Normanton

Front matter

NORMANTON. BY A. J. BARROWCLIFFE, AUTHOR OF " AMBERHJLL," " TRUST FOR TRUST," ETC. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, COENHILL. M.DCCC.LXII. f The right of Translation is reserved. ] CONTENTS. JULY THE THIRTY-FIRST. Chap. 1'age I. The Village ...... 1 II. Lynns Mill . . . . . 14 HI. Keepsakes . . . . . .26 IV. Fairyland ■ . . . . 41 AUGUST THE FIRST. I. The Abbey Wood . . . . .71 H. In the Orchard . . . . 85 IH. The Old Canal . . . . .95 AUGUST THE SECOND. I. On the Towing-Path . . . . 113 II. The Gams of Gold . . . . .1-4 III. Mr. Dishley's Opinion . . • • • 155 IV. Village Bees . . . . • .167 V. Baggs and his Story . . . . 180 VI. Among the Lilies ..... 19S CONTENTS. iv AUGUST THE THIRD. Chap. Page I. Mark Woodthorpe and the Squire . . .215 H. Lilla's Question . . . . .231 IH. The Burial of the Dead . . . . 245 IV.

Executors . . . . . .261 V. Underwood's Daughter . . . . . 269 AUGUST THE FOURTH. I. Open Windows ... . 095 II. Mrs. Armstrong ... . 303 III. Mark's Return . . . . .311 IV. Thk Evening and the Morning . . . NOKMANTON JULY THE THIRTY-FIRST.

Chapter I. The Village

In those meadows where the cattle are for ever grazing, and the boats go slowly behind the willows, between the reedy banks of the old canal, the white village of' Normanton stands among its orchards at the foot of the hills, whose slopes are covered with woods and cornfields and over whose ridges the morning comes. Winding up those hills, hidden when it skirts the woods, hut plainly seen from the green meadows when it goes zig-zag among the fields of corn, a road leads from the village to the country lying eastward. It disappears before the ridge is gained, for there is a hollow there, and NORMANTON. the road goes down into it and rises afterwards among the trees of a thick plantation. In the hollow an oak-wood grows, and in the wood there is a ruin called the Abbey, though nothing is left of it excepting a tower and some crumbling walls, and it has long been used as a game-keeper's cottage, the ground-floor of the tower having been made habitable and the situation being a desirable one.

The spot is lonely, and seldom cheerful to human souls; but other things find their pleasure there. There are owls at night and wood-peckers by day ; king-fishers fly along the stream that trickles down the hollow, and large winged dragon flies float over it. The cup-moss reddens, and the orobanche withers, near at hand, and a large bush of the deadly nightshade grows behind one of the gothic windows of the ruin. The abbey is about two miles from Normanton. Returning by the zig-zag road, the white village lies below you, and over it there is a wide prospect of pasture lands. A river partly navigable winds through them, and where its channel is too shallow or its course too tortuous, the straight fines of a canal complete the water way. You may trace it by the towing path, by the barges floating down, and by the clear line of light upon the water, for, in the shallow and unused parts of the river, rushes and the yellow iris half fill it with green islands and frequent promontories.

No bridge is visible. The river separates two counties and the lands on either side are held by different proprietors. There is a bridge two miles farther down, over which a turnpike road passes, but a low spur running from the hills, with a spinney on it, intervenes. Close to the village, however, where only a single field lies between the nearest hayricks and the river, there is a King's Ferry, established long ago, and still the principal means of communication from side to side. A foot path down the middle of the field leads to it. Another, on the opposite bank, branches off in three or four directions across the meadows, the best trodden of its branches being the foot-road to Lakeby, a market town four miles from the ferry : you see the blue haze over it almost in the horizon. Outside the village, to the left, near one of the bends in the river, is a white building a good deal larger than the cottages.

