Shutting up thought, for fear of despising myself for the coinage of such a little trick, I hurried across the long meadow to the mill, and went through the cow-gate into the yard, and the dog began to bark at me. Seeing that he had a strong chain on, I regarded him with lofty indignation. “Do you know what Jowler would do to you?” I said; “Jowler, a dog worth ten of you. He would take you by the neck and drop you into that pond for daring to insult his mistress!” The dog appeared to feel the force of my remarks, for he lay down again, and with one eye watched me in a manner amusing, but insidious. Then, taking good care to keep out of his reach, I went to the mill-pond and examined it.
It looked like a very nice pond indeed, long, and large, and well banked up, not made into any particular shape, but producing little rushy elbows. The water was now rather low, and very bright (though the Moon itself is not a crystal stream), and a school of young minnows, just watching a water-spider with desirous awe, at sight of me broke away, and reunited, with a speed and precision that might shame the whole of our very best modern fighting. Then many other things made a dart away, and furrowed the shadow of the willows, till distance quieted the fear of man—that most mysterious thing in nature—and the shallow pool was at peace again, and bright with unruffled reflections.
“What ails the dog?” said a deep gruff voice; and the poor dog received a contemptuous push, not enough to hurt him, but to wound his feelings for doing his primary duty. “Servant, miss. What can I do for you? Foot-path is t’other side of that there hedge.”
“Yes, but I left the foot-path on purpose. I came to have a talk with you, if you will allow me.”
“Sartain! sartain,” the miller replied, lifting a broad floury hat and showing a large gray head. “Will you come into house, miss, or into gearden?”
I chose the garden, and he led the way, and set me down upon an old oak bench, where the tinkle of the water through the flood-gates could be heard.
“So you be come to paint the mill at last,” he said. “Many a time I’ve looked out for you. The young leddy down to Mother Busk’s, of course. Many’s the time we’ve longed for you to come, you reminds us so of somebody. Why, my old missus can’t set eyes on you in church, miss, without being forced to sit down a’most. But we thought it very pretty of you not to come, miss, while the trouble was so new upon us.”
Something in my look or voice made the old man often turn away, while I told him that I would make the very best drawing of his mill that I could manage, and would beg him to accept it.
“Her ought to ‘a been on the plank,” he said, with trouble in getting his words out. “But there! what good? Her never will stand on that plank no more. No, nor any other plank.”
I told him that I would put her on the plank, if he had any portrait of her showing her dress and her attitude. Without saying what he had, he led me to the house, and stood behind me, while I went inside. And then he could not keep his voice as I went from one picture of his darling to another, not thinking (as I should have done) of what his feelings might be, but trying, as no two were at all alike, to extract a general idea of her.
“Nobody knows what her were to me,” the old man said, with a quiet little noise and a sniff behind my shoulder. “And with one day’s illness her died—her died.”
“But you have others left. She was not the only one. Please, Mr. Withypool, to try to think of that. And your dear wife still alive to share your trouble. Just think for a moment of what happened to my father. His wife and six children all swept off in a month—and I just born, to be brought up with a bottle!”
I never meant, of course, to have said a word of this, but was carried away by that common old idea of consoling great sorrow with a greater one. And the sense of my imprudence broke vexatiously upon me when the old man came and stood between me and his daughter’s portraits.
“Well, I never!” he exclaimed, with his bright eyes steadfast with amazement. “I know you now, miss. Now I knows you. To think what a set of blind newts us must be! And you the very moral of your poor father, in a female kind of way! To be sure, how well I knew the Captain! A nicer man never walked the earth, neither a more unlucky one.”
