“Because ever since I was a little one Granny’s always said I was to wed Ephraim and he, and he—oh! in his wild way I think he loves me. And I’d always taken it for granted that I should be his wife though now I know I didn’t love him. And then you came, and I knew what love is, and it seems strange that ever I should have thought of Ephraim in that way. But, I’m feart, oh! I’m feart—not for myself, but for you, when Ephraim knows the truth. Oh! what should I do if harm came to you, if my love should be your curse?”
Of course I chided her for her groundless fears, a lass’s whimsies I called them, and, clasping her in a long embrace, bade her banish her gloomy thoughts and leave it to me to win our way to the sweet fulfilling of our love.
“Then there’s that horrid man at the Wakes,” she faltered. “It wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to me, though he never touched me before.”
“What, Tom o’ Bills, o’ th’ ‘Moorcock’?”
Now “the Moorcock Inn” is a little public house high up above Greenfield on the slope from the road that crosses the hills from Lancashire into Yorkshire, and there resided Bill o’ Jack’s, innkeeper and gamekeeper, a wizened, crafty, old sinner, whose grey hairs were not venerable, with an evil heart and a foul tongue. More often than not Bill’s son, Tom, was to be found at the Inn, when not striding the moors or tippling in the hostelries of Greenfield or Saddleworth. Tom, too, was a gamekeeper, a burly, blustering bully of a fellow, much given to ale and strong waters, and to coarse amours with the light o’ loves of the country-side, though he had a wife and children of his own living at Sidebank, near Greenfield. It was given out that the poor neglected woman lived there that her children might be near their work at Greenfield Mill; but I fancy Tom o’ Bill’s had less worthy reasons for spending most of his nights at the Moorcock. Father and son were Bradburys—sprung of a good yeoman stock, to be sure, but themselves debauched by the calling they had given their lives to, for I have noted as a strange thing, and not easy to be accounted for, that men whose soul’s ken is limited to a dog and a gun, and the ways of wild birds, and hares, and rabbits, and the vermin that prey on them weasels, and stoats, and the like, are oft tavern-haunters, and dicers, and brawlers, and blasphemers and sons of Belial in many other ways, of which the less said the better. My blood boiled within me at thought of Miriam clasped in that lecher’s arms, his evil eye gloating on her sweet face.
“Perhaps ’twas only the drink,” I said to soothe her, for she trembled as she spoke of Tom o’ Bill’s.
“It isn’t always the drink. He’s as bad when he’s sober. He wants me to go serve at “the Moorcock,” and says he’ll load me with jewels, and I shall live like a lady. He must have the cunning of a fox, for often when I’ve thought for sure I’d given him the go-bye in my journeys across the moor he’s sprung from behind a wall or risen sudden from the heather. And I think it’s because of me he’s so down on Ephraim. He’s boasted in his cups that he’ll never rest till he has the King’s bracelets on Ephraim’s wrists and him sent to the Plantations. There’s evil blood between them, and I fear me there’ll be blood let if things go on”—and she shivered in my arms.
“This isn’t Ephraim’s business now; it’s mine,” I declared. But she clung to me, and bade me if I loved her give the Bradburys a wide berth. I soothed her with smooth sayings, but made no promise, for it seemed a hard thing that in this fair England of ours a maiden even a Burnplatter should be evilly entreated and not a constable bold enough to do the work he was paid for. It was an old saying in those days that gamekeepers and the constables were thick as thieves, and that a brace of grouse or a hare at Christmas time could close the mouth and eyes of the constables who were so quick to clap a poor weaver in the stocks if he got quarrelsome in his cups and the Justices on the Bench were as bad as the keepers, sportsmen, and game preservers to a man, except perhaps the Vicar of St. Chad’s, and he was too butty with his brother justices to thwart them in their handling of the men the keepers hauled before them. But I’d a notion of English law amid justice, and I thought Parson Holmes’s son could hold his own even against a keeper.
I set no great store by myself, as indeed why should I, but I had a great opinion of my father’s name and calling. Why, even the Vicar of St. James’s had been heard to speak respectfully of the pastor of Pole Moor ever since the day when that incumbent had written a lengthy epistle to my father anent the laying on of hands, couched in the Greek tongue, thinking, maybe, so to humiliate my father, and the doughty little minister, not to be outdone, had replied at twice the length, not, to be sure, in Greek, but in Hebrew!
I walked home that night, ’twixt gloam and moon, in a world bewitched. I forgot all about Jim, about my father, about Ruth, doubtless racking their brains in vain, wondering why I did not return to supper.