That is Lynns Mill. The stream that trickles down the hollow behind you runs by it and turns its heavy water-wheel. It has latticed windows and a slated roof. There are low appendages in the shape of out-houses at one end, and at the other a considerable projection with a broad dark archway in it. All is as white as chalk, except the doorways and windows, the slate of the roof, the chimney tops, and the dark hollow of the arch, and over this even the roof and windows are partly whitened with the dust of flour. At the 1—2 NORMANTON. 4 other end of the building is a long row of white palings, enclosing an apple-orchard. There is a green field behind, between the house and the river, and in front, if you were nearer, you would see a garden full of quaint beds and stately flowers ; lilies and hollyhocks, foxgloves and tall campanulas, each hi its season, with whatever else grows trimly upwards with quiet aspiration.

Roses, too, and flowers that blush and glow, but do not flaunt and stare ; an old vine over the door and up to the eaves, and a yew tree arch above the white gate leading into the road. Looking down from these wooded hills, over the thick plantations, the sloping cornfields, and the wide green plain ; listening to the pastoral sounds, breathing the freshness, smelling the fragrance, dazed by the sunshine, you dream of a perfect peace and a perpetual cheerfulness. The old proverbs slip away ; the glory of the world abides ; it is not wisdom that warms you ; it is not prophecy that inspires you ; but at least it is happiness. In truth, your dreaming is not without some plausible confirmation. If ever anything stood still after coming to perfection, you see it surely when you look down on Normanton.

It has blossomed like a hawthorn in May, but not a flower has fallen since its old men were children in the grass. There has not been a cottage added to it these twenty years. In its hedgerows, the elms may have grown taller here and there ; an old oak may have been cut down and a young one planted, but no one looking from above could tell the difference. The footpaths across the fields have never been altered. They go from stile to stile with the same wilful bends and unnecessary angles lengthening the track, to the eye's delight and the grief of mathematics. The very ducks in the pond are the same in number, plumage, and habitude, if you were only near enough to see and count them. There are the same groups of children on the green, smiling with the same blue eyes through the same yellow hair, and if you called them by the same names they would answer to them, though the names are on head-stones also under the yew trees, and these, perhaps, are children's children.

In the churchyard, even, there is no change to speak of. There is, as there always was, a grave newer than the rest; but the number of the graves seems scarcely altered, though the black funerals of aged men, and the white ones of young maidens, and babies' coffins slung in handker chiefs, have often passed through the gate while the bell was tolling. The violets grow on the older mounds as they grew when these were newest ; and the white ones are as rare, and the dark purple flowers as plentiful, and both are as sweet and as much desired by the village children about Easter time as ever they were. Yet, for all this, Normanton is like the rest of the world. Its quiet has been broken and its whole NORMANTON. aspect changed in a few hours, time after time. The narrow river you see is nearly lost in the wide green plain.

But once, at least, in almost every year, the whole plain is swallowed by the river. Heavy rain on the hills will swell it to overflowing, sometimes in a single night ; and when it overflows the flood is terrible, spreading from field to field, from farm to farm, from parish to parish, till, from Normanton to Lakeby, there is nothing but a fresh water sea, with trees for islands, hedge-tops for reefs, floating hay for seaweed, and cattle, swimming for their lives, for the monsters of the deep. The flood subsides as rapidly as it rises, and, in a week or two, you look down on the old scene of pastoral beauty, restored again without visible change, though a real tragedy has been acted there, and the lives and fortunes of a good many living souls will never be again as they were before the rain fell.

Even so with the hidden world of feeling and affection of which the fields and the white cottages are the husk and shell. In the midst of its real monotony and constant self-repetition, it has its sudden downfalls and violent floods, when, for a time, everything is changed, and all things are in danger ; and when the waters fall again and the former quiet returns, a work has been wrought and life has become the worse or the better, even for the blue-eyed children who laugh, as they always laughed, through their yellow hair. Normanton was one of those villages wherein, as you walk through it and look at the houses, all the people seem to be brethren. Not that they are found on one another's bosoms, but that, to all appearance, there is only one surname in the place. At Nor manton that name was Woodthorpe, and it met you everywhere.

