A Man of the Moors

by Halliwell Sutcliffe

"What do you find to talk about all your time?" Roddick had snarled one day.

"We live; we don't talk much about it," Griff had assured him, with a laugh that was entirely one of satisfaction.

That was just it. He had known wittier women than Kate, and some that were more beautiful in their own way; but Kate—well, she rounded off his life for him, and there was an end of it.

Mrs. Lomax, who often ran across from the Manor to spend a night or two with them, was speedily convinced that Griff's foolhardy experiment had proved a success. Now and then, indeed, she would throw out tentative warnings to "the children," a suggestion that they should see more people, or a doubt lest presently they might find themselves suffering from an overdose of a very good thing; and to all these hints Griff always made the same response—that they would fly in search of outside help directly the first symptoms of weariness set in.

But the Marshcotes doctor, who had grown grey in friendship with the Lomaxes, used to shake his head when he came away from his periodical visits to Kate. It was no use bothering Griff about it—or, at least, he could find no heart to do it—but not all Kate's brightness of spirits served to hide that underlying weakness of hers from the old man's eyes. Sometimes, as he recrossed the moor to Marshcotes, he would swear softly to himself, in a way ill-befitting the whiteness of his hair, and would murmur that it was a damned shame young Lomax had not come into Kate's life in time to save her.

Griff, when he was not at work, or at play, with his wife, was generally to be found somewhere about the farm. There had been a farm attached to the Manor for many years after his father's death, and he had picked up a good deal of practical knowledge as a lad, which Simeon, his farm-man at Gorsthwaite, helped him to furbish up from day to day. Simeon distrusted his master's interference in these matters, as being "one what nobbut laked at wark," but he was bound to admit, underneath all his sneers, that Griff must have been to the manner born, so kindly did he take to the details of his education.

It was in the middle of August that Lomax, taking a short cut home one morning, discovered a pleasing fact in connection with Gorsthwaite Moor. The moor folk know well enough that gorse never grows on a peaty soil, and few of them guessed that Gorsthwaite, for all its splashes of yellow bloom, had a rich peat-bed on the side away from Marshcotes. Griff, chancing this morning to have his eyes on the bilberry clumps, to see if the second crop of berries would be worth the gathering, saw a rusty spade on the ground in front of him—a long, narrow spade, turned over at the right-hand side perpendicularly to the main face. A little further some crumbling peats were scattered on the top of a reddish-brown gash in the cheek of the moor.

"Simeon," said he to his farm-man, directly he got home, "there's peat to be had for the asking a mile away. Why should I go on paying for the stuff they bring from Cranshaw Moor?"

"It's noan o' th' best, isn't th' Cranshaw peät, but I niver heärd tell on there being peäts just hereabouts. Besides, it's ower late i' th' year to dry 'em now."

"We'll see about that. The time of year doesn't matter a button, so long as there is sun enough to dry them. Our stack is not big enough, I fancy, to last us through the winter."