The Adventures of Tom Leigh (2 page)

“He'd do best to go down Mearclough, by t'beck,” offered a voice from the back of the room.

“Aye, well, happen he had. It'd be gainest, choose how,” said another.

“Nay, it's coming dark. Best stick to t'lane.”

“He'll never find it.”

“One of you can set him on t'road.”

“Nay, lad! It's all of a mile, and rain's fair teeming down.”

“He's right out of his way.”

“He should never have come here in t'first place.”

I remember what they said very well, though at the time I did not understand it. Now I know that a
beck
is a stream, a
clough
the cleft in the hills down which it runs,
teeming
means pouring, and
gainest
means quickest, fastest. I was still half asleep when my father steered me out into the rain and set off briskly along the hill.

“Couldn't we stay the night at the inn, father?” I besought him, for my left heel had a blister and I was tired out.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn't much care for the look of some of the men in there,” said my father, lowering his voice. “I wish I hadn't shown 'em my bag. Besides, we must be in Halifax market tomorrow morning.”

We both quickened our steps. When we entered the inn it had been twilight, now it was dusk; the great hills loomed sombrely around us, the wind roared, sleet was now mingled with the heavy rain.

“This is the way,” said my father, turning off into a muddy path which dipped down steeply from the lane. “This will be the clough they spoke of.”

It seemed to me a fearsome place. True, on our right there was one of those stone walls with which this county abounded, and a few straggling hawthorns, which gave us some shelter; but on our left at the bottom of a kind of narrow gorge a stream flung itself furiously downhill over a bed of rocks, with a clamour which almost overtopped the roar of the wind. The path was very muddy and slippery, and occasionally a sharp point of rock tripped me up. Once I was thrown sprawling; I thought I should fall into the stream but managed to cling to some very long tough grass halfway down the bank, and my father gave me a hand to climb up again.

It was now quite dark, or perhaps it seemed so because we came into a thicker belt of hawthorns; at any rate I could see nothing, not even my father just in front of me, so when he stopped suddenly I stumbled into him.

“Wait here a moment, Tom,” he said in a troubled tone. “I am not sure of the way. There seems to be a bend here in the path.”

I was not sorry to stand for a moment and catch my breath. Behind the wind, the rain, the roar of the stream, the slow heavy steps of my father as he edged his way along, I thought I heard a crackle behind the wall. But I had hardly had time to think what it might be—a footstep perhaps on broken twigs—before a voice pealed out, it seemed almost in my ear:

“Keep to your left!”

I swear I heard this, whatever Mr. Firth and Sir Henry and the Constable may say. It was a shout: loud, urgent, commanding, and at the same time a shout of warning. Then there came a wild high scream and a sound, difficult to describe but clear enough in what it meant, of a body falling over rocks.

“Tom!” cried my father. “Keep away, boy! Keep back! I'm—”

I rushed forward, and pitched straight down the bank, for the path took a bend to the right there, as my father had guessed. My father lay half amid rocks, half in a deep cold pool. I cried: “Father! Father!” and pulled at his arm, but he did not speak or stir. Then I felt his face, and it was under water, and I got my hands into his armpits and hauled at his shoulders frantically, and I kneeled in the water at the edge of the pool and got his head up on my knees and held him so and tried to drag him out of the water, but he was too heavy for me to move. Indeed it was as much as I could do to hold him there, and gradually his body slipped down and his head fell forward, and just as I was beginning to feel that my aching arms could hold him no longer something fell heavily on the back of my head, and I knew no more.

When I came to myself I was lying in a very clean bed in a small room with a peaked roof and one very small window. I had never seen the room before, and after a time, as my senses cleared, I began to wonder where I could be. I sat up, but at once my head swam, I felt giddy and had to lie down again. The coverlet, I noticed, was a piece of undyed white cloth of the cheap rough kind called kersey, with several very bad faults in the weaving of it. Presently I made another attempt to rouse myself, and after one or two efforts managed to get out of bed and stumble to the window. A kind of despair seized me as I looked out. All round the horizon the hills rose and fell; the nearer ones were green with dark tops, the further ones blue, for it was a sunny morning and this window was high and had a distant view. So I could not be in Suffolk. Then I remembered the bleak night and the tumbling stream and the weight of my father's body and the strange slack feel of his cheek against mine, and I tore the coverlet off the bed and wrapped myself in it and pulled open the door of the room—and fell straight into the arms of an enormous fat woman with very red cheeks, who was coming in with a mug of gruel in her hand.

