Читать книгу Thompson's Progress - C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne - Страница 3

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Clara, the dog of doubtful ancestry, lifted a mottled nose in the air and gave utterance to the faintest possible whimper, and Tom’s Son lifted his head above the bramble clump, and looked sharply round him through the aisles of the tree-stems. There was no one in view, but he was quite aware that the unhandsome Clara possessed several senses which were denied to even his acuteness, and, moreover, that she never departed from her poacher’s taciturnity without adequate cause. So he clapped an extra knee on the rabbit-net, and stooped his ear to the pine-needles on the turf.

Beneath him he could hear the scared rabbits kicking danger-signals with their hind-legs against the walls of the burrow, and the scratchings of his brown hob ferret as it harried them. But telephoned in and amongst these sounds there were others which he presently recognized as distant footfalls—thum-thums when they fell on the turf, thush-thush on the moist autumn soil, and sash-crackle when they pushed through gorse and bramble, or trod on the dead sticks of the undergrowth.

Tom’s Son made a quick diagnosis of the position. “Yon’s t’keeper,” he decided, “wi’ a mate,” and promptly wished he had been working the hob ferret on a line instead of free.

Prudence suggested desertion of the ferret and an immediate retreat. Professional pride declaimed that honour would be lost if the hob were left behind.

So far no sound of the advancing enemy came to him through the air, but he kept his sharp ears strained to their fullest pitch to catch the first warning. He took in three of his outlying nets. As he was in the very act and article of unpegging a fourth, a scared rabbit bolted into it and butted spasmodically amongst the meshes. Again prudence urged that, in view of possible complications, it was advisable not to be carrying a recently killed rabbit upon the person. But Tom’s Son had that within him which made it almost impossible to jettison property once acquired; and, moreover, now as in after life, the riskiness of a speculation never scared him if he saw an opportunity of good profit and the means of bringing off the venture successfully. So he gave the rabbit a skilful coup de grâce, staled it, and slipped the limp, warm remains into a skirt-pocket.

Already he had the contours of the hummocky ground, the plan of the coverts, and the line of his own retreat marked out in his mind with entire accuracy. He had decided to a hand’s-breadth the direction in which the keeper and his companion were coming, and had mapped out to a yard the point which they would have to pass before there was any necessity for his retirement. He was a lad, as may be seen, who left nothing to chance if calculation could make it certainty.

The one thing he could not decide was whether the keeper had brought his dog, and even Clara’s wonderful talents stopped short at giving information on a nice point like this. If the dog was present he must make a long retreat, as the dog’s nose would be a danger if he and Clara remained in the neighbourhood, and he took no avoidable risks. If, on the other hand, there was no dog, he knew of a snug place of hiding close at hand which was quite man-proof. It was part of his capital, the knowledge of these places. Then he could return to business as soon as the keeper had gone his ways. If only that miserable hob ferret would bolt those two rabbits which were left, and come out ...

The keeper’s brown cloth cap showed at the appointed place, and Tom’s Son doubled up under the lee of the bushes and glided away. The hob must be deserted after all. Annoying, but there was no help for it. Moreover, he was learning young that fine art of cutting a loss which would serve him so well in later years. So he ran on by the ways he had marked out for himself, and Clara slunk silently along at his heels.

A quick reconnaissance told him that Hustler, the gamekeeper, had (like a fool) come without his dog, and so the retreat took its shorter alternative. They came to a portly old oak that had been pollarded by lightning. Many a time had Tom’s Son gathered acorns from beneath its branches to fatten the rabbits in the burrows before he poached them. Moreover, he had learned that the tree, though to all appearance sound, was a mere funnel inside, and indeed it had more than once served him as a place of temporary residence.

He picked up Clara and clapped her round his neck, lamb-fashion, and that intelligent mongrel clung on there skilfully. Then, with boot-toes and knees and fingers, he climbed the rough bark till he got to a branch, swung himself up till he reached the crown, and thereupon disappeared, and Clara with him.

Meanwhile Hustler and his companion were coming at a steady plod, and presently the gamekeeper’s instinct became aware of a recent disturbance of the ground. He should have seen rabbits round this warren; a pheasant or two should have been feeding on those acorns; but the wood was desert and quiet except for the twittering of small birds. His trained eye began to rove about more curiously, and once he found a place on a shale bank where Tom’s Son, in spite of all his thoughtful cunning, had been compelled to leave a boot-print.

He stooped a moment and examined the tiny fountains of muddied water which had welled into the nail-pocks. “That’s fresh wi’in this last hour, Hophni,” said he.

“It’ll be Tom’s Son, yon lad I telled tha’ about.”

“ ’Appen so, ’appen no,” said the keeper. “Let’s be moving and see if we can leet on him. Cower quiet.”

They walked on stealthily, and the keeper’s woodcraft was severely tested in following the tracks, because Tom’s Son, as became an intelligent poacher, made a study of walking invisibly. But in another score of yards the rape of the burrow lay patent to any professional eye.

