The Quarry
A Novel in Three Volumes
Volume the First
Chapter I
Lowfield lay in the limestone hollow four miles above the junction of the Aire and the Calder, where the stone had been quarried since the reign of Queen Anne to face the canal locks and build the river-wharves.
It was a parish of eight hundred souls, an ancient chapel-of-ease with a lead-patched roof, sixteen lime-kilns that burnt the refuse stone for the farmers, a wharf upon the navigation, and the Hall.
The Hall was a long, low house of grey ashlar, built in 1684 by a Hesketh who had been high sheriff of the county. In the autumn of 1819, it was inhabited by Walter Hesketh, his daughter Martha, an old cook named Betty who was half-blind from the peat-smoke, and a lad who drove the cart.
Walter Hesketh was six-and-thirty. He had two hundred and eighty pounds a year from three farms on the clay ridge, and a fourth share in the Lower Drift quarry, which had been worked by his family for three generations. He was a man of mild voice and considerable reading; he had two shelves of books upon drainage and geology in his study; he could read an old charter with any attorney in the West Riding; and he was known by all his neighbors to be a kind landlord who never distrained upon a tenant in a bad year.
He had lost his wife in 1812. She had been the daughter of a timber-merchant at Selby, and had brought him nine hundred pounds; and the whole of that nine hundred pounds, with three hundred more borrowed of the bank at Wakefield, had gone into the driving of the deep level in the quarry, which was to have cut the main bed of magnesian limestone twenty feet below the old workings.
The level had been driven eighty yards through the solid rock; it had found the stone—a magnificent bed of pale, fine-grained ashlar, eight feet thick, without a flaw—and then, in the wet November of that year, the river had risen six feet in two nights, the water had found an ancient underground fissure through the swallow-holes in the pasture above, and the deep level had been drowned in twelve hours.
The nine hundred pounds was at the bottom of the drift; the interest of the Wakefield mortgage took thirty pounds a year out of the rents; and Walter Hesketh had spent seven years in explaining to the magistrates at the quarter-sessions that if the river had not risen in that particular November, he should have been the principal stone-master in the county.
His daughter Martha was eight years old. She was a quiet, grey-eyed child who had never had a mother to tell her what young ladies were expected to feel; she kept the house-keys in a small leather pocket at her side; she knew that a stone of flour cost two shillings and fourpence at the mill; and she had learned to read out of her father’s folio copy of Camden’s Britannia, because there were no other books in the house that were not kept locked in the walnut bookcase.
Chapter II
In the October of 1819, Mr. Richard Vane came to Lowfield.
He was eight-and-twenty, the second son of a baronet in the North Riding, and had been two years at the great iron-works at Low Moor. He was not a mere projector. He had successfully drained sixty acres of coal-workings at Mirfield with a high-pressure engine of his own designing; he understood the steam-engine as well as any mechanic in Leeds; and he had an offer from the Navigation Board to take twenty thousand tons of ashlar for the new docks at Goole at seven shillings a ton, provided the delivery began before the following Michaelmas.
He stayed three days at the Hall, and he brought with him his own maps, his surveyor’s levels, and a letter from the manager of the Leeds bank which stated that Mr. Vane was authorized to draw upon them for twelve hundred pounds.
‘The water is there, Mr. Hesketh,’ he said, as they sat over the fire in the south parlor, with the plans of the drift spread upon the table. ‘Nobody denies it. But it is water in a limestone basin, not a subterranean river. A fourteen-horse engine from Fenton and Murray will throw out four hundred gallons a minute. In six weeks the floor will be dry; we can put forty masons into the heading; and with the Goole contract in our hands, the whole outlay will be cleared before we have cut five thousand yards of stone.’
Walter Hesketh took down his Geology of Yorkshire from the shelf.
‘The rock is fractured, Mr. Vane,’ he said, pointing to the plate of the strata. ‘My grandfather always said that the water came from the swallow-holes in the High Garth.’
