“Not so loud! Mellor’s got pistols,” he repeated.
“Never!” said Joe in an agony. “Never! I won’t do it.”
“What about thy oath?” demanded Walker. “Eh?”
“I don’t care,” panted Joe. “I won’t do it, that’s flat. I never heard o’ such a thing.”
“Happen not,” said Walker derisively. After a pause, during which he and Joe stood still and looked fixedly at each other, he mumbled: “I’m non so keen on it myself. Let’s go back to Ire Bridge.”
“Nay!” said Joe with decision. “We mun go forward and meet them others, and persuade them non to do it. If we don’t go happen they’ll do it.”
“Well, I don’t care if they do,” muttered Walker.
“But I do,” said Joe. “By God, I do.” His heart stood still at the thought of arriving too late to prevent the attack. “We mun get on without wasting any more time,” he cried, and struck out swiftly. Walker, grumbling, followed.
As they neared the turning they saw that Mellor and Thorpe were already there, talking to a child, who presently sped off down the lane.
“George,” gasped Joe breathlessly as soon as he was within hearing distance: “What’s this about Mester Oldroyd?”
“What’s what?” demanded Mellor, laughing.
“Tha’s non going to fire at him?” queried Joe, somewhat relieved by his tone.
“I’m not, eh?” cried Mellor wildly. “Look at this, tha fool!” He drew from the pocket of his coat an enormous pistol, its barrel almost half a yard long, bound with brass rings which winked in the sunshine. “I mean to do for him!” he screamed, his pale eyes squinting with the intensity of his hatred. “One good shot, and there’ll be no more frames in th’ Ire Valley.”
“George,” said Joe soberly, feeling a sickening apprehension: “Tha’s mad.”
Mellor laughed wildly, and his eyes rolled. “Well, I’ve reason to be mad,” he said. “Tha’s seen shop, hasn’t tha? Tha said thysen it were quiet. I’ve reason to be mad.”
“Not so much reason as Tom here,” urged Joe.
“Well, he’s got a pistol too,” laughed Mellor. “And Walker.”
“Tha didn’t tell me tha had one,” said Joe reproachfully to Walker, who coloured and mumbled something unintelligible.
“Well, I mean to use mine, choose how,” said Thorpe drily, showing the weapon. It was not quite as huge as Mellor’s, but still looked ludicrously large in the hand of the undersized Thorpe, and Joe gave a troubled smile.
“There’s nowt to laugh at,” said Thorpe in the cold dry tone he had adopted lately. “We mean what we say. T’pistols is loaded.”
“But where have you got them? When did you plan all this?” demanded Joe, utterly bewildered.
“They made it up to-day in t’shop, soon as Mellor knew about Oldroyds’ frames,” volunteered Walker, looking anxiously from one to the other of the group, so as to be ready, Joe thought contemptuously, to side with the opinion which prevailed.
“See thee, Joe,” said Mellor, speaking more calmly than he had yet done: “Art thou a true Ludder or a traitor?”
“I’m non a traitor,” stammered Joe, perplexed almost to madness:. “But I’m non a murderer either.”
“If tha takes one step towards Syke Mill to warn yon Oldroyds,” said Mellor with vicious determination, “I’ll shoot thee like a dog.”
“Don’t say such things, George,” urged Joe wretchedly, not in the least believing him, but deeply troubled that such things should be said in the Ire Valley. “That’s non the way to talk. A good-hearted man like Mester Oldroyd, too!”
“Good-hearted!” shouted Mellor wildly, tears starting to his eyes. “My God!”
“I don’t see as we need stand in the middle of the road wi’ pistols in our hands like this,” put in Thorpe, “to be fallen over by the first passerby. Let’s get behind yon wall and wait there.” He shepherded them towards the wall which enclosed Syke Wood.
“Well, there’s one thing,” said Joe with a certain triumph, “You’ll have to wait a long time if you’re going to wait here for Mester Oldroyd. Wild horses wouldn’t drag him from them frames to-day.”