Hophni Asquith, the keeper’s companion, could not, it is true, read the marks till they were pointed to him; but when Hustler displayed the impress of the poacher’s knee and toe, the newly riven earth where pegs had held down the rabbit-nets, and the dozen other matters which told an expert the exact history of what had been done, the younger man read these things eagerly enough for himself, and repeated with a fresh snap of delight that this was surely the work of Tom’s Son. “He’s a jill ferret that they tell me’s a marvel,” said Asquith.

The keeper of a sudden stiffened into immobility and motioned for silence. A scared rabbit bolted, and presently a lithe brown animal came capering out of the burrow. It stopped for a moment, framed in the archway, and then ran out into the open. The keeper stretched out a large, gentle hand and secured it.

“Well, Hophni lad, this ’ere ferret’s a ’ob, and so tha’rt wrong. Appears to me there’s a good deal of dislike atwixt this Tom’s Son, if that’s his name, and thee. What’s it about?”

“There’s a lass that I like that likes ’im better. Not that he walks her out. But she’ll noan walk wi’ me, an’ if I’d ’im gaoled, I’m thinking she’d forget t’beggar.”

“I care nowt for thee nor tha’ lass,” said the keeper, with cheerful candour; “but if this chap comes here after my rabbits, I’m wi’ tha’ i’ wanting ’im stowed away i’ t’jug. We’ll just go ower yonder out o’ sight and wait a while. ’Appen he’ll come back. It’s us that’s scared him, you can see that, but I must say he’s picked up his feet and run away remarkable cautious. There’s not a bootmark to show onywheres. But he’ll noan be so pleased at losing yon ferret, and ’appen he’ll come back to fotch it. We’ll go an’ set wersens down agen yon gurt oak.”

Some impish fate decided that the tree in question should be that lightning-pollarded patriarch which has already sprouted into this history, and when Tom’s Son heard the thump of their shoulders, not three inches from his own ear, he could have laughed aloud in his amusement. It is terribly hard at times to keep such excellent jests as these to oneself.

The mirth, however, died out of him to some extent as he listened. Asquith, with frankly unconcealed spite, was giving the history of this poacher to the keeper. He was telling how, almost as soon as the lad was breeched, he descended with his father to work as a ‘hurrier,’ or propeller of corves (which are miniature coal-trucks), in one of the collieries. This event first took place in the year 1842, before the Education Department was born and when labour laws were mostly conspicuous by their absence. In the winter months he was lowered down the pit-shaft before daybreak, and so did not see the sun, except on Sundays, for six months together. The buckle-end of a belt gave him encouragement when he was tired, and as he did not die under the treatment he grew uncommonly strong and hardy. “He could throw thee an’ me together,” said Asquith, and spat disgustedly at the thought.

The keeper smiled contemplatively and felt his forearm. “Tha’st been brought up i’ t’miln,” he said, “but I can wrastle aboon a bit mysen. I’d like to have a thraw wi’ him. Why, he’s nobbut a lad. He’s nobbut sixteen or seventeen. And what’s his name, dost ta say?”

“Tom’s Son they call him i’ Bierley. His mother died when he wor a bairn. They called his father Tom.”

“Tom who?”

“T never heard t’owd chap given any other name than Tom, and as he’s been dead these two year now, killed by a fall o’ muck i’ t’pit, I don’t suppose that there’s any that remembers.”

The talk dropped between them then, but at intervals, to beguile the tedium of waiting, the history was continued in scraps. It appeared that the original Tom had done a trifle of poaching at intervals, according to the usual collier custom which then held in the Low Moor and Bradford districts, and (also according to custom) blooded his son to the sport as soon as that urchin was old enough. The original Tom was a poor poacher, and took to the woods only in a dilletante way. But Tom’s Son proved a genius and an enthusiast at the business, and had frequently to be checked by applications of the paternal belt, lest he should lose the entire taste for the beauties and necessities of coal-mining.

After the fall of earth made him an orphan, as all the household property was swallowed up in providing sufficient pomp for the funeral, Tom’s Son became for a while a lodger in various cottages, but attended less and less at the pit as the months went on, and finally ceased even to have an official residence amongst the haunts of men during those seasons when game was sufficiently edible to find a market. At intervals, it seemed, he appeared in Bierley and Wibsey, and other villages, to sell his wares, and more than one tired mill-lass—for that was the era before the ten-hour day—gave him free leave to pay her court. But not even a love-affair could anchor him, and where he bestowed himself no man knew.

“I’d have liked thee to cop him if it could have been managed,” said Hophni; “but if he’s too artful for that, there’s another way. Sithee, here’s the law o’ t’land on poaching. I weared two shilling on it. Here’s the point we can touch him on. Now read that.”

