The Dew of Their Youth
by S. R. Crockett · English · Gutenberg #23736 · 573,609 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Dew of Their Youth
Author: S. R. Crockett
Release date: December 4, 2007 [eBook #23736]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23736
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH
By
S. R. CROCKETT
Author Of
'The Lilac Sunbonnet,' 'The Black Douglas,' 'Strong Mac,'
'Rose Of The Wilderness,' etc.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON--MCMX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
Bread Street Hill, E.C., and
Bungay, Suffolk.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Haunted House of Marnhoul 1
CHAPTER II
'In the Name of the Law!' 10
CHAPTER III
Miss Irma gives an Audience 18
CHAPTER IV
First Foot in the Haunted House 22
CHAPTER V
The Censor of Morals 33
CHAPTER VI
The Apotheosis of Agnes Anne 42
CHAPTER VII
The Doctor's Advent 51
CHAPTER VIII
Kate of the Shore 62
CHAPTER IX
The Eve of St. John 73
CHAPTER X
The Crowbar in the Wood 82
CHAPTER XI
Agnes Anne's Experiences as a Spy 87
CHAPTER XII
The Fight in the Dark 96
CHAPTER XIII
A World of Ink and Fire 101
CHAPTER XIV
The White Free Traders 109
PART II
CHAPTER XV
My Grandmother speaks her Mind 118
CHAPTER XVI
Castle Connoway 127
CHAPTER XVII
The Man 'Doon-the-hoose' 133
CHAPTER XVIII
The Transfiguration of Aunt Jen 138
CHAPTER XIX
Loaded-pistol Pollixfen 146
CHAPTER XX
The Real Mr. Poole 155
CHAPTER XXI
While we sat by the Fire 162
PART III
CHAPTER XXII
Boyd Connoway's Evidence 170
CHAPTER XXIII
The Sharp Spur 184
CHAPTER XXIV
The College of King James 193
CHAPTER XXV
Satan Finds 201
CHAPTER XXVI
Perfidy, thy Name is Woman! 209
CHAPTER XXVII
Then, Heigh-ho, the Molly!' 218
CHAPTER XXVIII
Love and the Logician 227
CHAPTER XXIX
The Avalanche. 233
CHAPTER XXX
The Vanishing Lady 244
CHAPTER XXXI
wice Married 254
CHAPTER XXXII
The Little House on the Meadows 262
CHAPTER XXXIII
And the Door was Shut 268
CHAPTER XXXIV
A Visit from Boyd Connoway 274
CHAPTER XXXV
The Valley of the Shadow 280
CHAPTER XXXVI
The Supplanter 288
CHAPTER XXXVII
The Return of the Serpent to Eden Valley 297
CHAPTER XXXVIII
By Water and the Word 305
CHAPTER XXXIX
The Wicked Flag 313
CHAPTER XL
The Great 'Tabernacle' Revival 322
CHAPTER XLI
In the Wood Parlour 330
CHAPTER XLII
The Place of Dreams 338
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PART I
CHAPTER I
THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF MARNHOUL
I, Duncan MacAlpine, school-master's son and uncovenanted assistant to
my father, stood watching the dust which the Highflyer coach had left
between me and Sandy Webb, the little guard thereof, as he whirled
onward into the eye of the west. It was the hour before afternoon
school, and already I could hear my father's voice within declaiming as
to unnecessary datives and the lack of all feeling for style in the
Latin prose of the seniors.
A score of the fifth class, next in age and rank, were playing at
rounders in an angle of the court, and I was supposed to be watching
them. In reality I was more interested in a group of tall girls who were
patrolling up and down under the shade of the trees at the head of their
playground--where no boy but I dare enter, and even I only officially.
For in kindly Scots fashion, the Eden Valley Academy was not only open
to all comers of both sexes and ages, but was set in the midst of a wood
of tall pines, in which we seniors were permitted to walk at our guise
and pleasure during the "intervals."
Here the ground was thick and elastic with dry pine needles, two or
three feet of them firmly compacted, and smelling delightfully of resin
after a shower. Indeed, at that moment I was interested enough to let
the boys run a little wild at their game, because, you see, I had found
out within the last six months that girls were not made only to be
called names and to put out one's tongue at.
There was, in especial, one--a dark, slim girl, very lissom of body and
the best runner in the school. She wore a grey-green dress of rough
stuff hardly ankle-long, and once when the bell-rope broke and I had
sprained my ankle she mounted instead of me, running along the rigging
of the roofs to ring the bell as active as a lamplighter. I liked her
for this, also because she was pretty, or at least the short grey-green
dress made her look it. Her name was Gertrude Gower, but Gerty
Greensleeves was what she was most frequently called, except, of course,
when I called the roll before morning and afternoon.
I had had a talk with Sandy Webb, the guard, as he paused to take in the
mails. My father was also village postmaster, but, though there was a
girl in the office to sell stamps and revenue licences, and my mother
behind to say "that she did not know" in reply to any question
whatsoever, I was much more postmaster than my father, though I suppose
he really had the responsibility.
Sandy Webb always brought a deal of news to Eden Valley. And as I had
official and private dealings with him--the public relating to way-bills
and bag-receipts, and the private to a noggin of homebrewed out of the
barrel in the corner of our cellar--he always gave me the earliest news,
before he hurried away--as it were, the firstlings of the flock.
"There's a stir at Cairn Edward," he said casually, as he set down his
wooden cup. "John Aitken, the mason, has fallen off a scaffolding and
broken----"
"Not his leg?" I interrupted anxiously, for John was a third cousin of
my mother's.
"No, more miraculous than that!" the guard averred serenely.
"His back?" I gasped--for John Aitken, as well as a relation, was a
fellow-elder of my father's, and the two often met upon sacramental
occasions.
"No," said Sandy, enjoying his grave little surprise, "only the trams of
his mortar-barrow! And there's that noisy tinkler body, Tim Cleary, the
Shire Irishman, in the lock-up for wanting to fight the Provost of
Dumfries, and he'll get eight days for certain. But the Provost is
paying the lodgings of his wife and family in the meantime. It will be a
rest for them, poor things."
It was at this moment that Sandy Webb, square, squat, many-wrinkled man,
sounded his horn and swung himself into his place as the driver, Andrew
Haugh, gathered up his reins. But I knew his way, and waited
expectantly. He always kept the pick of his news to the end, then let it
off like a fire-cracker, and departed in a halo of dusty glory.
"Your private ghost is making himself comfortable over yonder at the
Haunted House. I saw the reek of his four-hours fire coming up blue out
of the chimbly-top as we drove past!"
It was thus that the most notable news of a decade came to Eden Valley.
The Haunted House--we did not need to be told--was Marnhoul, a big,
gaunt mansion, long deserted, sunk in woods, yet near enough to the
Cairn Edward road to be visible in stray round towers and rows of
chimneys, long unblacked by fire of kitchen or parlour. It had a great
forest behind it, on the verges of which a camp of woodcutters and a
rude saw-mill had long been established, eating deeper and deeper in,
without, however, seeming to make any more difference than a solitary
mouse might to a granary.
We boys knew all about the Haunted House. Since our earliest years it
had been the very touchstone of courage to go to the gate on a moonlight
night, hold the bars and cry three times, "I'm no feared!" Some had done
this, I myself among the number. But--though, of course, being a
school-master's son, I did not believe in ghosts--I admit that the
return journey was the more pleasant of the two, especially after I got
within cry of the dwellings of comfortable burgesses, and felt the
windows all alight on either side of me, so near that I could almost
touch them with my hand.
Not that I _saw_ anything! I knew from the first it was all nonsense. My
father had told me so a score of times. But having been reared in the
superstitious Galloway of the ancient days--well, there are certain
chills and creeps for which a man is not responsible, inexplicable
twitchings of the hairy scalp of his head, maybe even to the breaking of
a cold sweat over his body, which do not depend upon belief. I kept
saying to myself, "There is nothing! I do not believe a word of it! 'Tis
naught but old wives' fables!" But, all the same, I took with a great
deal of thankfulness the dressing-down I had got from my father for
being late for home lessons on a trigonometry night. You see, I was born
and reared in Galloway, and I suppose it was just what they have come to
call in these latter days "the influence of environment."
Well, at that moment, who should come up but Jo Kettle, a good fellow
and friend of mine, but of no account in the school, being a rich
farmer's son, who was excused from taking Latin because he was going to
succeed his father in the farm. Jo had a right to the half of my
secrets, because we both liked Gerty Greensleeves pretty well; and I was
certain that she cared nothing about Jo, while Jo could swear that she
counted me not worth a button.
So I told Jo Kettle about the Haunted House, and he was for starting off
there and then. But it was perfectly evident that I could not with these
fifth class boys to look after, and afternoon school just beginning. And
if I could not, I was very sure that he had better not. More than once
or twice I had proved that it was his duty to do as I said. Jo
understood this, but grew so excited that he bolted into school in a
moment with the noise of a runaway colt. His entrance disarranged the
attention of the senior Latiners of the sixth. My father frowned, and
said, "What do you mean, boy, by tumbling through the classroom door
like a cart of bricks? Come quietly; and sit down, Agnes Anne!"
This was my poor unfortunate sister, aged fourteen, whom a pitiless
parent compelled to do classics with the senior division.
Jo Kettle sat down and pawed about for his mensuration book, which he
studied for some time upside down. Then he extracted his box of
instruments from his bag and set himself to do over again a proposition
with which he had been familiar for weeks. This, however, was according
to immemorial school-boy habit, and sometimes succeeded with my father,
who was dreamy wherever the classics were not concerned, and regarded a
mere land-measuring agricultural scholar as outside the bounds of human
interest, if not of Christian charity.
In two minutes my father was again immersed in Horace, which (with
Tacitus) was his chief joy. Then Jo leaned nearer to Agnes Anne and
whispered the dread news about the Haunted House. My sister paled,
gasped, and clutched at the desk. Jo, fearful that she would begin,
according to the sympathetic school phrase, "to cluck like a hen,"
threatened first to run the point of his compasses into her if she did
not sit up instantly; and then, this treatment proving quite inadequate
to the occasion, he made believe to pour ink upon her clean cotton
print, fresh put on that morning. This brought Agnes Anne round, and,
with a face still pale, she asked for details. Jo supplied them in a
voice which the nearness of my father reduced to a whisper. He sat with
his fingers and thumbs making an isosceles triangle and his eyes gently
closed, while he listened to the construing of Fred Esquillant, the
pale-faced genius of the school. At such times my father almost purred
with delight, and Agnes Anne said that it was "just sweet to watch him."
But even this pleasure palled before the tidings from the Haunted House
as edited and expanded by Jo Kettle.
"Yes, Duncan had told him, and Sandy Webb had told _him_. There were
daylight ghosts abroad about Marnhoul. Everybody on the coach had seen
them----"
"What were they like?" queried Agnes Anne in an awestruck whisper; so
well poised, however, that it only reached Jo's ear, and never caused my
enraptured father to wink an eyelid. I really believe that, like a good
Calvinist with a sound minister tried and proven, my father allowed
himself a little nap by way of refreshment while Fred Esquillant was
construing.