‘Your grandfather had no steam-engines, my dear sir,’ said Vane, with that pleasant, hearty confidence which carries conviction because it is so entirely sincere. ‘He had only the old wooden gin and two blind horses. A horse tires in three hours; a steam-cylinder does not tire at all. We shall wall the swallow-holes with hydraulic lime from Ferrybridge, sink the sump three feet into the hard floor, and the water will have nowhere to go but down the culvert into the canal.’
The calculation was fair upon its face. The numbers were exact; the price of the engine was known; the contract was real; and Walter Hesketh, who had lived for seven years upon the memory of his lost nine hundred pounds, felt the old ambition stir in him with a force that made his hands shake as he held the paper.
Martha sat in the corner of the window-seat, hemmed a duster of coarse linen, and looked at the two men.
‘Mr. Vane,’ she said, as she folded her hem.
‘Well, my little maid?’ said the young engineer, turning round with a smile.
‘The swallow-hole in the High Garth took in two sheep in the great snow,’ said the child.
‘Did it, my dear?’
‘The shepherd went down with a rope to find them,’ said Martha; ‘and he said the hole had no bottom, and that he could hear the water running under the rock like the mill-race.’
‘A shepherd’s bottom, my dear, is commonly about twenty feet,’ said Vane, laughing kindly as he took a handful of hazel-nuts from his coat pocket and laid them upon her knee. ‘A miner with a sinking-pick will find the bottom of it in half a shift.’
Martha did not eat the nuts. She laid them in a straight row upon the stone window-sill, counted them twice, and put them into her pocket to give to the cart-lad.
Chapter III
The contract was signed in November.
Walter Hesketh did not act blindly. He rode to Leeds himself; he saw the engine at the foundry in Water Lane; he spoke to the engineer, who confirmed Mr. Vane’s calculations in every particular; and he obtained from the bank an agreement that his own liability should be limited to the four hundred pounds which he raised upon the security of the Hall meadow.
It was a reasonable venture. If it had succeeded, it would have restored his family, paid his debts, and given his daughter a comfortable independence; and if it failed, he had still his three farms and his roof over his head.
The engine was erected in February. It was a beautiful piece of work, with a bright brass cylinder and a great cast-iron beam that moved with a deep, regular stroke which shook the windows of the Parsonage half a mile off; and on the tenth of March, the water in the deep drift had fallen seven feet.
On the twelfth of April, the floor was reached.
Walter Hesketh went down the ladder with Vane, in his old boots and an oilskin coat, and saw the pale, beautiful stone lying in blocks eight feet thick, exactly as he had left it in the year twelve.
They shook hands upon the wet rock, under the flare of the tallow candles; and Vane gave the sixteen workmen five pounds to drink the health of the Lowfield Stone Company at the George that night.
On the twenty-fourth of April, the rain began.
It was not a common spring rain. It was a great, warm, continuous deluge that blew from the south-west for six days without twenty minutes’ intermission, melting the late snows upon the moors and filling every dry ditch in the valley with a brown torrent of peat-water.
On the sixth night, at two in the morning, the ground above the High Garth gave way with a sound like the discharge of a cannon.
The old swallow-hole had not merely filled; the whole floor of the upper limestone had dropped twelve feet into an ancient subterranean cavern which no surveyor could have suspected; and the water of the hill-brook, turned from its natural channel, poured into the chasm in a solid column six feet in diameter.
The engine did not fail.
It worked until the water rose to the fire-bars; the engine-man stood to his post until the water was up to his middle; and at four o'clock the steam-cylinder gave a loud, bubbling hiss and was still.
By noon on the Sunday, the water in the drift was sixteen feet deep, and the top of the cast-iron beam was the only thing to be seen above the yellow lake that covered the lower part of the quarry.
Chapter IV
Mr. Vane behaved like an honest man who had been beaten by a misfortune he could not foresee.