Apparently the keeper read, for there was silence for a minute or so, broken only by the faint rustle of a blunt finger tracing the words laboriously along the paper, and then a grunt or two of satisfaction. “By Go’!” he said, “I didn’t know the law ran as simple as that. Why, if he goes on at his present gait—and there’s no reason why he should change—we can just pick him up and run him in when we choose.”

Inside the tree-trunk, Tom’s Son, the listener, was wrung with a sudden clap of fear. Of what nature was this danger they spoke about so confidently? He did not know. It was beyond his art to guess. He saw no means of finding out. It came to him as a horrid shock that he could not read.

His cool nerve, of which he had been so proud, seemed to slip entirely away from the confines of his system. He had a strong imagination, and it depicted to him in that moment visions of gaols and diagrams of treadmills in the most lurid of colouring. He had, up to now, thought himself armed at every point by his courage, his ability, and his cunning; as he was a poacher, it was his ambition and vanity to be the most perfect and skilful kind of poacher; and lo! here he was told of a gap in his defences, whose position it was beyond all his art to discover. So profound, indeed, was his agitation, that Clara, by intuition, shared in it, and began to move uneasily in her form, and even forgot her poacher’s manners so much as to utter the ghost of a whimper.

It was Clara’s agitation which cooled his wits again. Panic is the most catchy thing on earth, but one finds here and there rare fellows on whom the sight of panic in others has the most amazingly bracing effect; and it is these who in war, and in trade, and in everything else, become leaders. Tom’s Son slid out a strong, steady hand and laid it on Clara’s mottled nose, and Clara looked up and saw from her master’s eye that, outwardly at any rate, he was calm again, and that was enough for her. She was quite willing to accept the opinion of anyone else upon the situation, so long as it was coolly and steadily given. She was eminently one of the ruck. She had no ambition to think and lead for herself.

Tom’s Son, once more his own lad again, decided that the situation needed a remedy, and, churning it over in his nimble brain, plotted out with very little waste of time what that remedy must be. He must learn to read. It was typical of him that he tried to find other alternatives. It was typical of him also that in less than a minute he had reviewed every other possible course, and proved to himself that each of them held its own insuperable flaw. But once he had made up his mind upon the point, he dismissed the entire subject from his thought, and employed his imagination upon quite alien matters, till the keeper and Hophni Asquith chose to go, and left him free to follow their example.

He climbed out of his shelter then, dusted himself free from dead leaves and punk—for he always had a niceness about his clothes—and started off watchfully to get free from the woods, with Clara treading delicately at his heels.

Now Tom’s Son, though fully determined to acquire the art of reading, was by no means minded to expend unnecessary capital over the matter if it could be avoided. In the first place, he destined what money he had for other purposes; and, in the second, the love for a deal lay deep within his blood, and it dearly tickled him to get the upper hand in one, through sheer lust for conquest.

However, Mr Squire Tordoff, the teacher, whom Tom’s Son went then to interview, was as close-fisted an elderly man as, in the years 1840-50, could be found in that part of Yorkshire. He had begun life as a hand-loom weaver, but on accession to the ancestral property—which consisted of three low-rented cottages—he had left his family to propel the clacking looms in the upper chamber, and himself set up a night-school for the instruction of grown-ups. In earlier days he had been a devout Chartist, had drilled with a pike in ’38, and twice in the autumn of that year had dodged the sabres of indignant dragoons in Bradford streets. He still held to some very weird and revolutionary political opinions, and education for the masses was his constant outcry. Hence the night-school. But he tempered fanaticism with commerce, and scoffers held that once he had raised enthusiasm amongst the unlettered, and lured them into his night-school, they found the fees there exorbitantly heavy.

Squire Tordoff and Tom’s Son were old antagonists. Many a time had Squire pointed out to the lad the tremendous advantage of education, and Tom’s Son (without prejudice) had admitted the point, but held that so strenuous an apostle ought to supply his wares gratis. They were quite friendly over the matter. Once Squire had tried to break Tom’s Son’s head for his impudence, and found out that he had tackled a professional boxer, who was built apparently of chilled steel, with copper fastenings, and got soundly trounced for his pains. But, of course, he did not bear any enmity for that. He merely boasted of the circumstances in Bradford afterwards, as showing what thews Bierley could produce amongst its young.

When Tom’s Son called at the Tordoff residence the family there were partaking of their evening meal of oatmeal porridge delicately flavoured with bacon grease. He produced a fine plump rabbit from a skirt-pocket—a rabbit from a burrow which he had carefully fed with acorns before poaching it—and threw it into a corner of the room. It always pleased him to make unexpected gifts.

He waited till the meal was at an end, and the porridge bowls were gathered on the sink, and the clogs of the household had clattered off, and overhead the hand-looms had once more begun their clacking, and then he tackled his subject without any unnecessary preface.

“Squire,” he said, “I want that schooling. But I’ll noan pay tha’.”

