A storm of execration and obscene abuse burst over Taffendale as the crowd came to a halt and faced him. It suddenly died down into a low continuous growl as he lifted a hand.
"Not a foot do you set on my property, you scoundrels!" he shouted. "You've done enough harm for one night down yonder, and some of you'll find yourselves in gaol before the week's out. Be off before you get your heads broken."
A further roar of abuse followed Taffendale's admonition, and one of the masked men forced himself to the front and shook his fist at the figure on the horseblock.
"None o' yeer advice!" he shouted, with a foul epithet, at which the crowd burst into a shriek of derisive laughter. "We know what's t' law and what isn't t' law. We're on the public highway, and ye can't put us offen it. We'm boun' to burn t' images o' ye and yer fancy woman afore yer faces—what, lads?"
In the midst of another storm of abuse some hand in the crowd threw a rotten egg at Taffendale with well-directed aim. The egg struck him full on the breast of his buttoned-up coat, burst, and bespattered the coat with its stinking contents. The mob yelled delightedly: Taffendale calmly divested himself of the coat and tossed it over the garden hedge behind him.
"Any more violence and you shall have something to yell for," he said. "I shan't warn you. Keep quiet, men!" he shouted, as some of the lime-burners started forward, cudgels in hand. "Keep quiet, I say! Let them have their play out."
The mob retreated a few paces to the broad strip of grass on the opposite side of the road. To the accompaniment of the blaring horns, the insistent thumping of the drum and beating of the pans and kettles, the leaders made their preparations for burning the stuffed effigies, which still swayed and nodded in ridiculous fashion on the ladder. Some of the men carried bundles of straw; others armfuls of sticks and dry wood; a lad came forward with a tin bottle of paraffin. Facing the horseblock, on which Taffendale kept his position, defiant and watchful, they built up a pyre of straw and wood, on the apex they placed the figures, still tied together at the waists. To the accompaniment of an increased volume of objurgation the fire was lighted, and black smoke and bright flame shot upward above the glow of the lime-pits in the background. And Taffendale, looking round, saw in the windows of his house the white faces of the frightened women, and further away the last dull light of the fire at Cherry-trees—burnt out.
The masked leader who had answered Taffendale's challenge with defiance, sprang upon a heap of stones at the side of the burning effigies. As the flames roared and sputtered upwards he began to shout the words of the doggerel nominy, his followers of the mob dancing and leaping about him and the quivering tongues of red fire—
"Rang a dang-dang! Rang a dang-dang It's not for you nor for me that we ride this stang! But for—"
Taffendale felt a hand pull at his knee. He looked down and saw the foreman's face beneath him, full of anxiety.
"Maister!" he said. "Maister! Look wheer them sparks is flyin'!"
Taffendale glanced at the shower of sparks sailing gaily away before the wind. A south-east breeze had been steadily rising and increasing in force all the evening, and now as the flakes of fire rose from the smoking mass on the roadside it was carrying them across the corner of the garden towards the great stackyard which lay at the side of the farmstead. And, as the foreman had remarked in the hollow, there were in that stackyard five-and-forty stacks of wheat and barley and oats, the yield of the recent harvest. Taffendale, a wealthy man, had no need to thrash his corn, as most farmers did—almost as soon as it was got from the land. He could afford to keep it, and keep it for months he always did. No thrashing machine had entered his yard that autumn, nor would enter; there stood the forty-five stacks, stoutly thatched and neatly trimmed, not to be touched before the end of the next spring. And now the sparks were flying that way; as Taffendale and the foreman gazed anxiously into the blackness above them, they saw a scurrying lump of red fall on the roof of the pigeon-cote and continue to glow fiercely and to shoot out tiny sparks of flame over the surrounding tiles.
Taffendale snapped out one fierce exclamation and leaped from the horseblock. He snatched a stick from one of his own farm lads, and waved his arm to his men.
"Out with that fire!" he shouted, above the roar of the flames and the strident voice of the nominy caller. "Quick, men! Out with it! Lay on!"
The lime-burners leaped on the crowd with a fury that sent its members flying as sparrows fly before the sudden onset of a hawk. Up rose the cudgels and down they fell, on heads, arms, shoulders, and on the burning figures and the red mass of straw and wood beneath. But the beating in of the fire only sent a fresh shower of sparks whirling and eddying into the sky, to be seized and carried onward by the wind, and suddenly, high above the yells and oaths of the men and the screeching of the women, they heard the voice of Tibby Graddige screaming from an upper window of the house.
"The stackgarth's on fire! The stackgarth's on fire!"
Taffendale slashed the leader of the mob heavily across the face with his cudgel, saw him sink down into the bonfire like a dead man, and calling on the lime-burners and his farm hands, ran like one demented round the garden and the outbuildings to the stack-yard. And as he turned the last corner he groaned and sobbed from very despair and helplessness because of the sight that met him. Three of the closely ranged stacks were well alight, and blazing furiously, and the wind was carrying the fire amongst the others in wide, curling sheets of flame.
For a moment Taffendale halted, staring at the fierce, never-ceasing onslaught of the terrible force which was tearing its way through his safely-garnered produce. Already the flame was licking a hundred new paths from stack to stack; as the men hastened up, it hastened before them; as they beat it out in one place it burst out anew in another. Before his very eyes the side of a great wheatstack caught and harboured a spark, was transformed into a sheet of glowing red, and sent up a circling pillar of smoke, through which the fire flashed like a live thing. He stood dazed, trembling, utterly bewildered. He saw one of his lads dash out of the stable-yard on his own horse, and go careering madly over the meadows, leaping hedge and ditch as they came, and he knew that he was riding to call the firemen from the market-town, five long miles off. He saw the lime-burners and the farm hands tear down branches of trees wherewith to beat out the spreading flames; he saw the flames set fire to the branches and go on eating their way to the hearts of the stacks. He saw the foreman and others dragging tarpaulins over the sides of the stacks which the fire had not yet reached; the fire swept on and set the tarpaulins alight, and more volumes of black and oily smoke rolled away to mingle with the flames. He saw the men driven back, driven away, until at last, smoke-grimed and singed and sullen they stood gathered about him, silently watching the great glowing mass of straw and grain, worth many a thousand pounds, mould itself into a mighty furnace, the glow of which was spread widely over the sky and was seen for miles upon miles by many a wondering town and village.
"That's done for!" said Taffendale at last. "There's naught can save it. Every stack 'll go. No use any fire brigade coming—they can do naught. But there's one good job—the wind's blowing it away from the buildings and the stables. Some of you go and quiet those horses. Let them out into the garth—they're worse than the women!"
The horses were screaming in the stables, and when the lads released them they rushed out into the homegarth and galloped wildly away across country, to round up at last in a shaking, quivering mass and, closely huddled together, to stare back in wide-eyed affright at the horror which had driven them close to madness. And Taffendale stared, and the men gathered about him stared, and the women, clustering in the farmhouse windows, stared, until in the grey morning the great fire burnt itself out, and where the stacks had stood in their prim neatness and ordered lines, thatched and trimmed and shaven, there was nothing but shapeless heaps of blackened refuse, through which evil tongues of feeble flame darted at every puff of wind.
And