“What are you about, you daft lad?” she said in that cheerful railing Yorkshire tone which I have now learned is not meant to be unfriendly. “Do you want to kill yourself? Get back into bed and sup your gruel.”

I did as I was told, for I hardly had strength to do aught else, but I demanded: “Where am I?” in an urgent tone.

“Where are you? In Barseland poorhouse, to be sure. Where did you think you were?”

“Poorhouse?” I exclaimed in horror. “What am I doing in a poorhouse? What will my father say? I must leave at once.”

“Now, don't fret yourself, love,” said the fat woman, pressing her hand kindly on my shoulder. “It's no use leaving here till tha's somewhere else to go, tha knows.”

“Where is my father?”

“Well—he's not in Barseland, and that's a fact.”

“Where is Barseland? Is it near Halifax?”

“Aye, it is.”

“Then I'll go to Halifax. My father will be there.”

The fat woman stepped to the door, and called out: “Mr. Gledhill! Mr. Gledhill!”

After a moment a tall thin serious-looking man with a very long face and grey hair came into the room.

“This is Mr. Gledhill, the Barseland Constable and Overseer of the Poor,” said the fat woman to me. “So answer him as straight as you can. He's asking for his father,” she said to Mr. Gledhill.

Mr. Gledhill looked graver than ever.

“What is your name, my boy?”

“Thomas Leigh. Most people call me Tom.”

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“You were with your father, were you? What were you doing down Mearclough on such a wild stormy night? Where had you come from? Where were you going to? Those are a lot of questions; take your time and answer as fully as you can.”

I told him all about our home at Lavenham, and why we had come to Yorkshire, and how we had lost ourselves, and the scene at the inn, and the voice that had sent my father stumbling down the bank—at this he and the fat woman exchanged looks of disbelief, which vexed me. But on the whole he seemed pleased, I thought, with my account.

“Your father had a trade, then?”

“Of course! He's a weaver. A very
good
weaver.”

“Not a vagrant, then,” said the fat woman.

“Seems not,” said Mr. Gledhill.

“What is a vagrant?” I asked.

“Somebody who wanders about the country without money—a man with no trade—a beggar.”

“How dare you say my father is a beggar!” I shouted angrily.

“We just said he wasn't, love,” said the fat woman. “Since he had a trade.”

“He has a trade and he has money,” I cried. “He has five guineas in gold and a handful of silver—well, nearly a handful,” I corrected myself, remembering my father paying for our meat and drink at the Fleece. “I'll go to Halifax and find him, and then he'll explain it all to you.”

“Listen, lad,” said Mr. Gledhill. “I'm sorry to have to tell you this, my boy, but it must be done. You've lost your father, Tom. He broke his neck when he fell into the stream. He fell on the rocks, you know.”

“Do you mean he's—dead?”

“Dead and buried,” said the fat woman.

At this I fell into a kind of violent stormy shouting and weeping and beating my hands against the coverlet. The fat woman threw up her hands and left, but Mr. Gledhill drew up a chair and sat through it all in solemn silence. When from sheer exhaustion I quietened at last, he began to question me as to my family in Lavenham. But I had no blood kin living anywhere, and so I told him. He stroked his chin thoughtfully.

“We shall have to send you back to Lavenham, Tom,” he said. “You don't belong to Barseland, you've no settlement here, you see. We can't pay out Barseland rate money for a Lavenham pauper.”

“I am not a pauper,” I said indignantly. “My father had money with him. Surely that money is now mine?”

“Aye, it is. Or it would be if we could find it,” said Mr. Gledhill. “Your father had no money on him when we found him. I examined him myself, Tom. There was no money.”

“It was in a bag in an inner pocket of his jacket.”

“There was no money, Tom.”