“Then, my young friend,” said Squire Tordoff, lighting a long pipe and preparing for argument, “you may just stay where you are in outer darkness. If a man of the present day appreciates that the blessings of education will put him on the level of the so-called aristocracy of this country, and yet will not pay a small fee to the professor who drags him there, he may just stay where his fathers were, amongst the beasts that perish.”

“I’ll pay tha’ one rabbith a week for three nights’ teaching. And ye know well, Squire, that my rabbiths is allus fine fat ’uns.”

“Your rabbits are plump, Tom, and I’m free to own that they’re the best sold in this district, though how you manage to find them in such fine condition I do not know. But your proposal that I should accept your fee in kind is not accepted. I might mention that when rabbits are needed in this household, I have some skill in culling them from their native hedgerows myself. Put your wares on the market, Tom, and bring your school-fees in current coin of the realm, like a gentleman.”

“I’m noan a gentleman, though I will be one of these days, and talking ‘fine,’ like thee and t’parson. Better tak’ t’rabbiths, Squire, or I’ll be forcing tha’ to snap at a worse offer afore I’ve done with tha’.”

“As you would say in the vernacular, Mr Thompson, t’brass or nowt are my terms; and if you don’t like them, clear out of this dwelling and let me read the paper. I only have my turn with it for another hour, and then I have to give it up. As it is, you’ve been wasting me a good half-inch of tallow candle with your idle talk, and I think the least you can do as a recompense is to tell me where you get those fine fat rabbits of yours. All those that I can find are as lean as greyhounds.”

Squire Tordoff quite expected a refusal of this request, but made it on the principle that little is lost by asking. Somewhat to his surprise, he was promptly told of a burrow where the rabbits had achieved a portliness past belief, but was bidden to raid them the following afternoon, or they would be collected by another hand. After which Tom’s Son departed from the house feeling very pleased with himself.

Squire dipped into the sevenpenny newspaper, which he and others subscribed for amongst them, with a feeling of conquest and complacency, though if he could have known the thoughts which had been passing in the brain of the nimble-minded diplomatist who had just left him, he might not have felt so secure of his future happiness and ease. But then, of course, it was too early in life for Tom’s Son to have earned the reputation of being “a queer fellow to cross,” which was sometimes so humorously applied to him in later years.

Tom’s Son, on his part, laid his plans with care. He artfully let it come to the ears of Phineas Asquith (brother to Hophni of that ilk) that he intended raiding a certain warren in the Low Moor woods on the succeeding afternoon, to supply a large order which he had received for rabbits, and then, to clinch matters still further, went and did a few minutes’ flirtation (coram publico) with the girl of Hophni’s fancy. It was a case somewhat of wheels within wheels, but Tom’s Son had a clear head and saw his way through. The trifle of courtship would come promptly to Hophni’s ears and keep his jealous wrath warm and active; Phineas, knowing the feud, would certainly make it his business to tell Hophni of the poaching plans out of sheer clannishness; Hophni would lay information with Hustler, the keeper; and for the rest of the campaign also Tom’s Son had his careful arrangements.

In due time, then, he betook himself across country to Low Moor woods, with the usual Clara at his heels, and, after depositing that intelligent mongrel in a place of security, went on alone under the trees, and presently obliterated himself from sight and scent amongst some convenient undergrowth. It was just possible that the keeper might have the gumption to bring a dog with him, and, as Tom’s Son knew that fact quite well, he remembered there is nothing like loam, new-rootled, to neutralize the human taint so far as a dog’s or a rabbit’s nose is concerned, and used his knowledge.

The tedium of waiting was in no wise heavy to him. He had his keen commercial instincts even at that early stage, but upon occasion he could eliminate these entirely from his mind, and leave free for work that artistic half of his soul, which showed him more than is granted to most men the beauty of the woods even in their winter dress, and helped him to appreciate with almost an animal’s ardency the music which the wind and the wet and the things of life make amongst their branches. I think he had a more receptive eye than most people, and certainly an ear capable of taking up a larger gamut of melody.

But with all this he was no dreamer, to get lost beyond hope of rescue in his dreams. He could awake with a dog’s quickness to the stress of everyday life; and when from far off the rustle of a blundering footstep on a broken branch fell upon his ear, he sloughed off in that moment his poetic mood, and became once more the poacher and schemer.

He chuckled presently to find that the newcomer was his particular enemy, Hophni Asquith, and watched him get to cover; and when, in the course of another half-hour, Squire Tordoff resolved himself out of the mist of distant trees, and came up with clumsy caution, Tom’s Son shook with noiseless laughter.

Squire, though at home he preached loudly the common inheritance of ground game, the inalienable rights of man, and his own contempt for unjust game laws, was openly nervous. His process of culling the rabbits was to net all convenient holes of a burrow except one, and then to introduce down this a spluttering reeky firework of damp gunpowder, which, in theory, should cause all residents to bolt without standing upon the order of their exit. His fingers trembled as he pegged down the nets, and when it came to striking a light for his engine, the wood rang with the tack-tack-tack of his steel upon the flint, and he barked his fingers four times over through sheer scare before he got a spark upon the tinder. To watch him casting back frightened squints, first over this shoulder and then over that, was, thought Tom’s Son, one of the most exquisitely humorous scenes he had ever peeped upon.