He stayed at Lowfield ten days; he spent eighty pounds of his own money in trying to turn the hill-brook with a dam of turf and hurdles; and when he found that the rock was shattered for fifty yards round the chasm, he called the creditors together at the Black Swan at Ferrybridge, laid his books before them, and surrendered his own share of the machinery and the materials towards the payment of the debts.
He lost seven hundred pounds; he gave up his horse and his gig; and he went away to Newcastle on foot, with his surveyor’s level in a box upon his shoulder, to take a place as an assistant-engineer on the new railway.
Walter Hesketh had three hundred and forty pounds to pay to the Leeds foundry for the balance of the engine-hire.
He sold the Hall meadow to the maltster at Selby; he sold his three per cent stock; and when everything was cleared, he had forty-two pounds a year left from his three clay farms, after the interest of the old mortgage was paid.
It was not ruin. A man may live upon forty-two pounds a year in the West Riding if he has no rent to pay and eats what grows in his garden.
The true ruin was of another kind.
From that twenty-fourth of April, Walter Hesketh ceased to be a man who had made an unsuccessful investment, and became a man who had been singled out by an unjust destiny for destruction.
He did not blame Vane; he was too gentle a man to think ill of a gentleman who had lost seven hundred pounds and walked to Newcastle; he blamed the world, the government, the seasons, the constitution of nature, and the inscrutable decree which had caused an ancient cavern to fall in upon the only six acres of land in the county which belonged to a Hesketh.
He sat in the south parlor, with his legs wrapped in a flannel petticoat that had belonged to his wife, and read the history of Job; and whenever a neighbor called to ask how he did, he took down the map of the drift, showed him the place where the cavern had broken through, and proved to him that if the rain had held off for three weeks longer, he should have cleared sixteen hundred pounds by the Goole contract.
Martha was nine. She had seen the meadow sold; she had seen the two cows driven away by the maltster’s man; and she had seen her father sit down in his chair and leave the lad to be dismissed without his month’s wages because there was not sixteen shillings in the house to pay him.
She went to the drawer in the walnut desk, took out the sixteen shillings from her mother’s small hoard which had been kept for her own schooling, paid the lad at the kitchen door, took his receipt on a slip of paper with a cross, and filed it upon the brass wire with the household bills.
She had made her first choice. It was not a choice between wealth and poverty; it was a choice between an account that balanced and an account that did not; and having once seen that a debt unpaid is a lie in the house, she never afterwards looked at any human transaction without wanting to see the receipt.
Volume the Second
Chapter I
Twelve years in a house where there is no money and no hope do not pass in events; they pass in hours.
Martha was one-and-twenty in the year 1831.
She was not tall, but she had an upright, compact figure, a clear, pale skin that showed no color except when the wind was cold, and that particular sort of quietness which makes other people feel that they have been speaking too loud.
She did the whole work of the house. She baked the bread, washed the linen, weeded the garden, and walked two miles to the mill every Tuesday to sell her eggs and her butter to the miller’s wife.
Her father had grown very deaf, and his hands trembled so that he could not write his own name without making a great blot upon the paper; but he had found an occupation which lasted him from breakfast to dinner.
He had begun to write a book.
It was called A Treatise upon the Ancient Mineral Rights of the Manor of Lowfield, with Some Observations upon the Causes of the Decay of the Landed Interest in the County of York; and it was written upon forty quires of large blue paper which he had bought on credit of a stationer at Selby who had died three years afterwards without having ever been able to get his money.
In the autumn of that year, the road-surveyor for the district died of a fever, and the place was to be filled up at the Michaelmas sessions at Pontefract.
Walter Hesketh spent three days in writing a letter of four sides to the magistrates, to offer himself as a candidate.
He stated that he was an ancient freeholder of the county; that his family had held land in Lowfield since the time of the Plantagenets; that he had devoted many years to the study of the geology and mineral resources of the district; and that he had suffered the most unmerited losses from the unprecedented inundation of the year twenty.
He read the letter to Martha over their dinner of boiled turnips and bacon.
