Thus hurriedly, for Cicely Eastwood, came and went her delicious moment.
After that, not the clogger’s shop only, but half Horwick and all Back o’ th’ Mooin were abuzz with the news. The strict three days of the spring fair were over, but Horwick seemed as if it would never know the sober traffic of a Thursday again. Far into the warm nights lads and men sat on the pieceboards and drank ale. James Eastwood was boisterously complimented on the winding up of his clock. The jest of Cope and fat Dooina was renewed, and Eastwood Ellah, it was said, had been seized with another igg and had talked loudly and disjointedly in the middle of the Fullergate. The wedding was fixed for the second week in June; that was also the appointed time for the shearing of Eastwood’s sheep, and one supper was to celebrate both events.
The wedding morning broke hot and cloudless, with a sky of midsummer blue and larks invisible in it singing tirelessly. The bell in the squat belfry at Wadsworth began to ring at eight o’clock in the morning, and up the Shelf from Horwick and down the Scout from Back o’ th’ Mooin hundreds of people poured. From behind the houses at the top of the village, where a stream had been dammed for the washing that had taken place the day before, came the constant calling of penned sheep; and now and then a man passed up the street with a bucket of tar or ruddle for marking. You could hardly get into the “Gooise” for drinkers and merrymakers, and a throng as dense filled James Eastwood’s yard, where three tables were already set up. Matthew Moon had come, little in his way as were women and weddings; and to top all, Monjoy had taken no refusal but Jeremy Cope must come also.
The parson passed from his house at a quarter-past eleven; but no sooner had he set foot in the church but out he came again, beside himself with indignation. The church was a tumult of laughing and shouting and hilarity. Pim o’ Cuddy was fetched from the bellrope and sternly bidden to announce that there would be no wedding, and Pim fled from the ire in the parson’s face. His appearance in the clerk’s desk was the signal for a shout; and in consternation, Arthur Monjoy, who had but just arrived, sought the parson. The parson was already half way to his own house.
“Be off, if you are he!” the parson cried; “or bow your back to the pillars, as Samson did, that God’s defiled house may overwhelm you all together!”
But Monjoy’s own rage and remorse were so apparent, and he besought the parson so movingly for one minute in which he himself might restore order, that the parson cried, “I give you three minutes, then; but if so much as a whisper reaches my ears——” Monjoy was gone. Before the parson had fairly turned back, the engraver, coiner, forger, unlicensed smelter of metals, was in the clerk’s desk and Pim o’ Cuddy was pitched into the arms of the horde below. As he stood there, it was hardly too much to say of him that he looked a king, a barbarian king of some older time, who made laws with his eye and executed them with his hand.
“Have you done?” he roared.
At his wrathful voice the tumult fell.
“Take those caps off!”
There was a movement, every cap was removed, and Monjoy’s head moved arrogantly from side to side.