The History of David Grieve

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THE HISTORY

OF

DAVID GRIEVE

BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

AUTHOR OF 'ROBERT ELSMERE,' ETC.

TO THE DEAR MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

BOOK I CHILDHOOD

BOOK II YOUTH

BOOK III STORM AND STRESS

BOOK IV MATURITY

BOOK I CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER I

'Tak your hat, Louie! Yo're allus leavin summat behind yer.'

'David, yo go for 't,' said the child addressed to a boy by her
side, nodding her head insolently towards the speaker, a tall and
bony woman, who stood on the steps the children had just descended,
holding out a battered hat.

'Yo're a careless thing, Louie,' said the boy, but he went back and
took the hat.

'Mak her tie it,' said the woman, showing an antiquated pair of
strings. 'If she loses it she needna coom cryin for anudder. She'd
lose her yead if it wor loose.'

Then she turned and went back into the house. It was a smallish
house of grey stone, three windows above, two and a door below.
Dashes of white on the stone gave, as it were, eyebrows to the
windows, and over the door there was a meagre trellised porch, up
which grew some now leafless roses and honeysuckles. To the left of
the door a scanty bit of garden was squeezed in between the hill,
against which the house was set edgeways, and the rest of the flat
space, occupied by the uneven farmyard, the cart-shed and stable,
the cow-houses and duck-pond. This garden contained two shabby
apple trees, as yet hardly touched by the spring; some currant and
gooseberry bushes, already fairly green; and a clump or two of
scattered daffodils and wallflowers. The hedge round it was broken
through in various places, and it had a casual neglected air.

The children went their way through the yard. In front of them a
flock of some forty sheep and lambs pushed along, guarded by two
black short-haired collies. The boy, brandishing a long stick,
opened a gate deplorably in want of mending, and the sheep crowded
through, keenly looked after by the dogs, who waited meanwhile on
their flanks with heads up, ears cocked, and that air of
self-restrained energy which often makes a sheep-dog more human
than his master. The field beyond led to a little larch plantation,
where a few primroses showed among the tufts of long, rich grass,
and the drifts of last year's leaves. Here the flock scattered a
little, but David and the dogs were after them in a twinkling, and
the plantation gate was soon closed on the last bleating mother.
Then there was nothing more for the boy to do than to go up to the
top of the green rising ground on which the farm stood and see if
the gate leading to the moor was safely shut. For the sheep he had
been driving were not meant for the open moorland. Their feeding
grounds lay in the stone-walled fields round the homestead, and had
they strayed on to the mountain beyond, which was reserved for a
hardier Scotch breed, David would have been answerable. So he
strode, whistling, up the hill to have a look at that top gate,
while Louie sauntered down to the stream which ran round the lower
pastures to wait for him.

The top gate was fast, but David climbed the wall and stood there a
while, hands in his pockets, legs apart, whistling and looking.

'They can't see t' Downfall from Stockport to-day,' he was saying
to himself; 'it's coomin ower like mad.'

Some distance away in front of him, beyond the undulating heather
ground at his feet, rose a magnificent curving front of moor, the
steep sides of it crowned with black edges and cliffs of grit, the
outline of the south-western end sweeping finely up on the right to
a purple peak, the king of all the moorland round. No such colour
as clothed that bronzed and reddish wall of rock, heather, and
bilberry is known to Westmoreland, hardly to Scotland; it seems to
be the peculiar property of that lonely and inaccessible district
which marks the mountainous centre of mid-England--the district of
Kinder Scout and the High Peak. Before the boy's ranging eye spread
the whole western rampart of the Peak--to the right, the highest
point, of Kinder Low, to the left, 'edge' behind 'edge,' till the
central rocky mass sank and faded towards the north into milder
forms of green and undulating hills. In the very centre of the
great curve a white and surging mass of water cleft the mountain
from top to bottom, falling straight over the edge, here some two
thousand feet above the sea, and roaring downward along an almost
precipitous bed into the stream--the Kinder--which swept round the
hill on which the boy was standing, and through the valley behind
him. In ordinary times the 'Downfall,' as the natives call it, only
makes itself visible on the mountain-side as a black ravine of
tossed and tumbled rocks. But there had been a late snowfall on the
high plateau beyond, followed by heavy rain, and the swollen stream
was to-day worthy of its grand setting of cliff and moor. On such
occasions it becomes a landmark for all the country round, for the
cotton-spinning centres of New Mills and Stockport, as well as for
the grey and scattered farms which climb the long backs of moorland
lying between the Peak and the Cheshire border.

