There were winks and glances when Cicely Eastwood came to be in Horwick with Sally Northrop. Now, instead of Monjoy’s trudges to Wadsworth in order (as they said) to “wind Jim Eastwood’s clock up,” the boot was on the other leg, and Ellah must come to the “Cross Pipes.” It was thought, too, that James Eastwood had taken to heart the parson’s parable of the fighting dogs, and that Monjoy would be like to be served before Ellah. And it puzzled folk that the rivalry of the two men should be bound up in a curious off-and-on sort of intimacy.
One of the first signs of this intimacy was that Monjoy fashioned for Ellah an ear-trumpet of brass. Apart from his trade of engraving, he had some skill in the related crafts of metal-work, and none knew much of how he occupied himself of a night in the garret chamber of Matthew Moon’s warehouse up the Fullergate. The low houghing of a pair of bellows could sometimes be heard, and the grinding of a pestle and mortar; but from below nothing could be seen but a pair of closed crane-doors, and the crane-arm above them. When Ellah gave a grunt of thanks for the ear-trumpet, Monjoy laughed and said:
“We’ll have a finer one than that when the hazels push on a bit.”
The spring was in truth coming nicely forward, and the gardens and closes of Horwick were budding with plum and cherry and pear. The pear-tree in front of Cope’s house had begun to hide the dormers, and a sprinkling of petals lay on the grass-grown cobbles below. In yards, cloth dried on the tenter-hooks; weavers broke their work at midday to lean over walls and watch the fattening of their neighbours’ pigs or the fluffy cletches of chickens; and the primroses were out in the deans and on the scanty farms the crows and starlings followed the plough.
It was during this mild and promising weather that, almost every day, Monjoy took the road to Wadsworth, picked up Eastwood Ellah on the way, and ascended the Scout by straggling sheep-tracks to the high Causeway. Spring, spare and delicate, had touched the moors too, and in the leagues of bloomless heather the birds were nesting, and the dainty white bedstraw and the tiny yellow portantilla peeped among the grey bents. But the two men recked little of the harmonies of russet and grey and airy blue. Monjoy carried in his pocket a hammer and a short iron gavelock, and they grubbed sometimes in the choked bellpits, where the rain still trickled and whispered to the shaft below, sometimes at the dean-heads where the rills slipped down to the valleys, sometimes south over rocky Soyland and the Ridges of Brotherton and Holdsworth, and sometimes up the High Moor itself, where nothing stirred but the sheep and birds and the world seemed to end beyond the next undulation of the waist-high heather. At nightfall they would return to Horwick together, dusty and thirsty, and so lost in earth or lime-rubbings, that Sally Northrop would not have them in her kitchen till they had scraped or drenched themselves. Then they would sit for a couple of hours watching Cicely as she stitched or nursed. Monjoy often left first, and as he put on his coat the muffled knocking of stones would come from his pockets.
Sally, during her own courtship, had known how to set the lamp in the window and to go loitering long ways to the milking or the taking-in of weft; and she favoured Monjoy’s wooing scandalously. She was a merry little body still, save when a word or a look or less put her in mind of Jim; and she delighted to whisper sly words to Cicely and to watch the flush deepen on her cheek.
“A great red bear!” she would whisper. “I’ve seen him watching your foot o’ the wheel-truddle, and d’ye know what he thinks? ‘A cradle-rocker, not a truddle,’ thinks Arthur; and you dandling Jimmy as if men hadn’t eyes an’ that!”
“Nay, then, you shall dandle him yourself,” Cicely would reply, reddening; “men needs little ’ticing on in such matters.”
“Ye didn’t find that out from Arthur, I’ll be bound! Who was it?... Who was it, puss?... Ellah, I’ll swear, and I can guess when and where!”
But, though Sally knew well enough that once in a while, of a December or January night, Cicely had taken a watch at her father’s lambing-sheds on the moor, not even to Sally would Cicely speak of a certain hour of her cousin’s infirmity when, all her nature suddenly disordered and ajar, she had saved herself from his mood, blundering through the dark heather and hearing behind her in the lonely cabin the sounds by which he did violence to himself. Nothing but pure pity for his alienation had entered her heart; but from that night had dated occasional quick changes in her cheek, as if she surprised something in her own thoughts that her modesty would not have had there.