"I'd rather he'd ha' bin Church," commented Mrs. Schofield. "Aw've often noticed 'at those 'at put it on so mich o' Sundays tak' it aat o' th' Mondays. Devil dodgers, aw call 'em."
"There are good men among the Dissenters." Mr Black's spirit of fairness compelled him to testify, "though I wish they could find their way to heaven without making so much pother on earth." The days of the Salvation Army were not as yet, and sound and salvation were not convertible terms.
"There's one gooid thing abaat it," was the landlady's opinion. "Holmfirth's nobbut over th' hill, so to speak, an' th' lad could come to see his old friends at Whissunday and th' Feast, when th' mills are lakin'."
"Aye, aye, a lot better nor them furrin' parts," agreed the farmer. "Owd England for me, say I."
"And I have not lost hopes of clearing up the mystery of the boy's birth," concluded Mr. Black. "He must stay near us."
To this time nothing had been said to Tom about his parents. He knew he had no father and no mother--that was all. He knew other lads had fathers and mothers, and how he came to be without did not concern him very much. Once, indeed, one of the village lads had jeered at him as a love-child. He did not understand what this might mean, but he had sense to perceive something offensive was meant.
"What is a love-child?" he asked Mrs. Schofield one day, suddenly.
"All childer's love childer," fenced Mrs. Schofield, but Tom was not satisfied.
"What's a love child, Jack?" he asked his bosom friend.
Jack ruminated. Definition was not his forte.
"It means a lad's mother's nooan as good as she should be."
Tom flushed hotly, and said nothing: but that night a village lad with lips much swollen slept with a raw beefsteak over his eye.
The germ of thought had been sown in the youthful mind. _Why_ was he different from other lads? Time had been when in some confused sort of fashion he had looked on Mrs. Schofield as his mother and Mr. Black as his father.
"Mr. Black," he asked one day, "where is my mother?"
It was a question that the Schoolmaster had looked for at every recent visit that he courted and yet dreaded.
It was on a Sunday noon as the congregation left the porch of St. Chad's some lingering by the gateway to exchange neighbourly greeting, others sauntering with an air of unconcern to the door of the Church Inn across the way, whilst yet others still made with leaden foot to a recent grave to pay the tribute of the mourner's tears.