The History of David Grieve | Page 4

way up the further slope, in a steep
stony nook, under two black boulders, which protected her rear in case
of reprisals from David. Time passed away. David, on the other side of
the brook, revelling in the joys of battle, and all the more alive to them
perhaps because of the watch kept on Louie by one section of his brain,
was conscious of no length in the minutes. But Louie's mood gradually
became one of extreme flatness. All her resources were for the moment

at an end. She could think of no fresh torment for David; besides, she
knew that she was observed. She had destroyed all the scanty store of
primroses along the brook; gathered rushes, begun to plait them, and
thrown them away; she had found a grouse's nest among the dead fern,
and, contrary to the most solemn injunctions of uncle and keeper,
enforced by the direst threats, had purloined and broken an egg; and
still dinner-time delayed. Perhaps, too, the cold blighting wind, which
soon made her look blue and pinched, tamed her insensibly. At any rate,
she got up after about an hour, and coolly walked across to David.
He looked up at her with a quick frown. But she sat down, and,
clasping her hands round her knees, while the primroses she had stuck
in her hat dangled over her defiant eyes, she looked at him with a
grinning composure.
'Yo can read out if yo want to,' she remarked.
'Yo doan't deserve nowt, an I shan't,' said David, shortly.
'Then I'll tell Aunt Hannah about how yo let t' lambs stray lasst evenin,
and about yor readin at neet.'
'Yo may tell her aw t' tallydiddles yo can think on,' was the
unpromising reply.
Louie threw all the scorn possible into her forced smile, and then,
dropping full-length into the heather, she began to sing at the top of a
shrill, unpleasing voice, mainly, of course, for the sake of harrying
anyone in her neighbourhood who might wish to read.
'Stop that squealing!' David commanded, peremptorily. Whereupon
Louie sang louder than before.
David looked round in a fury, but his fury was, apparently, instantly
damped by the inward conviction, born of long experience, that he
could do nothing to help himself. He sprang up, and thrust his book
into his pocket.

'Nobory ull mak owt o' yo till yo get a bastin twice a day, wi an odd
lick extra for Sundays,' he remarked to her with grim emphasis when he
had reached what seemed to him a safe distance. Then he turned and
strode up the face of the hill, the dogs at his heels. Louie turned on her
elbow, and threw such small stones as she could discover among the
heather after him, but they fell harmlessly about him, and did not
answer their purpose of provoking him to turn round again.
She observed that he was going up to the old smithy on the side of
Kinder Low, and in a few minutes she got up and sauntered lazily after
him.
'T' owd smithy' had been the enchanted ground of David's childhood. It
was a ruined building standing deep in heather, half-way up the
mountain-side, and ringed by scattered blocks and tabular slabs of grit.
Here in times far remote--beyond the memory of even the oldest
inhabitant--the millstones of the district, which gave their name to the
'millstone grit' formation of the Peak, were fashioned. High up on the
dark moorside stood what remained of the primitive workshop. The
fire-marked stones of the hearth were plainly visible; deep in the
heather near lay the broken jambs of the window; a stone doorway with
its lintel was still standing; and on the slope beneath it, hardly to be
distinguished now from the great primaeval blocks out of which they
had sprung and to which they were fast returning, reposed two or three
huge millstones. Perhaps they bordered some ancient track, climbed by
the millers of the past when they came to this remote spot to give their
orders; but, if so, the track had long since sunk out of sight in the
heather, and no visible link remained to connect the history of this high
and lonely place with that of those teeming valleys hidden to west and
north among the moors, the dwellers wherein must once have known it
well. From the old threshold the eye commanded a wilderness of moors,
rising wave-like one after another, from the green swell just below
whereon stood Reuben Grieve's farm, to the far-distant Alderley Edge.
In the hollows between, dim tall chimneys veiled in mist and smoke
showed the places of the cotton towns--of Hayfield, New Mills,
Staleybridge, Stockport; while in the far northwest, any gazer to whom
the country-side spoke familiarly might,