To-day, also, after the snow and rains of early April, the air was
clear again. The sun was shining; a cold, dry wind was blowing;
there were sounds of spring in the air, and signs of it on the
thorns and larches. Far away on the boundary wall of the farmland a
cuckoo was sitting, his long tail swinging behind him, his
monotonous note filling the valley; and overhead a couple of
peewits chased each other in the pale, windy blue.

The keen air, the sun after the rain, sent life and exhilaration
through the boy's young limbs. He leapt from the wall, and raced
back down the field, his dogs streaming behind him, the sheep, with
their newly dropped lambs, shrinking timidly to either side as he
passed. He made for a corner in the wall, vaulted it on to the
moor, crossed a rough dam built in the stream for sheep-washing
purposes, jumped in and out of the two grey-walled sheep-pens
beyond, and then made leisurely for a spot in the brook--not the
Downfall stream, but the Red Brook, one of its westerly
affluents--where he had left a miniature water-wheel at work the
day before. Before him and around him spread the brown bosom of
Kinder Scout; the cultivated land was left behind; here on all
sides, as far as the eye could see, was the wild home of heather
and plashing water, of grouse and peewit, of cloud and breeze.

The little wheel, shaped from a block of firwood, was turning
merrily under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a
neighbouring fall. David went down on hands and knees to examine
it. He made some little alteration in the primitive machinery of
it, his fingers touching it lightly and neatly, and then, delighted
with the success of it, he called Louie to come and look.

Louie was sitting a few yards further up the stream, crooning to
herself as she swung to and fro, and snatching every now and then
at some tufts of primroses growing near her, which she wrenched
away with a hasty, wasteful hand, careless, apparently, whether
they reached her lap or merely strewed the turf about her with
their torn blossoms. When David called her she gathered up the
flowers anyhow in her apron, and dawdled towards him, leaving a
trail of them behind her. As she reached him, however, she was
struck by a book sticking out of his pocket, and, stooping over
him, with a sudden hawk-like gesture, as he sprawled head
downwards, she tried to get hold of it.

But he felt her movement. 'Let goo!' he said imperiously, and,
throwing himself round, while one foot slipped into the water, he
caught her hand, with its thin predatory fingers, and pulled the
book away.

'Yo just leave my books alone, Louie. Yo do 'em a mischeef whaniver
yo can--an I'll not have it.'

He turned his handsome, regular face, crimsoned by his position and
splashed by the water, towards her with an indignant air. She
laughed, and sat herself down again on the grass, looking a very
imp of provocation.

'They're stupid,' she said, shortly. 'They mak yo a stupid gonner
ony ways.'

'Oh! do they?' he retorted, angrily. 'Bit I'll be even wi yo. I'll
tell yo noa moor stories out of 'em, not if yo ast iver so.'

The girl's mouth curled contemptuously, and she began to gather her
primroses into a bunch with an air of the utmost serenity. She was
a thin, agile, lightly made creature, apparently about eleven. Her
piercing black eyes, when they lifted, seemed to overweight the
face, whereof the other features were at present small and pinched.
The mouth had a trick of remaining slightly open, showing a line of
small pearly teeth; the chin was a little sharp and shrewish. As
for the hair, it promised to be splendid; at present it was an
unkempt, tangled mass, which Hannah Grieve, the children's aunt,
for her own credit's sake at chapel, or in the public street, made
occasional violent attempts to reduce to order--to very little
purpose, so strong and stubborn was the curl of it. The whole
figure was out of keeping with the English moorside, with the
sheep, and the primroses.

But so indeed was that of the boy, whose dark colouring was more
vivacious and pronounced than his sister's, because the red of his
cheek and lip was deeper, while his features, though larger than
hers, were more finely regular, and his eyes had the same piercing
blackness, the same all-examining keenness, as hers. The yellowish
tones of his worn fustian suit and a red Tam-o'-Shanter cap
completed the general effect of brilliancy and, as it were,
_foreignness_.

Having finished his inspection of his water-mill, he scrambled
across to the other side of the stream so as to be well out of his
sister's way, and, taking out the volume which was stretching his
pocket, he began to read it. It was a brown calf-bound book, much
worn, and on its title-page it bore the title of 'The Wars of
Jerusalem,' of Flavius Josephus, translated by S. Calmet, and a
date somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century. To this
antique fare the boy settled himself down. The two collies lay
couched beside him; a stone-chat perched on one or other of the
great blocks which lay scattered over the heath gave out his
clinking note; while every now and then the loud peevish cluck of
the grouse came from the distant sides of the Scout.

