Читать книгу Judith of the Red Hand - J. Monk Foster - Страница 4

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The village of Saxilham lay in the midst of a broad shallow Valley, through which a sluggish stream, named the Saxe, flowed lazily—save in wet, wintry seasons, when its swollen waters surged turbidly between its banks of grass and gravel and under the low-arched, old-fashioned bridge of stone, over which the village highway ran.

To the north and south of Saxilham the country rose in green, softly-swelling uplands, cultivated to the highest ridge on either hand, and dotted here and there with farmhouses. Trees were scarce on the uplands, but down in the valley there were many umbrageous clumps of elm, ash and sycamore and the lush meadows lying on either side of the little river, the fruitful orchards, spread here and there about the village, gave the place a most pleasant and countrified aspect.

Yet Saxilham folk were in no sense an agricultural community. Of the two or three thousand souls the busy little village contained, not more than half a hundred of them earned a livelihood either on the land or from it. Of those, perhaps, a score of villagers won their bread and cheese as farm labourers; and in the proper season the wives and daughters of those rustics eked out the earnings of their husbands by lending a helping hand in the fields when the hay was shorn, the corn garnered, or the rich root crops were gathered in.

But for the remaining four or five hundred of workers in the village there was an abundance of employment in the neighbourhood. Beyond the green uplands to the east lay the prosperous town of Saxilford, not more than a couple of miles away, and there one might find plenty to do in the cotton-mills, the iron foundries, the coal pits, the score and one different workshops with which the thriving old borough abounded.

Hence, it followed that there was each morning, winter and summer, fair weather or foul, an exodus of toilers from the village to many points of the compass—many of the Saxilham men and youths faring forth to one or another of the different collieries in the district, some of them seeking the town's workshops, wherein they plied their trades; and quite a crowd of Saxilham women and maidens going to the cotton mills at Saxilford.

There was one colliery in the village, but all in vain a stranger might have looked for the towering headgear, the big engine-house, the great pulleys, and the thin snakelike steel ropes, which almost always mark the spot where coal is wrought.

That colliery was known locally as "Old Haliburton's Colliery," but out of the village itself the name of the mine was the Hill End Colliery. The mine itself was a small, old-fashioned concern, situated a quarter of a mile or so outside the village at the foot of the green swelling upland; and it consisted, not of a shaft, but of an arched tunnel, adit, or day eye, driven right into the heart of the hill side.

At the mouth of the tunnel the coal cropped out under the green sod, sloping down beneath the earth somewhat steeply; and here some teens of years before the winning of the seam had been commenced, in the clumsy and inefficient manner common to those days. But when the present proprietors came on the scene things had been altered for the better in every way, and now in the year 1869, when our story begins, the Hill End Colliery was almost all that one could expect in a mine of that character.

The mouth of the tunnel was six feet in height and about seven feet wide, a narrow line of tramway running from the surface to a point half a mile distant under the green hill. Save for the unnecessary headgear, there was everything about the mine usually found at more important collieries.

A low engine-house stood, a score of yards from the mouth of the tunnel; inside it was a powerful pair of "coupled" engines, which let down the gangs of empty tubs or boxes in the tunnel and hauled back the gangs of full tubs; there were shoots and screens, whereat carts for "land sale" and waggons for "foreign sale" could be loaded; there was a banksman who looked after all the coal that came out of the seam; there were surface labourers and half-a-dozen pit-brow girls running the small pit waggons here and there, accompanied by the usual clang and clamour, dust and bustle of a pit in full swing; while below, the wide fertile valley lay pleasantly in the sunshine, the picturesque old village slumbered or went quietly about its business, and the green slopes on either side Saxilham nurtured their crops of grain and roots.

One afternoon in May, shortly after the Hill End mine had ceased working for the day, a miner and a miner maid came down the sloping road together, making for the village, where both lived. She was young, tall and finely built, and the sun struck ruddy gleams from the masses of hair showing in front and below her soft bonnet; he was some seven or eight years older than his companion—perhaps six-and-twenty—and his big muscular frame, and his short black beard, added to the grime of the mine he had just left, gave the man a somewhat dour appearance.