But it hung in Tom’s mind that he did not make up all of the audience. He knew the position of Hophni. It struck him also that the warren was in the flat floor of a gully, and that Hophni Asquith blocked one of the only two available exits. Presently he concluded that Hustler, the keeper, would come up from the other direction, and so they would net the excellent Squire between them.

These deductions did not surprise him in the least; in fact, it was all worked in with his plan of campaign that Squire Tordoff should be in this way surrounded and pinned. But it was by no means part of the game that the man should be actually captured; and so, having made sure in his own mind that the trap was acting perfectly, he slipped from his cover into the narrow gutter cut by a tiny beck, and in his noiseless way made for the burrow where Squire was working.

He knew he was well out of sight of Hophni. He knew also that Hustler, if he was watching in the neighbourhood (which was probable), could not see him. But, for all that, he moved rapidly, because, like quick decision, quick movement was part of his nature. Life seemed to him so full and so busy that it was sheer gratuitous sin to waste time over any of its details.

His great trouble was how to make Squire Tordoff aware of his presence without causing that doughty person (who was as nervous as a hare) to start violently, and probably advertise the cause of his emotion to the watchful Hophni. He managed, however, to let his presence be known just as Squire extracted a bolting rabbit from one of the nets, and though start the old man did, to any watcher his sudden movement and uplifted hand might have been one of the ordinary actions of the chase. Indeed, the upraised hand descended next instant on the rabbit’s neck to give it a coup de grâce, for Squire Tordoff had his pride like other people, and did not wish to leave on record even with Tom’s Son his exhibition of fear. Moreover, he had his lips ready to utter an ordinary greeting, but there was a look on Tom’s Son’s face that froze the speech behind his teeth, and though he was a dogged, obstinate man himself, he fell to wondering for an instant as to what there could be in the lad’s looks which sent out such an unrefusable command.

However, it was presently shown to him in very unmistakable signs that there was danger abroad, but that he personally was to show no consciousness of it. Obedient to the stronger mind, he dropped down again on to his knees and busied himself at his employment, and though his face beaded, and his fingers twitched as though St Vitus had visited him, he continued to exhibit a very tolerable presentment of the undisturbed amateur poacher.

Tom’s Son, with a gurgle of intense laughter, stalked nearer along the ditch, and in a delicately modulated whisper spoke with splendid descriptiveness of the dangers that encompassed them: how there was Hophni on this side, the keeper on that, and the shale walls of the ravine on either flank, too steep for a man of Squire’s figure to scale. “But ’appen they’ll let tha’ off wi’ a fine when tha’st up before t’magistrates,” Tom’s Son concluded, with wicked consolation, “as it will be a first offence.”

“ ’Twill not be a first offence,” groaned Squire. “I’ve been there twice before, and got warned. It will be gaol for me this time, and no option.”

“Well,” said Tom’s Son, shaking in his ditch, “ ’appen gaol is noan as bad as they say. And tha’ can tell afterwards, when tha’rt making speeches Saturday neet at t’public, that tha’ went theer for conscience sake.”

It was a neat application from Squire’s former lectures, but it did not soothe the victim. On the contrary, it moved him to muffled and somewhat irrational profanity, though at the same time he studiously went on manipulating the rabbit-nets and the burrows, for the benefit of possible onlookers. Finally, “It isn’t as if I was younger,” he said. “I’m too old to offer myself as a martyr now, for the people’s good; and besides, the case is not clear here, and the motive might be misunderstood. Tom lad, I’m going to make a run for it, and do you come with me. Then, if the keeper tries to stop us, you can give him a rap over the head.”

“Not me. I’m noan poaching, and I’ve nowt to run for. Run ye and get copped—unless, that is, a fine would suit tha’ better.”

The old man caught somewhat pitifully at the alternative. “A fine, Tom. How do you mean?”

“Give me that schooling for nowt, and I’ll get tha’ off, and neither Hophni nor t’keeper shall know where tha’st gone to.”

“Certainly, Tom. I’ll teach you with pleasure, and do it free, as you say; I’ll teach you all I know. You’re a bright, smart lad, and I always intended to do something for you.”

“Ye sung a different tune t’other neet.”

“I was hurried. I wanted to read the paper. But I thought after you when you’d gone, and intended to see you about it again some other day. Quick now, Tom. How am I to get away? I’ve just seen Hustler down yonder through the trees, and if I’ve caught sight of him it’s likely he’s noticed me. Can you catch Hophni and give him ‘what for’ if I run that way?”

“Cower down i’ t’dyke here aside o’ me.”

“But, my good lad, they’re certain to ferret us out of there.”