Titus was now making his final assault on the Temple. The Zealots
were gathered in the innermost court, frantically beseeching Heaven
for a sign; the walls, the outer approaches of the Sanctuary were
choked with the dying and the dead. David sat absorbed, elbows on
knees, his face framed in his hands. Suddenly the descent of
something cold and clammy on his bent neck roused him with a most
unpleasant shock.

Quick as lightning he faced round, snatching at his assailant; but
Louie was off, scudding among the bilberry hillocks with peals of
laughter, while the slimy moss she had just gathered from the edges
of the brook sent cold creeping streams into the recesses of
David's neck and shoulders. He shook himself free of the mess as
best he could, and rushed after her. For a long time he chased her
in vain, then her foot tripped, and he came up with her just as she
rolled into the heather, gathered up like a hedgehog against
attack, her old hat held down over her ears and face. David fell
upon her and chastised her; but his fisticuffs probably looked more
formidable than they felt, for Louie laughed provokingly all the
time, and when he stopped out of breath she said exultantly, as she
sprang up, holding her skirts round her ready for another flight,
'It's greened aw yur neck and yur collar--luvely! Doan't yo be
nassty for nothink next time!'

And off she ran.

'If yo meddle wi me ony moor,' he shouted after her fiercely, 'yo
see what I'll do!'

But in reality the male was helpless, as usual. He went ruefully
down to the brook, and loosening his shirt and coat tried to clean
his neck and hair. Then, extremely sticky and uncomfortable, he
went back to his seat and his book, his wrathful eyes taking
careful note meanwhile of Louie's whereabouts. And thenceforward he
read, as it were, on guard, looking up every other minute.

Louie established herself some way up the further slope, in a steep
stony nook, under two black boulders, which protected her rear in
case of reprisals from David. Time passed away. David, on the other
side of the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the
more alive to them perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by
one section of his brain, was conscious of no length in the
minutes. But Louie's mood gradually became one of extreme flatness.
All her resources were for the moment at an end. She could think of
no fresh torment for David; besides, she knew that she was
observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of primroses along
the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, and thrown them
away; she had found a grouse's nest among the dead fern, and,
contrary to the most solemn injunctions of uncle and keeper,
enforced by the direst threats, had purloined and broken an egg;
and still dinner-time delayed. Perhaps, too, the cold blighting
wind, which soon made her look blue and pinched, tamed her
insensibly. At any rate, she got up after about an hour, and coolly
walked across to David.

He looked up at her with a quick frown. But she sat down, and,
clasping her hands round her knees, while the primroses she had
stuck in her hat dangled over her defiant eyes, she looked at him
with a grinning composure.

'Yo can read out if yo want to,' she remarked.

'Yo doan't deserve nowt, an I shan't,' said David, shortly.

'Then I'll tell Aunt Hannah about how yo let t' lambs stray lasst
evenin, and about yor readin at neet.'

'Yo may tell her aw t' tallydiddles yo can think on,' was the
unpromising reply.

Louie threw all the scorn possible into her forced smile, and then,
dropping full-length into the heather, she began to sing at the top
of a shrill, unpleasing voice, mainly, of course, for the sake of
harrying anyone in her neighbourhood who might wish to read.

'Stop that squealing!' David commanded, peremptorily. Whereupon
Louie sang louder than before.

David looked round in a fury, but his fury was, apparently,
instantly damped by the inward conviction, born of long experience,
that he could do nothing to help himself. He sprang up, and thrust
his book into his pocket.

'Nobory ull mak owt o' yo till yo get a bastin twice a day, wi an
odd lick extra for Sundays,' he remarked to her with grim emphasis
when he had reached what seemed to him a safe distance. Then he
turned and strode up the face of the hill, the dogs at his heels.
Louie turned on her elbow, and threw such small stones as she could
discover among the heather after him, but they fell harmlessly
about him, and did not answer their purpose of provoking him to
turn round again.

She observed that he was going up to the old smithy on the side of
Kinder Low, and in a few minutes she got up and sauntered lazily
after him.