Nothing loath, Jo launched headlong into the grisly. Through the matted
undergrowth of years, over the high-spiked barriers of the deer-park,
the Highflyer had seen not only the familiar Grey Lady in robes of
rustling silk (through which you could discern the gravel and weeds on
the path), but little green demons with chalk-white heads and long ears.
These leaped five-barred gates and pursued the coach and its shrieking
inmates as far as the little Mains brook that passes the kirk door at
the entrance of the village. Then there was a huge, undistinct, crawling
horror, half sea-serpent, half slow-worm, that had looked at them over
the hedge, and, flinging out a sudden loop, had lassoed Peter Chafts,
the running footman, whose duty it was to leap down and clear stones out
of the horses' hoofs. Whether Little Peter had been recovered or not, Jo
Kettle very naturally could not tell. How, indeed, could he? But, with
an apparition like that, it was not at all probable.
Jo was preparing a further instalment, including clanking chains, gongs
that sounded unseen in the air, hands that gripped the passengers and
tried to pull them from their seats--all the wild tales of Souter
Gowans, the village cobbler, and of ne'er-do-well farm lads, idle and
reckless, whose word would never have been taken in any ordinary affair
of life. Jo had not time, however, for Agnes Anne had a strong
imagination, coupled with a highly nervous organization. She laughed out
suddenly, in the middle of a solemn Horatian hush, a wild, hysterical
laugh, which brought my father to his feet, broad awake in a second. The
class gazed open-mouthed, the pale face of Fred Esquillant alone
twitching responsively.
"What have you been saying to Agnes Anne MacAlpine?" demanded my father,
who would sooner have resigned than been obliged to own son or daughter
as such in school-time.
"Nothing!" said Jo Kettle, speaking according to the honour that
obliges schoolboys to untruth as a mode of professional honour. Then
Jo, seeing the frown on the master's face, and forestalling the words
that were ready to come from his lips, "But, sirrah, I saw you!" amended
hastily, "At least, I was only asking Agnes Anne to sit a little farther
along!"
"What!" cried my father, with the snap of the eye that meant punishment,
"to sit farther along, when you had no interest in this classical
lesson, sir--a lesson you are incapable of understanding, and--all the
length of an empty bench at your left hand! You shall speak with me at
the close of the lesson, and that, sirrah, is now! The class is
dismissed! I shall have the pleasure of a little interview with Master
Joseph Kettle, student of mensuration."
Jo had his interview, in which figured a certain leathern strap, called
"Lochgelly" after its place of manufacture--a branch of native industry
much cursed by Scottish school-children. "Lochgelly" was five-fingered,
well pickled in brine, well rubbed with oil, well used on the boys, but,
except by way of threat, unknown to the girls. Jo emerged tingling but
triumphant. Indeed, several new ideas had occurred to him. Eden Valley
Academy stood around and drank in the wondrous tale with all its ears
and, almost literally, with one mouth. Jo Kettle told the story so well
that I well-nigh believed it myself. He even turned to me for
corroboration.
"Didn't he tell you that, Duncan? That was the way of it, eh, Duncan?"
I denied, indeed, and would have stated the truth as it was in Guard
Webb. But my futile and feeble negations fell unheeded, swept away by
the pour of Jo's circumstantial lying.
Finally he ran off into the village and was lost to sight. I have
little doubt that he played truant, in full recognition of pains and
penalties to come, for the mere pleasure of going from door to door and
"raising the town," as he called it. I consoled myself by the thought
that he would find few but womenfolk at home at that hour, while the
shopkeepers would have too much consideration for their tills and
customers to follow a notorious romancer like Jo on such a fool's
errand.
I cannot tell how that afternoon's lessons were got over in Eden Valley
Academy. The hum of disturbance reached even the juniors, skulking
peacefully under little Mr. Stephen, the assistant. Only Miss
Huntingdon, in the Infant Department, remained quiet and neat as a dove
new-preened among her murmuring throng of unconscious little folk.
But in the senior school, though I never reported a boy to my father
(preferring to postpone his case for private dealing in the playground),
the lid of the desk was opened and snapped sharply every five minutes to
give exit and entrance to "Lochgelly." Seldom have I seen my father so
roused. He hated not to understand everything that was going on in the
school. He longed to ask me what I knew about it, but, according to his
habit, generously forbore, lest he should lead me to tell tales upon my
fellows. For, though actually junior assistant to my father, I was still
a scholar, which made my position difficult indeed. To me it seemed as
if the clock on the wall above the fireplace would never strike the hour
of four.
CHAPTER II
"IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!"
At last--at last! The door between the seniors and Mr. Stephen's juniors
was thrown open. My father, making his usual formal bow to his
assistant, said, "When you are ready, Mr. Stephen!" And Mr. Stephen was
always ready. Then with his back to the hinges of the door, and his
strong black beard with the greying strands in it set forward at an
angle, Mr. John MacAlpine, head-master of Eden Valley Academy, said a
few severe words on the afternoon's lack of discipline, and prophesied
in highly coloured language the exemplary manner in which any repetition
of it would be treated on the morrow. Then he doubled all home lessons,
besides setting a special imposition to each class. Having made this
clear, he hoped that the slight token of his displeasure might assure us
of his intention to do his duty by us faithfully, and then, with the
verse of a chanted psalm we were let go.
Class by class defiled with rumble of boots and tramp of wooden-soled
clogs, the boys first, the girls waiting till the outside turmoil had
abated--but, nevertheless, as anxious as any to be gone. I believe we
expected to tumble over slow serpents and nimble spectres coming
visiting up the school-loaning, or coiling in festoons among the tall
Scotch firs at the back of the playground.
We of the sixth class were in the rear--I last of all, for I had to
lock away the copybooks, turn the maps to the wall, and give my father
the key. _But_ I had warned the other seniors that they were not to
start without me.
And then, what a race! A bare mile it was, through the thick fringes of
woods most of the way--as soon, that is, as we were out of the village.
Along the wall of the Deer Park we ran, where we kept instinctively to
the far side of the road. We of the highest class were far in front--I
mean those of us who kept the pace. The Fifth had had a minute or two
start of us, so they were ahead at first, but we barged through their
pack without mercy, scattering them in all directions.
There at last was the gate before us. We had reached it first. Five of
us there were, Sam Gordon, Ivie Craig, Harry Stoddart, Andrew Clark and
myself--yes, there was another--that forward Gerty Greensleeves, who had
kilted her rough grey-green dress and run with the best, all to prove
her boast that, but for the clothes she had to wear, she was as good a
runner as the best boy there. Indeed, if the truth must be told, she
could outrun all but me.
The tall spikes, the massive brass padlock, green with weathering, in
which it was doubtful if any key would turn, the ancient "Notice to
Trespassers," massacred by the stones of home-returning
schoolboys--these were all that any of us could see at first. The
barrier of the deer-park wall was high and unclimbable. The massy iron
of the gates looked as if it had not been stirred for centuries.
But a tense interest held us all spellbound. We could see nothing but
some stray glimpses of an ivy-clad wall. A weathercock, that had once
been gilded, stood out black against the evening sky. The Grey Lady in
the rustling silk, through whom you could see the rain drops splash on
the gravel stones, was by no means on view. No green demons leaped these
sullen ten-foot barricades, and no forwandered sea-serpent threw oozy
wimples on the green-sward or hissed at us between the rusty bars.
It was, at first, decidedly disappointing. We ordered each other to stop
breathing so loudly, after our burst of running. We listened, but there
was not even the sough of wind through the trees--nothing but the
beating of our own hearts.
What had we come out to see? Apparently nothing. The school considered
itself decidedly "sold," and as usual prepared to take vengeance, first
upon Jo Kettle and then, as that youth still persisted in a discreet
absence of body, on myself.
"You spoke to Sandy Webb, the guard," said Gertrude-of-the-Sleeves,
scowling upon me; "what did he say?"
Before I could answer Boyd Connoway, the village do-nothing,
enterprising idler and general boys' abettor, beckoned us across the
road. He was on the top of a little knoll, thick with the yellow of
broom and the richer orange of gorse. Here he had stretched himself very
greatly at his ease. For Boyd Connoway knew how to wait, and he was
waiting now. Hurry was nowhere in Boyd's dictionary. Not that he had
ever looked.
In a moment we were over the dyke, careless of the stones that we sent
trickling down to afflict the toes of those who should come after us. We
stood on the top of the mound. Connoway disturbed himself just enough to
sit up for our sakes, which he would not have done for a dozen grown
men. He removed the straw from his mouth, and pointed with it to the
end chimney nearest to the great wood of Marnhoul.
We gazed earnestly, following the straw and gradually we could see,
rising into the still air an unmistakable "pew" of palest blue
smoke--which, as we looked, changed into a dense white pillar that rose
steadily upwards, detaching itself admirably against the deep green
black of the Scotch firs behind.
"There," said Connoway gravely, "yonder is your ghost mending his fire!"
We stood at gaze, uncomprehending, too astonished for speech. We had
come, even the unbelievers of us, prepared for the supernatural, for
something surpassingly eery, and anything so commonplace as the smoke of
a fire was a surprise greater than the sight of all Jo Kettle's
imaginations coming at us abreast.
Yet the people who owned the great house of Marnhoul were far away--few
had ever seen any of them. Their affairs were in the hands of a notable
firm of solicitors in Dumfries. How any mortal could have entered that
great abode, or inhabited it after the manner of men, was beyond all
things inexplicable. But there before us the blue reek continued to
mount, straight as a pillar, till it reached the level of the trees on
the bank behind, when a gentle current of air turned it sharply at right
angles to the south.
Now we heard the tramp of many feet, and beneath us we saw Jo Kettle
with half-a-dozen of his father's workers, and the village constable to
make sure that all was done in due and proper order. To these was joined
a crowd of curious townsmen, eager for any new thing. All were armed to
the teeth with rusty cutlasses and old horse pistols, which, when
loaded, made the expedition one of no inconsiderable peril.
The man with the crowbar applied it to the rusty chain of the padlock.
Two others assisted him, but instead of breaking the chain, the iron
standard of the gate crumbled into so much flaky iron rust, while
padlock and attachments swung free upon the other. It was easy enough to
enter after that.
"In the name of the law!" cried the constable, taking a little staff
with a silver crown upon it in his hand. And at the word the gate
creaked open and the crowd pressed in.
But the constable held up his hand.
"'In the name of the law,' I said. I _might_ have put it, 'In the King's
name,' but what I meant was that we are to proceed in decency and
order--no unseemly rabbling, scuffling, or mischief making--otherwise ye
have me to reckon with. Let no word of ghosts and siclike be heard. The
case is infinitely more serious----"
"Hear to Jocky wi' his langnebbit words!" whispered Boyd Connoway in my
ear.
"Infinitely more so, I say. It is evident to the meanest capacity--"
"Evidently!" whispered Connoway, grinning.
"--that a dangerous band of smugglers or burglars is in possession of
the mansion of Marnhoul, and we must take them to a man!"