There was Martin Luther Wood thorpe, licensed dealer in tea, coffee, and other comforts, profitable to the flesh and the excise ; there was Hezekiah Woodthorpe, the blacksmith, great at the clarionet; there was Susannah Woodthorpe, at the sign of the Green Man, and Peter James Woodthorpe, Paneter and Glasher, so he wrote himself, whose wife manufactured pop. The two principal farms were held respectively by Andrew and Patrick Woodthorpe ; the smaller one, between them, by Mrs. Armstrong, widow, who was a Woodthorpe born. George Woodthorpe was the owner of Lynns Mill, and old Jabez Woodthorpe, the miser, lived, or was rather dying, in the dilapi dated and lonely house by the road-side just beyond the village. So common a name of course identified nobody, and, in consequence, though the eye saw it everywhere, the ear seldom heard it spoken.

Susannah and Hezekiah, Master Andrew, and Mas ter George, were distinguishing appellatives, but a call for " Master Woodthorpe " would have brought forth the posse comitatus. According to tradition there had been an abori- NORMANTON. ginal Woodthorpe, who, at his death, had left behind him sons and daughters. The daughters, having only the privilege of transmitting other people's names to posterity, left of course no record of their existence ; but three of the sons, living and dying in Normanton, became the heads of three large families. Cousins iu the first generation and second cousins in the next, their descendants, who, instead of inter marrying had generally sought their wives among the daughters of other villages, had become in the course of time so far removed in blood relationship as to lose sight of it altogether except under special circumstances.

One of the families of course became impoverished in very early times and went on pro ducing labourers, blacksmiths, paneters and makers of pop for a century. These were not regarded as relations in any sense by the richer inheritors of the family name. Of the other two branches, one was on the point of being extinguished ; its sole surviving male represen tative being Mr. George Woodthorpe, the owner of Lynns Mill. His first wife died early, leaving him only her daughter, Lilla. He married again, but had no second family ; and both he and the present Mrs. George were now about fifty years old. The third branch of the Woodthorpes, though apparently flourishing with far more vigour, was in fact almost as near extinction as the second ; very lately it had consisted of four brothers and two sisters : of the two sisters, one had married a Captain Hastings of the East India Company's service, and had with her husband been lost at sea, leaving a son at school, in England.

The other married a Mr. Armstrong, a Scotchman, but being left a widow, with one half-witted child, she returned to Normanton and was the owner and occupier of one of its farms. Three out of the four brothers had lived all their lives at Normanton, but were all unmarried. Jabez, the eldest, was as miserable an old miser as ever saved a penny at the cost of his soul. He was rich and wretched, and not at all worth speaking of, except for pity's sake, and for his influence upon other people, and because there is a world where souls like his may stand astounded at the wild ex travagance which sacrificed an eternal heritage for a leasehold of fifty years. Old Jabez lived, dirty and silent, in one of his own houses, standing alone outside the village, too large for him by half, but so dilapidated that nobody would rent it from him without a previous outlay, which, in his later years, even the chance of profit could not wring from him.

Eor many years he had allowed himself two luxuries. One was a servant to take care of him, but he had sent her away at last. The other was a rushlight in his bedroom. This he lit every night in front of an old blunder buss on the wall, as a precaution against thieves. NORMANTON. He bought his rushlights wholesale, at a reduced price, and a considerable box of them came pe riodically by the canal. People said he made broth of them, but that was a mistake; there is cheaper food than rushlights, all things being con sidered. Andrew and Patrick, two of the brothers of old Jabez, were substantial farmers in Normanton, pro prietors of their own farms, old bachelors and old rivals ; not in affairs of courtship, but in their crops and cattle. Andrew was a small, shrewd man, clever at details ; Patrick, a burly English farmer with an agricultural wink in his eye.