'T' owd smithy' had been the enchanted ground of David's childhood.
It was a ruined building standing deep in heather, half-way up the
mountain-side, and ringed by scattered blocks and tabular slabs of
grit. Here in times far remote--beyond the memory of even the
oldest inhabitant--the millstones of the district, which gave their
name to the 'millstone grit' formation of the Peak, were fashioned.
High up on the dark moorside stood what remained of the primitive
workshop. The fire-marked stones of the hearth were plainly
visible; deep in the heather near lay the broken jambs of the
window; a stone doorway with its lintel was still standing; and on
the slope beneath it, hardly to be distinguished now from the great
primaeval blocks out of which they had sprung and to which they
were fast returning, reposed two or three huge millstones. Perhaps
they bordered some ancient track, climbed by the millers of the
past when they came to this remote spot to give their orders; but,
if so, the track had long since sunk out of sight in the heather,
and no visible link remained to connect the history of this high
and lonely place with that of those teeming valleys hidden to west
and north among the moors, the dwellers wherein must once have
known it well. From the old threshold the eye commanded a
wilderness of moors, rising wave-like one after another, from the
green swell just below whereon stood Reuben Grieve's farm, to the
far-distant Alderley Edge. In the hollows between, dim tall
chimneys veiled in mist and smoke showed the places of the cotton
towns--of Hayfield, New Mills, Staleybridge, Stockport; while in
the far northwest, any gazer to whom the country-side spoke
familiarly might, in any ordinary clearness of weather, look for
and find the eternal smoke-cloud of Manchester.

So the deserted smithy stood as it were spectator for ever of that
younger, busier England which wanted it no more. Human life
notwithstanding had left on it some very recent traces. On the
lintel of the ruined door two names were scratched deep into the
whitish under-grain of the black weather-beaten grit. The upper one
ran: 'David Suveret Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863;' the lower, 'Louise
Stephanie Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863.' They were written in bold
round-hand, and could be read at a considerable distance. During
the nine months they had been there, many a rustic passer-by had
been stopped by them, especially by the oddity of the name
_Suveret_, which tormented the Derbyshire mouth.

In a corner of the walls stood something more puzzling still--a
large iron pan, filled to the brim with water, and firmly bedded on
a foundation of earth and stones. So still in general was the
shining sheltered round, that the branches of the mountain ash
which leant against the crumbling wall, the tufts of hard fern
growing among the stones, the clouds which sailed overhead, were
all delicately mirrored in it. That pan was David Grieve's dearest
possession, and those reflections, so magical, and so alive, had
contrived for him many a half-hour of almost breathless pleasure.
He had carried it off from the refuse-yard of a foundry in
the valley, where he had a friend in one of the apprentices.
The farm donkey and himself had dragged it thither on a certain
never-to-be-forgotten day, when Uncle Reuben had been on the other
side of the mountain at a shepherds' meeting in the Woodlands,
while Aunt Hannah was safely up to her elbows in the washtub. Boy's
back and donkey's back had nearly broken under the task, but there
the pan stood at last, the delight of David's heart. In a crevice
of the wall beside it, hidden jealously from the passer-by, lay the
other half of that perpetual entertainment it provided--a store of
tiny boats fashioned by David, and another friend, the lame
minister of the 'Christian Brethren' congregation at Clough End,
the small factory town just below Kinder, who was a sea-captain's
son, and with a knife and a bit of deal could fashion you any craft
you pleased. These boats David only brought out on rare occasions,
very seldom admitting Louie to the show. But when he pleased they
became fleets, and sailed for new continents. Here were the ships
of Captain Cook, there the ships of Columbus. On one side of the
pan lay the Spanish main, on the other the islands of the South
Seas. A certain tattered copy of the 'Royal Magazine,' with
pictures, which lay in Uncle Reuben's cupboard at home, provided
all that for David was to be known of these names and places. But
fancy played pilot and led the way; she conjured up storms and
islands and adventures; and as he hung over his pan high on the
Derbyshire moor, the boy, like Sidney of old, 'sailed the seas where
there was never sand'--the vast and viewless oceans of romance.

CHAPTER II

Once safe in the smithy, David recovered his temper. If Louie
followed him, which was probable, he would know better how to deal
with her here, with a wall at his back and a definite area to
defend, than he did in the treacherous openness of the heath.
However, just as he was settling himself down, with a sigh of
relief, between the pan and the wall, he caught sight of something
through one of the gaps of the old ruin which made him fling down
his book and run to the doorway. There, putting his fingers to his
mouth, he blew a shrill whistle along the side of the Scout. A bent
figure on a distant path stopped at the sound. It was an old man,
with a plaid hanging from his shoulders. He raised the stick he
held, and shook it in recognition of David's signal. Then resuming
his bowed walk, he came slowly on, followed by an old hound, whose
gait seemed as feeble as his master's.