These words brought about a marked hesitation in the rear ranks, a
wavering, and a tendency to slip away through the breach of the broken
gate into the road.
"Halt there," cried Constable Black, holding the staff of office high.
"I call upon you, every man, to assist his Majesty's officers. You are
special constables, as soon as I get time to swear you in. Praise be,
here's good Maister Kettle! He's a Justice of the Peace. He will hold
you to it now and be my witness if ye refuse lawful aid. Now, forward!
Quick march!"
And this formidable armed band took its way along the overgrown gravel
avenue up to the front of the great house of Marnhoul. We boys (and
Greensleeves close to my elbow) played along the flanks like
skirmishers. All our spiritual fears were abated. At the name of the
law, and specially after the display of the silver-crowned staff, we
entered joyously into the game. If it had only been the arm of flesh we
had to encounter, we were noways afraid--though it was a sad downcome
from the solemn awe of coming to grips with the prince of darkness and
his emissaries.
"You that have pistols that will go off, round with you to guard the
back doors!" cried Constable John Black. "It's there the thieves have
taken up their abode. The smoke is coming from the kitchen lum. I see it
well. The rest, not so well armed, bide here with me under the
protection of the law!"
And with that Constable Black, commonly called Jocky, elevated once more
his staff in the air, and marched boldly to the fatal door. He went up
the steps by which the Grey Lady was wont to descend to the clear
moonlight to take her airing in the wood. A little behind went Connoway,
in the same manner holding a "bourtree" pop-gun which he had just been
fashioning for some lucky callant of his acquaintance.
Almost for the first time in his life Boyd Connoway had all the humour
to himself. Nobody laughed at his imitation of Officer Jocky's pompous
ways. They would do it afterwards in the safety of their own dwellings
and about the winter fire. But not now--by no means now.
Even though supported by the majestic power of the law, the crowd kept
respectfully edging behind wall and trees. Their eyes were directed
warily upwards to the long array of windows from which (legend
recounted) the Maitlands of Marnhoul had once during the troubles of the
Covenant successfully defended themselves against the forces of the
Crown.
Now be it understood once for all, the inhabitants of Eden Valley were
peaceful and loyal citizens, except perhaps in what concerned the excise
laws and the ancient and wholesome practice of running cargoes of
dutiable goods without troubling his Majesty's excise officers about the
matter. But they did not wish to support the law at the peril of their
lives.
An irregular crackle of shots, the smashing of window glass in the back
of the mansion, with two or three hurrahs, put some courage into them.
On the whole it seemed less dangerous to get close in under the great
vaulted porch. There, at least, they could not be reached by shot from
the windows, while out in the open or under the uncertain shelter of
tree boles, who knew what might happen? So there was soon a compact
phalanx about the man in authority.
Constable Black, being filled with authority direct from the
Lord-Lieutenant of the County, certainly had the instinct of magnifying
his office. He raised his arm and knocked three times on the bleached
and blistered panels of the great front door.
"Open, I command you! In the name of the law!" he shouted.
After the knocking there befell a pause, as it might be of twenty
breaths--though nobody seemed to draw any. Such a silence of listening
have I never heard. Yes, we heard it, and the new burst of firing from
the rear of the house, the cheers of the excited assailants hardly
seemed to break it, so deeply was our attention fixed on that great
weather-beaten door of the Haunted House of Marnhoul.
Again Jocky, his face lint-white, and his voice coming and going
jerkily, cried aloud the great name of the law. Again there was silence,
deeper and longer than before.
At last from far within came a pattering as of little feet, quick and
light. We heard the bolts withdrawn one by one, and as the wards of the
lock rasped and whined, men got ready their weapons. The door swung back
and against the intense darkness of the wide hall, with the light of
evening on their faces, stood a girl in a black dress and crimson sash,
holding by the hand a little boy of five, with blue eyes and tight
yellow curls.
Both were smiling, and before them all that tumultuary array fell away
as from something supernatural. The words "In the name of----" were
choked on the lips of the constable. He even dropped his silver-headed
staff, and turned about as if to flee. As for us we watched with dazzled
eyes the marvels that had so suddenly altered the ideas of all men as to
the Haunted House of Marnhoul.
But for a space no one moved, no one spoke. Only the tall young girl and
the little child stood there, like children of high degree receiving
homage on the threshold of their own ancestral mansion, facing the
lifted bonnets and the pikes lowered as if in salutation.
CHAPTER III
MISS IRMA GIVES AN AUDIENCE
"My name is Irma Maitland, and this is my brother Louis!" Such were the
famous words with which, in response to law and order in the person of
Constable Jacky Black, the tall smiling girl in the doorway of the
Haunted House of Marnhoul saluted her "rescuers."
"And how came you to be occupying this house?" demanded Mr. Josiah
Kettle, father of Joseph the inventive. He was quite unaware of the
ghastly terrors with which his son had peopled the Great House, but as
the largest farmer on the estate he felt it to be his duty to protect
vested rights.
"In the same way that you enter your house," said the girl; "we came in
with a key, and have been living here ever since!"
"Are you not feared?" piped a voice from the crowd. It was afterwards
found that it was Kettle junior who had spoken.
"Afraid!" answered the girl scornfully, holding her head higher than
ever; "do you think that a few foolish people firing at our windows
could make us afraid? Can they, Louis?" And as she spoke she looked
fondly down at her little brother.
He drew nearer to his sister, looking up at her with a winning
confidence, and said in as manly a voice as he could compass, "Certainly
not, Irma! But--tell them not to do it any more!"
"You hear what my brother says," said the girl haughtily. "Let there be
no more of this!"
"But--in right of law and order, I must know more about this!" cried
Constable Jacky, lifting up his staff again. Somehow, however, the magic
had gone from his words. Every one now knew that his thunder had a
hollow sound.
"Ah, you are the _gendarme_--the official--the officer!" said the tall
girl, with a more pronounced foreign accent than before, making him a
little bow; "please go and tell your superiors that we are here because
the place belongs to us--at least to my brother, and that I am staying
to take care of him."
"But how did you come?" persisted the man in authority.
The tall girl looked over his head. Her glance, clear, cool,
penetrating, scanned face after face, and then she said, as it were,
regretfully, "There are no gentlefolk among you?"
There was the slightest shade of inquiry about words which might have
seemed rude as a mere affirmation. Then she appeared to answer for
herself, still with the same tinge of sadness faintly colouring her
pride. "For this reason I cannot tell you how we came to be here."
Mr. Josiah Kettle felt called upon to assert himself.
"I have reason to believe," he said pompously, "that I am as good as any
on the estate in the way of being a gentleman--me and my son Joseph. I
am a Justice of the Peace, under warrant of the Crown, and so one day
will my son Joseph--Jo, you rascal, come off that paling!"
But just then Jo Kettle had other fish to fry. From the bad eminence of
the garden palisade he was devouring the new-comer with his eyes. As for
me, I had shaken the hand of the lately adored Greensleeves from my arm.
The girl's glance stayed for an instant and no more upon the round and
rosy countenance of Mr. Josiah Kettle, Justice of the Peace. She smiled
upon him indulgently, but shook her head.
"I am sorry," she said, with gentle condescension, "that I cannot tell
anything more to you. You are one of the people who broke our windows!"
Then Josiah Kettle unfortunately blustered.
"If you will not, young madam," he cried, "I can soon send them to you
who will make you answer."
The young lady calmly took out of her pocket a dainty pair of ivory
writing tablets, such as only the minister of the parish used in all
Eden Valley, and he only because he had married a great London lady for
his wife.
"I shall be glad of the name and address of the persons to whom you
refer!" said Miss Irma (for so from that moment I began to call her in
my heart).
"The factors and agents for this estate," Josiah Kettle enunciated
grandly. The writing tablets were shut up with a snap of disappointment.
"Oh, Messrs. Smart, Poole & Smart," she said. "Why, I have known them
ever since I was as high as little Louis."
Then she smiled indulgently upon Mr. Kettle, with something so easily
grand and yet so sweet that I think the hearts of all went out to her.
"I suppose," she said, "that really you thought you were doing right in
coming here and firing off guns without permission. It must be an
astonishing thing for you to see this house of the Maitlands inhabited
after so long. I do not blame your curiosity, but I fear I must ask you
to send a competent man to repair our windows. For that we hold you
responsible, Mr. Officer, and you, Mr. Justice of the Peace--you and
your son Jo! Don't we, Louis?"
"I will see to that myself!" a voice, the same that had spoken before,
came from the crowd. Miss Irma searched the circle without, however,
coming to a conclusion. I do think that her glance lingered longer on my
face than on any of the others, perhaps because Gerty Greensleeves was
leaning on my shoulder and whispering in my ear. (What a nuisance girls
are, sometimes!) So the glance passed on, with something in it at once
calm and simple and high.
"If any of the gentlefolk of our station will call upon us," she went
on, "we will tell _them_ how we came to be here--the clergyman of the
parish--or----" here she hesitated for the first time, "or his wife."
Instinctively she seemed to feel the difficulty. "Though we are not of
their faith!" she added, smiling once more as with the air of serene
condescension she had shown all through.
Then she nodded, and swept a curtsey with an undulating grace which I
thought to be adorable, in spite of the suspicion of irony in it.
"Good-bye, good people," she said, letting her eyes again run the
circuit of the sea of faces, reinforced by those who had been firing
their blunderbusses and horse-pistols (now carefully concealed) so
uselessly at the back windows of the house. "We are obliged for your
visit. Salute them, Louis!"
Obediently the child carried his hand to the curls on his brow in the
same fashion I had seen soldiers do at the militia training on the
Dumfries sands, but with the same smilingly tolerant air of receiving
and acknowledging the homage of vassals which both of them had shown
from the beginning.
Then Miss Irma smiled upon us all once more, nodded to me (I am sure of
it), and without another word, shut the door in our faces.
CHAPTER IV
FIRST FOOT IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE
To understand what a sensation these strange events made in Eden Valley,
it is necessary that you should know something of Eden Valley itself and
how it was governed.
Governed, you say? Was it not within the King's dominions, and governed
like every other part of these his Majesty's kingdoms? Had we of the
Wide Valley risen against constituted authority and filled all Balcary
Bay between Isle Rathan and the Red Haven with floating tea-chests?
Well, not exactly; but many a score of stealthy cargoes had been carried
past our doors on horse-back, pony-back, shelty-back--up by Bluehills
and over the hip of Ben Tudor. And often, often from the Isle of Man
fleet had twenty score of barrels been dropped overboard just in time to
prevent the minions of the law, as represented by H.M. ship _Seamew_,
sloop-of-war, from seizing them. So you will observe that the revolt of
Eden Valley against authority, though not quite so complete as that of
the late New England colonies, yet proceeded from the same motives.
