



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,' 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 <DW72>, 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 <DW72> 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.