‘It is a very handsome letter, father,’ said Martha, laying down her knife.
‘I flatter myself it is, my dear,’ said he, smoothing the blue sheet with his sleeve. ‘It is written with dignity. A gentleman in reduced circumstances should never forget what is due to his name. I have mentioned my grandfather’s commission in the militia.’
‘Mr. Calverley told the churchwarden that the magistrates intended to appoint a man who could measure the roads with a chain,’ said Martha.
‘A chain!’ cried her father, with a contemptuous wave of his hand. ‘A common land-measurer’s boy can pull a chain! What is wanted is a man of enlarged views—a man who understands the general principles of communication and the mineral value of the strata.’
‘The salary is eighty pounds a year,’ said Martha. ‘And the surveyor must keep a horse.’
‘I can keep a horse very well upon the glebe-meadow,’ said he. ‘The tenant will let me have the grass for four pounds; and I can buy a very respectable cob at Howden fair for twelve or fourteen guineas.’
‘You have seven pounds four shillings in the tea-caddy, father,’ said Martha, in her quiet, level voice. ‘And the half-year’s interest on the mortgage is due on the twenty-second of November.’
Walter Hesketh laid down his letter, pushed his plate away from him, and looked at his daughter with that piteous, bewildered expression which had become his ordinary look whenever money was mentioned.
‘You have no enterprise, Martha,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘You are just like your mother’s family. You see a difficulty in everything. If I had had a wife who could have entered into my views, I should not have been sitting in this room upon eighty pounds a year.’
Martha said nothing. She rose from the table, cleared the dishes, carried them into the scullery, and washed them in cold water because the coal was too low to keep the boiler hot.
Chapter II
The magistrates appointed Luke Gill.
Luke Gill was four-and-twenty, the son of a working mason at Tadcaster. He had been five years an assistant to the surveyor of the Leeds and Selby turnpike; he had no grandfather who had been in the militia; but he had walked every yard of the thirty miles of road between Ferrybridge and Goole with a five-foot rod and a field-book; he knew the thickness of every bed of gravel in the district; and he had shown the committee a method of breaking the limestone to a two-inch ring which would save fifteen pounds a mile in the annual repair of the road.
He came to Lowfield on the first of November, because the toll-house at the cross-roads was empty and the rent was only three pounds ten shillings a year.
He was a broad, square-shouldered young man, with a quiet, brown face, dark eyes that had a great deal of light in them when he looked at a piece of work, and large, hard hands that had been cut in fifty places by the sharp edges of the flint.
He brought with him a deal box of books on mechanics, a brass theodolite in a leather case, and an old woman who was his mother’s sister and had been struck with the palsy so that she could not speak above a whisper.
On the third morning after he came, he was at work on the Lowfield lane at daylight.
The lane was a mile long, from the turnpike to the church; it had been neglected for twenty years; and the water from the Hall ditch had overflowed the road until the bottom was a swamp of black mud that took a horse up to the hocks.
Luke Gill did not ask for any laborers from the parish.
He took off his drab coat, hung it upon an elder-bush, and began to cut a deep ditch through the turf along the hedge-side, throwing the gravel into the middle of the road to form a barrel.
Martha passed him at eight o'clock, with her basket of butter on her arm, on her way to the mill.
She stopped on the dry bank to look at the work.
‘Good morning, Miss Hesketh,’ said the surveyor, touching his cap with his muddy hand.
‘Good morning, sir,’ said Martha.
‘You have a wet walk to the mill,’ said he.
‘I have my boots,’ said Martha. ‘The lane has been wet these twelve years.’
‘It will not be wet after Friday,’ said Luke Gill, driving his spade into the clay with a hard, clean stroke. ‘The fall is sixteen inches to the brook; it only wanted a ditch with a three-foot bottom to take the water off the gravel.’
‘My father says the water comes from the rock under the orchard,’ said Martha.
Luke Gill paused, leaned upon his spade, and looked towards the Hall with those clear, quiet eyes which seemed to measure everything they looked at.