“I beg you—let me beg you,” I began to say; “since you have found me out like this—”
“Hush, miss, hush! Not my own wife shall know, unless your own tongue telleth her. A proud man I shall be, Miss Raumur,” he continued, with emphasis on my local name, “if aught can be found in my power to serve you. Why, Lord bless you, miss,” he whispered, looking round, “your father and I has spent hours together! He were that pleasant in his ways and words, he would drop in from his fishing, when the water was too low, and sit on that very same bench where you sat, and smoke his pipe with me, and tell me about battles, and ask me about bread. And many a time I have slipped up the gate, to give him more water for his flies to play, and the fish not to see him so plainly. Ah, we have had many pleasant spells together; and his eldest boy and girl, Master George and Miss Henrietta, used to come and fetch our eggs. My Polly there was in love with him, we said; she sat upon his lap so, when she were two years old, and played with his beautiful hair, and blubbered—oh, she did blubber, when the Captain went away!”
This invested Polly with new interest for me, and made me determine to spare no pains in putting her pretty figure well upon the plank. Then I said to the miller, “How kind of you to draw up your sluice-gates to oblige my father! Now will you put them down and keep them down, to do a great service both to him and me?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, he promised that any thing he could do should be done, if I would only tell him what I wanted. But perhaps it would be better to have our talk outside. Taking this hint, I followed him back to the bench in the open garden, and there explained what I wished to have done, and no longer concealed the true reason. The good miller answered that with all his heart he would do that much to oblige me, and a hundred times more than that; but some little thought and care were needful. With the river so low as it was now, he could easily stop the back-water, and receive the whole of the current in his dam, and keep it from flowing down his wheel trough, and thus dry the lower channel for perhaps half an hour, which would be ample for my purpose. Engineering difficulties there were none; but two or three other things must be heeded. Miller Sims, a mile or so down river, must be settled with, to fill his dam well, and begin to discharge, when the upper water failed, so as not to dry the Moon all down the valley, which would have caused a commotion. Miller Sims being own brother-in-law to Master Withypool, that could be arranged easily enough, after one day’s notice. But a harder thing to manage would be to do the business without rousing curiosity, and setting abroad a rumor which would be sure to reach my enemy. And the hardest thing of all, said Master Withypool, smiling as he thought of what himself had once been, would be to keep those blessed boys away, who find out every thing, and go every where. Not a boy of Shoxford but would be in the river, or dancing upon its empty bed, screeching and scolloping up into his cap any poor bewildered trout chased into the puddles, if it were allowed to leak out, however feebly, that the Moon water was to stop running. And then how was I to seek for any thing?
This was a puzzle. But, with counsel, we did solve it. And we quietly stopped the Moon, without man or boy being much the wiser.
CHAPTER XLIII
GOING TO THE BOTTOM
It is not needful to explain every thing, any more than it was for me to tell the miller about my golden eagle, and how I had managed to lose it in the Moon—a trick of which now I was heartily ashamed, in the face of honest kindness. So I need not tell how Master Withypool managed to settle with his men, and to keep the boys unwitting of what was about to come to pass. Enough that I got a note from him to tell me that the little river would be run out, just when all Shoxford was intent upon its dinner, on the second day after I had seen him. And he could not say for certain, but thought it pretty safe, that nobody would come near me, if I managed to be there at a quarter before one, when the stream would begin to run dry, and I could watch it. I sent back a line by the pretty little girl, a sister of poor Polly, to say how much I thanked him, and how much I hoped that he himself would meet me there, if his time allowed. For he had been too delicate to say a word of that; but I felt that he had a good right to be there, and, knowing him now, I was not afraid.
Nearly every thing came about as well as could be wished almost. Master Withypool took the precaution, early in the morning, to set his great fierce bull at large, who always stopped the foot-path. This bull knew well the powers of a valley in conducting sound; and he loved to stand, as if at the mouth of a funnel, and roar down it to another bull a mile below him, belonging to his master’s brother-in-law. And when he did this, there was scarcely a boy, much less a man or woman, with any desire to assert against him the public right of thoroughfare. Throughout that forenoon, then, this bull bellowed nobly, still finding many very wicked flies about, so that two mitching boys, who meant to fish for minnows with a pin, were obliged to run away again.
