The Adventures of Tom Leigh Read Free

father. “Keep away, boy! Keep back! I’m—”
    I rushed forward, and pitched straight down the bank, for the path took a bend to the right there, as my father had guessed. My father lay half amid rocks, half in a deep cold pool. I cried: “Father! Father!” and pulled at his arm, but he did not speak or stir. Then I felt his face, and it was under water, and I got my hands into his armpits and hauled at his shoulders frantically, and I kneeled in the water at the edge of the pool and got his head up on my knees and held him so and tried to drag him out of the water, but he was too heavy for me to move. Indeed it was as much as I could do to hold him there, and gradually his body slipped down and his head fell forward, and just as I was beginning to feel that my aching arms could hold him no longer something fell heavily on the back of my head, and I knew no more.

2
In the Poorhouse
    When I came to myself I was lying in a very clean bed in a small room with a peaked roof and one very small window. I had never seen the room before, and after a time, as my senses cleared, I began to wonder where I could be. I sat up, but at once my head swam, I felt giddy and had to lie down again. The coverlet, I noticed, was a piece of undyed white cloth of the cheap rough kind called kersey, with several very bad faults in the weaving of it. Presently I made another attempt to rouse myself, and after one or two efforts managed to get out of bed and stumble to the window. A kind of despair seized me as I looked out. All round the horizon the hills rose and fell; the nearer ones were green with dark tops, the further ones blue, for it was a sunny morning and this window was high and had a distant view. So I could not be in Suffolk. Then I remembered the bleak night and the tumbling stream and the weight of my father’s body and the strange slack feel of his cheek against mine, and I tore the coverlet off the bed and wrapped myself in it and pulled open the door of the room—and fell straight into the arms of an enormous fat woman with very red cheeks, who was coming in with a mug of gruel in her hand.
    â€œWhat are you about, you daft lad?” she said in that cheerful railing Yorkshire tone which I have now learned is not meant to be unfriendly. “Do you want to kill yourself? Get back into bed and sup your gruel.”
    I did as I was told, for I hardly had strength to do aught else, but I demanded: “Where am I?” in an urgent tone.
    â€œWhere are you? In Barseland poorhouse, to be sure. Where did you think you were?”
    â€œPoorhouse?” I exclaimed in horror. “What am I doing in a poorhouse? What will my father say? I must leave at once.”
    â€œNow, don’t fret yourself, love,” said the fat woman, pressing her hand kindly on my shoulder. “It’s no use leaving here till tha’s somewhere else to go, tha knows.”
    â€œWhere is my father?”
    â€œWell—he’s not in Barseland, and that’s a fact.”
    â€œWhere is Barseland? Is it near Halifax?”
    â€œAye, it is.”
    â€œThen I’ll go to Halifax. My father will be there.”
    The fat woman stepped to the door, and called out: “Mr. Gledhill! Mr. Gledhill!”
    After a moment a tall thin serious-looking man with a very long face and grey hair came into the room.
    â€œThis is Mr. Gledhill, the Barseland Constable and Overseer of the Poor,” said the fat woman to me. “So answer him as straight as you can. He’s asking for his father,” she said to Mr. Gledhill.
    Mr. Gledhill looked graver than ever.
    â€œWhat is your name, my boy?”
    â€œThomas Leigh. Most people call me Tom.”
    â€œHow old are you?”
    â€œFourteen.”
    â€œYou were with your father, were you? What were you doing down Mearclough on such a wild stormy night? Where had you come from? Where were you going to? Those are a lot of questions; take your