‘Your father is mistaken, Miss Hesketh,’ he said, in a slow, steady voice. ‘The rock under the orchard is magnesian limestone, and limestone does not hold water; it lets it through. The water comes from the ditch because the ditch is full of briars; and when a ditch is full of briars, the water must go over the lane or stay where it is.’
Martha looked at the ditch, then at the clean gravel he was turning up, and then at the young man’s brown face.
‘That is what I thought myself,’ she said.
‘It is not a matter of thought, Miss Hesketh,’ said he, turning over another spit of clay. ‘It is a matter of levels. A level does not ask anybody’s opinion; it only shows which way the water will run.’
Chapter III
In January, there was an accident at the Lowfield lock.
The old timber gates, which had been put up in 1795, gave way under the pressure of a great flood of ice from the upper river; the lock-chamber was filled with twenty feet of stone and gravel; and the traffic of the canal was stopped just at the time when the Leeds manufacturers were in the greatest need of coal from the southern pits.
The Navigation Board sent for their head-engineer from Hull; but he was eighty miles off, and the roads were blocked with snow; and the resident committee at Ferrybridge sent an express to Luke Gill to ask if he could clear the chamber and put in temporary gates of larch-poles before the frost broke.
Luke Gill went to the lock at three o'clock in the afternoon.
He took with him twenty quarrymen with picks and sledges; he had three great fires of coal lighted upon the stone coping to thaw the ground; and he worked in the bottom of the lock-chamber for nineteen hours without sitting down or taking off his boots.
At seven o'clock on the following morning, Martha Hesketh was coming back from the farm with a pitcher of milk for her father’s breakfast, when she saw a crowd of people standing upon the bridge.
She went to the parapet and looked down.
The lock-chamber was cleared of the ice; the great timber balks were in their places, braced with iron straps which the blacksmith had beaten out during the night; and the first coal-barge from Barnsley was passing through the gates into the lower reach, with its horn blowing to clear the way.
Luke Gill was standing upon the stone wing-wall, with his coat covered with frozen mud and his face as pale as a piece of chalk from the cold and the fatigue.
As the barge went through, Mr. Calverley of Oulton, who was one of the directors of the canal, came across the bridge on his horse.
He pulled up by the wing-wall, took out his pocket-book, and drew out two bank-notes of five pounds each.
‘Mr. Gill,’ he said, before all the people on the bridge, ‘you have done a very great service to the company. The engineer could not have been here before Thursday, and every day’s stoppage was a hundred pounds out of our pockets. Take this for yourself, over and above your expenses.’
The crowd cheered; and the blacksmith, who had been drinking gin to keep out the cold, threw his cap into the air.
Luke Gill did not put out his hand.
He looked at the bank-notes, then at the barge which was moving away down the river, and then at Mr. Calverley’s face.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, in his slow, quiet voice. ‘I am the surveyor of the roads, and the Navigation pays forty pounds a year towards the road-rate. I have done the work in the company’s time, with the company’s men; and I cannot take money for doing what was my duty to the district.’
‘Nonsense, man!’ cried the director, with some warmth. ‘The work was outside your district. It was an emergency; and the Board will be very glad to confirm the gift.’
‘I am very much obliged to the Board, sir,’ said Luke Gill. ‘But I have eighty pounds a year from the magistrates, which is paid on the quarter-day; and if I were to take ten pounds from the Navigation for a night’s work at the lock, I should never feel that my books were clean when I laid them before the sessions.’
He touched his cap, turned round, and walked down the towing-path towards the toll-house, with his field-book under his arm and his hands in his pockets.
Martha stood upon the bridge with her milk-pitcher in her hand, and watched him until he went round the corner of the willow-garth.
She had seen her father borrow twenty pounds of the curate to buy a pony which he did not want, and she had seen him explain that the curate was very much honored by being allowed to oblige a gentleman; and she felt, as she walked home through the snow, that she had seen something that morning which was of more value than the whole thirty quires of blue paper in the walnut desk.
