That night of terror and ruin did not see the roll of death made up. Such catastrophes have far-reaching effects. The wet, the exposure, the shock, were sure to produce after-sickness and succeeding mortality.
With ready hospitality, the parsonage, the inns, the houses of the well-to-do, were thrown open to receive those temporarily homeless, and food, warmth and clothing were forced upon them. But such as were received felt that they could not protract their stay and burden unduly their hosts, and insisted on returning prematurely to their sodden houses, there to contract rheumatic fevers and inflammations.
Twenty years ago, the author of this story wrote an account of such a disaster in a novel, the first on which he essayed his pen. Time has rolled away, and like the flood, has buried much; and amongst the things it has swept off and sunk in oblivion is that book. Probably not a dozen copies of it exist. He may now be permitted to repeat what was there written, when the impression produced by the cataclysm was fresh and vivid; and let not the rare possessor of the lost novel charge him with plagiarism if he repeats something of his former description.
Near the spot where the Keld left the hills had stood a public-house called the Horse and Jockey. The full violence of the descending wave fell on it and effaced it utterly. The innkeeper's body was never found; the child's cradle, with the child in it, had gone down the stream, kept from overbalancing by the kitchen cat, and so escaped destruction. The beer casks floated ashore some miles down, were never claimed, and were tapped and drunk dry by some roughs. The sign of Horse and Jockey came to land twenty miles away, unhurt; it was the most worthless article the house had possessed. About a mile and a half above Mergatroyd was a row of new cottages, lately erected on money borrowed from a building society. They were of staring red brick, with sandstone heads to doors and windows; the flood carried away three out of the four.
In the first lived a respectable wool-picker with wife and children, all Wesleyans. He and his wife and child were swept from life in a moment, and supplied the preacher at their chapel with a topic for his next Sunday's discourse.
In the second lived a widow, who sold 'spice,' that is to say, sweets, together with sundry articles in the grocery line; a mighty woman, rotund and red, with a laugh and a joke for everyone; a useful woman to mothers in their troubles, and to children with the toothache, whooping cough, and other maladies. Black bottle and peppermint drops, Mother Bunch's syrup, soothing powders, porous plasters, embrocations, and heal-alls various, and of various degrees of mischievousness, were her specifics, and when the doses were nasty her lemon-drops and sugar-candy were freely given to cleanse the mouth of the taste of medicine. Now, she was gone down the river, her lollipops dissolved, her medicines dispersed. Away she had gone, floundering and spluttering, till her lungs were filled with the fluid she involuntarily imbibed, and then she sank and was caught among some sunken tree-snags, and her body was afterwards recovered from among them.
In the third cottage resided a musical shoemaker, a man with one love, and that the love of his bass viol. A wiry, solemn man, greatly in request at all concerts, able to conduct a band, or take almost any instrument himself, but loving best—a viol.
Now, he was gone, and grit had been washed into the sacred case of the cherished instrument, ruined along with its master.
In the last cottage of the row lived a drunken, good-for-nothing fellow, who did odd jobs of work; a fellow who had driven his own wife with her bairns from the house, and lived with another woman, as intemperate as himself, and with a mouth as foul as his own. This house and those within were spared.
'Well, now,' said an elder to the preacher, after the sermon at Providence Chapel next Sunday, 'ah, did think thou wer't boun' to justify the ways o' Providence.'