Honorine asked Jeremy more than once how he came to be acquainted with Mr. Stennis. But his only reply was that "there were certain things which it was good for women to know, but how he first came to meet Mr. Stennis was not one of them."
CHAPTER XXIV
THE BREAKING DAM
(The Narrative continued by Joe Yarrow.)
I have given this part of Elsie's diary in full, as she wrote it out, both because she was so far from the truth as to what was happening above ground, and because her style of writing is so literary—far before mine, with words that I should have to look out in the dictionary.
Why, of course, there was no end of a rumpage. The whole country rose. It is the third time that tells. You never saw anything like it. Farmers and their men flocked in from the field, and took shot guns and hay forks, or tied scythes to poles, making ugly enough weapons. The village of Breckonside emptied itself. It chanced that a little boy, Frankie Leslie, on his way to school, had seen "eour teacha," as he called Elsie, in the company of a tall woman in black going through the pastures towards the woods of the Deep Moat.
That was enough. That was evidence at last. There was to be no pausing this time. The place was to be ransacked, if not sacked. And what would have happened to the poor mad sisters if it had not been for the presence of mind of Mr. Ablethorpe, it is better not surmising. I don't believe that the idea of compelling witches by torture to release their victims is extinct—at least, not in such a place as Breckonside. That mob of angry men and furious women which flocked out towards the house of the Golden Farmer would have taken to the red-hot knitting needle and the flat-irons as naturally as their ancestors two hundred years ago on Witches' Hill, a little beyond the Bridge End. They would have burned, too, only that they were afraid of the police—I don't mean old Codling, but the real police, who would come up from East Dene and Longtown.
I had seen the first surprise about the empty mail gig which had been escaladed by the murderers of poor Harry Foster. I had seen the midnight levy when my father's mare came home without him. But far beyond either was the sight of that silent flood of people, at the noon of a winter's day, when in the ordinary course of things they would have been sitting down to dinner: breaking barriers, throwing down gates, and spreading over the fields in the direction of Deep Moat Grange! It fairly took the breath from me.
Once I had even been a leader at that sort of thing. I had found the traces of the crime that had been committed in the case of poor Harry. I had been my father's son on the second occasion. People had deferred to me. Even Ebie the blacksmith, with his fore-hammer over his shoulder, had asked my advice. But now I was nobody. No one was anybody. A force which no one could control had been set in motion. I understood better what is that Democracy of which they speak. It is the setting in motion of destructive forces, always most dangerous when most silent.