“Tha’st no ’casion to pay t’fine,” said Tom’s Son drily, “if t’gaol suits tha’ better.”

Squire Tordoff wiped the sweat from a very white face, and got down into the little watercourse.

“If tha’ splashes and slips like that,” said Tom’s Son sharply, “I shall leave tha’, and tha’lt go to Wakefield after all. Try and handle your feet cleverer. Look at me.”

They worked across the floor of the little ravine, and part of the way up one of its sides. Twice Tom’s Son raised his head above the lip of the watercourse and took an observation from behind the cover of brambles. Hophni Asquith had left his hiding-place, and had gone to the ravished burrow, and was foolishly fingering the abandoned nets. Presently he shouted, and the keeper’s reply came from quite close at hand. But Tom’s Son did not unduly hurry the retreat, and Squire Tordoff sweated with fear as he crouched along at his heels, following the windings of the channel.

But presently the ditch widened, and its walls grew more tall, and then in front of them there opened out what seemed to be an abandoned quarry, with its sides covered with fern and bush and grasses, and its floor filled with a tiny pond. There was no possible scaling of its walls. It seemed to the old man a cul de sac, and he almost whimpered as he said so.

“Watch where I put my feet,” said Tom’s Son, “and come on; or, if you don’t like that, stay behind and get copped.”

Squire did as he was instructed, and found that there were stepping-stones not more than an inch below the surface of the pond. So he got across to a clump of elders at the farther side of the quarry, and discovered there a black tunnel disappearing into the hill and floored with black, forbidding water.

“For the Lord’s sake, lad, not in there! It’s an old day-hole, and it will be full of foul air; and the roof may fall on us. Nay, lad, better gaol than that.”

“Tha’st comed this far,” said Tom’s Son, catching the old man’s hand into his own strong grip, “and I’m noan bahn to leave tha’ behind for evidence. This is my own residence, Squire, and I wish to keep it particular private from Hustler and that Hophni Asquith. Now, sithee here,” he added, when he saw that his visitor’s terror was going to get the better of him, “call out one word aloud and I’ll stun tha! Tha’st n’casion to be ’flaid. They’ve noan gotten coal from this day-’oil these forty year, but t’roof’s as sound as ever it was, and t’air’s as sweet as blackberries.”

He ducked his head and slopped off into the darkness, with Squire plunging along at his heels, and that eminent man tried to tell himself that if there was a pit in the unseen contours of the floor, Tom’s Son’s plunge would demonstrate the fact, and his companion would not necessarily be involved in the fall. Although he had lived in a colliery district all his days, this was his first journey underground; he was a hand-loom weaver by caste and trade, and these always held themselves socially above the colliers; and so the dark, dank, echoing tunnel daunted him past belief.

Of a sudden Tom’s Son, by a quick twist, wrenched free his hand, and Squire whimpered with a new terror at finding himself orphaned in this abominable blackness. “Lad, lad,” he cried, “give me back your hand! You’re a collier, and can see in the dark, but I can’t, Tom, and I’m afraid! Tom lad, come back to me! Tom, I’m afraid!”

“Cower quiet where you are, you owd foil! Nowt’ll bite tha’. I’m seeking t’plank. There was a fault here i’ t’coal, an’ they sunk a shaft to find t’new seam. Shaft’s full o’ watter, and I’ve a plank weighted and sunk in it, if I could nobbut find t’string to fotch it up. Ah, here ’tis!”

There was a sound of heavy breathing, a splash or two, and then the clatter of the plank being thrown across the gap.

“Now grip my hand again and come on, and see tha’ doesn’t tread over into t’watter. T’plank’s nobbut a ten-inch ’un.”

Again the powerful unseen hand drew Squire along, and his fumbling feet shuffled sideways across that invisible plank in terrified three-inch strides. The blackness that crowded in around gave him physical pain. At the thought of the horrid abyss beneath the plank his stomach rose till it almost choked him.

Tom’s Son left him again for a moment and drew across the plank, hiding it in some fold of the coal-seam. “It’ll noan be Hophni and Hustler that follow us in here, even if they do think of trying the entrance, which I doubt. But if they did, there’s a swim for them.”

“My God!” gasped Squire, “do you think that any man would walk into hell like this unless he were dragged?”

They were in a crossroad just then, and Tom’s Son’s laugh rumbled down three galleries. “Hell’s a place with a fire in it, don’t they say? Well, if I show tha’ a few lit coals, Squire, do not be ’flaid and think it hell.”

But Squire Tordoff’s mind was numb to any further accumulation of terrors. They turned and twisted on through more invisible galleries, now climbing steep banks, and now slithering down muddy hills and splashing through unseen ponds at their foot, and he blundered on with his hand in Tom’s Son’s lusty grip, walking like a man in a trance.

At length they halted in a place that was warm to the face, and dry and hard to the foot, and filled with a feeble glow of light; and though in his raised state this confirmed Squire’s worst belief, his mind had got its full load already and was incapable of further emotion. Here was hell, apparently warm and comfortable, and presently would arrive the devil. After coming to which conclusion he shut his eyes, and either slept or fainted.