Only, as it typo happened, the tea-chests which were spilt in Boston
Harbour were finished so far as the brewing of tea was concerned, while
the kegs and firkins dropped overboard were easily recoverable by such
as were in the secret. In a day or two, the tide being favourable and
the nights dark enough, these same kegs would be found reposing in bulk
in the recesses of Brandy Knowe, next by Collin Mill--save for a few,
left in well defined places--one being left at the Manse for the Doctor
himself. That was within the very wall of the kirkyard, and under the
shadow of the clump of yews which had dripped upon the tombstones that
covered at least three of his predecessors. A second reposed under the
prize cabbages belonging to General Johnstone (who, as a young officer
of Marines, had simulated the courage of Admiral Byng before Minorca,
and like that gallant seaman, narrowly escaped being shot for his
pains). General Johnstone's gardener knew well where this keg was
hidden. But it contained liquid well-nigh sacred in the eyes of his
master, and he had far too much common-sense ever to presume to find it.
A third came to anchor under a peat-stack belonging to Mr. Shepstone
Oglethorpe, the only Episcopalian within the parish bounds, and the
descendent of an English military family which had once held possession
of the Maitland estates during the military dragonnades of Charles II
and James II, but had been obliged to restore the mansion and most of
the property after the Prince of Orange made good his landing with his
"Protestant wind" at Torbay. Enough, however, remained to make Mr.
Shepstone Oglethorpe the next man in the parish after the minister and
the General. He was, besides, a pleasant, gossipy, young-old, fluttery
bachelor--a great acquisition at four-hours tea-drinkings, and much more
of a praise to them that do well than any sort of a terror to
evil-doers.
These three constituted the general staff of our commonwealth, and in
spite of occasional forgetfulnesses as to the declaration of the
aforesaid kegs, parcels of French silks and Malines lace, to H.M.'s
Supervisor of Customs, King George had no more loyal subjects than
these highest authorities in Eden Valley, ecclesiastical, military and
civil. Then, after due interval, came the farmers of Eden Valley,
honest, far-seeing, cautious men, slow of action, slower still of
speech--not at all to be judged by the standard of the richest of them,
Mr. Josiah Kettle. He was, in fact, a mere incomer, who had been
promoted a Justice of the Peace because, on the occasion of the last
scare as to a French invasion, he had made and carried out large and
remunerative contracts for the supply of the militia and other troops
hastily got together to protect the Solway harbours from Dryffe Sands to
the Back Shore.
The siege of the Haunted House of Marnhoul happened on a Friday, the
last school-keeping day of the week. Saturday was employed by the parish
in digesting the news and forming opinions for the consumpt of the
morrow. Meantime there was a pretty steady stream of the curious along
the Marnhoul road, but the padlock had been replaced, and only the
broken bar bore token of the storm which had passed that way.
On Sunday, however, a small oblong scrap of white attracted the
attention of the nearer curious. It was attached, at about the level of
the eyes, to the unbroken bar of the gate of Marnhoul, and on being
approached with due care, was found to bear the following mysterious
inscription--
"Sir Louis Maitland of Marnhoul, Bart., and Miss
Irma Sobieski Maitland receive every afternoon from
2 to 5."
Marnhoul, Galloway, June 21.
"Keep us a'!" was the universal exclamation of Eden Valley as it read
this solemnizing inscription. It was generally believed to be a
challenge to the lawyers and the powers in general to come at these
hours and turn the young people out.
And many were the opinions as to the legality of such a course. Law was
not generally understood in the Galloway of that date, and though the
Sheriff Substitute rode through the village once a month to spend a
night over the "cartes" with his friend the General, he too only laughed
and rode on. He was well known to me at the head of his profession, and
to have the ear of the Government. Such studied indifference, therefore,
could only be put down to a desire to wink at the proceedings of the
children, illegal and unprecedented as these might be.
But I must now say something about my own folk.
Though undoubtedly originally Highland, and, as my father averred, able
to claim kindred with the highest of his name, the MacAlpines had long
been domiciled in the south. My father was the son of a neighbouring
minister, and had only escaped the fate of succeeding his father in the
charge by a Highland aversion to taking the sacrament at the age when he
was called upon to do so--in order that, by the due order of the Church
of Scotland, he might be taken on his trials as a student in Divinity.
He had also, about that date, further complicated matters by marrying my
mother, Grace Lyon, the penniless daughter of a noted Cameronian elder
of the parish of Eden Valley.
In order to support her, and (after a little) _us_, John MacAlpine had
accepted a small school far up the glen, from which, after a year or
two, on the appointment of Dr. Forbes to the parish, he had followed his
old college friend to Eden Valley itself. Under his care the little
academy had gradually been organized on the newest and best scholastic
lines known to the time. Even for girls classics and mathematics played
a prominent part. Samplers and knitting, which had previously formed a
notable branch of the curriculum, were banished to an hour when little
Miss Huntingdon taught the girls, locked in her own department like
Wykliffites in danger of the fires of Tower Hill. And at such times my
father almost ran as he passed the door of the infant school and thought
of the follies which were being committed within.
"Samplers," he was wont to mutter, "samplers--when they might be at
their Ovid!"
My mother--Gracie Lyon that was--had none of the stern blood of her
Cameronian forebears, nor yet my father's tempestuous Norland mood. She
was gentle, patient, with little to say for herself--like Leah,
tender-eyed (in the English, not in the Hebrew sense)--and I remember
well that as a child one of my great pleasures was to stroke her cheek
as she was putting me to sleep, saying, "Mother, how soft your skin is.
It is like velvet!"
"Aye," she would answer, with a sigh gentle as herself, "so they used to
tell me!"
And I somehow knew that "they" excluded my father, but whom it included
I did not know then nor for many a day after.
But my grandmother, my mother's mother--ah, there indeed you were in a
different world! She dwelt in a large house on the edge of the Marnhoul
woods. My grandfather had the lease of the farm of Heathknowes, with
little arable land, but a great hill behind it on which fed black-faced
sheep, sundry cattle in the "low parks," and by the river a strip of
corn land sufficient for the meal-ark and the stable feeding of his four
stout horses. Also on my father's behalf my uncles conducted the lonely
saw-mill that ate and ate into the Great Wood and yet never got any
farther. There might be seen machinery for making spools--with
water-driven lathes, which turned these articles, variously known as
"bobbins" and "pirns," literally off the reel by the thousand. It was a
sweet, birch-smelling place and my favourite haunt on all holidays.
William Lyon, my grandfather, had had a tempestuous youth, from which,
as he said, he had been saved "by the grace of God and Mary Lyon."
"Many a sore day she had with me," he would confess to me, for he took
pleasure in my society, "but got me buckled down at last!"
As my grandmother also kept me in the most affectionate but complete
subjection, the fact that neither one nor the other of us dared disobey
"Mary Lyon" was a sort of bond between us. Yet my grandmother was not a
very tall nor yet to the outward eye a powerful woman. You had to look
her in the eye to know. But there you saw a flash that would have cowed
a grenadier. There was something masterful and even martial in her walk,
in the way she attacked the enemy of the moment, or the work that fell
to her hand. All her ways were dominating without ever being
domineering. But in the house of Heathknowes all knew that she had just
to be obeyed, and there was an end to it.
When my father and she clashed, it was like the meeting of Miltonic
thunderclouds over the Caspian. But on the whole it was safe to wager
that even then grandmother got her way. John MacAlpine first discharged
his Celtic electricity, and then disengaged his responsibility with the
shrug of the right shoulder which was habitual to him. After all, was
there not always Horace in his pocket--which he would finger to calm
himself even in the heat of a family dispute?
A great school-master was my father, far ben in the secrets of the
ancient world--and such a man is always very much of a humanist. My
grandmother, alert, clear, decided on all doctrinal points,
argumentative, with all her wits fine-edged by the Shorter Catechism,
could not abide the least haziness of outline in religious belief.
She did not agree with my grandfather's easier ways, but then he did not
argue with her, being far too wise a man.
"Eh, William," she would say, "ye will carry even to the grave some rag
of the Scarlet Woman. And at the end I will not be surprised to find ye
sitting on some knowetap amang the Seven Hills!"
But at least my grandfather was a Cameronian elder, in the little kirk
down by the ford, to which the Lyons had resorted ever since the days of
the societies--long before even worthy Mr. MacMillan of Balmaghie came
into the Church, ordaining elders, and, along with the pious Mr. Logan
of Buittle, even ordaining ministers for carrying on the work of the
faithful protesting remnant.
But my father, John MacAlpine, both by office and by temperament,
belonged to the Kirk of Scotland as by law established. So indeed did
nine-tenths of the folk in the parish of Eden Valley. The band of
Cameronians at the Ford, and the forlorn hope of Episcopalians in their
hewn-stone chapel with the strange decorations, built on the parcel of
ground pertaining to Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe, were the only
non-Establishers in the parish. Yet both, nevertheless, claimed to be
the only true Church of Scotland, claimed it fiercely, with a fervour
sharpened by the antiquity of their claims and the smallness of their
numbers. This was especially true of the Cameronians, who were ever
ready to give a reason for the faith that was in them. The
Episcopalians lacked the Westminster Catechisms as a means of
intellectual gymnastic. So far, therefore, they were handicapped, and
indeed reduced to the mere persistent assertion that they, and they
alone, were the apostolic Church, and if any out of their communion were
saved, it must only be by the uncovenanted mercies of God.
Yet, though not within the sacred triangle of gentility (as it was known
in Eden Valley), of which the manse, the General's bungalow, and the
residence of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe occupied the three angles, my
grandmother was the first caller upon the lonely children in the great
house of Marnhoul.
I shall never forget her indignation when I went in to the dairy and
told her in detail what had happened--of the forcing of the gates, and
the firing upon the back windows. My grandfather, seated within doors,
in his great triangular easy-chair at his own corner of the wide
fireplace, looked up and remarked in his serene and far-off fashion that
"such proceedings filled him with shame and sorrow."
The words and still more the tone roused my grandmother.
"William Lyon," she said, standing before him in the clean middle of the
hearth which she had just been sweeping, and threatening him with the
brush (she would not have touched him for anything in the world, for she
recognized his position as an elder). "Hear to ye--'shame and sorrow'!
Aye, well may ye say it. Had I been there I would have 'sinned and
sorrowed' them. To go breaking into houses with swords and staves, and
firing off powder and shot--all to frighten a pair of poor bairns!
Certes, but I would have sorted them to rights--with tongue, aye, and
with arm also."
And at this point Mary Lyon advanced a step so fiercely and with such
martial energy, that, well inured as my grandfather was to the generous
outbursts of his wife, he moved his chair back with a certain alacrity.
"Mary," he remonstrated, "Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe was with them. So at
least I understand, and also Mr. Kettle, who is a Justice of the
Peace--these in addition to the constable----"
He got no further. My grandmother swooped upon the names, as perhaps he
expected. It was by no means the first time that, in order to draw off
the hounds of his wife's wrath, he had skilfully drawn a red herring
across the trail.
"Shepstone--Shepstone!" she cried, "a useless, daidling body! What was
he ever good for in this world but to tie his neckcloth and twirl his
cane? Oh aye, he can maybe button his 'spats'! That is, if he doesna get
the servant lass to do it for him. And Josiah Kettle! William, I wonder
you are not shamed, goodman--to sit there in your own hearth-corner and
name such a hypocrite to me----"
"Stop there, Mary," said her husband; "only a man's Maker has the right
to call him a hypocrite----"
"Well, I am an Elder's wife, and I'll e'en be his Viceroy. Josiah Kettle
_is_ a hypocrite, and I hae telled him so to his face--not once, but a
score of times. He has robbed the widow. He has impoverished the orphan.
