"Oh, the idea struck me as being comic--keeping a great umbrella up when
it wasn't wanted."
"Oh, I don't know," said Josh, solemnly; "a shower might come down."
"But, I say, Josh, that won't do. I've got such a rum idea."
"Let's have it."
"Come along, then."
A few words were whispered, though there was not the slightest need, for
no one was in sight, and the rattle and whirr of machinery set in motion
by a huge water-wheel, whose splashings echoed from the vast, wall-like
sides of the lovely fern-hung glen in which it was placed, would have
drowned anything lower than a shout.
Willows' silk-mill had ages ago ceased to be a blot in one of the
fairest valleys in beautiful Derbyshire, for it was time-stained with a
rich store of colours from Nature's palette; great cushions of green
velvet moss clung to the ancient stone-work, rich orange rosettes of
lichen dotted the ruddy tiles, huge ferns shot their glistening green
spears from every crack and chasm of the mighty walls of the deep glen;
and here and there, high overhead, silver birches hung their pensile
tassels, and scrub oaks thrust out their gnarled boughs from either
side, as if in friendly vegetable feeling to grasp hands over the
rushing, babbling stream; for Beldale--Belle Dale, before the dwellers
there cut it short--formed one long series of pictures such as painters
loved, so that they came regularly from the metropolis to settle down at
one of the picturesque cottages handy to their work, and at times dotted
the dale with their white umbrellas and so-called "traps."
Nature was always the grandest of landscape gardeners, and here she may
be said to have excelled. Her work had been very simply done: some time
or other when the world was young the Great Gray Tor must have split in
two, forming one vast jagged gash hundreds of feet deep, whose walls so
nearly matched, that, if by some earthquake pressure force had been
applied, they would have fitted together, crushing in the verdant
growth, and the vast Tor would have been itself again.
But, needless to say, this had never happened, and the lovely place, so
well named, became Belle Dale.
High up in the Pennine Range the waters gathered in the great reservoirs
of bog and moss to form a stream, an infant river, which ran clear as
crystal, of a golden hue, right down the bottom of the gorge; here
trickling and singing musically, there spreading into a rocky pool,
plunging down into fall after fall, to gather again into black, dark
hollows as if to gain force for its next spring; and nowhere in England
did moss, fern, and water-plant grow to greater perfection than here,
watered as they were by the soft, fall-made mists.
All through the summer the place was full of soft, dark nooks, and
golden hollows shaded by birch, through whose pensile twigs the sunshine
seemed to fall in showers of golden rain--cascades of light that plunged
into the transparent waters, and flashed from the scales of the
ruddy-spotted trout.
No two boys ever had brighter homes, for their dwellings were here--Josh
Carlile's at the Vicarage, planted on a shelf where the arrow-spired
church looked down from near the head of the dale, where the first fall
plunged wildly full thirty feet beside the little, mossy, stone-walled
burial-ground. It was the home of mosses of every tint, from the
high-up, metallic green in the cracks among the stones, down to the soft
pink and cream patches of sphagnum, sometimes of their own vivid green
when charged with water ready to spurt out at the touch of a traveller's
foot.
Will's home--nest, he called it--was far below, at the mill, that
pleasant home built first by one of his exiled ancestors, an old
Huguenot who fled from France full of fervour, for his religion's sake,
seeking refuge in old England, where, like many others, he found a safe
asylum to live in peace, and think.
Old Guillaume Villars had "Monsieur" written before his name; but he was
one of France's fine old working gentlemen, a great silk-weaver, and his
first thought was to find a place where he and his following, a little
clan, could earn their bread as sturdy workers living by the work of
their hands; no beggars nor parasites they, but earnest toilers, the men
who introduced their industry every here and there.
Some two hundred years ago, old Guillaume found Belle Dale ready with
its motive power to his hand. He wanted water for his silk-mill: there
it was, and, in a small way, he and his began their toil.
Their nearest neighbours, few indeed, soon found them quiet, earnest,
religious men, and the welcome they had was warm. In their gratitude
they said, "France to us is dead; this in future is our home;" and,
though clinging to their language, they cast aside their fine patrician
names, making them English and homely like those of the dwellers near.
There was something almost grotesque at times in the changes that they
made, but they were not noticed here. The D'aubignes became Daubeneys,
or homely Dobbs; Chapuis, Shoppee; Jean Boileau, the great silk-weaver's
right hand, laughingly translated his name to Drinkwater; and, as the
time went on and generations passed, a descendant, "disagreeable
old Boil O!" as the two boys called him, was the odd man,
Jack-of-all-trades, and general mechanician at Beldale Mill, the servant
of old Guillaume Villars' son, many generations down--John Willows now,
father of Will of the Mill.
A long piece of pedigree this, but we must say who's who, and what's
what, and, by the same rule, where's where; so here we have Beldale Mill
and the boys--just the place they loved and looked forward to reaching
again from the great school at Worksop, when the holidays came round.
There was no such place for beauty, they felt sure; no such fishing
anywhere, they believed; in fact, everything the country boy could wish
for was to their hand. Collect?--I should think they did: eggs, from
those of the birds of prey to the tiny dot of the golden-crested wren;
butterflies and moths, from the Purple Emperors that were netted as they
hovered over the tops of the scrub oaks, and hawk-moths that darted
through the garden, the only level place about the bottom of the glen.
Fishing too--the artist who came down was only too glad to make them
friends, seeing how they knew the homes of the wily trout in the rocky
nooks below the great fall down by the sluice, where the waters rushed
from beneath the splashing wheel; and in the deep, deep depths of the
great dam where the waters were gathered as they came down from the
hills above, forming a vast reserve that never failed, but kept up the
rattle and clatter of looms from year to year, and formed a place where
the boys early learned to dive and swim, making their plunges from one
of the ferny shelves above. They were pretty high, some of these
shelves, and required a cool head and steady nerve to mount to them in
safety; but they had been improved in time. By a little coaxing, James
Drinkwater had been induced by the boys to climb with them on the one
side or the other of the gorge, armed with hammer and cold chisel, to
cut a step here, and knock out a stone there, so that most of the
shelves formed by the strata of limestone had been made accessible, and
glorious places to ascend to for those who loved to scramble.
One of these shelves--the best of all, so Will said--was quite three
hundred feet above the dam. It was filled with bristling, gnarled oak,
and the walls beneath were draped with Nature's curtains, formed of the
long strands of small-leaved ivy; and there, if you liked, you could
look down, to the left, upon a lovely garden, the mossy roofs of mill
and house, all to the left; while to the right you looked up the zig-zag
gorge with its closed-in, often perpendicular walls, to see the glancing
waters of the stream, and far up, the great plunging fall, flashing with
light when the sun was overhead, deep in shadow as it passed onward
towards the west.
Best of all, Will said, was lying on your breast looking right into the
dam, pitching down collected pebbles, which fell with a splashless
"chuck!" making "ducks' eggs," as they called it, and sending the white
Aylesburys scuttling out of the way.
So much for the home of Will of the Mill.