Their course lay in the same track as the Irk, now pursuing its course as smilingly under the bright August sun as though its banks were not strewed with wreck, and foul with thick offensive mud, and the woeful devastation were none of its doing. There were fewer houses on their route than now, and they kept close as possible to the course of the river, questioning the various inhabitants as they went along. They had gone through Collyhurst and Blakely without rousing anyone to a thought beyond self-sustained damage, or gaining a single item of intelligence, though they made many a detour in quest of it. At a roadside public-house close to Middleton they sat down parched with heat and thirst, called for a mug of ale each, drew from their pockets thick hunks of brown bread and cheese, wrapped in blue and white check handkerchiefs, and whilst satisfying their hunger, came to the conclusion that no cradle could have drifted safely so far, crossing weirs and mill dams amongst uprooted bushes, timber, and household chattels and that it was best to turn back.
In Smedley Vale, where the flood seemed to have done its worst, and where a small cottage close to the river lay in ruins, a knot of people were gathered together talking and gesticulating as if in eager controversy. As they approached, they were spied by one of the group.
“Here are th’ chaps as fund th’ babby, an’ want’n to know who it belungs to,” cried he, a youth whom they had interrogated early in the day.
To tell in brief what Simon and his companion learned by slow degrees—the hapless child was alone in the world, orphaned by a succession of misfortunes. The dilapidated cottage had been for some fifteen months the home of its parents. The father, who was understood to have come from Crumpsall with his young wife and her aged mother, had been sent for to attend the death-bed of a brother in Liverpool, and had never been heard of since. The alarm and trouble consequent upon his prolonged absence prostrated the young wife and caused not only the babe’s premature birth, but the mother’s death. The care of the child had devolved upon the stricken grandmother, who had him brought up by hand, as Matthew’s sagacity had suggested. She was a woman far advanced in years, and feeble, but she asked no help from neighbours or parish, though her poverty was apparent. She kept poultry and knitted stockings, and managed to eke out a living somehow, but how, none of those scattered neighbours seemed to know—she had “held her yead so hoigh” (pursued her way so quietly).
She had been out in her garden feeding her fowls, when the flood came upon them without warning, swept through the open doors of the cottage, and carried cradle and everything else before it, leaving hardly a wall standing. In endeavouring to save the child she herself got seriously hurt, and was with difficulty rescued. But between grief and fright, bruises and the drenching, the old dame succumbed, and died on the Thursday morning, and had been buried by the parish—from which in life she had proudly kept aloof—that very afternoon, and no one could tell other name she had borne than Nan.
Bess sobbed aloud when she heard her father’s recital which lost nothing of its pathos from the homely vernacular in which it was couched.
“An’ what’s to be done neaw?” asked Cooper, as he sat on one of the rush-bottomed chairs, sucking the knob of his walking-stick, as if for an inspiration. “Yo canno’ think o’ keeping th’ choilt, an’ bread an’ meal at sich a proice!”
“Connot oi? Then aw conno’ think o’ aught else. Wouldst ha’ me chuck it i’ th’ river agen? What dost thah say, Bess?” turning to his daughter, who had the child on her lap.
“Whoi, th’ poor little lad’s got noather feyther nor mother, an’ thah’s lost boath o’ thi lads. Mebbe it’s a Godsend, feyther, after o’, as yo said’n to me,” and she kissed it tenderly.
“Eh, wench!” interposed Matthew, but she went on without heeding him.