The fourth brother's name was Mark. He was a doctor, and early hi life had bought a country practice in Cumberland. He married and had a son, named after himself, who was sent to Cambridge, and was in due time to stand in his father's shoes. But his health gave way at college. His father abandoned his original plan, and sent the youth for two years to learn farming with his uncle Andrew at Normanton. Mark loved the country, but his love was chiefly for its beauties rather than its occupations. He got his health restored, but made little progress as a tiller of the ground. Mr. Andrew, nevertheless, was proud of him as a nephew who had been to colleo-e, and was quite content to let him do as he pleased. One winter's morning Mark was summoned back to Cumberland. A fatal sever was raging amonothe mountains.

His father had fallen before it, his mother followed him, and the young man, awe stricken, stood alone by his household graves. Six months passed in the settlement of his father's affairs and his own gradual return to the habits and interests of daily life ; for these heavy blows make strangers of our ordinary feelings, and we have to grope our way back slowly to the old acquaint anceship. Mark found himself rich enough to take his owti time in choosing his future occupation, so he turned everything into money for the moment, and, with the yomig wings of liberty on his shoulders, fluttered back to Normanton. It was on the 31st of July, in the afternoon, while old Jabez Woodthorpe was still alive, that Mark returned. Neither coach nor railway passed through the quiet village, and Mark, arriving at Lakeby, left his luggage there that he might walk to Normanton across the fields.

In Lakeby he called to see his friend, Mr. Rose, the surgeon, a small man with a very benevolent face, who welcomed him heartily, and told him the village news. Old Jabez was on the point of death; at least he might die any day. He was as miserable as ever, and quite alone. Mr. Rose visited him every other day to look after him, and had tried to get Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. George Woodthorpe to keep his room in order for him. But they could not manage it: NORMANTON. while their hands helped, their tongues reviled him, and he hated the sight of them. The only person who had delicacy enough to serve him without vexing him, was Lilla Woodthorpe, and for some weeks she had spent an hour every morning in doing what he would let her for his comfort. At Lynns Mill all were in good health, Lilla especially ; but George Woodthorpe was anxious and uneasy.

The mill had long been mortgaged to Mr. Jabez. It was worth the mortgage, but there was a defective title which would make it difficult to raise money on it from strangers. When old Jabez died his brothers were expected to be his executors : they were on bad terms with George ; would probably call the money in directly they got the power, and George's affairs were not pros perous enough to bear such a strain upon his credit. Mr. Rose took occasion to suggest that, as Mark had money in hand, he might do George Wood thorpe an important service, by taking the mortgage himself. He made the proposal rather earnestly, contriving to mention Lilla's name in doino* so. To his surprise, Mark answered stiffly, that the invest ment would not suit him. " Are you afraid of the security ? " " No ! " " But you see objections ?

" said the doctor. "It would be like bribing St. Peter," Mark replied. " You are over scrupulous, or over proud," said Mr. Rose. But Mark said only, " Some things are im possible." Mr. Rose sighed slightly, told Mark that Hugh Hastings was at Normanton, praised his manners and appearance, and observed that he was often at Lynns Mill. Mark expressed his pleasure at the prospect of meeting Hugh ; they had been fellow students and had not seen each other for two years or more. He made no further refer ence to the mortgage, and, after a little gossip, took his leave. Mr. Rose was very fond of Mark, and he knew more than any one else what Mark thought about Lilla Woodthorpe. There was no verbal confidence between them ; but once when she was ill, Mark had come to him to make inquiry about her, with cheeks that left no more to be told. NORMANTON.

Chapter II. Lynns Mill

Lilla Woodthobpe stood on the yellow gravel by the white garden gate, under the yew-tree arch at Lynns Mill, casting a steady shadow, with her hands hanging down before her, just touching one another, on the little black apron. She was listening to Hugh Hastings, who stood in the road, leaning over the gate, half dazzled by the level sunlight which fell full upon his face ; but looking at her as well as he could, and talking briskly in a familiar way. He was the son of the Indian captain who married a Woodthorpe, and had been lost at sea. His father had lest money enough for his education, but not much more, and being of liberal habits and splendid desires, he had accepted the offer of a mercantile appointment in India, where the prospect of reward was large. Delays occurred in the arrangements, and he had spent the last three months at Normanton with his aunt, Mrs. Armstrong, his mother's sister, who treated him almost as a son.

