Collected works of j s f.., p.464
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 464
Scholes had no objection to telling his tale over and over again, and there was not a pair of ears in all that neighbourhood which had not heard it; if not at first, then at second hand — nor was there a soul which did not feel a certain warmth in recognising Jeckie Farnish’s astuteness; Scholes himself recognised it.
“Ye see, shoo hed me afore iver shoo come to t’house!” he would say. “Knew t’coal wor theer afore iver shoo come reck’nin’ to want to buy mi fotty acre and mak’ an orchard on’t! But niver a word to me! Buyin’, shoo wor, not fotty acre o’ poor land, d’ye see, but what they call t’possibilities ‘at ligged beneath it! T’possibilities o’ untold wealth! As should ha’ been mine. Nowt but a moral thief — that’s what shoo is, yon Jecholiah. Clever’ ’er may be — I don’t say shoo isn’t, but a moral thief.”
“Tha means an immoral thief,” said one of his listeners.
“I mean what I say!” retorted Scholes. “I know t’English language better nor what thou does. A moral thief! — that’s what yon woman is. I appeal to t’company. If ye nobbut come to consider, same as judges and juries does at t’sizes, how shoo did me, ye’ll see ‘at, morally speakin’, shoo robbed me o’ my lawful rights. Ye see — for happen ye’ve forgotten some o’ t’fine points o’ t’matter, it wor i’ this way — —”
Then he would tell his tale all over again, and would afterwards argue it out, detail by detail, with his audience. In that part of Yorkshire the men are fond of hearing their own tongues, and wherever Scholes went the companies of the inn-kitchens were converted into debating societies.
One night, Scholes, full of rum and of delight in his grievance, went home and found his wife dead. As he had left her quite well when he went out in the morning, the shock sobered him, and certain affecting sentences in the Burial Service at which he was perforce present a few days later turned his thoughts toward religion. The truth was that Scholes, already half mad through his exaggeration of his wrongs, developed religious mania in a very sudden fashion. But no one suspected it, and the vicar, who was something of a simpleton, believed him to have undergone a species of conversion; Scholes, anyhow, forsook the public-house for the house of prayer, and was henceforth to be seen in company of a large prayer-book at all the services, Sunday and week-day. Very close observers might have noticed that he took great pleasure in those of the Psalms which invoke wrath and vengeance on enemies, and, on days when the choir was not present and the service was said, manifested infinite delight in repeating the Psalmist’s denunciation in an unnecessarily loud voice. But no one remarked anything, and if the vicar secretly wished that his new sheep would not bleat quite so loudly, he put the excess of vocalisation down to the fact that Scholes was new to his job and anxious to obey the directions of the Rubrics. Moreover, he reflected, the probability was that Scholes would soon tire of attendance on the services, and would settle down to the conventional and respectable churchmanship of most of the folk around him.
Scholes, however, developed his mania. He suddenly got rid of his farm, realised all that he was worth, and went to live, quite alone, in a small cottage near the churchyard. From that time forward he divided his time between the church services and the doings on Savilestowe Leys. Whenever there was a service he was always in church — but so soon as ever any service was over he was off to the end of the village, to haunt the hedgerows and fences, and button-hole anybody who cared to hear his story. This went on for many an eventful month, and at last became a matter of no moment; Ben Scholes, said all the village, was a bit cracked, and if it pleased him to spend ten minutes in church, and all the rest of the day hanging about the outskirts of Jeckie Farnish’s pit, why not? But in the last months of the operations at the new pit, the first day of another Lent came round, and the vicar, with Scholes and a couple of old alms-women as a congregation, read the Commination Service. Scholes had never heard this before, and the vicar was somewhat taken aback at the vigour with which he responded to certain fulminations.
“Cursed,” read the vicar in unaffected and mellifluous tones, more suited to a benediction, “cursed is he that smiteth his neighbour secretly!”
“Amen!” responded Scholes, suddenly starting, as if a thought struck him. “Amen!”
“Cursed,” presently continued the vicar, “is he that putteth his trust in man....”
“Amen, amen!” said Scholes fervently. “Amen!”
