I BECOME A CONSPIRITOR.
IT must, I think, have been about the end of September. I had gone as usual to the Mill a couple of hours before our baggin (breakfast), but had had to jack work because of some accident to the water-wheel. Jim was throng in the millrace, but I had perforce an idle day on my hands, and avowed to Mary my intention of taking a long walk over the moors. She said I might as well make myself useful and bring her a can of barm for that week’s baking, with a cupful to spare for the home-brewed; and no better barm was to be had, she declared, than that they scummed at the Moorcock. The Bradburys, father and son, she conceded, might be the devil’s own spawn for ought she knew or greatly cared, but sell good barm they did; and if I wanted to stretch my long legs to more purpose than sprawling in front of the kitchen fire or strolling idly about the lanes I could do no better than take up by Holly Grove and cut across the fields towards Pots and Pan’s and thence to the Moorcock at Bill’s o’ Jack’s.
We had said not a word to Mary about the incident at the Wakes, so I had no decent excuse to put forward when she produced her quart can and sent me for on my errand.
It was a glorious day; we were having a splendid autumn, dry and warm, just the weather for a climb up the hills. I had the day before me, the rare treat of an extra holiday, the price of a luncheon of bread and cheese—with an onion—and a pint of ale, in my pocket, youth and health, a sunlit sky, the pure, fresh air of the far-flung moors, sweet thoughts of Miriam to warm my heart and many a scheme for the future to busy my brain—what more could man ask of life?
Once off the road above the Workhouse I went in a bee-line for Pots and Pans, that cluster of huge boulders, black with age, and worn by the countless storms they had weathered since first the morning stars sang together—Jim said they had been left on their exalted bed after being bundled about by the Flood before the waters subsided and stranded Noah on Ararat: but, then, Jim had also a theory, in support of which he advanced many cogent arguments, that the huge rocks that cap the hills on either side of the valley-head at Bill’s 0’ Jack’s had been used as missiles when Gog stood on one hill and hurled them across the intervening ravine in some titanic contest with Magog—else why, he shrewdly asked, were these summits dubbed Gog and Magog to this day; there must be a reason for it and what so likely as that. Idly revolving many and various thoughts I at length crossed the great steep, somewhat blown, and fain to doff my cap and let the cooling breeze blow about my brow. I sat down in the shadow of one of the crags, against which I stretched my long legs in great ease and content, and what with the warmth and the pleasant weariness of my stiff climb, I presently nodded off to sleep.
How long I sat there I cannot say, but when I woke, which fortunately I did gradually and without the start one gives when the buzzer goes, wakefulness coming gently and quietly, as daybreak lifting the clouds, I became aware that I had no longer Pots and Pans to myself; and the consciousness that I was trespassing, and the knowledge that trespassers were ill-brooked when the grouse were about, suggested that if I had not as yet been observed ’twere just as well not to obtrude my presence. So I closed my eyes and lay low. But I kept my ears open.
“It’s no use thee talkin’, feyther, I’m bent on it,” I heard, “so tha may as well keep thi breath to cool thi porridge. I’st ha’ that lass if aw dee for it.”
“What dost ta mean? Tha cannot wed her, and if tha could tha’d be a fooil to put a rope raand thee nah. Tha’d rue it nobbut once, Tom, an’ that’d be all thi life after th’ fust week or two.
“Aw said nowt abaat weddin’ her. Aw sud think twice afore I put a ring on to a Burnplatter’s finger.”
“Tha’rt none talkin’ o’ that black-haired wildcat o’ a gipsy wench tha gate sich a mauling ovver at th’ Wakes?”