Fegs, if I were a man, I could not keep my hands off him, and, 'deed, I
have hard enough work as it is. If there was a man about the house worth
his salt----"
"Forgive your enemies----" suggested my grandfather, "do good----"
"So I would--so I would," cried my grandmother, "but first I would give
the best cheese out o' the dairy-loft to see Josiah ducked head over
heels in Blackmire Dub! Forgive--aye, certainly, since it is commanded.
But a bit dressing down would do the like o' him no harm, and then the
Lord could take His own turn at him after!"
Thus did my grandmother address all who came into contact with her, and
there is every reason to believe that she had more than once similarly
exhorted Mr. Josiah Kettle, rich farmer and money-lender though he was.
Yet it is equally certain that if Mr. Kettle had been stricken with a
dangerous and deadly malady which made his nearest kin flee from him, it
would have been my grandmother who would have flown to nurse him with
the same robust and forcible tenderness with which she oversaw the
teething and other ills incidental to her daughter's children.
"As for Jocky Black," continued my grandmother, "the pomp of the
atomy--'In the name of the law,' says he--I'd law him! I would e'en nip
his bit stick from his puir twisted fingers and gie him his paiks--that
is, if it were worth the trouble! As for me, get me my bonnet, Jen--my
best Sunday leghorn with the puce _chenille_ in it--I must look my
featest going to a great house to pay my respects. And you shall come
too, Duncan!" (She turned to me with her usual alertness.) "Run home and
tidy--quick! Bid your mother put on your Sunday suit. No, Jen, I will
_not_ take you to fright the poor things out of their wits. Afterwards,
we shall see. But at first, Duncan there, if he gets over his blateness,
will be more of their age, and fear them less."
"If all I hear be true," said my Aunt Jen, pursing up her mouth as if
she had bitten into a crab apple, "the lassie is little likely to be
feared of you or any mortal on the earth!"
"Maybe aye--maybe no," snapped my grandmother, "at any rate be off with
you into the back kitchen and see that the dishes are washed, so as not
to be a show to the public. You and Meg have so little sense that whiles
I wonder that I am your mother."
"You are not Meg's mother that I ken of!" her daughter responded
acridly.
"I am her mistress, and the greater fool to keep such a handless hempie
about the house! You, Janet, I have to provide for in some wise--such
being the will of the Lord--His and your father's there. Now then,
clear! Be douce! Let me get on my cloak and leghorn bonnet."
My grandmother being thus accoutred, and I invested with a black jacket,
knee-breeches, shoes, and the regulation fluffy tie that tickled my
throat and made me a week-day laughing stock to all who dared, Mistress
Mary Lyon and I started to make our first call at the Great House of
Marnhoul.
CHAPTER V
THE CENSOR OF MORALS
As my grandmother and I went down the little loaning from Heathknowes
Farm she had an eye for everything. She "shooed" into duty's path a
youngling hen with vague maternal aspirations which was wandering off to
found a family by laying an egg in the underbrush about the saw-mill.
She called back final directions to her daughter Jen and maidservant
Meg, and saw that they were attended to before she would go on. She
looked into the saw-mill itself in the by-going, and made sure that Rob
McTurk was in due attendance on the whirling machinery which was turning
off the spools, as it seemed to me, with the rapidity of light. She
inquired as to the whereabouts of her husband.
"Oh, he was in a minute since!" said the politic Rob, who knew very well
that my grandfather had climbed into the bark storage loft, and was at
that moment sitting on a bundle, with a book in his hand and content in
his heart at having escaped the last injunctions of his wife.
"Well, then," said Mistress Mary Lyon, "tell him from me----" And, as
usual, a long list of recommendations followed.
"I'll see to it that he hears," said Rob McTurk imperturbably, knowing
full well that his master could by no means help hearing, since my
grandmother, in order to drown the noise of the whirling spindles and
clattering cogs, had raised her voice till her every word must have
penetrated to the pleasant, bark-scented place where, under his solitary
skylight, Mr. William Lyon was so calmly reading his favourite _Memoirs
of the Life of Thomas Boston of Ettrick_.
Besides my clothes, there were two things which interfered with the
happiness of my jaunt. One was the presence of a third and most
uncertain party to the affair--our rough, red house-collie Crazy, and
the other was a doubt as to the way in which we would be received. For,
be it remembered, I had seen Miss Irma Maitland shut the great door at
the top of the Marnhoul steps on the raging crowd of assailants, and I
wondered if we would not also find it slammed in our faces.
I had, however, confidence in my grandmother.
On the way to the padlocked gate at the entrance of the avenue which led
to the Haunted House, my grandmother had abundant room for the exercise
of her gifts. Never was there a woman who came across so many things
that "she could not abide."
Such, for instance, were Widow Tolmie's ideas as to disposal of her
nocturnal household rubbish on the King's highway. Into the Tolmie house
went Mistress Mary Lyon, well aware that words would have no avail. In a
minute she had requisitioned broom, bucket, and "claut," or byre-rake.
In other three minutes all was over. Widow Tolmie had a clean frontage.
The utensils had been washed and hung up, and my grandmother was
delivering a lecture from one of the most frequently-quoted texts which
are not to be found in Holy Writ, while she drew again upon her strong,
energetic old hands the pair of lisle thread "mitts" she had taken off
in order to effect her clean sweep.
After she had duly lectured the Widow Tolmie, she bade her in all amity
"Good-day," and started to reform Crazy, who had been gyrating furiously
across her path, trying apparently to bite his tail out by the roots.
Crazy was, it appeared, a useless, good-for-nothing beast, a disgrace to
a decent Elder's house, and I was ordered to stone him home.
Now I did not particularly wish Crazy to go with us to the Great House.
I thought of the smiling carelessness of the girl's face I had seen
there. Crazy might, and very likely would, misbehave himself. But still,
Crazy was my friend, my companion, my joy. _Stone Crazy!_ It was not to
be thought of. He would certainly consider it some new kind of game and
run barking after the missiles. I therefore shot so far beyond that the
pebbles fell over the hedge, till my grandmother, whose sole method was
an ungainly cross between a hurl and a jerk, took up the fusillade on
her own account, with the result that Crazy was wrought up to the
highest point of excitement, and, as I had foreseen, brought each stone
back to my grandmother, barking joyously and pulling at her skirts for
her to throw again.
"And just wait till I get you home," gasped Mrs. Mary Lyon, shaking her
rough white head, "there shall a rope be put about your neck, my lad!"
But whether for the purpose of mere tying up, or to carry out the
extreme sentence of the law, I did not gather. I resolved that, in the
latter case, Crazy should come with me to the school-house. There was a
place I knew of there, a crib at the end of the stick-cellar, which at a
pinch would do admirably for Crazy. And I felt sure that Crazy, wholly
incompetent at his own business of shepherding, would be a perfect
"boys' dog" and a permanent acquisition to the Academy of Eden Valley.
There was, of course, my father to consider. But I did not stop to think
of that. The classics and Fred Esquillant were enough for him at the
moment.
As she passed various cottage doors my grandmother had several bouts
with joiners who blocked the road with unfinished carts and diffusive
pots of red paint, with small wayside cowherds in charge of animals
which considered the hedge-rows as their appointed pasturage, with boys
going fishing who had learned at school that a straight line is the
shortest distance between two points, and who practised their Euclid to
the detriment of their neighbours' fences.
But nothing of great moment occurred till, on the same knoll from which
he had summoned us to view the smoke of the ghost's afternoon fire at
Marnhoul, we encountered Boyd Connoway. He was stretched at length, as
usual, one leg crossed negligently over the other. He had pivoted his
head against a log for the purpose of seeing in three directions about
him--towards the Great House, and both up and down the main road. A
straw, believed to be always the same, was in his mouth.
A red rag to a bull, a match to tinder, are weak metaphors--quite
incapable of expressing a tenth of what my grandmother felt at the sight
of the pet idler of Eden Valley.
She rushed instantly to the assault, much as she would have led a
forlorn hope. The dragoons who plunged their swords into great mows of
straw in Covenanting barns, the unfortunates who pursued a needle
through a load of hay, were employed in hopeful work when compared with
Mistress Mary Lyon, searching with her tongue in this mass of
self-sufficiency for any trace of Boyd Connoway's long-lost conscience.
"Why are you not at home?" she cried; "I heard Bridget complaining as I
came by, that she could not feed the pig because she had nobody to bring
her wood for her boiler fire--and she in the middle of her blanket
washing!"
The husband whom fate and her own youthful folly had given to Bridget
Connoway, took off his battered and weather-beaten hat with the native
politeness of a born Irishman. He did not rise. That would have been too
much to expect of him. But he uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the
other way about.
"Mistress Lyon," he said indolently, but with the soft, well-anointed
utterance of the blarneying islander, which does not die away till the
third generation of the poorest exile from Erin, "now, misthress dear,
consider!"
"I have considered you for seven years, and seven to the back of that,
Boyd Connoway, and you are a lazy lout! Every year you get worse!"
My grandmother counted nothing so stimulating as truth spoken to the
face. She acted, with all save her male grandchildren, on the ancient
principle that "Praise to the face is an open disgrace!" And Boyd, in
his time, had been singularly exempt from this kind of disgrace, so far
as my grandmother was concerned.
"But consider, Mrs. Lyon," he went on tranquilly, while my relative
stood in the road and eyed him with bitter scorn, "there's my wife, now
she's up early and late. She's scrubbing and cleaning, and all for
what?--just that yonder pack o' children o' hers should go out on the
road and come trailing back in ten minutes dirtier than ever. She runs
to Shepstone Oglethorpe's to give his maid a help in the mornings, all
for a miserable three shillings a week. She takes no rest to the sole of
her foot, nor gives nobody any either! Poor Bridget--I am sorry for
Bridget. 'Take things easier, and you will feel better, Bridget,' I say.
'Trust in Providence, Bridget!' 'Think on what the Doctor said three
Sundays but one ago from the very pulpit.' And would ye believe me,
Mistress Lyon, that poor woman, being left to herself, threw all the
weights at me one after the other--aye, and would have thrown the scales
too if I had not come away!"
Here Connoway sighed and stretched himself luxuriously, rubbing the
stiff fell of his hair meditatively as he did so.
"Ah, poor Bridget," he continued, with pathos in his voice, "Bridget is
so dreadfully unresigned, Mistress Lyon. Often have I said to her, 'Be
resigned, Bridget--trust in Providence, Bridget!' But as sure as I point
out Bridget's duty, there is something broken in our house!"
"Pity but it was your head, Boyd Connoway! Come away, child!" cried my
grandmother, "quick--lest I do that man an injury. He puts me in such a
state that I declare to goodness I am thankful I have not a poker in my
hand! Now there's your grandfather----"
But she went no further in the discussion of her own lesser household
burden. For there right in front of us was the great gate, the battered
notice to trespassers, the broken standard on which the padlock, now
removed, had worn a rusty hollow, and in its place we read the little
white notice concerning the hours at which the mistress of the mansion
could receive visitors.