Chapter IV
In the following summer, Martha made the great mistake of her life.
Mr. Luke Gill had lived nine months at the toll-house; he had cleared the lanes; he had repaired the culverts; he had spent three evenings a week in the Parsonage garden, showing the old vicar how to prune his apple-trees; and he had walked home from church behind Martha every Sunday afternoon without ever having said a word to her that might not have been printed in the Leeds Mercury.
In August, his deaf aunt had a second stroke, which left her completely helpless; and Luke Gill was obliged to hire a girl from the village to sit by her while he was away on the roads.
The girl was a niece of the blacksmith—a good-natured, careless thing of seventeen, who let the fire go out, broke two of the surveyor’s stone-ware jugs, and spent the afternoons in talking to the wagoners over the garden-paling.
One Tuesday evening, as Martha was passing the toll-house, she saw that the old woman had fallen forward in her chair by the window and was in danger of being suffocated by her neckerchief, while the girl was down at the smithy watching the shoeing of a horse.
Martha went into the house, lifted the old woman up, set her straight in her chair, gave her a cup of water, and stayed with her two hours until Luke Gill came home from Goole on his brown pony.
When he came in, hot and dusty from his thirty miles’ ride, he found his house clean, the kettle boiling on the hearth, and Martha sitting by the table mending his aunt’s woollen stockings.
He stopped upon the threshold, with his hat in his hand.
‘Miss Hesketh,’ he said.
‘Your aunt had a fit, Mr. Gill,’ said Martha, without looking up from her work. ‘The girl had left her alone.’
‘I know she is a careless girl,’ said he, setting his whip in the corner. ‘I have had to tell her three times about the fire.’
‘She is a girl who will never be any better,’ said Martha, biting off her thread. ‘She has no sense of duty; and it is an unchristian thing to leave a poor old woman who cannot speak to be tended by a simpleton.’
It was the first time she had ever spoken with any sharpness to him; and she said it because she was tired, because her hands were rough with the washing, and because she had a secret, angry feeling that a man of his sense ought to have managed his house better.
Luke Gill stood silent for a minute, looking at his boots.
‘I have no other person to ask, Miss Hesketh,’ he said, very quietly. ‘The women in the village will not come for four shillings a week, because the house is lonely; and I cannot afford more out of my salary.’
‘Then you should not have taken her,’ said Martha, rising and putting on her bonnet. ‘It is better to do the work oneself than to pay a person who does it badly.’
‘I have thirty miles of road to inspect every week, Miss Hesketh,’ said he, looking at her with his steady, grey eyes. ‘If I stay at home to wash the floor, the contractors will put soft shale into the bottom of the ruts at Knottingley, as they did in the old surveyor’s time; and the county will be paying for stone and getting dirt.’
Martha went out of the door without answering him; and she walked home in a state of the most profound self-reproach.
She saw that she had been guilty of that very fault which she most despised in her father—the fault of judging another person’s duty without knowing the conditions of his work; she had treated an honest man, who was doing his best under a heavy burden, as if he had been an idle gentleman who neglected his family; and she had done it out of mere irritation and a foolish desire to be thought superior.
She went into the dairy, sat down upon the stone cheese-press in the dark, and felt the hot tears come into her eyes—the first tears she had shed since the day the meadow was sold.
Volume the Third
Chapter I
She did not ask his pardon in words. She was not a woman who could make a speech about her feelings; and Luke Gill was not a man who expected one.
What she did was to go to the toll-house every morning at six o'clock, before her father was awake, to dress the old woman, light the fire, and set the breakfast upon the table; and she did it for seven weeks, until the old woman died quietly in her sleep on the night of the first frost in October.
On the day after the funeral, Luke Gill walked up to the Hall in his clean black coat.
He found Walter Hesketh in his study, sitting among his blue papers with his spectacles on his nose.
