



Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Prince









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,'