Thorpe and Mellor exchanged looks, of which Joe had opened his lips to ask the meaning, when a horse’s hoofs were suddenly heard in a furious gallop up the lane. “There’s someone coming!” screamed Walker in an agony of fear, rushing for the wood. Panic seized them all; in a wild chaos of tossing arms and legs they hurled themselves over the low rough wall and dropped into the grassy gully on the other side. “Get up to t’far end o’ t’wood, you two,” commanded Mellor pantingly, crouching behind a tree. “Be off, quick now! If we miss, you’re to fire; we’ll whistle when he comes. Don’t thee utter a sound, Joe Bamforth, or tha’s a dead man.” Joe half pulled himself up by the wall, stumbled over a tree root and fell sideways, his shoulder in the grass; he rolled over to get up; the horse’s hoofs seemed suddenly on top of him, their clatter was so loud; as in a dream he saw Mellor pull himself up by the tree, his hand spread out on its trunk. Suddenly the hand vanished, Mellor gave an animal snarl and stood erect; there were two sharp reports, a drift of sulphurous smoke, a thunderous bang which seemed to burst the heavens, a scream, and then all the four of them were racing up the hill between the trees, stumbling over roots and stones, sinking into last year’s leaf mould, sobbing for breath. Each tree trunk seemed to loom enormous, sinuous, so that the world was full of green serpents advancing and retreating, yet at the same time everything was black, there was no daylight, nothing but a great horror of darkness. They came to an end of the wood, topped a wall and flew across a rough field, in the corner of which a man was working; he dropped his spade and stared at them in amaze. Joe’s heart laboured, his muscles cracked, he rather fell over the next wall than climbed it, and dropped beneath another patch of trees. The others all dropped to the ground too, and sat glaring at each other, panting.
“Take this,” Thorpe, from whose cheek blood was slowly welling and trickling down the collar of his coat, said, handing his pistol to Walker: “I’m non going to carry it any more.”
“Why, it’s warm!” screamed Walker, dropping it as though it burnt him.
“Of course it’s warm, tha fool,” panted Mellor. “Thine should be warm too. Why didn’t you fire, either on you? Damn you for flats!”
“Tha didn’t whistle,” objected Walker in a whine. “What’s wrong wi’ thy cheek, Thorpe?”
“It’s t’pistol,” said Thorpe in a strangled tone. He put his hand to the place, drew it away and looked at the smears of blood on his finger with a shudder.
“My finger’s bad too,” said Mellor, showing his right forefinger torn and bloody.
“Tha shouldn’t have loaded t’pistols so full,” Walked reproved him. “I told thee so.”
“Shut up!” said Mellor savagely. He sniffed, drew his sleeve across his forehead, which was thickly beaded with sweat, and looked about him haggardly. Sounds of hoofs and shouting rose from the road below. “We can’t stay here,” went on Mellor in a hoarse whisper. “Tom, thou and I’ll go down to thy father’s; we’ll get shut o’ these coats wi’ blood on, and have a bit of a clean-up. You two can go over the brow and down to Emsley and get back home Annotsfield way, as best you can.”
“I’ve no brass, George,” whined Walker.
“Oh, be damned to thee,” said Mellor in a tone of disgust. He stood up, drew a florin from his pocket and threw it contemptuously on the ground. “Come on, Tom,” he urged, pulling up Thorpe, who seemed utterly dazed.
“There’s my pistol,” muttered Thorpe in a trembling voice, hanging his head.
Mellor stopped and picked up the pistol which Walker had cast down, then made off, dragging Thorpe by the arm. After a few steps he paused and turned. “Now you two, mind your oaths,” he said in a tone of sombre menace. “If this day’s work gets known we shall all on us swing for it. Mind your oaths. And don’t sit staring there,” he added irritably. “Be off wit
h you to Emsley.”
Joe and Walker obediently got to their feet and staggered in silence up the hill. There was no more noise from the road, everything seemed quiet and still and somehow, after the furious rush of the last few minutes, slow. It seemed to take minutes upon minutes to reach and pass each tree; hours seemed to have dragged by on leaden feet before they at length reached the top of the brow. The sun had now got fully out, and the valley was bathed in evening sunshine; the Ire was a bright blue ribbon, the foam at the Syke Mill dam sparkled, the fields had warmed to a soft, lovely, kindly, spring-like green. Joe groaned in anguish; all this beauty was no more for him, he could never enjoy it again. Walker, apparently encouraged by the sound, glanced at him and whispered:
“Joe, I’m fleyd over this job.”
It was not fear that Joe felt now; he did not feel to care whether his share in the day’s work was ever discovered or not; what he felt was the utter damnation of his complete moral ruin. His great desire had been to serve his fellow men and, fool, soft fool that he was, this was the result. What was the result, by the way? Whose were those horse’s hoofs?
“Who was it they shot at, Ben?” he asked, as they left the Ire behind and began to drop into the Emsley Valley.
Walker gave him an odd look. “I reckon it were thy Mester Oldroyd,” he said.
“Mester Oldroyd!” repeated Joe, stopping, sickened. “Did tha see him?”
“No,” said Walker quickly.
Joe did not believe him, and his heart sank still lower. “Does tha think they hit him?” he queried in a low wretched tone.
“Nay, I don’t know,” said Walker. This time his tone carried conviction, and Joe walked on.
“But how did he come to leave the mill! To leave them new frames! That’s what I can’t understand,” he burst out after a moment or two.
“Happen they sent that child down to Syke Mill wi’ a message,” suggested Walker.