"Oh, the poor young things!" said my grandmother, her anger (as was its
wont) instantly cooling, and even Boyd Connoway dropping back into his
own place as perhaps a necessary factor in an ill-regulated but on the
whole rather bearable world.
The gate creaked open slowly. My grandmother drew herself up. For did she
not come of the best blood of the Westland Whigs, great-granddaughter
of that Bell of Whiteside, kinsman of Kenmure's, who was shot by Lag
on the moor of Kirkconnel, near to the Lynn through which the Tarff
foams white?
For me, I was chiefly conscious of the bushes and shrubs on either side
the avenue, broken and trampled in the tumultuous rush of the populace
on the day of the discovery. I felt guilty. By that way Gerty
Greensleeves and I had passed, Gerty very close to my elbow. And now,
like the rolling away of a panorama picture in a show, Gerty
Greensleeves, and all other maids save one, had passed out of my life.
Or so, in my ignorance, I thought at the time.
For no woman ever passes wholly out of any man's life--that is, if he
lives long enough. She steals back again with the coming of life's
gloaming, with the shadows of night creeping across the hills, or the
morning mists swimming up out of the valley. Sometimes she is weeping,
but more often smiling. For there is time enough, since the man last
thought of her, for all tears to be wiped from her eyes. But come she
will. Yet sometimes it is not so. She does not smile. She only stands on
the threshold of a man's soul with reproachful eyes, and lips drawn and
mute. Then it is not good to be that man.
But in those days, being a boy, carried along in the waft of my
grandmother's skirt, I knew nothing about such things.
I watched my grandmother take the antique knocker between her fingers,
noting with housewifely approval that it had recently been polished. I
have seldom passed a more uncomfortable time of waiting, than that
between the resounding clatter of grandmother's knocking reverberating
through the empty house, and the patter of feet, the whispering, and at
last the opening of the door.
Then I saw again the tall girl with the proudly angled chin, the crown
of raven curls, and the pair of brave outlooking eyes that met all the
world with something that was even a little bold.
I had been afraid that my grandmother, so indiscriminating in her
admonitions, might open fire upon this forlorn couple, isolated in the
great haunted house of Marnhoul. But I need not have troubled.
My grandmother had the instinct of caressing maternity for all the
young, the forlorn, the helpless. So she only opened her arms and cried
out, "Oh, you dears--you poor darlings!"
And the little boy, moved by the instinctive yearning of all that needed
protection, of everything of tender years and little strength towards
the breast that had suckled and the hands that had nursed, let go his
sister's hand and ran happily to my grandmother. She caught him in her
arms and lifted him up with the easy habitual gesture of one long
certified as a mother in Israel. He threw his little arms about my
grandmother's neck, nestling there just as the rest of us used to do
when we were in any trouble.
"I like you! You are good!" he said.
Miss Irma and I were therefore left eye to eye while Louis Maitland, in
spite of his title, was so rapidly making friends with the actual head
of our family.
Irma eyed me, and I did the like to Miss Irma--that is, to the best of
my ability, which in this matter was nothing to hers. She seemed to look
me through and through. At which I quailed, and then she appeared a
little more content.
With the child still in her arms, and her voice, lately so harsh in
rebuke, now tuned to the cooing of a nesting dove, my grandmother
introduced herself.
"Child," she said to Miss Irma, "I am your nearest neighbour. Who should
come to welcome you if not I? You will find me at the farm of
Heathknowes. It is my goodman's saw-mills that you hear clattering from
where you stand, and I am come to see if there is anything I can do to
help you."
"I thank you----" began the girl, and then hesitated. She had meant to
declare that they wanted for nothing, perhaps to indicate that the wife
of a tenant was hardly a fitting "first-foot" to venture over the
threshold of a baronet of ancient name and of the sister who acted as
his sponsor, tutor and governor.
But then Miss Irma did not know my grandmother as Eden Valley did, still
less as we who were, as one might say, of Caesar's household.
"Let me come in--I will soon see for myself!" quoth my grandmother, and
marched straight into the front hall of the Maitlands, that immense
dusky cavern I had only once looked into over the pikes and pitchforks.
She carried Sir Louis, tenth baronet of that name, on one arm. With her
free right hand she went hither and thither, sweeping her hand along the
ledges of great oak cabinets, blowing at the dust on the stone
mantelpiece, and finally clearing the great curtained south-western
window to let in the sun in flakes and patches of scarlet and gold.
Then she turned to Miss Irma and said in the tone of an expert who has
inspected a grave piece of work and not found it wanting, "You have done
very well, my dear!"
And at this Miss Irma changed the fashion of her countenance. Pleasure
shone scarce concealed. It was certain that up to that moment she had
regarded my grandmother somewhat in the light of an intruder, but she
could not bear up against such an appeal from housewife to housewife.
"Will you come up-stairs?" she said, "I have hardly got begun here yet."
CHAPTER VI
THE APOTHEOSIS OF AGNES ANNE
No word or look included me in the invitation which Miss Irma tendered
to my grandmother. Nevertheless I followed, not knowing what else to do.
I felt huge, awkward, clumsy of build and knotty of elbow and knee. I
was conscious that my knuckles were red. I felt in the way and unhappy.
In short, I hulked. Indeed, but that I was able to watch two eyes of
darkest grey beneath a wisp of untamed curls on a small and shapely
head, and the look of the thing, I would far rather have stopped out on
the doorstep with Crazy.
And perhaps that would have been the best place for me, all things
considered.
After we had passed two or three rooms in review, all of which were, as
it appeared to me, garnished with the ordinary sheets and coverlets of a
bedroom, my grandmother abruptly turned upon Miss Irma.
"Let me see your hands!" she said, in her ordinary brusque manner. I was
in terror lest we should be shown to the door. But the freemasonry of
work, the knowledge of things feminine, the fine little nod of
appreciation at a detail which is perfectly lost on a man, the flush of
answering approbation had done their perfect work between the old woman
and the girl.
Such things were not within my ken, and my grandmother promptly banished
me. She set down the little baronet at the same time with a "Run and
play, my doo!" She issued directions for me to charge myself with the
responsibility. I would much rather have stayed to hear what grandmother
and Miss Irma had to say one to the other, because I was more interested
in that. But the choice was not given to me. Go I must.
And with her first personal word of acknowledgment that I was a human
being, Miss Irma, calling me by name, indicated the "drawing-room" as
the place where we might await the end of this first congress of the
Holy Alliance.
I was some little alarmed at the place, the name of which so far I had
only seen in books, but little Sir Louis whispered in my ear as he took
my hand, "We can play there. That's only what sister Irma calls it!"
When my grandmother and Miss Irma appeared after an absence of
half-an-hour they found the two of us deep in a game of bat-ball. I made
an attempt to hide the ball, fearing lest Miss Irma might think I
usually carried such things about with me (I had confiscated it in class
that day). But I need not have troubled, she paid no attention whatever
to me, continuing to hold my grandmother's hand and look into the wise,
stormy, tender, emphatic, much-enduring old face. And I wondered at my
relative, and saw in this marvel one more proof of her own
infallibility.
"You must not stay any longer in this great house alone," she was
saying, "I will send you--somebody."
Then she looked again at Miss Irma's hands, and though I did not see
why, nor understand at the time, she added, "No--no--it will never
do--never do!" I wish I could say that on this first occasion of our
meeting, Miss Irma devoted a little of her attention to me. But the
truth is, she had eyes for nobody but Mistress Mary Lyon of
Heathknowes. True, a glance occasionally came my way, which caused me
instinctively to straighten myself up and square my shoulders, as I did
in the playground when acting as drill sergeant to the juniors. But the
very same glance with quite as much personality in it, passed on to
Crazy, who, to the exuberant delight of little Louis, had by this time
intruded himself. It was impossible for the most self-conceited to bring
away much comfort or encouragement from favours so slight as these.
Even Louis, after the advent of Crazy, considered me only as his
drill-sergeant, and valued me according as Crazy consented to show off
his tricks at the word of command from me.
"Behave, sir! You are in the kirk!" cried I. And lo! to the boy's wonder
Crazy, who had been gambolling about on the bare floor, sank down with
his head between his paws and his eyes hypocritically closed, till I
gave the signal, "Now fight the French!" Upon which uprose Crazy like a
dancing bear on his hind legs, and jumped about with flaming eyes,
barking with all his might. This, being the performance which pleased
Crazy most, was also the favourite with the young Sir Louis.
Indeed leavetaking was difficult, though by no means on my account. For
Miss Irma was all taken up with grandmother and little Louis with Crazy.
Nobody minded me, and Miss Irma did not so much as reach me a finger,
though at the last she just nodded, and Sir Louis had to be removed
wailing, because he wished to keep his arms tight about the shaggy neck
of Master Crazy, that singularly indifferent sheep-dog, but excellent
variety entertainer.
It was, however, promised that Crazy should return, and as I knew that
Crazy would by no means perform without me, considering himself bound to
me by hours of patient labour and persistent fellow truantry, I saw some
light on the horizon of an otherwise dark future. I must go back too.
But in the meantime Louis wept uncomforted, and "batted" his sister with
baby palms in the impotence of his anger as she carried him within.
My grandmother said nothing of any importance on the way home. She was
evidently thinking deeply, and confined herself to "Hush, you there!"
and "Do ye hear what I was saying to ye?" Under a fire of suchlike
remarks, delivered more or less at random, and without the least
discrimination between the barking of Crazy (the effect) and me (the
cause)--I kept a little in the rear so that I might have a sober face on
me when she turned round, while the less subtle Crazy galloped in
furious circles yapping and leaping up even in my grandmother's face. He
was, however, useful in drawing her fire, and though I had to keep a
sharp look-out for the stones she caught up to throw at Crazy (who ran
no personal danger) our home-coming was effected in good order and with
considerable amusement to myself.
But on her arrival at Heathknowes, Mrs. Mary Lyon found that there were
forces in the universe which even she was powerless to conquer.
Meg, the "indoor" lass at Heathknowes, refused point-blank to go one
foot in the direction of the "Ghaist's Hoose." She persisted in her
refusal even when addressed by the awe-inspiring baptismal name of
Margaret Simprin Hetherington, and reminded of the terms of her
engagement.
No, Margaret Simprin Hetherington would not--could not--dared not--stay
a night in the great house of Marnhoul. Whatever my grandmother might
say it was not so nominated in the bond. She had been hired to serve
about the farmhouse of Heathknowes, and she did not mind carrying their
dinners to the workmen in the saw-mill----
"No," interpolated my grandmother, "nor taking an hour-and-a-half to do
it in!"
Upon which, as if stirred by some association of ideas, Meg added that
she would go none to Marnhoul Big Hoose, "because not a soul would come
near the place." It did not matter whether _she_ believed in Grey Ladies
with rain-drops pattering through them or not--other people did, and she
would not be banished "among the clocks and rattons"--no, not for double
wages!
