Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 54
It was observed that the gentleman who had entered the court a moment before immediately left it. The magistrate saw him pass out of the door merely as a distorted figure in the dusky shadows.
“Let her be removed to the Dartford asylum,” said the magistrate; “I will give an order at once.”
A voice came from the body of the court. It was Mrs. Drayton’s voice, thick with sobs.
“And if you please, your worship, may me and my husband take care of the child until the poor young thing is well enough to come for it? We’ve no children of our own, sir, and my husband and me, we’d like to have it, and no one would do no better by it, your worship.”
“I think you are a good woman, Mrs. Drayton,” said the magistrate. Then, turning to the clerk, he added: “Let inquiries be made about her, and, if all prove satisfactory, let the child be given into her care.”
“Oh, thank your worship; it do make me cry—”
“Yes, all right — never mind now — we know all about it — come along.”
The prisoner recovered consciousness in being removed from the dock; the constable was taking the child out of her arms. She clung to it with feverish hands.
“Take me away,” she said in a deep whisper, and her eyes wandered to the door.
“Stop that man!” said the magistrate, pointing to the vague recesses into which the spectator had disappeared. An officer of the court went out hastily. Presently returning: “He is gone,” said the officer.
“Take me away, take me away!” cried the prisoner in a tense voice. “Paul, Paul, my own little Paul!” The woman’s breath came and went in gusts, and her child cried from the convulsive pressure to her breast.
“Remove them,” said the bench.
There was a faint commotion. Among the people in the court, huddled like sheep, there was a harsh scraping of feet, and some suppressed whispering. The stolid faces on the bench turned and smiled slightly in the yellow gleam of the gas that burned in front of them. Then the momentary bustle ended, the woman and child were gone, and the calm monotony of the court was resumed.
Six months later a handsome woman, still little more than a girl, yet with eyes of suffering, stepped up to the door of a house in Pimlico and knocked timidly.
“I wish to see Mrs. Drayton,” she said, when the door was opened by an elderly person.
“Bless you, they’re gone, Mrs. Drayton and her Husband.”
“Gone!” said the young woman, “gone! What do you mean?”
“Why, gone — removed — shifted.”
“Removed — shifted?” The idea seemed to struggle its slow way into her brain.
“In course — what else, when the big hotel fails and he loses his job? Rents can’t be paid on nothing a week, and something to put in the mouth besides.”
“Gone? Are you mad? Woman, think what you’re saying. Gone where?”
“How do I know where? Mad, indeed! I’ll not say but other folk look a mort madder nor ever I looked.”
The young woman took her by the shoulder.
“Don’t say that — don’t say you don’t know where they’re gone. They’ve got my child, I tell you; my poor little Paul.
“Oh, so you’re the young party as drowned herself, are you? Well, they’re gone anyways, and the little chit with them, and there’s no saying where. You may believe me. Ask the neighbors else.”
The young woman leaned against the door-jamb with a white face and great eyes.
“Well, well, how hard she takes it. Deary me, deary me, she’s not a bad sort, after all. Well, well, who’d ha’ thought it! There, there, come in and sit awhile. It is cruel to lose one’s babby — and me to tell her, too. Misbegotten or not, it’s one’s own flesh and blood, and that’s what I always says.”
The young woman had been drawn into the house and seated on a chair. She got up again with the face of an old woman.
“Oh, I’m choking!” she said.
“Rest awhile, do now, my dear — there — there.”
“No, no, my good woman, let me go.”
“Heaven help you, child; how you look!”
“Heaven has never helped me,” said the young woman. “I was a Sister of Charity only two years ago. A man found me and wooed me; married me and abandoned me; I tried to die and they rescued me; they separated me from my child and put me in an asylum; I escaped, and have now come for my darling, and he is gone.”
“Deary me, deary me!” and the old woman stroked her consolingly.
“Let me go,” she cried, starting up afresh. “If Heaven has done nothing for me, perhaps the world itself will have mercy.”
