Read Online Gathering the Water by Robert Edric - Free Book Online Page B

pay were finished.
    The blocks and splinters of rock amid which I stood were vividly red on their cut surfaces, and the low sun brightened these even further. I tried to climb several of the mounds, but was defeated by their looseness, making the noise of ten men in my clumsy attempts.
    All the cutting and drilling machinery had long since been removed, and would no doubt now be at workelsewhere as the Board’s schemes fed one upon the other and leapfrogged into the future.
    It was as I returned to the quarry entrance that I saw Mary Latimer walking alongside the river below me. I watched her for a moment to ensure she was alone. Had her sister been with her, I would not have revealed myself to them.
    Upon seeing me, she stopped walking and I made my way down to her.
    â€˜I was examining the quarry,’ I said.
    â€˜Before it was excavated for the dam there was a cave which was once home to a hermit.’
    I had heard of such a thing only once before. The estate owner of the village in which Helen had lived had, during the summer months when his house and lands were frequently visited, employed the services of a man to sit in a grotto with a candle in one hand and a Bible in the other. For a few coins he would read to his small audiences. I visited the place once with Helen and her sister. He was a civilized hermit and read well, and because of this I was disappointed by him, by the sham he had allowed himself to become.
    â€˜It was said he was able to cure most ailments by the laying on of hands.’ Mary Latimer spoke almost in a reverie, and I saw again how tightly the vine of her sister was wound through and around her.
    â€˜And were people cured?’
    â€˜I doubt it. But they came. He lived on their charity. I remember being told by my grandfather that he was some harmless lunatic driven away from other places and that he had come here in torment to purge himself in his miserable isolation.’ Her casual use of the word ‘lunatic’ surprised meand she saw this. ‘Then, as now, it seems, we lived in an endlessly scrutinizing and judging age.’
    â€˜Did your sister recover after my visit?’
    â€˜Rest assured, you were quickly forgotten. My grand-father said the man absorbed all the sicknesses that were visited upon him into his own body and that he sat alone with them, making no attempt to cure himself until they left him of their own accord and he made his recovery. This was never a healthful place. Dysentery, diphtheria, the smallpox, other small plagues; that is what they were called. I don’t know how long the man persisted, two or three years perhaps, but to survive even that short time through the winters here was a miracle of sorts, I suppose.’
    â€˜What became of him?’
    â€˜I don’t know. I remember that after a year or two he was visited more frequently, that people came from elsewhere to seek his help. Most, I imagine, were simply curious, pleasure-seekers after some new novelty, come to scoff at him. But some were kinder. Some came to talk to him, brought him food. He held a great fascination for children.’
    â€˜So did you and your sister visit him?’
    She paused at the memory. ‘Must you endlessly have your connections, Mr Weightman, however tenuous?’
    â€˜It wasn’t my intention to suggest—’
    â€˜I know. But you see how adept I have become at seeing these things and avoiding them. Yes, she and I came here. It seemed a strange place, then, before the quarry, before the river was lowered; strange and isolated, even by the standards of the valley.’
    â€˜Do you think he was a lunatic?’
    â€˜Possibly. But a harmless one. Perhaps just a soul provoked beyond endurance.’
    â€˜As you are now provoked by my own prodding.’
    She looked beyond me into the derelict workings. ‘I daresay if he had been more provoked or ridiculed then there were other, even more distant and unvisited places