However, I was in the dark about him, and as much afraid of him as any body, when he broke into sight of me round a corner, without any tokens of amity. I had seen a great many great bulls before, including Uncle Sam’s good black one, who might not have meant any mischief at all, and atoned for it—if he did—by being washed away so.
And therefore my courage soon returned, when it became quite clear that this animal now had been fastened with a rope, and could come no nearer. For some little time, then, I waited all alone, as near that bridge as I could bring myself to stand, for Mrs. Busk, my landlady, could not leave the house yet, on account of the mid-day letters. Moreover, she thought that she had better stay away, as our object was to do things as quietly as could be.
Much as I had watched this bridge from a distance, or from my sheltering-place, I had never been able to bring myself to make any kind of sketch of it, or even to insert it in a landscape, although it was very well suited and expressive, from its crooked and antique simplicity. The overhanging, also, of the hawthorn-tree (not ruddy yet, but russety with its coloring crop of coral), and the shaggy freaks of ivy above the twisted trunk, and the curve of the meadows and bold elbow of the brook, were such as an artist would have pitched his tent for, and tantalized poor London people with a dream of cool repose.
As yet the little river showed no signs of doing what the rustic—or surely it should have been the cockney—was supposed to stand still and wait for. There was no great rush of headlong water, for that is not the manner of the stream in the very worst of weather; but there was the usual style of coming on, with lips and steps at the sides, and cords of running toward the middle. Quite enough, at any rate, to make the trout jump, without any omen of impending drought, and to keep all the play and the sway of movement going on serenely.
I began to be afraid that the miller must have failed in his stratagem against the water-god, and that, as I had read in Pope’s Homer, the liquid deity would beat the hero, when all of a sudden there were signs that man was the master of this little rustic. Broadswords of flag and rapiers of water-grass, which had been quivering merrily, began to hang down and to dip themselves in loops, and the stones of the brink showed dark green stripes on their sides as they stood naked. Then fine little cakes of conglomerated stuff, which only a great man of nature could describe, came floating about, and curdling into corners, and holding on to one another in long-tailed strings. But they might do what they liked, and make their very best of it, as they fell away to nothing upon stones and mud. For now more important things began to open, the like of which never had been yielded up before—plots of slimy gravel, varied with long streaks of yellow mud, dotted with large double shells, and parted into little oozy runs by wriggling water-weeds. And here was great commotion and sad panic of the fish, large fellows splashing and quite jumping out of water, as their favorite hovers and shelves ran dry, and darting away, with their poor backs in the air, to the deepest hole they could think of. Hundreds must have come to flour, lard, and butter if boys had been there to take advantage. But luckily things had been done so well that boys were now in their least injurious moment, destroying nothing worse than their own dinners.
A very little way below the old wooden bridge the little river ran into a deepish pool, as generally happens at or near a corner, especially where there is a confluence sometimes. And seeing nothing, as I began to search intently, stirring with a long-handled spud which I had brought, I concluded that even my golden eagle had been carried into that deep place. However, water or no water, I resolved to have it out with that dark pool as soon as the rest of the channel should be drained, which took a tormenting time to do; and having thick boots on, I pinned up my skirts, and jumping down into the shoals, began to paddle in a fashion which reminded me of childish days passed pleasantly in the Blue River.
Too busy thus to give a thought to any other thing, I did not even see the miller, until he said,
“Good-day, miss,” lifting his hat, with a nice kind smile. “Very busy, miss, I see, and right you are to be so. The water will be upon us again in less than half an hour. Now let me clear away they black weeds for you. I brought this little shivel a-purpose. If I may make so bold, miss, what do ‘e look to find here?”
“I have not the very smallest notion,” I could only answer; “but if there is any thing, it must be in that hole. I have searched all the shallow part so closely that I doubt whether even a sixpence could escape me, unless it were buried in the mud or pebbles. Oh, how can I manage to search that hole? There must be a yard of water there.”