The ghastly face answered ill to the grating laugh that followed as she jerked her head aside and hurried away.
CHAPTER I.
IN THE YEAR 1875.
It was Young Folks’ Day in the Vale of Newlands. The summer was at its height; the sun shone brightly; the lake to the north lay flat as a floor of glass, and reflected a continent of blue cloud; the fells were clear to their summits, and purple with waves of heather. It was noontide, and the shadows were short. In the slumberous atmosphere the bees droned, and the hot air quivered some feet above the long, lush grass. The fragrance of new-mown hay floated languidly through a sub-current of wild rose and honeysuckle. In a meadow at the foot of the Causey Pike tents were pitched, flags were flying, and crowds of men, women, and children watched the mountain sports.
In the center of a group of spectators two men, stripped to the waist, were wrestling. They were huge fellows, with muscles that stood out on their arms like giant bulbs, and feet that held the ground like the hoofs of oxen. The wrestlers were calm to all outward appearance, and embraced each other with the quiet fondling of lambs and the sinuous power of less affectionate creatures. But the people about them were wildly excited. They stopped to watch every wary movement of the foot, and craned their necks to catch the subtlest twist of the wrist.
“Sista, Reuben, sista! He’ll have enough to do to tummel John Proudfoot. John’s up to the scat to-day, anyways.”
“Look tha! John’s on for giving him the cross-buttock.”
John was the blacksmith, a big buirdly fellow with a larger blunt head.
“And he has given it too, has John.”
“Nay, nay, John’s doon — ey, ey, he’s doon, is John.”
One of the wrestlers had thrown the other, and was standing quietly over him. He was a stalwart young man of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired, clear-eyed, of a ruddy complexion, with a short, thick, curly beard, and the grace and bearing that comes of health and strength and a complete absence of self-consciousness. He smiled cheerfully, and nodded his head in response to loud shouts of applause. “Weel done! Verra weel done! That’s the way to ding ‘em ower! What sayst tha, Reuben?”
“What a bash it was, to be sure!”
“What dusta think you of yon wrestling, ey, man?”
“Nay, nay, it’s verra middling.”
“Ever seen owt like it since the good auld days you crack on sa often, auld man?”
“Nay, he doont him verra neat, did Paul — I will allow it.”
“There’s never a man in Cumberland need take a hand with young Paul Ritson after this.”
“Ey, ey; he’s his father’s son.”
The wrestler, surrounded by a little multitude of boys, who clung to his sparse garments on every side, made his way to a tent.
At the same moment a ludicrous figure forced a passage through the crowd, and came to a stand in the middle of the green. It was a diminutive creature, mounted on a pony that carried its owner on a saddle immediately below its neck, and a pair of paniers just above its tail. The rider was an elderly man with shaggy eyebrows and beard of mingled black and gray. His swarthy, keen wizened face was twisted into grotesque lines beneath a pair of little blinking eyes, which seemed to say that anybody who refused to see that they belonged to a perfectly, wideawake son of old Adam made a portentous mistake. He was the mountain peddler, and to-day, at least, his visit was opportune.
“Lasses, here’s for you! Look you, here’s Gubblum Oglethorpe, pony and all.”
“Why, didsta ever see the like — Gubblum’s getten hissel into a saddle!”
Gubblum, from his seat on the pony, twisted one half of his wrinkled face awry, and said:
“In course I have! But it’s a vast easier getting into this saddle nor getting out of it, I can tell you!”
“Why, how’s that, Gubblum?” cried a voice from the crowd.
“What, man, did you never hear of the day I bought it?”
Sundry shakes of many heads were the response.
“No?” said Gubblum, with an accent of sheer incredulity, and added, “Well, there is no accounting for the ignorance of some folks.”
“What happened to you, Gubblum?”
Gubblum’s expression of surprise gave place to a look of condescension. He lifted his bronzed and hairy hand to the rim of his straw hat to shade his eyes from the sun.