My grandmother, indeed, explained that there was no question of ladies
grey or rain-drops pattering, but of obedience to her legal mistress.
But she knew that the cause was lost, and I am quite sure anticipated
the reply of Margaret Simprin Hetherington, which was to the effect that
no lass, indoor or outdoor, was more willing to obey her mistress than
she, but it would be in the place in which she had been hired to
serve--there and not elsewhere.
For once my grandmother was nonplussed. Being a good Galloway woman she
knew that of all things it is most impossible to run counter to the
superstitions of her people. Perhaps she retained a touch of these
herself. But, as she said, "The grace of the Lord can overcome all the
wiles of the Evil One! And Mary Lyon would like to see witch or warlock,
ghost or ghostling, that would come in her road when she went forth
under His banner." On the darkest night she marched unafraid, conquering
and to conquer, having the superstitions born in her, but knowing all
the same (and all the better for that knowledge) on which side were the
bigger battalions.
It was no use to send my Aunt Jen, who had once been "in a place"
before. Aunt Jen would go, but--she would take her tongue with her. She
had her mother's command of language, but was utterly destitute of her
tact, lacking also, as was natural, the maternal instinct. As, in a
moment of exasperation my grandmother once said of her, "Our Jinnet is
dried up like a crab-tree in the east wind!"
She would certainly undo all that Mistress Mary Lyon had done, and "that
puir young lassie" (as she called Miss Irma) carried a warlike flash in
her eye which warned the rugged grandmotherly heart that she and our
Aunt Jen could not long bide at peace in the same house.
My mother might have done, as far as temper was concerned, but she
wanted what grandmother called the "needcessary birr." Besides which she
had more than enough to do in caring for her own house, mending my
father's clothes and misinforming the public as to Post Office
regulations. On the whole, though she loved her married daughter, I
think Mary Lyon was not a little sorry for my father, John MacAlpine, in
his choice of a housekeeper. I could see this by the occasional descents
she made upon our house, and the way she had of going about the rooms,
setting things to rights, silent save for a running comment of soft
sniffs upon the nose of contempt--the while my mother, after a
sympathetic glance at me, devoted herself to silent prayer that
grandmother would not light upon anything very bad.
With my grandmother, to fail in the due ordering of a house was a
cardinal sin. And my poor mother sinned, not indeed by intention,
hardly even in labour, but in that appearance of easy perfection, which
in a household is the result of excellent plans thoroughly and timeously
carried out. She was apt to be found late of an afternoon in a chair
with a book--and the dinner dishes still unwashed. Then Agnes Anne, my
sister, would come in without a word. Her school frock would be quickly
shrouded under a great coarse apron. If I happened to be within doors I
was beckoned to assist. If not, not--and Agnes Anne did them herself
while my mother slept on.
But I do not think that grandmother knew this, for she very generally
ignored Agnes Anne altogether, having a decided preference for boys in a
family. It fell out, therefore, that when she came a little shamefacedly
to consult my father, as she sometimes did in days of difficulty--for
under a show of contempt she often really submitted to his judgment--it
was given to Agnes Anne to say suddenly, "Let me go to Marnhoul,
grandmother!" If Balaam's ass (or say, Crazy), had spoken these words,
grandmother could not have been more astonished.
More so still when John MacAlpine nodded approval.
"Yes, let the lassie go--let her put her hand to the work. The burden
cannot be too soon laid on young shoulders--that is, if they are strong
enough."
Mary Lyon stared, as if both he and his daughter had suddenly taken
leave of their senses.
"Why, what can the lassie _do_?" she cried; "I thought you were making
her nothing but a don in the dead languages!"
"I can bake, and brew, and wash, and keep a house clean," said Agnes
Anne, putting in her testimonials, since there was no one so well
acquainted with them. My father nodded. He was not so blind as many
might suppose. My mother said, "Aye, 'deed, she can that. Agnes Anne is
a good lass. I know not what I should do without her!"
My grandmother looked about at the new air of tidiness, and for the
first time a suspicion crossed her mind that, out of a pit from which
she was expecting no such treasure, some one in her own image might
possibly have been digged among her descendants of the second
generation. She looked at Agnes Anne with a ray of hope. Agnes Anne
stood the awful searching power of that eye. Agnes Anne did not flinch.
Mary Lyon nodded her head with its man's close-cropped locks of rough
white hair in lyart locks about her ears.
"You'll do, Agnes Anne, you'll do," she said, adding cautiously, "that
is, after a time"--so as not to exalt the girl above measure. It was,
however, recognized by all as a definite triumph for my sister. My
grandmother, a rigid Calvinist, who believed in Election with all her
intellect, and acted Free Will with all her heart, elected Agnes Anne
upon the spot. Had the girl not willed to rise out of the pit of sloth
and mere human learning? And lo! she had arisen. Thenceforth Agnes Anne
stood on a pedestal, and for a while one sturdy disciple of Calvin's
thought heretically of the pure doctrine. Here was a human being who had
willed, and, according to my grandmother, had made of herself a miracle
of grace.
But she recalled herself to more orthodox sentiments. The steel was out
of the sheath, indeed, but it had to be tried. Even yet Agnes Anne might
be found wanting.
"When will you be ready to start?" she said, turning her black twinkling
eyes upon her granddaughter.
"In five minutes," said Agnes Anne boldly.
"And you are not frightened?"
"Of what?"
"Of these vain tales--ghosts, hauntings, and so forth. Our Meg Simprin
(silly maid!) would not move a foot, and you are far younger."
"I am no younger than those who are in the house already," said Agnes
Anne, with great sense, which even I would hardly have expected from
her, "and if ghosts are spirits, as the Bible says, I do not see that
they can interfere with housework!"
My grandmother rose solemnly from her seat, patted Agnes Anne on the
top-knot of her hair, shook hands with John MacAlpine, nodded meaningly
at my mother, and said, "Come along, young lass," in a tone which showed
that the aged shepherdess had unexpectedly found a lamb whom she long
counted lost absolutely butting against the door of the sheep-fold.
This was the apotheosis of Agnes Anne. Her life dates from that evening
in our kitchen, even as mine did from the afternoon when one half the
fools of Eden Valley were letting off shot-guns at the back windows of
Marnhoul Great House, while Miss Irma withstood the others on the
threshold of the front door.
CHAPTER VII
THE DOCTOR'S ADVENT
The firm of lawyers in Dumfries, the agents for the Maitland properties,
did not seem to be taking any measures to dispossess Miss Irma and young
Sir Louis. Perhaps they, too, had private information. Perhaps those who
had brought the children to Marnhoul may have been in the confidence of
that notable firm of Smart, Poole & Smart in the High Street. At any
rate they made no move towards ejection. They may also have argued that
any one who could dispossess the ghosts and make Marnhoul once more a
habitable mansion, was welcome to the tenancy.
It was the Reverend Doctor Gillespie who, first of all the distinguished
men of the parish, received in some slight degree the confidence of Miss
Irma. Grandmother knew more, of course, and perhaps, also, Agnes Anne.
But, with the feeling of women towards those whom they approve, they
became Irma's accomplices. Women are like that. When you tell them a
secret, if they don't like you, they become traitors. If they do, they
are at once confederates. But the Doctor visited Marnhoul as a
deputation, officially, and also for the purpose of setting the minds of
the genteel at rest.
The Doctor's lady gave him no peace till he did his duty. The General's
womenfolk at the Bungalow were clamorous. It was not seemly. Something
must be done, and since the action of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe on the
occasion of the assault on the house had put _him_ out of the question,
and as the General flatly refused to have anything to do with the
affair, it was obvious that the duty must fall to the Doctor.
Nor could a better choice have been made. Eden Valley has known many
preachers, but never another such pastor--never a shepherd of the sheep
like the Doctor. I can see him yet walking down the manse avenue--it had
been just "the Loaning" in the days before the advent of the second Mrs.
Doctor Gillespie--a silver-headed cane in his hand, everything about him
carefully groomed, and his very port breathing a peculiarly grave and
sober dignity. Grey locks, still plentiful, clustered about his head.
His cocked hat (of the antique pattern which, early in his ministry, he
had imported by the dozen from Versailles) never altered in pattern.
Buckles of unpolished silver shone dully at his knee and bent across his
square-toed shoes.
Above all spread his neckcloth, spotless, enveloping, cumbrous,
reverence-compelling, a cravat worthy of a Moderator. And indeed the
Doctor--our Doctor, parish minister of Eden Valley, had "passed the
Chair" of the General Assembly. We were all proud of the fact, even
top-lofty Cameronians like my grandmother secretly delighting in the
thought of the Doctor in his robes of office.
"There would be few like him away there in Edinburgh," she would say.
"The Doctor's a braw man, and does us credit afore the great of the
land--for a' that he's a Moderate!"
And had he been the chief of all the Moderates, the most volcanic and
aggressive of Moderates, my grandmother would have found some good thing
to say of a fellow-countryman of so noble a presence--"so personable,"
and "such a credit to the neighbourhood."
Wisdom, grave and patient, was in every line of his kindly face.
Something boyish and innocent told that the shades of the prison-house
had never wholly closed about him. It was good to lift the hat to Dr.
Gillespie as he went along--hat a little tip-tilted off the
broadly-furrowed brow. In the city he is very likely to stop and regard
the most various wares--children's dolls or ladies' underpinnings. But
think not that the divine is interested in such things. His mind is
absent--in communion with things very far away. Lift your hat and salute
him. He will not see you, but--it will do _you_ good!
William Gillespie was the son of a good ministerial house. His father
had occupied the same pulpit. He himself had been born in his own
manse--which is to say, in all the purple of which our grey Puritan land
can boast. We were proud of the Doctor, and had good reason therefor. I
have said that even my field-preaching grandmother looked upon the
Erastian with a moisture quasi-maternal in her eyes, and as for us who
"sat under him and listened to his speech," we came well-nigh to worship
him.
Yet "the Doctor" was self-effacing beyond many, and only our proper
respect for the "Lady of the Manse" kept the parishioners in their
places. Discourses which he had preached in the callow days of his youth
on the "Book of the Revelation" had brought hearers from many distant
parishes, and at that time the Doctor had had several "calls" and
"offers" to proceed to other spheres on account of their fame. But he
had always refused to repeat any of them.
"I have changed my mind about many things since then," he would say;
"young men are apt to be hasty! The greatest of all heresies is
dogmatism."
But among the older saints of the parish that "series of expositions"
was not forgotten. "It was" (they averred) "like the licht o' anither
world to look on his face--just heeven itsel' to listen to him. Sirce
me, there are no such discourses to be heard now-a-days--not even from
_himsel'_!"
And be it remembered that our dear Doctor could unbend--that is, in
fitting time and place. From the seats of the mighty, from Holyrood and
the Moderator's chair our Cincinnatus returned to shepherd his quiet
flock among the bosky silences of Eden Valley. He wore his learning, all
his weight of honour lightly--with a smile, even with a slight shrug of
the shoulder. The smile, even the jest, rose continually to his lips,
especially when his wife was not present. But at all times he remembered
his office, and often halted with the ancient maxim at the sight of some
intruder, "Let us be sober--yonder comes a fool!" And many of his
visitors noticed this sudden sobriety without once suspecting its cause.
