“Oh! you’ll know soon enough when he takes it,” was the most explicit answer that Dorothy could obtain, and with that she had to be content.
“I wonder why Dorothy mentioned the twenty-first of May next?” asked Tom of Lucy, when they were alone together.
“Why she comes of age then, stupid,” said Lucy, as shortly as ever she was known to speak.
But some months must elapse before that eventful day was due in the ordinary progress of the leaden-footed months. The Christmas of 1851 was for all in whose fortunes we are concerned, but a cheerless and anxious season. Work continued fairly good, and on that score there was nothing much to complain of. The winter months were open and depressing. The old adage that a green Yule makes a fat churchyard was amply verified. Low fevers were rife. The strains of the waits on Christmas Eve failed to arouse the sense of Christmas in the heart. Plum pudding and roast beef failed to stimulate to cheerfulness when all around was a damp, drizzly, clinging blanket of rain-charged atmosphere. For days together a pall of moisture settled over the Valley. The moors were soaked, and oozed like surcharged sponges. Every rill became a rivulet, every rivulet a river. The lower lands contiguous to the Holme were flooded. The dams were charged to the brinks, and in the mill-races the pressing waters strained the stoutest shuttles. From the hillsides the swollen streams brought rocky fragments rolling, tumbling, splashing. It was a man’s work to watch the river immediately below the tail-goits of every mill, to prevent the goit being blocked by the flotsam of the stream, and the water-wheel thrown into back-water.
It was an anxious time for Tom and Ben on more than one account. The apprehensions that had long possessed Tom as to the safety of Bilberry reservoir did not leave him. Rather he saw daily reasons for the more concern. The new year of 1852 saw little improvement in the weather, Almost daily Tom made his way to the banks of the great dam, surveying it with anxious eye. When he spoke his fears to old residents, they were pooh-poohed. It was the old cry of “Wolf.” The people in most immediate danger had been told so often that something was wrong with Bilberry embankment, and for so long had the gloomy predictions of the local Cassandras come to nought, that Tom spoke to deaf ears. None heeded him. Even Ben accorded him only the attention of politeness. The people lower down the Valley based their indifference to his suggestions of possible peril upon the indifference of those nearer the reservoir. If the people who lived cheek by jowl as it were with the big dam could afford to laugh at Tom’s dismal forebodings, why should they put themselves about. They recommended Tom to permit the Commissioners to know something about their business, and more than hinted that he had enough to do to look after his own particular concerns without worrying himself about what was after all a matter for the public authorities. It did not occur to them to reflect that if a man is drowned it does not matter much to him whether he has met his death through public or private defeasance.
On Tuesday, the 4th of February Tom had been as usual to market. He had done his business early in the afternoon, but had been detained in town by the necessity of seeing Mr. Sykes in connection with the eternal lawsuit. Then he had to wait for a train so that it was long past the hour for the evening meal when he reached Ben Garside’s house in Holmfirth. The tea-things had long been cleared away, but Hannah was soon bustling about preparing an appetising meal of broiled rashers, poached eggs, and tea and toasted teacake. The meal was grateful after the long wearying day. It had been a depressing day. The market had been slackly attended: the weather had something to do with that. It had rained pitilessly all day, a steady, persistent, dogged downpour, ceasing at times for the fragment of an hour, only to commence again, and so on, as if it never meant to stop. And as it was on the Tuesday, so it had been for three or four days before. At the “ordinary” at the Queen Hotel, kept by Mrs. Beevers, in the Market Street, the manufacturers from the valleys of the Colne and the Holme were full of talk of choked tail-goits water piled back into the wheel-race so that the wheel refused to turn upon its axis. The merchants shook their heads gloomily over the mild, open weather. They declared, as their grandchildren declare to-day, that when they were boys winter was winter; but now there was no depending on the weather, and the almanac was a snare and a delusion.
Tom lingered over his meal, luxuriating in the warmth of the room, and the pleasing rest of mind and body. But about nine o’clock the rain abated. The moon glided high in the heavens, sailing in and out among the masses of the drifting clouds. It looked as if the weather might take up after all. It was time it did. But wet or fine Tom had work to do he had fixed to do that night, work which could only be done at the mill, and which were better done that night. That done, the morrow would be clear for the morrow’s work. He would have an hour at his account books, he told Ben, and sleep at the mill, and Jack—you have not, reader, forgotten Work’us Jack—should bear him company. Hannah protested in vain that “Tom was killing himself with overwork. Flesh and blood couldn’t stand it, and Tom would never make old banes if he went on at that noit. It was bad enough to kill one’s self to keep one’s self, but it was ten times worse to kill one’s self building a house o’ cards, only to be blown down by that Jabez Tinker.”