‘Mr. Hesketh,’ said the surveyor, standing by the table with his hat in his hand, ‘I am come to ask your leave to pay my addresses to your daughter.’
Walter Hesketh laid down his pen, took off his spectacles, and looked at the young man with an expression of the most absolute, unmeasurable amazement.
‘To my daughter!’ he cried. ‘To Miss Hesketh of Lowfield!’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Luke Gill. ‘I have known her two years; I have seen her in her own house and in mine; and I know that she is the only woman in this county who can make a home happy upon a small income.’
‘A small income!’ repeated Walter Hesketh, his face becoming the color of a scarlet geranium. ‘Do you know who I am, sir? Do you know that my grandfather was a magistrate for this Riding, and that we have been seated in this parish for three hundred years?’
‘I know it, sir,’ said Luke Gill. ‘The parish clerk showed me the monuments in the chancel when I surveyed the church-lane.’
‘And you—a surveyor of the turnpikes—a man whose father was a working mason—you presume to ask for my daughter!’
‘I am not a working mason, Mr. Hesketh,’ said Luke Gill, in that slow, unmoving voice which had never been raised in anger since he came into the parish. ‘I have a hundred and twenty pounds a year from the magistrates, which was voted to me unanimously at the last sessions; I have fifty pounds a year from the Navigation for looking after the bridges; and I have seventy pounds in the savings-bank at Leeds. I can keep a wife with comfort; and I have never owed a shilling to any man in my life.’
‘I will not hear of it!’ cried Walter Hesketh, rising from his chair and striking the table with his fist. ‘It is an insult—a gross, unprovoked insult! If I had my health, sir, I would show you the door with my own hands!’
‘You need not show me the door, Mr. Hesketh,’ said Luke Gill, taking up his hat. ‘I can find it very well myself. But I have spoken to Miss Hesketh; and she has told me that if you will give your consent, she will have me; and I shall not give up the hope of it because you are angry with me to-day.’
He bowed with great respect, went out into the passage, and shut the door behind him without making the smallest noise.
Chapter II
Walter Hesketh had an attack of the jaundice which lasted six weeks.
He declared, three times a day, that his daughter was going to bring down his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave; he wrote a letter of seven pages to his cousin, the prebendary of York, to ask whether there was any legal method of preventing a young woman of ancient family from contracting a degrading marriage; and he refused to eat his dinner unless it was brought to him by the old charwoman from the lane.
Martha bore it all with that same quiet, unbending patience which she had shown in the great frost.
She did not argue with him; she did not cry; she made his barley-water, she aired his linen, and she sat by his bedside for hours together, reading the history of the rebellion in the north out of his old books, in her clear, monotonous voice.
At the end of November, the prebendary of York sent his answer.
It was a very sensible letter, written on large post paper with a great seal of red wax.
He stated that he had made inquiry concerning Mr. Luke Gill; that he found he was a young man of unblemished character, of great industry, and of remarkable skill in his profession; that he had been employed by the Chapter upon the repairs of the minster-wall at Ripon, and had given the greatest satisfaction; that the Heskeths of Lowfield had not been seated in the parish for three hundred years, but only since the year 1672, when their ancestor had been an attorney at Pontefract; and that in the present state of the agricultural interest, a young woman with no fortune of her own could not do better than marry a man who had two hundred pounds a year and the prospect of being the first engineer in the county.
Walter Hesketh read the letter twice through, with his hands shaking like an aspen-leaf; and then he threw it into the fire, and turned his face to the wall.
‘A prebendary!’ he groaned. ‘A dignitary of the church! To talk of an attorney at Pontefract! The world is turned upside down—everything is falling to pieces! There is no honor—no blood—no religion left in England!’
On the following Sunday, however, he came down into the parlor; he looked at Martha as she was setting the tea-cups upon the table; and he said, in a voice that was very low and broken:
‘If you are determined to have that fellow, Martha, I suppose you must have him. But I will not see him in this house; and I will not give him a single penny of your mother’s money as long as I live.’