He had been making things as pleasant as he could for himself, and especially addino to the prospective pleasures of leaving England for an indefinite time, by seeing a great deal of Lilla. Not that he cared ; oh, no ! He had the gift of thinking always that he could do whatever he pleased with himself under all circumstances ; or, that, if that failed him, he could, at any rate, make other people do whatever became necessary to his own ease and comfort. Yet the news having come that day that all arrangements were made, and that he must be ready in a fortnight to sail from London, he felt a species of surprise which, in its turn, surprised him : became conscious of a sudden buffet in some inward part of him, and of a rapid wakening out of sleep that had caught him unawares, and had passed the whole day, without saying a word to anybody about the letter he had received, rambling among the Abbey woods and throwing chestnuts at the squirrels.

Passing Lynns Mill on his way home, and seeing Lilla in the garden, he had stopped at the gate to talk to her. " You see, cousin, India 's the laud of promise to the lazy ; nothing like it on this side Jericho. No end of people, all Pagans, Mahometans, and every thing hopeless ; no good at all on their own account — only made to wait on the superior races. European notions all reversed: nothing done for the people, and everything by them. Four servants to get you up in the morning : one to wake you, one to dress you, one to say your prayers, and another to'sweep out the snakes. Four more to feed you : two with tea and tamarinds, two with rice and currie powder. NORMANTON. t Half-a-dozen to clean your boots, and twice as many to carry you in your palanquin. Everything magni fied, especially yourself; a town a-piece to live in, Bengal tigers for cats, and elephants for wheel barrows."

" You are not lazy enough for all that, Mr. Hastings." "I am the idlest fellow that ever wished it had been written, ' Six days shalt thou kick thy shins and do nothing at all.' There was a hon, depend on it, among my ancestors, or perhaps a boa-constrictor. I like to make a rush at anything pleasant, catch it, and devour it; and then lie down for a week to digest at ease. As to regular work, if it must be done, it must ; but it's like eating leather in a famine. You see the post suits me wonderfully." " And you sail in a fortnight ? " " Yes. Any objection, cousin Lilla ? " " It must be a long voyage to India ? " " That's the best of it. Positively nothing to do all the way. Think of the blue sea and the hot weather ; the southern stars and the mermaids." " I'm afraid I should think of home."

" So you might : with Lynns Mill to live in, and all Normanton to love you. But I have no home, cousin, nor anybody but my aunt to care about me. What should I think of except how to get rich and how to be jolly till I do ? " " You sing very well at church, Mr. Hastings." " So do you, Miss Woodthorpe." " And some of the hymns are very beautiful." " They suit your voice, I can tell you. I believe the old fellow picks 'em out on purpose." "Most of them are about home, and somebody caring for us, and something very happy to think of." "Cousin, you are splendid in the choir; but I never heard you in the pulpit before." " I'm not used to it, and don't know what to say," she answered, blushing all over. " Yes, you do — you do ! " he cried, starting up suddenly, and clutching his own black hair in one of his hands.

" You make me feel what parsons havo been dinning into my ears in vain. There are beasts of the earth, and I am the greatest ; and there are real live angels in the world, and you are one of them. I was right enough to put a snake in my pedigree. I'm right enough to go to India. I've been a pagan all my days, and I shall find my proper place there. I should have gone before, and I shouldn't have come here ; but I've spent my life in doing what I ought not to have done, and leaving undone what I ought to have done." Lilla stood astonished, and Hastings himself, after a moment's pause, seemed hardly less so. " Well," he said ; " I had no more right to make a confessor of you than I have to call you cousin, as I do. But you are kind, and, after all, it can't matter much when one is going to India."