“Well, when I got on to auld Bessy, here, I couldn’t get off again — that’s what happened.”
“No? Why?”
“You see, I’d got my clogs on when I went to buy the saddle in Kezzick, and they’re middling wide in the soles, my clogs are. So when I put my feet into the stirrups, there they stuck.”
“Stuck!”
“Ey, fast as nails! And when I got home to Branth’et Edge I couldn’t get them out. So our Sally, she said to my auld woman, ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘we’ll have to put father into the stable with the pony and fetch him a cup of tea.’ And that’s what they did, and when I had summat into me I had another fratch at getting out of the saddle; but I couldn’t manish it; so I had — what you think I had to do?”
“Nay, man, what?”
“I had to sleep all night in the stable on Bessy’s back!”
“Bless thee, Gubblum, and whatever didsta do?”
“I’m coming to that, on’y some folks are so impatient. Next morning that lass of mine, she said to her mother, ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t it be best to take the saddle off the pony, and then father he’ll sure come off with it?’”
“And they did do it?”
“Ey, they did. They took Bessy and me round to the soft bed as they keeps maistly at the back of a stable, and they loosened the straps and gave a push, and cried ‘Away.’”
“Weel, man, weel?”
“Weel! nowt of the sort! It wasn’t weel at all! When I rolled over I was off the pony, for sure; but I was stuck fast to the saddle just the same.”
“What ever did they do with thee then?”
“I’m coming to that, too, on’y some folks are so mortal fond of hearing theirselves talk. They picked me up, saddle and all, and set me on the edge of the kitchen dresser. And there I sat for the best part of a week, sleeping and waking, and carding and spinning, and getting fearful thin. But I got off at last, I did!” There was a look of proud content in Gubblum’s face as he added, “What a thing it is to be eddicated! We don’t vally eddication half enough!”
A young fellow — it was Lang Geordie Moore — pushed a smirking face between the shoulders of two girls, and said:
“Did you take to reading and writing, then, Gubblum, when you were on the kitchen dresser?”
There was a gurgling titter, but, disdaining to notice the interruption, Gubblum lifted his tawny face into the glare of the sun, and said:
“It was my son as did it — him that is learning for a parson. He came home from St. Bees, and ‘Mother,’ he said, before he’d been in the house a minute, ‘let’s take fathers clogs off, and then his feet will come out of the stirrups.”
A loud laugh bubbled over the company. Gubblum sat erect in the saddle and added with a grave face:
“That’s what comes of eddication and reading the Bible and all o’ that! If I had fifty sons I’d make ‘em all parsons.”
The people laughed again, and crowed and exchanged nods and knowing winks. They enjoyed the peddler’s talk, and felt an indulgent tenderness for his slow and feeble intellect. He on his part enjoyed no less to assume a simple and shallow nature. A twinkle lurked under his bushy brows while he “smoked the gonies.” They laughed and he smiled slyly, and both were satisfied.
Gubblum Oglethorpe, peddler, of Branth’et Edge, got off his pony and stroked its tousled mane. He was leading it to a temporary stable, when he met face to face the young wrestler, Paul Ritson, who was coming from the tent in his walking costume. Drawing up sharply, he surveyed Paul rapidly from head to foot, and then asked him with a look of bewilderment what he could be doing there.
“Why, when did you come back to these parts?”
Paul smiled.
“Come back! I’ve not been away.”
The old man looked slyly up into Paul’s face and winked. Perceiving no response to that insinuating communication, his wrinkled face became more grave, and he said:
“You were nigh to London three days ago.”
“Nigh to London three days ago!” Paul laughed, then nodded across at a burly dalesman standing near, and said: “Geordie, just pinch the old man, and see if he’s dreaming.”
There was a general titter, followed by glances of amused inquiry. The peddler took off his hat, held his head aside, scratched it leisurely, glanced up again at the face of young Ritson, as if to satisfy himself finally as to his identity, and eventually muttered half aloud:
“Well, I’m fair maizelt — that’s what I am!”
