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'Is't Uncle Reuben? whispered Louie, pressing her face against the side of the rocks, and trying to look through the chink between it and the covering stone. 'Aye wi a lantern. But there's talkin theer's someone else. Jim Wigson, mebbe. 'If it's Jim Wigson, said Louie, between her small, shut teeth, 'I'll bite him! 'Cos yo're a gell! Gells and cats bite they can't do nowt else!
He had few friends of his own age, yet he was not unpopular, except, perhaps, with an overbearing animal like Jim Wigson, who instinctively looked upon other people's brains as an offence to his own muscular pretensions. But his Easter Eve struggle with Hannah closed, as it were, a childhood, which, though hard and loveless, had been full of compensations and ignorant of its own worst wants.
The smart of his back and legs recalled him, after a few moments of bewilderment, to a mental torture he had scarcely yet had time to feel. He David Grieve had been beaten thrashed like a dog by Jim Wigson! The remembered fact brought with it a degradation of mind and body a complete unstringing of the moral fibres, which made even revenge seem an impossible output of energy.
So they can just lock up the 'ouse and leave the gas a-burning, so's no one won't know, and get back bright an' early by 'leven o'clock. And we'll make a night of it, Mrs Prosser, so we will. I'm just a-going to run out to pop the letter in the post." And then the lady what had chosen the three ha'porth so careful, she said: "Lor, Mrs Wigson, I wonder at you, and your hands all over suds.
It seemed to David that she was describing her lover of the winter; he caught her gesture as she illustrated her performance with Jim Wigson the boxing of the amorous lout's ears in the lane by the Dye-works.
David tried desperately to rise in vain Jim had him by the collar; and four or five times more the heavy whip came down, avenging with each lash many a slumbering grudge in the victor's soul. Then Jim felt his arm firmly caught. 'Now, Mister Wigson, cried the landlord a little man, but a wiry 'yo'll not get me into trooble. Let th' yoong ripstitch go.
Involuntarily, Reuben held his breath, listening, hungering for the sound of children's voices on the still air. Nothing but a few intermittent bird notes and the eternal hurry of water from the moorland to the plain. There was a step on the road, and a man passed whistling. 'Jim Wigson! shouted Hannah, 'is that yo, Jim? The man opened the yard gate, and came through to them.
Then up and on again, through the rough uneven lane, higher and higher into the breast of the Scout. What if he met Jim Wigson on the way? What if Aunt Hannah, still unreconciled, turned him from the door? No matter! Rancour and grief have no hold on mortals walking in such an April world in such an exquisite and sunlit beauty. On! let thought and nature be enough!
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