“One thing I ought to have told ‘e for to do,” Master Withypool whispered, as he went on shoveling—“to do what the boys do when they lose a farden—to send another after un. If so be now, afore the water was run out, you had stood on that there bridge, and dropped a bright coin into it, a new half crown or a two-shilling piece, why, the chances would be that the run of the current would ‘a taken it nigh to the likeliest spot for holding any other little matter as might ‘a dropped, permiskous, you might say, into this same water.”
“I have done so,” I answered; “I have done that very thing, though not at all with that object. The day before yesterday a beautiful coin, a golden eagle of America, fell from my pocket on that upper plank, and rolled into the water. I would not lose it for a great deal, because it was given to me by my dearest friend, the greatest of all millers.”
“And ha’n’t you found it yet, miss? Well, that is queer. Perhaps we shall find it now, with something to the back of it. I thought yon hole was too far below the bridge. But there your gold must be, and something else, most likely. Plaise to wait a little bit, and us ‘ll have the wet out of un. I never should ‘a thought of that but for your gold guinea, though.”
With these words Master Withypool pulled his coat off and rolled up his shirt sleeves, displaying arms fit to hold their own even with Uncle Sam’s almost; and then he fell to with his shovel and dug, while I ran with my little spud to help.
“Plaise keep out of way, miss; I be afeard of knocking you. Not but what you works very brave indeed, miss.”
Knowing what men are concerning “female efforts,” I got out of the strong man’s way, although there was plenty of room for me. What he wanted to do was plain enough—to dig a trench down the empty bed of the Moon River, deep enough to drain that pit before the stream came down again.
“Never thought to run a race against my own old dam,” he said, as he stopped for a moment to recover breath. “Us never knows what us may have to do. Old dam must be a’most busting now. But her’s sound enough, till her beginneth to run over.”
I did not say a word, because it might have done some mischief, but I could not help looking rather anxiously up stream, for fear of the water coming down with a rush, as it very soon must do. Master Withypool had been working, not as I myself would have done, from the lips of the dark pit downward, but from a steep run some twenty yards below, where there was almost a little cascade when the river was full flowing; from this he had made his channel upward, cutting deeper as he came along, till now, at the brink of the obstinate pool, his trench was two feet deep almost. I had no idea that any man could work so with a shovel, which seems such a clumsy tool compared with a spade: but a gentleman who knows the country and the people told me that, with their native weapon, Moonites will do as much digging in an hour as other folk get through in an hour and a half with a spade. But this may be only, perhaps, because they are working harder.
“Now,” said Master Withypool at last, standing up, with a very red face, and desiring to keep all that unheeded—“now, miss, to you it belongeth to tap this here little cornder, if desirable. Plaise to excoose of me going up of bank to tell ‘e when the wet cometh down again.”
“Please to do nothing of the sort,” I answered, knowing that he offered to stand out of sight from a delicate dread of intrusion. “Please to tap the pool yourself, and stay here, as a witness of what we find in it.”
“As you plaise, miss, as you plaise. Not a moment for to lose in arguing. Harken now, the water is atopping of our dam. Her will be here in five minutes.”
With three or four rapid turns of his shovel, which he spun almost as fast as a house-maid spins a mop, he fetched out the plug of earth severing his channel from the deep, reluctant hole. And then I saw the wisdom of his way of working: for if he had dug downward from the pool itself, the water would have followed him all the way, and even drowned his tool out of its own strokes; whereas now, with a swirl and a curl of ropy mud, away rushed the thick, sluggish, obstinate fluid, and in less than two minutes the hole was almost dry.
The first thing I saw was my golden eagle, lodged about half-way down the slope on a crust of black sludge, from which I caught it up and presented it to Master Withypool, as a small token and record of his kindness; and to this day he carries it upon his Sunday watch chain.
“I always am lucky in finding things,” I exclaimed, while he watched me, and the up stream too, whence a babble of water was approaching. “As sure as I live I have found it!”
“No doubt about your living, miss. And the Captain were always lively. But what have your bright eyes hit upon? I see nort