“Cursed,” continued the vicar, glancing round at his respondent parishioner, and nervously hurrying forward, “are....”
“Covetous persons, extortioners!” exclaimed Scholes, anticipating certain passages to come. “Amen, amen! So they are — amen!”
Then without waiting to hear what it was that the prophet David bore witness for, he clapped his prayer-book together with a loud noise, and hurried from the church; through one of the windows the vicar saw him walking among the tombs outside, gesticulating, and evidently talking to himself. When the service was over, he went out to him. “I fear the service distressed you, Scholes,” he began, diffidently. “You are — —”
Scholes waved his arms abroad.
“Nowt o’ t’sort!” he exclaimed. “I wor delighted wi’ it! I could like to hev that theer service read ivery Sunda’! I wor allus wantin’ to mak’ sure ‘at a certain person ‘at I could name wor cursed. An’, of course, wheer theer’s cursin’ theer’s vengeance — vengeance, vengeance!”
“Don’t forget, Scholes, that it has been wisely said, ‘Vengeance is Mine: I will repay, saith the Lord,’” answered the vicar, in his mildest tones. “You must remember — —”
“Now, then, I forget nowt!” retorted Scholes. “I know all about it. But t’Lord mun use instruments — human instruments! Aw, it’s varry comfortin’, is what ye and me read together this mornin’ — varry comfortin’ to me. Cursed! ‘Covetous persons’! Aw! — ye needn’t go far away to find one!”
The vicar was one of those men who dislike scenes and enthusiasm, and he left Scholes to himself, meditating among the gravestones, and went home to tell his wife that he wished somebody would give the man a quiet hint that loud upliftings of voice were not desirable in public worship. But next Sunday Scholes was not in his accustomed place — the front pew in the south aisle — nor did he come to church again. The clauses in the Commination Service had set his crazy brain off on another tack, and from the day on which he heard them he forgot the temporary anæsthetic which religious observance had brought to him, and sought out his older and more familiar one — drink. He took to frequenting the “Brown Cow,” a hostelry of less pretensions than the “Coach-and-Four,” and there he would sit for hours, quietly drinking rum and water — as inoffensive, said the landlady, as a pet lamb in a farm-house kitchen.
For Scholes no longer talked about his grievance. He became strangely quiescent; sharper observers than the landlady would have seen that he was moody. He never talked to anybody at this stage, though he muttered a great deal to himself, and occasionally smiled and laughed, as if the thought of something pleased him. But one night, as he sat alone in a corner of the “Brown Cow,” there came in a couple of navvies whom he recognised as workers at the hated pit, and a notion came into his mentality, which, crazy as it was rapidly becoming, yet still retained much of its primitive craftiness. He treated these men to liquor; they came to be treated again the following night, and the night after that; they and Scholes henceforth met regularly of an evening in their corner, and drank and whispered for hours at a time.
There came a day whereon these men and Scholes no longer forgathered at the “Brown Cow.” Instead, they met at Scholes’s cottage. It was a lonely habitation, a tumbled-down sort of place in the lee of the old tithe-barn, and had been empty for years before Scholes took it and furnished it with odds and ends of seating and bedding. It stood well out of the village, and could be reached unobserved from more than one direction. Here the two navvies with whom he had made friends at the “Brown Cow” began to come. Scholes laid in a supply of liquor for their delectation. And here, round a smoky lamp and a spirit bottle, the three were wont to talk in whispers far into the night.
Had Jeckie Farnish or Lucilla Grice known of what it was that these three men talked — one of them already obsessed with the belief that he was the Lord’s chosen instrument of vengeance, the other two cunningly anxious to profit by it — neither would have slept in their beds, nor felt one moment’s peace until Scholes and his companions were safely laid by the heels. But they knew nothing; nothing, at any rate, that was discomposing or threatening. Ever since the time of putting more capital into the concern the making of the colliery had gone on successfully and even splendidly. The two shafts, up-cast and down-cast, had been sunk to depths of several hundreds of feet without any encountering of more than the ordinary difficulties; the two great dangers, water and running sand, had not presented themselves. On the surface the building of the various sheds and offices had proceeded rapidly; some were already roofed in; in one the winding machinery and engines had been installed. The connection road was made; the link of railway finished; and on the high ground above the Leys three rows of ugly red-brick cottages were steadily approaching completion. The man who made his silent calculations that morning when Jeckie Farnish stood by him in grim silence came to her one day with a sheepish smile on his face.
