"How do I know where? Mad, indeed! I'll not say but other folk look a mort madder nor ever I looked."
The young woman took her by the shoulder.
"Don't say that – don't say you don't know where they're gone. They've got my child, I tell you; my poor little Paul.
"Oh, so you're the young party as drowned herself, are you? Well, they're gone anyways, and the little chit with them, and there's no saying where. You may believe me. Ask the neighbors else."
The young woman leaned against the door-jamb with a white face and great eyes.
"Well, well, how hard she takes it. Deary me, deary me, she's not a bad sort, after all. Well, well, who'd ha' thought it! There, there, come in and sit awhile. It is cruel to lose one's babby – and me to tell her, too. Misbegotten or not, it's one's own flesh and blood, and that's what I always says."
The young woman had been drawn into the house and seated on a chair. She got up again with the face of an old woman.
"Oh, I'm choking!" she said.
"Rest awhile, do now, my dear – there – there."
"No, no, my good woman, let me go."
"Heaven help you, child; how you look!"
"Heaven has never helped me," said the young woman. "I was a Sister of Charity only two years ago. A man found me and wooed me; married me and abandoned me; I tried to die and they rescued me; they separated me from my child and put me in an asylum; I escaped, and have now come for my darling, and he is gone."
"Deary me, deary me!" and the old woman stroked her consolingly.
"Let me go," she cried, starting up afresh. "If Heaven has done nothing for me, perhaps the world itself will have mercy."
The ghastly face answered ill to the grating laugh that followed as she jerked her head aside and hurried away.
CHAPTER I
It was Young Folks' Day in the Vale of Newlands. The summer was at its height; the sun shone brightly; the lake to the north lay flat as a floor of glass, and reflected a continent of blue cloud; the fells were clear to their summits, and purple with waves of heather. It was noontide, and the shadows were short. In the slumberous atmosphere the bees droned, and the hot air quivered some feet above the long, lush grass. The fragrance of new-mown hay floated languidly through a sub-current of wild rose and honeysuckle. In a meadow at the foot of the Causey Pike tents were pitched, flags were flying, and crowds of men, women, and children watched the mountain sports.
In the center of a group of spectators two men, stripped to the waist, were wrestling. They were huge fellows, with muscles that stood out on their arms like giant bulbs, and feet that held the ground like the hoofs of oxen. The wrestlers were calm to all outward appearance, and embraced each other with the quiet fondling of lambs and the sinuous power of less affectionate creatures. But the people about them were wildly excited. They stopped to watch every wary movement of the foot, and craned their necks to catch the subtlest twist of the wrist.
"Sista, Reuben, sista! He'll have enough to do to tummel John Proudfoot. John's up to the scat to-day, anyways."
"Look tha! John's on for giving him the cross-buttock."
John was the blacksmith, a big buirdly fellow with a larger blunt head.
"And he has given it too, has John."
"Nay, nay, John's doon – ey, ey, he's doon, is John."
One of the wrestlers had thrown the other, and was standing quietly over him. He was a stalwart young man of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired, clear-eyed, of a ruddy complexion, with a short, thick, curly beard, and the grace and bearing that comes of health and strength and a complete absence of self-consciousness. He smiled cheerfully, and nodded his head in response to loud shouts of applause. "Weel done! Verra weel done! That's the way to ding 'em ower! What sayst tha, Reuben?"
"What a bash it was, to be sure!"
"What dusta think you of yon wrestling, ey, man?"
"Nay, nay, it's verra middling."
"Ever seen owt like it since the good auld days you crack on sa often, auld man?"
"Nay, he doont him verra neat, did Paul – I will allow it."
"There's never a man in Cumberland need take a hand with young Paul Ritson after this."
"Ey, ey; he's his father's son."
The wrestler, surrounded by a little multitude of boys, who clung to his sparse garments on every side, made his way to a tent.
At the same moment a ludicrous figure forced a passage through the crowd, and came to a stand in the middle of the green. It was a diminutive creature, mounted on a pony that carried its owner on a saddle immediately below its neck, and a pair of paniers just above its tail. The rider was an elderly man with shaggy eyebrows and beard of mingled black and gray. His swarthy, keen wizened face was twisted into grotesque lines beneath a pair of little blinking eyes, which seemed to say that anybody who refused to see that they belonged to a perfectly, wideawake son of old Adam made a portentous mistake. He was the mountain peddler, and to-day, at least, his visit was opportune.
"Lasses, here's for you! Look you, here's Gubblum Oglethorpe, pony and all."
"Why, didsta ever see the like – Gubblum's getten hissel into a saddle!"
Gubblum, from his seat on the pony, twisted one half of his wrinkled face awry, and said:
"In course I have! But it's a vast easier getting into this saddle nor getting out of it, I can tell you!"
"Why, how's that, Gubblum?" cried a voice from the crowd.
"What, man, did you never hear of the day I bought it?"
Sundry shakes of many heads were the response.
"No?" said Gubblum, with an accent of sheer incredulity, and added, "Well, there is no accounting for the ignorance of some folks."
"What happened to you, Gubblum?"
Gubblum's expression of surprise gave place to a look of condescension. He lifted his bronzed and hairy hand to the rim of his straw hat to shade his eyes from the sun.
"Well, when I got on to auld Bessy, here, I couldn't get off again – that's what happened."
"No? Why?"
"You see, I'd got my clogs on when I went to buy the saddle in Kezzick, and they're middling wide in the soles, my clogs are. So when I put my feet into the stirrups, there they stuck."
"Stuck!"
"Ey, fast as nails! And when I got home to Branth'et Edge I couldn't get them out. So our Sally, she said to my auld woman, 'Mother,' she said, 'we'll have to put father into the stable with the pony and fetch him a cup of tea.' And that's what they did, and when I had summat into me I had another fratch at getting out of the saddle; but I couldn't manish it; so I had – what you think I had to do?"
"Nay, man, what?"
"I had to sleep all night in the stable on Bessy's back!"
"Bless thee, Gubblum, and whatever didsta do?"
"I'm coming to that, on'y some folks are so impatient. Next morning that lass of mine, she said to her mother, 'Mother,' she said, 'wouldn't it be best to take the saddle off the pony, and then father he'll sure come off with it?'"
"And they did do it?"
"Ey, they did. They took Bessy and me round to the soft bed as they keeps maistly at the back of a stable, and they loosened the straps and gave a push, and cried 'Away.'"
"Weel, man, weel?"
"Weel! nowt of the sort! It wasn't weel at all! When I rolled over I was off the pony, for sure; but I was stuck fast to the saddle just the same."
"What ever did they do with thee then?"
"I'm coming to that, too, on'y some folks are so mortal fond of hearing theirselves