David leant against the doorway waiting. Louie, meanwhile, was
lounging in the heather just below him, having very soon caught him
up.

'What d'yo want 'im for?' she asked contemptuously, as the
new-comer approached: 'he'd owt to be in th' sylum. Aunt Hannah says
he's gone that silly, he owt to be took up.'

'Well, he woan't be, then,' retorted David. 'Theer's nobory about as
ull lay a finger on 'im. He doan't do her no harm, nor yo noather.
Women foak and gells allus want to be wooryin soomthin.'

'Aunt Hannah says he lost his wits wi fuddlin,' repeated Louie
shrilly, striking straighter still for what she knew to be one of
David's tenderest points--his friendship for 'owd 'Lias Dawson,' the
queer dreamer, who, fifteen years before, had been the schoolmaster
of Frimley Moor End, and in local esteem 't' cliverest mon abeawt
t'Peak.'

David with difficulty controlled a hot inclination to fall upon his
sister once more. Instead, however, he affected not to hear her,
and shouted a loud 'Good mornin' to the old man, who was toiling up
the knoll on which the smithy stood.

'Lias responded feebly, panting hard the while. He sank down on a
stone outside the smithy, and for a while had neither breath nor
voice. Then he began to look about him; his heaving chest subsided,
and there was a rekindling of the strange blue eyes. He wore a high
white stock and neckcloth; his plaid hung round his emaciated
shoulders with a certain antique dignity; his rusty wideawake
covered hair still abundant and even curly, but snow-white; the
face, with its white eyebrows, was long, thin, and full of an
ascetic delicacy.

'Wal, Davy, my lad,' the old man said at last, with a sort of
pompous mildness; 'I winna blame yo for 't, but yo interrupted me
sadly wi yur whistlin. I ha been occupied this day wi business o'
_graat_ importance. His Majesty King Charles has been wi me
since seven o'clock this mornin. And for th' fust time I ha been
gettin reet to th' _bottom_ o' things wi him. I ha been
_probin_ him, Davy--probin him. He couldno riddle through wi
lees; I kept him to 't, as yo mun keep a horse to a jump--straight
an tight. I had it aw out about Strafford, an t'Five Members, an
thoose dirty dealins wi th' Irish devils! Yo should ha yerd it,
Davy--yo should, I'll uphowd yo!'

And placing his stick between his knees, the old man leant his
hands upon it, with a meditative and judicial air. The boy stood
looking down at him, a broad smile lighting up the dark and vivid
face. Old 'Lias supplied him with a perpetual 'spectacle' which
never palled.

'Coe him back, 'Lias, he's soomwheer about. Yo need nobbut coe him,
an he'll coom.'

'Lias looked fatuously pleased. He lifted his head and affected to
scan the path along which he had just travelled.

'Aye, I daur say he's not far.--Yor Majesty!'

And 'Lias laid his head on one side and listened. In a few seconds
a cunning smile stole over his lips.

'Wal, Davy, yo're in luck. He's noan so onwillin, we'st ha him here
in a twinklin. Yo may coe him mony things, but yo conno coe him
proud. Noa, as I've fund him, Charles Stuart has no soart o' pride
about him. Aye, theer yo are! Sir, your Majesty's obleeged an
humble servant!'

And, raising his hand to his hat, the old man took it off and swept
it round with a courtly deliberation. Then replacing it, he sat
with his face raised, as though to one standing near, his whole
attitude full of a careful and pompous dignity.

'Now then, yor Majesty,' said 'Lias grimly,' I'st ha to put that
question to yo, yance moor, yo wor noan so well pleased wi this
mornin. But yo shouldno be soa tender, mon! Th' truth can
do yo _noa_ harm, wheer yo are, an I'm nobbut askin for
_informashun's_ sake. Soa out wi it; I'st not use it agen yo.
_That--wee--bit--o'--damned--paper,_--man, what sent poor
Strafford to his eend--yo mind it?--aye, _'at yo do!_ Well,
now'--and the old man's tone grew gently seductive--_'explain
yursel._ We'n had _their_ tale,' and he pointed away to
some imaginary accusers. 'But yo mun trust an Englishman's sense o'
fair play. Say your say. We 'st gie yo a varra patient hearin.'

And with chin thrown up, and his half-blurred eyes blinking under
their white lashes, 'Lias waited with a bland imperativeness for the
answer.