“Maizelt — why?”
“I could ha’ sworn I saw you at a spot near London three days ago.”
“Not been there these three years,” said Paul.
“Didn’t you wave your hand to me as we went by — me and Bessy?”
“Did I? Where?”
“Why, at the Hawk and Heron, in Hendon.”
“Never saw the place in my life.”
“Sure of that?”
“Sure.”
The grave old head dropped once more, and the pony’s head was held down to the withered hand that scratched and caressed it. Then the first idea of a possible reason on Paul’s part for keeping his movements secret suggested itself afresh to Gubblum. He glanced soberly around, caught the eye of the young dalesman furtively, and winked again. Paul laughed outright, nodded his head good-humoredly, and rather ostentatiously winked in response. The company that had gathered about them caught the humor of the situation, and tittered audibly enough to provoke the peddler’s wrath.
“But I say you have seen it,” shouted Gubblum in emphatic tones.
At that moment a slim young man walked slowly past the group. He was well dressed, and carried himself with ease and some dignity, albeit with an air of listlessness — a weary and dragging gait, due in part to a slight infirmity of one foot. When some of the dalesmen bowed to him his smile lacked warmth. He was Hugh Ritson, the younger brother of Paul.
Gubblum’s manner gathered emphasis. “You were standing on the step of the Hawk and Heron,” said he, “and I waved my hand and shouted ‘A canny morning to you, Master Paul’ — ey, that I did!”
“You don’t say so!” said Paul, with mock solemnity. His brother had caught the peddler’s words, and stopped.
“But I do say so,” said Gubblum, with many shakes of his big head. Let any facetious young gentleman who supposed that it was possible to make sport of him, understand once for all that it might be as well to throw a stone into his own garden.
“Why, Gubblum,” said Paul, smothering a laugh, “what was I doing at Hendon?”
“Doing! Well, a chap ‘at was on the road along of me said that Master Paul had started innkeeper.”
“Innkeeper!”
There was a prolonged burst of laughter, amid which one amused patriarch on a stick shouted: “Feel if tha’s abed, Gubblum, ma man!”
“And if I is abed, it’s better nor being in bed-lam, isn’t it?” shouted the peddler.
Then Gubblum scratched his head again, and said more quietly: “It caps all. If it wasn’t you, it must ha’ been the old gentleman hissel’.”
“Are we so much alike? Come, let’s see your pack.”
“His name was Paul, anyways.”
Hugh Ritson had elbowed his way through the group, and was now at Gubblum’s elbow listening intently. When the others had laughed, he alone preserved an equal countenance.
“Paul — what?” he asked.
“Nay, don’t ax me — I know nowt no mair — I must be an auld maizelin, I must, for sure!”
Hugh Ritson turned on his heel and walked off.
CHAPTER II.
The Vale of Newlands runs north and south. On its east banks rise the Cat Bell fells and the Eel Crags; on the west rise Hindscarth and Robinson, backed by Whiteless Pike and Grasmoor. A river flows down the bed of the valley, springing in the south among the heights of Dale Head, and emptying into Bassenthwaite on the north. A village known as Little Town stands about midway in the vale, and a road runs along each bank. The tents were pitched for the sports near the bed of the valley, on the east side of the Newlands Beck. On the west side, above the road, there was a thick copse of hazel, oak, and birch. From a clearing in this wood a thin column of pale blue smoke was rising through the still air. A hut in the shape of a cone stood a few yards from the road. It was thatched from the ground upward with heather and bracken, leaving only a low aperture as door. Near the hut a small fire of hazel sticks crackled under the pot that swung from a forked triangle of oak limbs. Fagots were stacked at one end of the clearing; a pile of loose bark lay near. It was a charcoal pit, and behind a line of hurdles that were propped with poles and intertwined with dead grass and gorse, an old man was building a charcoal fire.