When next he blinked into wakefulness again, he found himself resting very cosily on a bed of crisp, dry bracken, and was conscious of an appetizing smell of cooking meats. He looked round and saw a small, low room, some nine feet cube, lit by a most ordinary rushlight dip, and furnished chiefly by the well-built, well-groomed person of Thomas Tom’s Son, and a mongrel she-dog with a mottled nose. A vision of hell still hung mistily in his mind, and with it a picture of gridirons. Well, there was the gridiron truly enough, and a fire; but instead of an attendant with horns and hoofs, and the wicked man suffering penance, Tom’s Son was the operator, and a simple rabbit was his barbecue. He was tending it with salt, with butter, and with pinches of pepper, and the scent which arose from the performance was appetizing beyond words. Indeed, it was that scent more than anything else which brought Mr Squire Tordoff back again to his level senses.

Tom’s Son noted his guest’s recovery and winked approval. “There’s nowt like victuals ready and waiting to wake ’em up with their teeth sharpened.” He broke the rabbit across its back and handed half across to his guest. Clara uncoiled, stretched luxuriously, and stood by for scraps; and the meal progressed pleasantly. Knives and forks were little used in 1850 in the West Riding of Yorkshire by people of the station of Tordoff and Tom’s Son, and, for that matter, are by no means deemed necessities to-day. As a further luxury, there was a stone bottle of beer which each consulted in turn; and when in the end the rabbit’s meat had disappeared, and Clara had enveloped the head and frame-work, Squire Tordoff, who lived on porridge most of his days, felt that he had seldom dined so satisfactorily.

He knew that he must be in some old coal-workings, but there was no awful darkness now. The candle and the fire dispelled his superstitions, and his curiosity began to work at pressure. “Where does the smoke from your fire go to, Tom?” he asked as a preliminary.

It appeared that the ventilating shaft of one of the better-bed mines came up from below just alongside the little room, and ended in a fat, round stack of brick on the hilltop above, and Tom had tapped this and used it as his private chimney. For fuel he had a collier’s pick, and could dig coal himself from its native seam not a dozen fathoms away. Rabbits, for food, were easy to come by. Only beer and an occasional tallow candle did he have to import. But for the most part rabbits and his fiddle sufficed him. He could play best in the dark or by the dancing firelight.

All this did not come out at once—first, because, although Tom’s Son could feel, he was no hand at some kinds of description; and secondly, because he had a curious coyness about letting anyone into the secret of his love for delicious sounds. There seemed to him something positively unchaste about Squire Tordoff’s hands when they stretched out to take hold of his fiddle.

But when Tom’s Son did not like a conversation, he could be brusque enough at those days in changing it. He brought out a lump of chalk, and with a sweep of his hand indicated one of the smooth black walls of the room. “The candle’s wasting,” he said. “Learn me to read.”

Squire Tordoff preferred himself to do what ordering was done, as a general thing. But he made no objection to this proposal. Without exactly owning it even to himself, he was more than a little afraid of Tom’s Son. So he wrote out the letters of the alphabet, great and small, and discovered that after three repetitions the pupil knew them as well as he did. Here was no dullard, such as he was used to. Here was a fellow with brain and with prodigious memory, and Squire got inflamed with the ardour of teaching him.

The store of rushlights, which numbered three, ran out, and they stoked up the fire to light them at their labours, till the little cube of a room carried an atmosphere like that of an oven. To this flickering illumination Tom’s Son learned how A CAT ATE A RAT, and other great truths usually acquired by infants, and, boldly discarding the initial stage of pot-hooks and hangers, advanced straight into letters, and with another piece of chalk wrote duplicates of the texts in a dashing hand.

The sun made no division of day and night in that troglodytic residence, and long after the teacher had dropped back into sleep on the dried bracken, the pupil was working on at his lesson with tireless energy. Here was the beginning, a ridiculously easy thing: presently the whole art of reading would leap within his grasp. He was thrilled with a sense of the power which would then be his.

It was one of the peculiar attributes of Tom’s Son that he seldom took more than four hours’ sleep in the twenty-four, and never more than five. It gives a man a great pull if he can refresh himself in half the time that his neighbours take over that operation; but at the same time, when he is young, it is rather apt to make him impatient of those who employ the slower methods.

Squire Tordoff was addicted to a nine hours’ sleep, and when at the end of three hours he was rootled up, he was touchy in temper. He complained that his mouth tasted as if he had been sucking a brass tap, which, in view of the stuffy heat of the room, was not to be wondered at, and when asked at once there and then to continue his course of lessons, flatly and rudely refused.

Tom’s Son’s big lower jaw began to protrude itself unpleasantly.

“Squire,” he said, “could ye find a way back to out-o’-doors?”