“I was a bit out in my reckoning, Miss Farnish,” he said. “But it was on the right side! At the rate we’re going at now we’ll be finished, and the pit’ll be working from six to eight weeks sooner than I thought. You’d better hurry those builders on with the cottages; you’ll be wanting to fill them before so long.”
Jeckie needed no admonition to hurry anything. She was speeding up all the work as rapidly as she could, for good reasons which she kept to herself. Once more the outlay was proving greater than had been anticipated, and she knew that if the manager’s final reckoning of ten months from the time of her sale of the grocery business had been kept to she would have had to raise more capital. She was secretly overjoyed when Revis, of Heronshawe Main, drove over one day, made a careful inspection of all that had been done, and was then being done, and corroborated Robinson’s revised opinion — the pit would be at work six weeks sooner than she had thought.
“And I reckon you’ll be rare and glad to see the first tubs o’ coal wound, my lass!” he said heartily as he drove off. “I know I was!”
Jeckie nodded and smiled; she was too thankful for his opinion to put her feelings into words. That night she was wakeful — not from anxiety, but from satisfaction and anticipation. Two months more, and the money that had been sunk in that pit would be coming out of its depths again, multiplied, increased....
In the middle of that night a brilliant flash of lurid flame followed by a roar that shook her cottage to its foundations and left it rocking, sent her headlong from her bed. And as she stood sick and trembling, grasping at the lintel of her window, she heard, in the deadly silence that followed, a sudden outburst of the big bell of the church, pealing as if for victory.
CHAPTER IX
The Bell Rings
JECKIE FARNISH WAS a strong woman; physically as well as mentally she was the strongest woman in all those parts. She had scarcely ever known what it was to feel a sudden giving way of strength; the end of a long day’s toil usually found her fresh and vigorous, ready for and gladly anticipating the labours of the morrow. Nor had she ever known what it was to experience a mental giving way; the nearest approach to it — only a momentary one — had been on that day, long years before, whereon George Grice had turned his back on her and her father’s fallen fortunes. She had felt mentally sick and physically weak then, as though all the strength had been dashed out of her mind and body. But the feeling had quickly passed under the reviving fire of her anger and resentment, and since then she had rarely felt a qualm that affected her in either sense — determination and resolution had always kept her going. There were folks in the parish who were fond of saying that she was moulded of beaten iron with a steel core in the middle — it was their way of expressing a belief that nothing on earth below or in heaven above could move or bend her.
But as the vivid flash of flame and the infernal roar which followed it passed away, Jeckie standing in her night-clothes between her bed and her curtained window, felt herself stricken from head to foot; she was sick, in heart and brain. She suddenly realised that she was shaking throughout her strongly-fashioned frame, that her knees were knocking one against the other, her feet rattling on the floor, her fingers working as from a terrible shock. And in the silence she heard her heart thumping and thumping and thumping — it made her think of the engines at the pit which pumped up the leaking water as the shafts were driven deeper and deeper into the earth. She tried to lift a hand towards her heaving breast; it dropped back, nerveless, to her side.
“Oh God!” she breathed at last. “What is it? What is it?”
The hurrying of folk in the street outside roused her out of her momentary paralysis, and with an effort she stumbled rather than walked to the window-place, drew aside curtain and blind, flung open a casement, and leaned out into the night. And at what she saw, a moan burst from her lips, and she began to tremble as with a violent attack of ague. For the night was one of brilliantly clear moonlight, and from her window she could see all across the Leys and the buildings upon which she had expended such vast sums. And over the newly made pit, so rapidly approaching completion, hung a great umbrella-shaped cloud of dun-coloured smoke, thick and rolling, and from the pit mouth itself issued spurts and flickers of bright flame, which, as she stared, horror-stricken, began to gather at one place into a steady, spreading blaze. Thitherwards men were already beginning to hasten from the open doors of the cottages, calling to each other as they ran. And above their voices, never ceasing, sounded the frantic ringing of the big bell of the church, maddening in its insistence.