So Tom and Jack turned out into the night and set forth up the valley toward Hinchliffe Mill. Their road lay at times by the winding serpentine course of the river, and when the watery moon glanced downwards with bleared eye from among the clouds they could see the swollen waters. They met scarce a soul. It was late and a’ready the lights in the village and on the hillsides were being extinguished in the “house” or chamber. An occasional cur sadly bayed the moon. The swollen waters of the river rolled in their bed with sullen sob. It was a night of dread through which the growing wind wailed amid its tears. The gloom of the hour and scene fell upon the comrades. Scarce a word passed between them, as with bent heads and cloaks close drawn they made their way through the mire of the high-road and the sloughs of known bye-paths little trod. It was hard on ten of the night when the mill was reached. Jack kindled a fire in the office-grate and sat beside it for a time to dry his shoon. He made a brew of strong coffee for his master to cheer him through his task. Then Jack in stocking-feet sought the wool-hole where he had improvised a bed of unscoured pieces, greasy, but snug and warm, and anon his loud breathing might be heard above the beating of the storm without.
Up to something near the weird midnight hour Tom bent over his invoices and books, fighting against the waywardness of thoughts that seemed intent on anything but accounts. At length he abandoned his task half done. He felt strangely wake and alert. At all times able to do with little sleep,—that is a feature of your mill-worker—to-night he felt that he should woo slumber in vain. Donning his pilot jacket that had been steaming and drying on a chair-back before the fire, and lighting a lanthorn and taking in his hand his stout gnarled shillelagh, bought from an Irish hay-maker last harvest-time, he set forth alone on his usual round of the mill-yard, leaving the outer door of the mill on the latch. His round finished, led by what impulse, moved by that presentment he did not stay to consider, he left the mill-yard and began to climb the hill towards Bilberry reservoir. He walked sharply, for the night air was biting shrewdly, and Tom was a noted walker. His long strides soon covered the distance that lay between the mill and the reservoir bank. Tom hummed an air to keep him company in that vast solitude. The sky was clearer now than an hour or two before, but the night was still dark enough to make the feeble glimmer of the lanthorn grateful. Tom moderated his pace as he neared the embankment. Was it worth while to climb its steep face or should he turn his steps downhill. He could hear the water above his head lapping against the copings of the bank. Still, as he had come so far he might, he thought, as well walk the round of the embankment. He was on the huge abutment that turned its breast towards the valley the long barricade that cooped up the vast pile of water, and slowly, the lanthorn dangling by his side and swaying in the wind, he began to tread the path on the embankment top, slowly for in the uncertain light, a slip might cost him a sousing, and it was no hour for a cold bath. But, as he walked, peering ahead to pierce the gloom, and watching carefully his steps by the lanthorn’s pale glimmer, he came, midway in his course, upon a sight that checked him with sudden halt, and made his heart stand still. There, at his very feet the water was trickling over the bank, and down the outside. A thin flow, perhaps, a couple of feet in width, had worn the upper soil, and now a continuous stream, not a quarter of an inch in depth, was gently, silently ebbing over the embankment. Even as Tom gazed spell-bound, he was sensible that the opening widened, the water that overflowed was deeper, and its escape in quicker time. A great fear seized on Tom, a dreadful thought well-nigh crushed his brain. He felt powerless to move. Then, with a cry, he rushed heedless along the embankment to the culvert. Not a drop of water flowed over the culvert’s lip. The pent giant had found an outlet for itself, and was making for it. Tom ran back to the gap he had but just left. Even by this faint light he saw the breach was wider, the furrow deeper. Sick at heart, scarce realising what he did, Tom with stick and hand tried to tear up stones, cobbles, or sods that might stem the growing current. He spent his time and in vain. Fast as he made his tiny barrier, the licking wavelets undermined it and washed it gently down the embankment side; and the stream that now, oh! so silently, so grimly wore away the surface layers, bit and gnawed into the vast barrier and the clinging earthwork. But to Tom, with action had come perception. Vivid as lightning’s flash the whole sequence of the possible, nay, the seeming inevitable, was borne upon his mind. He sprang to his feet, dashed down the embankment side. Not two hundred yards below the reservoir some houses stood darkling in the night, their inmates locked in sleep. With fist and stick Tom hammered at the door, thrust his stick, his fist through the windows of the bottom room, where oft the turn-up bed was stretched.
“Rouse ye, rouse ye!” he cried. “The reservoir! Flee for your lives!” Down to the Co-op Mill he dashed, racing as sure only as those do speed who know that Death follows hard upon their heels, and ever as he sped and passed some silent, lowly cot he paused a breathing space to rend the midnight silence with wild, yet wilder cry, “The flood! The flood! Haste ye, save yourselves.” He reached the gates of his own mill, dashed to the corner where Jack still slept in dreamless sleep. He kicked his prostrate form, he shook him, dragged him to his feet.