NORMANTON. 18 " We shall hope to see you back again." " Not till I'm a nabob, or as rich as the Forty Thieves. And then what will be the use? All Normanton will be changed. Old Jabez will be dead ; uncle Andrew and uncle Patrick will have got the cow between them, and the Lakeby people will have eaten her. Tom will have broken his precious neck ; Sam Brooks will have been trans ported ; Dr. Frost will be archbishop of Canterbury ; and cousin Lilla Queen of Bohemia, perhaps, and mother of unapproachable princesses. If I bring back diamonds enough to gravel the garden with, it won't make Lynns Mill as it was before." Lilla listened, but made no answer. She stood looking at the ground, but, whether at solid gravel or imaginary diamonds, there was nothing to deter mine. O mother Earth ! what fairy visions, what happy lands, what pictures of things possible and impossible we see with our eyes cast down upon thee !

What verdure grows on thy waste places ; what shadows fall upon thy flowers ; how the o-raves open, how the cradles rock ; how life and death, and love and fear map out their whole dominions on thy surface, while in truth we look at nothing but a bushel of broken stones or a square yard of butter cups. Blest be the man who first, forgetting the uprightness of his stature, looked neither before nor after, but only downwards. That Avas a o*reat ex ample ; there was the advent of meditation ; his was the secret of silence in a noisy world. Let poets blind themselves with sunbeams ; let the hero and the prophet look in front, the coward and the priest behind. Those who would think much and feel much and make no sign, will they not turn their eyes, O mother Earth, to thee ? Hugh examined the girl's face for a second or two, and then swung himself half round with his hand on the gate and with some symptoms of impatience.

The village band was playing at some distance off and the sound came floating by. " How those fellows stick to their music, and what a jumble of tunes," said he. " ' Haste to the wedding' for Shipton Wakes to-morrow, and this psalm tune for church next Sunday, I suppose." " Thev are our waits at Christmas," she answered, " and this is one of their favourite carols. Do you like it?" " Upon my word, they play very well. You are lucky in your waits." " We sit up always to hear the midnight bells on Christmas Eve," said Lilla, " and about one o'clock in the morning, just as you are going to sleep, they come round the village playing this beautiful carol." " You like music in the night, then ? " " Like it ? It's absolute luxury." " By Jove ! " he exclaimed, and then stopped him self. " I shall say by Juggernaut, I suppose, when I come home again." 2—2 NORMANTON.

" Lilla, your father wants you," said a voice of some severity from one of the lower windows behind her among the vine-leaves. She went immediately, shaking hands with Hugh over the gate, and saying " Good evening," only, in answer to his impatient " Must you go ? " " You give Mr. Hastings plenty of your time," said Mrs. George Woodthorpe, her step-mother, as she entered the house. " He takes it, mother ; but in a fortnight he is going to India." " Lauk-a-mercy ! What does Mrs. Armstrong say ? I never thought she'd let him." " I have not seen her. Is my father in his room ? " " Yes, and there's the man from the starch-mills. He says he saw Mark Woodthorpe come into Lakeby on the coach this afternoon. You mav well blush, child. I don't see what's to hinder you." " How can I help it, mother, when you talk as you do ?

" and Lilla, looking quite distressed, passed on to the little room especially her father's, where he had his desk and his business papers ; where little sample bags of corn stood on the shelves; where a floury dust always crept through the doorway communicating with the mill, and the sound of the grindstones and the water-wheel could be heard pretty plainly when they were going. George Woodthorpe was a timid, mild man, orayhaired and rather grave ; very upright and con scientious in the midst of his alarms ; " too honest for a miller " said those who conceived a living soul to be properly a pair of grindstones, very hard, very useful for the filling of sacks, and not to be looked through by everybody ; but George, though not at all demonstrative on the subject, had thoughts of a river of water of life, and of a wheel turned thereby for other purposes ; and even when troubled about money matters, as he often was, he found it un questionably pleasant to remember that he had never ground truth or justice into flour.