"Well, Judith Trafford," the man said, presently, "and how are you? I reckon you'd be a bit surprised to see me back in Saxilham; but glad I expect?"

"I'm all right, Roderick Norbury," was the girl's quiet response, a certain vein of hardness apparent in her voice. "And to tell the truth, I was surprised to see you here, and not in any way glad. Aren't you frightened that the police will be after you for that poachin' business?"

"Never a bit, lass," he cried jauntily. "They collared the rest, and my mates were too staunch to give me away. The police will never bother now, and even if they do, I couldn't help coming back, Judith."

"To look after your mother, I dare say?"

"My mother! Not at all, Judith. It was yourself I was thinking about. You know what I mean."

"I have told you once for all, Roderick Norbury," the pit-brow girl said firmly, "that I do not care for you—that I never will care for you—and, surely, that should be enough for any man of spirit like you."

"Enough for a milk-sop," he cried, doggedly, "but not for me. You know what I think about you. I mean to have you for my wife some day—and if all the men in Saxilham come between us and if you say 'No' a hundred times, I shall only ask you again. That's the sort of man and lover I am, Judith Trafford!" And he bent slightly to put his black face close to her own fair one.

"Then I'm only sorry for you," she answered, with a curling lip, and tossing back her head.

"Why sorry, Judith?" he demanded, almost fiercely. "I want your love—and your pity, and by—I'll have it too!"

"I think not, Roderick Norbury," was the girl's quietly emphatic rejoinder, as she swung along by her rough wooer's side, her undisturbed face showing her unconcern. "But perhaps you haven't heard that I am keeping company now with Gabriel Blackwood?"

"I've heard, but I don't care a curse for that, Judith! It's a fine thing, I daresay you think, to have Gabriel Blackwood at your heels. His father is manager of Old Haliburton's Colliery; Gabriel himself is underlooker there, and may be manager some day. Well, you're flyin' at big game, wench, but I'm not afeard that Gabriel will ever wed you!" and the big, coarse-grained pitman laughed brutally.

"Not marry me! Who's to stop him, Roderick Norbury, if he wants to? And don't I tell you that we are keepin' company now."

"I'd stop him if I could!" he snarled savagely, "but it's not likely he'll need stopping, Judith," he added, in a meaning undertone.

"What do you mean now?" she demanded.

"I mean that Gabriel Blackwood will never marry you, although you say he is courting you. That's what I mean, Judith Trafford. And it stands to reason that I am right. Now just look at things as I see 'em," he urged. "You're the handsomest wench that ever stepped in Saxilham, and Gabriel Blackwood is the finest chap, I suppose. So far you are mates; but there all ends. You're a pit-brow lass, an' are likely to remain such all your days; but with Gabriel things are different. He means to be a manager someday—will be one too, I believe; and do you think that a man that's ambitious an' handsome, an' clever, like young Blackwood, will saddle himself for ever with a wife—no matter how beautiful she may be—who is nothing but a pit-brow lass that can hardly spell her own name?"

"I do believe it!" she cried. "Gabriel has pledged his word to me like a man, and I believe he will keep it like a man. What makes you say he won't? Has Gabriel ever said anything? Why I hardly believe he would thank you, Roderick Norbury, if you stopped him in the public street now."

"Perhaps not," and he snarled, grimly. "But before I took to snaring a few of somebody else's rabbits an' hares, Gabriel an' me used to be sort of chums. I've not forgotten all he told me then. He's no common chap is Gabriel; if he can rise in the world, he means to; no plain, poor lass like you will satisfy him; and for your own good, Judith Trafford, I'm telling you now to chuck him and stick to a man who would lick the dust from your clogs!"

"I can't do it! I won't do it!" she muttered. "With me to choose once is to choose for ever! Sink or swim, come better, come worse, I stand by Gabriel!"

"You'll rue it some fine day, Judith."

"Whenever I do I shall not come crying and complaining on your doorstep, Roderick Norbury."

"If ever you do I shall be ready to take you in."

She curled her lip at that, and at the edge of the village they parted unceremoniously, and went their different ways.