“I never thought o’ that!” cried Joe.
“Tha’s too simple by half, Joe,” said Walker sneeringly. “Well, neither on us fired a shot, that’s one comfort,” he added.
“We’re as guilty as they are,” said Joe sombrely. “For not stopping them.”
“Tha never says!” cried Walker, startled. “Then happen I’d better bury this pistol o’ mine?”
“Happen tha had,” agreed Joe.
When he had buried the pistol in a mole hole, Joe standing by and watching indifferently, the two men soberly crossed the rough fields until they struck the main road running down the valley.
It was as they were entering Emsley that Joe suddenly for the first time felt an overpowering pang of fear. There were people about; women standing at the doors of cottages, children playing in the road, men going home from their work. It was not yet dark, and the strangers were looked at curiously. It came upon Joe with the effect of a blow that if any of those people knew that Walker and he were L,uddites, hot from an attempted assault on a master clothier, they would look upon them as wicked murderers, unfit to associate with decent human beings. Nay, if any hint of what the two had been doing came to light, within an hour they would be in Annotsfield gaol, shut up in a tiny filthy hole of a room, or huddled in with a crowd of other wretched prisoners. There would be no light, no air, no sun; nothing but filth and dark and stinking smells and rough men ordering them. God! He felt choked and stifled, dragged his coat down from his throat, glanced about him wildly: he understood now what Walker meant when he said he was afraid about the job. Joe was afraid now too. If anyone had told him, even so short a time ago as that morning, that he would ever feel the same about anything as Walker did, he would have coloured with real indignation; but now! Now, reflected Joe, measuring the depth of his fall with a just and sober glance, he was just like Walker, he was afraid for his own skin.
“Let’s have a drink,” suggested Walker as they came to the Coach and Horses Inn: “Mellor gave me a two-shilling piece, tha knows.”
Mellor and Thorpe being thus recalled to Joe’s mind, with a shock of relief he remembered that their liberty as well as his own depended on his actions; if he took precautions to shield himself from suspicion he was shielding them as well. This braced him, steadied him, gave him something worth doing to do; he drew a deep breath, threw up his head, and looked about him almost cheerfully. It occurred to him that he had had practically nothing to eat all day, and he agreed to Walker’s suggestion that they should enter the inn. He must keep up his strength in order to maintain the necessary deception.
There seemed to be a good deal of cheerful noise coming from the public room, and the landlady, whom they met at the door, was laughing heartily with her head turned back to what she was leaving. The two Luddites went in, and found seven or eight men there laughing at a collier from the Emsley pit, a great hulking fellow, his face and hands seamed with coal dust, who had evidently had more ale than was altogether good for him and was agreeably drunk. Joe was not fond of the spectacle of drunkenness; he found it disgusting. Moreover, to feel the public gaze fixed upon Walker and himself, as it naturally was when they entered the room, made him tremble—their guilty secret seemed to be written all over them, on leg and arm as well as brow. He shrank back in his corner, and could not eat the food he had ordered when it was brought to him. Drunkards were not, he thought, as low as murderers, and measured his own ruin again by a hateful scale.
5
Meanwhile Will, picking his way across Marthwaite Bridge in the falling dark after some lovely hours of sweet content with Mary, almost rode down an excited group gathered at the bridge end. The mare swerved to avoid them and nearly jerked him from the saddle.
“Look out there!” he called crossly, jarred from his dream of love.
“Eh! It’s Will Oldroyd!” sang out a man’s voice in a tone of excited awe. A lantern was held up to confirm the speaker’s guess, and Will saw that it was carried by Enoch Smith.
“Well? What do you want of me?” demanded Will. “Is there owt wrong?”
“We’ve been looking for you a clock hour, Will,” said Enoch, laving his free hand on the young man’s thigh. “Wherever have you been? Your father’s been shot by the Luddites.”
It flashed through Will’s mind: “Confound him! Now it will be put off again about Mary.” He was at once deeply ashamed of such a thought at such a time, and cried out angrily, to prove to himself how concerned he was for his father: “What were the soldiers thinking of, the fools?”
“Oh,” said Enoch, “It wasn’t at the mill; it was on the road.”
“But did Father leave the mill?” cried Will in astonishment.
“They say I sent a message for him,” explained Enoch. “But I swear I never did. You’d best go to him—he’s at the Red Lion.”
“The Red Lion?” stammered Will, a sense of disaster beginning to creep upon him.
“Aye! He wasn’t fit to be moved any further,” said Enoch Smith. He gave Will’s thigh a sharp friendly pat, and said in a very kind tone: “You’d best go to him, lad.”
Will, all the current of his thoughts changed, his heart beating fast with apprehension, turned into the Market Place and drew rein at the Red Lion.