‘I do not want any of my mother’s money, father,’ said Martha, pouring the water into the tea-pot. ‘Mr. Gill has two hundred pounds a year; and we can live very well upon that.’
Chapter III
They were married on the ninth of January, in the chapel-of-ease, by the old curate who had christened Martha two-and-twenty years before.
There was no breakfast; there were no bridesmaids; and Walter Hesketh stayed in his study with the shutters barred, reading the genealogy of the family of Fairfax.
They walked across the fields to the house at the lock-gates, which the Navigation had built for the surveyor; and Martha took off her cloak, hung it behind the door, and began to arrange her father’s old books upon the shelves in the parlor.
She lived forty-two years in that house.
She saw the canal deepened; she saw the railway brought through the valley, with its great viaduct of eleven arches across the river; and she saw her husband become the chief engineer to the company, with six hundred pounds a year and a name that was known from Hull to Liverpool.
She did not become a fine lady. She kept her accounts in the same small, square book; she made her own bread until she was sixty; and she brought up four sons to be honest men who could measure a piece of work with their own hands and tell the truth about it afterwards.
Walter Hesketh lived until 1845.
He never went to the lock-house; he never spoke to his son-in-law; but he received forty pounds every half-year from Luke Gill’s office in Leeds, which was paid to him under the name of the rent of the Lower Drift quarry, and which he accepted to the day of his death as a small part of the compensation which was due to him from the public for the loss of his great estate.
When he was seventy-eight, he died quietly in his sleep, with his thirty quires of blue paper upon the table beside him.
Martha went up to the Hall to see him laid in his coffin.
She stood by the bed for a long time, looking at the pale, worn face which had never looked at any fact in this world without wishing it to be something else; and then she took the forty quires of blue paper, tied them with a piece of new black tape, and laid them in the drawer of the walnut desk.
She did not burn them; she did not laugh at them; she kept them as she had kept the nuts which Richard Vane had given her when she was eight years old, because they had belonged to a man who had had a great deal of kindness in his heart, and who had been ruined by the single fault of believing that a level could be altered by wishing it to run the other way.
Chapter IV
In the summer of 1862, when Luke Gill had been dead five years and Martha was eighty-one, her eldest grandson, Walter Gill, who was an engineer upon the Great Northern Railway, came to see her at the house by the lock.
He had been surveying the new line from Doncaster to Selby; and he brought with him a great roll of plans and sections, which he spread upon the mahogany table where his grandfather’s theodolite had stood for thirty years.
‘Grandmother,’ he said, as they sat together in the twilight, ‘we are going to carry the railway right through the Lowfield ridge, forty feet below the old quarry.’
The old woman took off her spectacles, and looked at the blue paper plans.
‘The rock is fractured in the south drift, Walter,’ she said. ‘There is a cavern forty feet wide under the High Garth.’
‘We know it, grandmother,’ said the young engineer, pointing to the section with his pencil. ‘The borings showed it at thirty-six feet. We shall put in an invert of solid brickwork four feet thick, carry the drainage through a six-foot culvert into the river, and the road will be as dry as this floor.’
‘It will cost a great deal of money,’ said Martha.
‘It will cost eighteen thousand pounds,’ said he. ‘The directors had a long debate about it on Tuesday. Some of them wanted to carry the line round by the marsh to save the expense of the culvert; but the chief engineer told them that if they built a railway upon a bog to save eighteen thousand pounds, they would have the trains in the ditch before they had been running six months.’
The old woman sat silent for a long time, watching the brown water of the canal as it moved through the lock-gates in the dusk.
‘Your grandfather always said so, Walter,’ she said, in her low, quiet voice.
‘Said what, grandmother?’
‘He said that if a man will not pay for his culvert before he lays his rails, he will have to pay for it afterwards with his engine in the mud.’
She rose from her chair, took her candle from the chimney-piece, and went slowly up the stairs to her room, leaving the young man sitting by the table with his plans before him in the dark.
