Will of the Mill | Page 2

picturesque
cottages handy to their work, and at times dotted the dale with their
white umbrellas and so-called "traps."
Nature was always the grandest of landscape gardeners, and here she
may be said to have excelled. Her work had been very simply done:
some time or other when the world was young the Great Gray Tor must
have split in two, forming one vast jagged gash hundreds of feet deep,
whose walls so nearly matched, that, if by some earthquake pressure
force had been applied, they would have fitted together, crushing in the
verdant growth, and the vast Tor would have been itself again.
But, needless to say, this had never happened, and the lovely place, so
well named, became Belle Dale.

High up in the Pennine Range the waters gathered in the great
reservoirs of bog and moss to form a stream, an infant river, which ran
clear as crystal, of a golden hue, right down the bottom of the gorge;
here trickling and singing musically, there spreading into a rocky pool,
plunging down into fall after fall, to gather again into black, dark
hollows as if to gain force for its next spring; and nowhere in England
did moss, fern, and water-plant grow to greater perfection than here,
watered as they were by the soft, fall-made mists.
All through the summer the place was full of soft, dark nooks, and
golden hollows shaded by birch, through whose pensile twigs the
sunshine seemed to fall in showers of golden rain--cascades of light
that plunged into the transparent waters, and flashed from the scales of
the ruddy-spotted trout.
No two boys ever had brighter homes, for their dwellings were
here--Josh Carlile's at the Vicarage, planted on a shelf where the
arrow-spired church looked down from near the head of the dale, where
the first fall plunged wildly full thirty feet beside the little, mossy,
stone-walled burial-ground. It was the home of mosses of every tint,
from the high-up, metallic green in the cracks among the stones, down
to the soft pink and cream patches of sphagnum, sometimes of their
own vivid green when charged with water ready to spurt out at the
touch of a traveller's foot.
Will's home--nest, he called it--was far below, at the mill, that pleasant
home built first by one of his exiled ancestors, an old Huguenot who
fled from France full of fervour, for his religion's sake, seeking refuge
in old England, where, like many others, he found a safe asylum to live
in peace, and think.
Old Guillaume Villars had "Monsieur" written before his name; but he
was one of France's fine old working gentlemen, a great silk-weaver,
and his first thought was to find a place where he and his following, a
little clan, could earn their bread as sturdy workers living by the work
of their hands; no beggars nor parasites they, but earnest toilers, the
men who introduced their industry every here and there.

Some two hundred years ago, old Guillaume found Belle Dale ready
with its motive power to his hand. He wanted water for his silk-mill:
there it was, and, in a small way, he and his began their toil.
Their nearest neighbours, few indeed, soon found them quiet, earnest,
religious men, and the welcome they had was warm. In their gratitude
they said, "France to us is dead; this in future is our home;" and, though
clinging to their language, they cast aside their fine patrician names,
making them English and homely like those of the dwellers near. There
was something almost grotesque at times in the changes that they made,
but they were not noticed here. The D'aubignes became Daubeneys, or
homely Dobbs; Chapuis, Shoppee; Jean Boileau, the great silk-weaver's
right hand, laughingly translated his name to Drinkwater; and, as the
time went on and generations passed, a descendant, "disagreeable old
Boil O!" as the two boys called him, was the odd man,
Jack-of-all-trades, and general mechanician at Beldale Mill, the servant
of old Guillaume Villars' son, many generations down--John Willows
now, father of Will of the Mill.
A long piece of pedigree this, but we must say who's who, and what's
what, and, by the same rule, where's where; so here we have Beldale
Mill and the boys--just the place they loved and looked forward to
reaching again from the great school at Worksop, when the holidays
came round.
There was no such place for beauty, they felt sure; no such fishing
anywhere, they believed; in fact, everything the country boy could wish
for was to their hand. Collect?--I should think they did: eggs, from
those of the birds of prey to the tiny dot of the golden-crested wren;
butterflies and moths, from the Purple Emperors that were netted as
they hovered over the tops of the scrub