She leaned farther out of the window and called to the folk who were hurrying past; called several times before she attracted attention. But at last a white face looked up and a voice hailed her — the voice of one of the principal foremen in the machinery department at the pit.
“Miss Farnish!” he called. “Miss Farnish! — it’s an explosion! The down-cast shaft! And look there! — the pit’s on fire!”
He pointed a shaking arm across the flat expanse of land before the cottage, and Jeckie saw that the gathering flame about the mouth of the shaft had suddenly leaped into a great mass of lurid light. Its brightness illumined the whole area around it, and she saw then that the surface works which had steadily grown up around the excavations had either been blown away or were left in shapeless bulks of ruinous masonry. Towards these from all directions men were running like ants swarming about a broken down nest.
She turned away from the window, and with no other light than the glare from without, sought for and huddled her shaking limbs into the first garments that came to hand. And as she fastened them about her, scarce knowing how, a hand began to beat upon her door, and Farnish called to her, once, twice, thrice, before she realised that the sounds were human and had any significance.
“Jeckie, mi lass!” Farnish was calling. “Jeckie! Jeckie!”
“What is it?” she asked at last in a dull, strained voice, so strange in its sound that she found herself wondering at it. “What do you want?”
“Yon noise?” cried Farnish, who slept at the back of the cottage. “What’s it about, mi lass? What’s it mean?”
“The pit’s blown up,” answered Jeckie, with almost sullen indifference. “It’s on fire, too. You can come in and see for yourself.”
Farnish pushed the door open and entered; he was half whimpering, half moaning as he crossed the floor towards the window. But Jeckie, now wrapped in a thick ulster coat and tying a shawl round her head and neck, said nothing. Her heart had resumed its normal action by then; she was only conscious that she felt sick and faint. She stared stupidly at her father’s figure, darkly outlined against the glow of the fire.
“God ha’ mercy on us!” groaned Farnish. “A bad job! a bad job! Howiver can it ha’ come about, and what mun be done? It’s all of a flame, and — —”
“Come out!” commanded Jeckie. “I must see for myself what’s — —”
She had laid a hand on the half-open door of the bedroom, when it was suddenly wrenched out of her grasp, and she herself thrown backwards across the bed by a second and apparently more violent explosion, which came simultaneously with another vivid burst of orange-coloured flame. Jeckie remembered afterwards what curious and vivid impressions she had in that moment. As she herself was flung over the edge of her thick feather-bed she saw Farnish thrown away from the window, his arms whirling in the air like the sails of a wind-mill; she heard a musical tinkle of falling glass, making a sort of background to his startled outcry. And she saw things. The vividness of the glare lit up a glass-fronted case on the bedroom wall wherein was a stuffed squirrel; it also lit up a framed text of Scripture, set in a floral bordering of hideous design, and a little weather-glass, furnished with two figures, one of which, a man, came out for fine weather, while the other, a woman, emerged for wet; years afterwards she had vivid recollections of how these two quaint puppets were violently agitated at the end of their wires. And then there was gloom again, and silence, and she heard Farnish gathering himself up from the floor, moaning.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, dully and indifferently. “Is aught wrong?”
“T’window were blown right in on mi face,” answered Farnish, “I’m bleedin’ somewhere. What about yoursen, mi lass?”
Jeckie was seeking for matches and a candle. The candle had been blown out of its tin holder and had rolled into a corner. When she found and lighted it it was to reveal Farnish with a trickle or two of blood on his cheeks and scarce a pane of glass left in the window. She pointed him to a towel, and turned to the door. “That ‘ud be the other shaft,” she said in a low voice, and in a fashion that made Farnish afraid. “It’s been a put-up job. I’ve enemies! But I’ll best ’em yet! I’ll not be bet!”