Squire blustered. “You must guide me, my good lad. Come, don’t answer back, but do as you’re bid. You’ve done me certain services, and I’ve repaid them handsomely. You’ve had your lesson, and I must say took good advantage of it. At intervals, if you come to my house, I shall be pleased to give you other lessons both in reading and writing, and I may throw in ciphering and other things. But first, my good lad, I must get back. My absence will be causing anxiety.”

That grim jaw of Tom’s Son softened by not one hair’s-breadth, and he in turn put forth his proposition. Having annexed a teacher, he saw no good cause in letting him go again. A month at the outside he reckoned as being necessary for the transference of all the learning that teacher possessed, and during that said month he might stay in the room in the disused mine, and Tom’s Son would feed him sumptuously on barbecued rabbits, with occasional tastes of beer.

The old man’s fury at these cool suggestions was worthy of his Chartist traditions. He was an Englishman, and demanded his freedom. He would be no man’s captive; he refused to work as a slave; he would die sooner than submit to such impertinent tyranny.

“Very well,” said Tom’s Son—“no teaching, no victual,” and proceeded to eat himself, but to offer no share of the repast to his guest. Squire pelted the meal, the place, and Tom himself with revilings—he was a man with an astonishing fluency of tongue—but got no answer for his pains. Tom’s Son was in thought going over again his lessons, till he assured himself all was locked in his memory and would not be forgotten.

Then, without an effort, he emptied his mind of all commercial things—ambition, poaching, Squire Tordoff, and suchlike—and got out his fiddle-case from the niche that was cut for it in the coal-seam. He tuned the strings, and then cuddled the delicate wood with his great square chin and began to play. The music sang out with delicious sweetness—airs from oratorio, lieder, even hymn-tunes, and there was weirder melody too, that the lad had heard from the woods and the brooks.

He did not play to his audience. He had gone away into a music dream and had forgotten he was not alone. In fact, he was as different from the hard schemer and bargainer of an hour ago as could well be imagined.

Squire Tordoff, on his part, listened not without appreciation. All Yorkshire men are born with an ear for music. But Mr Tordoff was not unnaturally sore in mind, and was almost equally anxious for escape and revenge. He had said all the nasty things which occurred to him already, and Tom’s Son had received them all on a hide of brass. But Squire was a man of large and varied experience, and he thought he knew something of the vanity which belongs to the artist. So presently he cried out again, “For God’s sake, my lad, stop that scraping! I might put up with being a prisoner, I might put up with teaching you, but that music you make hurts my stomach.”

When he had spat out his venom he was almost frightened. Tom’s Son’s face, as seen in the flickering firelight, lost on that instant its healthy colour, and was stricken with a sudden pallor. The music snapped off in the middle of a bar, the fiddle was put into its case, and the lid snapped down. It was the first criticism the lad had ever received upon his art, and he took it in its literal words. Squire was frightened at the bare look of him, but if only he had known how his host’s strong hands itched for murder, he would have been even more uncomfortable.

“Get up,” said Tom’s Son.

“I might give you another lesson now, I think.”

“Get up.”

“Come now, lad, you’d like to learn the multiplication table?”

“If tha’ doesn’t get up, I’ll use my clog-toe to tha’.”

Clara also stood erect, with stiff legs and bristling hackles, and showed a full set of unpleasantly powerful teeth. It was a matter of professional pride on Clara’s part to see that her moods coincided with those of her master.

“I’ve half a mind to leave thee to Clara,” said Tom’s Son thoughtfully.

Squire had the sense not to cower. “You’d lose your free schooling if you did, Tom.”

Tom’s Son thrust back his passion with a strong hand. “By Go’, Squire, but tha’rt right there! I’ve gone to some trouble to make a good bargain out o’ tha’, and it mustn’t be lost. By Go’, man, but I was very nearly wasting tha’!”

Squire Tordoff shivered.

“Well, man, tha’ can get thee gone from here, and when tha’ gets home, see that tha’ forgets this place and all about it. I’m noan wishing for visitors.”

“I’m not likely to talk, Tom. There’s very little I could tell to my own credit.”

By the devious galleries of that old-time mine they made their way to daylight again, and when Tom parted with his instructor he had quite regained his usual pleasant spirits. Music and prosperity were things apart, and he must not let them clash. Squire made for prosperity, and he had driven a sound bargain with him.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll come to tha’ two nights a week, Mondays and Thursdays, an’ tha’ mun learn me reading, writing, and sums, and owt else tha’ knows. And ’appen I’ll bring tha’ a rabbith every now and again as a bit o’ discount. By Go’, Squire, but I came very near to wasting tha’ just now, when ye gave me that sauce about t’fiddle! Look at Clara—she’s fit to rive tha’ i’ bits even now if I nobbut gave t’word.”

Squire Tordoff took himself off then, treading cautiously through the woods. During his walk home he wondered to himself how he could so often have preached from that lying text that “all men are born equal.”