest behind them and to the
north-east, Wadsworth way. “I’ll go out later in the afternoon,” he
said. “I may run across a man I may speak to, for all the £200. Did you
know your husband was worth £200, love?...”
At four o’clock he went out again. It was past seven when he returned,
and something in his cheerfulness seemed to alarm Cicely.
“Tell me what’s the matter, dear,” she asked gently.
“What matter, Cis?”
“You’re putting it on, your lightness. What have you seen or heard?”
“Nothing I didn’t know before, dear. I saw little Crutchie of Fluett,
and he’s bringing us food to-night. It seems £200 tempts some of them;
but that’s no news.”
She pressed closer to him. “It would be kinder to tell me, dear; there’s
no secrecy between us now, not like before.”
He was silent for a long time.
“Very well,” he said at last. “They’re flag-flapping. They began
flag-flapping on Wadsworth Shelf when you turned off into the dean.
They’ve seen you, or, maybe, both of us. It couldn’t be helped, for
they’d have missed you in any case. Never mind.”
It did not take her an instant to come to her decision. She sat up,
suddenly very pale.
“Arthur, you must leave me,” she said. “They can do nothing to me, and
I’ll meet you somewhere in a week or two--a month or two--oh, Arthur!”
“What’s that?” he said, with infinite gentleness. “No, dear. It would be
just the same in a week or a month; they’d follow you. We’ll take our
wedding-trip together, I think; won’t we, Jim?--No, darling; I decide
this. It’s three quarters through to get to Soyland; another hill, then
the Edge, and down into Ratchet, and over Chat Moss to Liverpool ... now
say ‘Yes’--say it at once----”
She made a lovely little murmuring against his shoulder, and he laughed.
“That’s my lass. Now let’s talk.--I like your parson, Cis. Why, you’ve
never asked me how I got along with him yet!...”
At ten o’clock he went out again, and met Crutchie of Fluett at the
appointed place. He was back by eleven.
“Is it time to push on?” she asked.
“No, dear,” he replied quietly; “I’ve brought food for another day
here.”
“Oh!...” she cried, tortured with apprehension; “what is it?”
“Ssh! It makes no difference. I know ways they wouldn’t find in a year.
It’s ten to one they’re mostly town men. Come and lie down, and trust
your husband. Come....”
It was long before she had sobbed herself to sleep in his arms, and he,
his own brain busily working, heard her murmuring in her sleep from time
to time through the night.
They awoke at seven o’clock, and he passed to the opening. As it had
happened, seven o’clock was not a minute too early for them to have
awakened. A fresh morning breeze stirred, and the ridge they had passed
showed through a sunny haze, shot with gold and grey and tender purple.
Down the hillside moved slowly a party of redcoats, and, their heads
visible from time to time and again hidden in the heather, four dogs
tugged at their leashes.
“Why don’t the fools loose ’em?” Monjoy muttered grimly. “Ay, they’re
town-bred.--Come, Cis, we’ll not stay for breakfast.”
He patted his pockets as if to make sure of something, and then looked
to the priming of a pair of pistols that Cicely did not know he
carried.