“Then somebody stole it,” I cried.

“Are you accusing me?” said Mr. Gledhill coldly.

“No, no. But the money was there.”

“We found no money, we entered him in our records as a vagrant. At present you are a pauper and must stay in this poorhouse until you can be sent back to Lavenham. You are under the orders of Mrs. Hollas, whom you have seen, and her husband, who is the Master of this poorhouse. They will set you to work as soon as you are able. I hope you soon will be able, for we have kept you for a fortnight already.”

“A fortnight?” said I, staggered.

“Aye, a fortnight. You have been ill of a fever. What with lying out all night in Barseland stream, with rain and wind beating on you, and the bang on your head, perhaps it is no wonder,” said Mr. Gledhill.

His voice, which had turned so cold when I said my father's money had been stolen, seemed now to warm again, and I took courage.

“Mr. Gledhill, I accuse nobody, believe me I accuse nobody, but my father had money, just as I told you, it was in a calfskin bag. Maybe the bag fell into the pool? Please have a search made for it. Please, Mr. Gledhill!”

“Well—when the pool has dried a little in this fine weather, I will have it dragged. Meanwhile, you had best keep quiet about the money, Tom. If money has really been stolen from a dead man, it will be a bad lookout for Barseland. Happen the bag fell into the pool. Let us hope so. If, indeed, there was a bag at all.”

“My father had a leather bag with five golden guineas in it,” said I firmly.

Mr. Gledhill's face twitched with annoyance, and he rose and made to quit the room. At the door, however, he paused, and turned to me, saying:

“Try not to grieve, Tom. When you are recovered—” he hesitated—“when you are recovered I will take you to see your father's grave.”

He went out. So there I was, of all boys, I thought, the most wretched. Fatherless, destitute, a pauper in a poorhouse in a strange land. I felt so lonely, so helpless, so desolate, that it was all I could do not to throw myself face down on my pillows and cry like a girl.

Since that time I have heard bad accounts of many poorhouses; how the inmates were ill fed and ill clothed, slept in dirty beds and were employed continually on hard exacting tasks. But except for the tasks, I did not find life too hard at the Barseland poorhouse. Mrs. Hollas, though bustling and rough in her manner and somewhat coarse in her speech, was kind at heart. Her husband I did not like so well. A thin wiry little man with red eyebrows, a very pale hollow face and strong freckles, he was mean in disposition, and I thought would have cheated Barseland and us if he had been able. But Mr. Gledhill in his quiet dour way delved into all the expenditure very closely and often. Before one of his visits Mr. Hollas was always in a bad temper, and took it out on the inmates, cuffing the younger and shouting at the older amongst us. Indeed he was too much given at all times to cuffing heads, boxing ears and hitting our wrists with his bunch of keys; we were always happiest in the poorhouse when he was away on one of his expeditions into the north of the county to buy provisions. It seemed that further north in Yorkshire there was more fertile land than in our part of the West Riding, and Mr. Hollas had a cousin who lived up that way, in Skipton, and from him he bought cheese and sides of mutton for our benefit. At cheap rates, he said, and certainly I never heard Mr. Gledhill grumble overmuch about these prices when he and Mr. Hollas went into the barn together to check the purchases. Mr. Hollas
was always agitated and fidgety as he unlocked the door, Mr. Gledhill very slow and quiet, with long bills in his hand.

Partly, therefore, owing to this useful cousin of Mr. Hollas, but more, I thought, to the watchfulness of Mr. Gledhill, our food, though neither ample nor varied, was sufficient; the cheese and oatmeal porridge and milk were plentiful, the meat, though not plentiful, was enough to give us all a small slice a day, and as the days went on I grew used to eating oatcake. At first these thin spongy ovals which were hung up on strings above the fire to dry filled me with dislike, but I soon found that when they were crisp their sharp taste and crackle were not disagreeable.

The poorhouse was kept clean, and we were given the chance to wash our linen. Though as regards clothes I was in evil case; our bundles had vanished with my father's money, so I had but one shirt, my shoes had dried out of shape and split, and my breeches were so torn and stained by my adventure in Barseland stream that I was ashamed to be seen in them.