He understood at once that the injury to his father was a serious one, for he was received with an awestruck pity, the very man who came out to hold his horse exclaiming sympathetically when he saw who the arrival was. The whole inn seethed with excitement; groups of men were clustered all about the hall and up the stairs, talking rapidly in low tones. Every now and then a voice rose high, and somebody exclaimed “Hush!” apprehensively. All the groups parted at once, eagerly, to let Will through; he was patted on the shoulder by men he barely knew, sympathetic murmurs buzzed in his ears, every face wore a look of excited interest thinly veiled by respectful commiseration. It was obvious that the attack on Mr. Oldroyd was a sensation such as the Ire Valley had never known before, and it was going to make the most of it. Will felt wretched as he mounted the stair; it was a scene such as hi
s father loved; every minute he expected to hear Mr. Oldroyd’s hearty voice laying down the law about the affair or to catch a choleric gleam from his blue eye, and every minute he was disappointed. At the top of the stairs he paused, and looked at the dimly lighted row of doors in perplexity. “To the right, to the right!” called several voices from below. He turned as directed and found fat little Henry Brigg bustling to meet him, every inch of his plump crimson cheeks, his button nose, his little black eyes and his stiff grizzled hair somehow expressive of intense concern.
“Hush! Hush!” whispered Brigg. (Will had not spoken.) “You can’t go in now; Mr. Stancliffe and another magistrate from Annotsfield are with him now, taking his deposition.”
“Is he very bad?” asked poor Will, horrified by this mention of magistrates and depositions.
“The doctor says his condition is serious,” stated Brigg solemnly. “There’s an artery severed.”
Will sickened. “But how did it all happen?” he demanded impatiently, swallowing. “For God’s sake tell me all you know.”
Brigg thereupon began a long and involved account of how he was riding down to Ire Bridge House to see Mr. Stancliffe and make a deposition about three broken windows up at Bin Royd—Will ground his teeth and almost stamped with impatience, but remembered himself just in time—and he had borrowed Mr. Oldroyd’s silver spurs for the journey, and just as he was rounding that corner beyond Marthwaite he saw Mr. Oldroyd turning, into the road towards him, out of Syke Mill Lane. At least he thought it was Mr. Oldroyd; he wasn’t sure then but he thought so; later of course he was sure. Well, he had just glimpsed this figure on horseback when there were two loud cracks and then a third much louder crack, obviously the reports of firearms, and Mr. Oldroyd seemed to sway about in his saddle, and fell on to his horse’s neck. Brigg, horrified, put spurs into his horse—the silver spurs which he had borrowed from Mr. Oldroyd because he was going to ride to Ire Bridge House to see Mr. Stancliffe about three broken windows up at Bin Royd (“Oh God!” groaned Will)—and galloped down the road. He distinctly saw four men fleeing up the hill through Syke Wood—“Who were they?” cried Will ferociously. Oh, as to that Brigg could not say; he only saw them vaguely, in the distance, as it were. (“Good God, what a fool the man is!” thought Will.) As he drew near Mr. Oldroyd, the wounded man raised himself up by the mane of his horse and cried “Murder!”—fortunately the horse stood still. Mr. Oldroyd was quite upright in his saddle when Brigg reached him; he said: “Oh Brigg, is it thou, lad? I’m shot, Brigg.” There was a mark—a long mark—of blood on the upper part of his breeches; suddenly he gave a sort of hiccuping groan and rocked in the saddle, Brigg took hold of his arm, Mr. Oldroyd fell back, blood gushed out of his left thigh in a thick clotted stream, he lost his balance and fell out of the saddle completely. Brigg tried to hold him up but could not, Mr. Oldroyd being such a big. heavy man, and his own horse growing restive; so he dismounted as quick as he could, and loosed Mr. Oldroyd’s feet from his stirrups and laid him on the ground. The blood was streaming from his side and Brigg was at his wits’ end what to do; he shouted and shouted but nobody seemed to hear. Mr. Oldroyd said in a kind of groaning voice: “I’m done for, Brigg. Go to Enoch Smith’s.” Brigg wondered that he did not bid him fetch his son, but supposed he knew best. (At this Will felt a deep blush of shame slowly flood his whole body.) Brigg did not like to leave the wounded man alone in the road; but just then luckily a boy came up the lane from Syke Mill; he called him and bade him stay by Mr. Oldroyd; the boy seemed frightened and unwilling but obeyed; Brigg galloped off for Enoch Smith; Enoch came back with him on his horse as fast as they could go, but before they got to the fatal spot they met a horse and waggon which had passed by and brought Mr. Oldroyd along. He looked on the point of death; they brought him into the Red Lion and Enoch flew off for the doctor, who had extracted no end of balls and bullets and slugs and what-nots from Mr. Oldroyd’s belly and thigh, and was with him now.
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