Even the Cameronians agreed that there was "unction" in the Doctor. For
his brave word's sake they forgave the heresies of his church about the
Civil Magistrate, and said freely among themselves that if in every
parish there was such a minister as Dr. Gillespie, the civil magistrate
would be compelled to take a very back seat indeed. But it was on
Communion Sabbath days that the Doctor became, as it were, transfigured,
the face of him shining, though he wist not of it.
Something of the spirit of the Crucified was poured forth that day upon
men and women humbly bowing their heads over the consecrated memorials
of His love.
A silence of a rare and peculiar sanctity filled the little bare,
deep-windowed kirk. The odour of the flowering lilacs came in like
Nature's own incense, and the plain folk of Eden Valley got a foretaste,
faint and dim, but sufficient, of the Land where the tables shall never
be withdrawn.
Better preachers than the Doctor?--We grant it you, though there are
many in the Valley who will not agree, but not one more fitted to break
the bread of communion before the white-spread tables.
It was Agnes Anne who opened the door of Marnhoul, and stood a moment
astonished at the sight of the Doctor all in black and silver--hat,
coat, knee-breeches, silken hose and leathern shoes of the first, locks,
studs, knee-buckles, shoe-buckles all of the second.
But our Agnes Anne was truly of the race of Mary Lyon, so in a moment
she said, "Pray come in, sir!" with the self-respect of the daughter of
a good house, as well as the dutifulness which she owed to one so
reverend and so revered.
The Doctor was not surprised. He smiled as he recognized the
school-master's daughter. But he betrayed nothing. He laid his hand as
usual on her smooth locks by way of a blessing, and inquired if Miss
Maitland and Sir Louis were at home.
"They are in the school-room," said Agnes Anne, in the most
business-like tone in the world; "come this way, sir."
It was a very different house--that which Agnes Anne showed the
Doctor--from the cobweb-draped, dust-strewn, deserted mansion of a few
weeks ago. Simply considering them as caretakers, the Dumfries lawyers
ought to have welcomed their new tenants. So far as cleanliness went,
Miss Irma had done a great deal--so much, indeed, as to earn the praise
of that severest of critics, my grandmother.
But there was much that no girl could do alone. Chair-seats and
sofa-cushions had been beaten till no speck of dust was left. This had
had to be carefully gone about. For though, apparently, no thieves had
broken through to steal, it was evident that the house had last been
occupied by people of excessively careless habits, who had put muddy
boots on chairs and trampled regardlessly everywhere. But the other half
of the text held good. Moth and rust had certainly corrupted.
However, Agnes Anne was handy with her needle, in spite of her father
and his class on Ovid. There was always a good deal to do in our house,
and since mother made no great effort, and was generally tired, it fell
to Agnes Anne to do it.
She it was who had re-covered the worn old drawing-room chairs with
brocade found in the deep, cedar-wood lined cupboards, along with wealth
of ancient court dresses, provision of household linen, and all that had
belonged to the Maitlands on the day when, after the falling of the head
of their house upon Tower Hill, the great old mansion had been shut up.
The Doctor had been strictly enjoined to take good heed to write
everything down on his mental tablets, and to give careful account to
his lady. He found the two young Maitlands seated at a table from which
the cloth had been lifted at one corner to make room for copybooks, ink,
pens and reading-books. Evidently Miss Irma was instructing her brother.
"Now, Louis," they heard her say as they came in, "remember the destiny
to which you are called, and that now is the time----"
"The Doctor to call upon you!" Agnes Anne announced in a tone of awe
befitting the occasion.
Then the stately apparition in black and silver which followed her into
the room came slowly forward, smiling with outstretched hand. Miss Irma
was not in the least put out. She rose and swept a curtsey with bowed
head. Little Sir Louis, evidently awed by the sedate grandeur which sat
so well upon the visitor, paused a moment as if uncertain how he ought
to behave.
He was a little behind his sister, and completely out of the range of
her vision, so he felt himself safe in sucking the ink from the side of
his second finger, and rubbing the wet place hard on his black velvet
breeches. Then, as Miss Irma glanced round, he fell also to his manners
and bowed gravely--unconsciously imitating the grand manner of the
Doctor himself.
The room used for lessons was a wide, pleasant place, rather low in the
roof, plainly panelled and wainscotted in dark oak, with a single line
of dull gold beading running about it high up. There was a large
fireplace, with a seat all the way round, and a stout iron basket to
hold the fire of sea-coal, when such was used. Brass and irons stood at
the side, convenient for faggots. A huge crane and many S-shaped
pot-hooks discovered the fact that at some time this place had been
occupied as a kitchen, perhaps in the straitened days of the last
"attainted" Maitlands.
But now the chamber was pleasant and warm, the windows open to the air
and the song of the birds. Dimity curtains hung on the great poles by
the windows and stirred in the breeze, as if they had been lying for
half a century in dusky cupboards. Agnes Anne looked carefully to see if
the darning showed, and decided that not even her grandmother could spy
it out--how much less, then, the Doctor.
She was, however, annoyed that the tall, brass-faced clock in the
corner, dated "Kilmaurs, 1695," could not be made to go. But she had a
promise from Boyd Connoway that he would "take a look at her" as soon as
he had attended to three gardens and docked the tails of a litter of
promising puppies.
The Doctor bowed graciously over the hand of Miss Irma, and shook hands
gravely with Sir Louis, who a second time had rubbed his finger on his
black velvet suit, just to make assurance doubly sure.
The conversation followed a high plane of social commonplace.
"Yes," said Miss Irma, "it is true that our family has been a long time
absent from the neighbourhood, but you are right in supposing that we
mean to settle down here for some time."
Then she deigned to enter into particulars. She had her brother to bring
up according to his rank, for, since there was no one else to undertake
the charge, it fell to her lot. Luckily she had received a good
education up to the time when she had the misfortune----
"Ah," said the Doctor quickly, "I understand."
He said nothing further in words, but his sympathetic silence conveyed a
great deal, and was more eloquent and consolatory than most people's
speech.
"And where were you educated?" asked the Doctor gently.
"My father sent me to the Ursuline Sisters in Paris," said Miss Irma
calmly.
The Doctor was secretly astonished and much disappointed, but his face
expressed nothing beyond his habitual good nature. He replied, "Then
your father has had you brought up a Catholic, Miss Maitland?"
"Indeed, no," answered Miss Irma, "only he had often occasion to be away
on his affairs, and to keep me out of mischief he left me with the
Ursulines and my aunt the Abbess. At my father's death I might have
stayed on with the good sisters, but I left because I was not allowed to
see my brother."
"Then am I right in thinking that--that--in fact--you are a
Presbyterian?" said the Doctor, playing with the inlaid snuffbox which
he carried in his hand. The amount of time he occupied in tapping the
lid and the invisibility of the pinches he had ever been seen to take
were alike marvels in the district.
"I have no religious prejudices," said Miss Irma to the Doctor, in a
calm, well-bred manner which must have secretly amused that
distinguished theologian, fresh from editing the works of Manton.
"I did not speak of prejudices, dear young lady" (he spoke gently, yet
with the thrill in his voice which showed how deeply he was moved), "but
of belief, of religion, of principles of thought and action."
Miss Irma opened her eyes very wide. The sound of the Doctor's words
came to her ears like the accents of an unknown tongue.
"The sisters were very good people," she said at last; "they give
themselves a great deal of trouble----"
"What kind of trouble?" said the Doctor.
"Kneeling and scrubbing floors for one thing," said Miss Irma; "getting
up at all hours, doing good works, praying, and burning candles to the
Virgin."
"I should advise you," said the Doctor, with his most gentle accent, "to
say as little as possible about that part of your experience here in
Eden Valley."
Miss Irma looked exceedingly surprised.
"I thought I told you they were exceedingly good people. They were very
kind to me, though they looked on me as a lost heretic. I am sure they
said prayers for me many times a day!"
The Doctor looked more hopeful. He was thinking that after all he might
make something of his strange parishioner, when the young lady recalled
him by a repetition of her former declaration, "As I said, I have no
religious prejudices!"
"No," said the Doctor a little sharply--for him, "but still each one of
us ought to be fully persuaded in his own mind."
"And that means," Miss Irma answered, quick as a flash, "that most of us
are fully persuaded according to our father and mother's mind, and the
way they have brought us up. But then, you see, I never _was_ brought
up. I know very well that my family were Presbyterians. Once I read
about their sufferings in two great volumes by a Mr. Wodrow, or some
such name. But then my grandfather lost most of his estates fighting for
the King----"
"For the Popish Pretender," said the Doctor, who could speak no smooth
things when it was a matter of the Revolution Settlement and the
government of King George.
"For the man he believed to be king, while others stayed snugly at
home," persisted Miss Irma. "Then my mother was a Catholic, and my
father too busy to care----"
"My poor young maid," said the Doctor, "it is wonderful to see you as
you are!"
And secretly the excellent man was planning out a campaign to lead this
lamb into the fold of that Kirk of Scotland, for the purity of whose
doctrine and intact spiritual independence her forefathers had shed
their blood.
"At any rate," said he, rising and bending again over the girl's hand
with old-fashioned politeness, "you will remember that your family pew
is in the front of our laft--I mean in the gallery of the parish kirk
of Eden Valley."
And the Doctor took his leave without ever remembering that he had
failed in the principal part of his mission, having quite forgotten to
find out by what means these two young things came to find themselves
alone in the Great House of Marnhoul.
CHAPTER VIII
KATE OF THE SHORE
It was, I think, ten days after Agnes Anne had left us for the old house
of the Maitlands when she came to me at the school-house. My father had
Fred Esquillant in with him, and the two were busy with Sophocles. I was
sitting dreaming with a book of old plays in my hand when Agnes Anne
came in.
"Duncan," she said, "I am feared to bide this night at Marnhoul. And I
think so is Miss Irma. Now I would rather not tell grandmother--so you
must come!"
"Feared?" said I; "surely you never mean ghosts--and such nonsense,
Agnes Anne--and you the daughter of a school-master!"
"It's the solid ghosts I am feared of," said Agnes Anne; "haste you, and
ask leave of father. He is so busy, he will never notice. He has Freddy
in with him, I hear."
So Agnes Anne and I went in together. We could see the man's head and
the boy's bent close together, and turned from us so that the westering
light could fall upon their books. Fred Esquillant was to be a great
scholar and to do my father infinite credit when he went to the
university. For me I was only a reader of English, a scribbler of verses
in that language, a paltry essayist, with no sense of the mathematics
and no more than an average classic. Therefore in the school I was a
mere hewer of wood and drawer of water to my father.
"Duncan is coming with me to bide the night at Marnhoul," said Agnes
Anne, "and he is going to take 'King George' with him to--scare the
foxes!"
"From the hen-coops?" said my father, looking carelessly up. "Let him
take care not to shoot himself then. He has no nicety of handling!"
I am sure that really he meant in the classics, for his thoughts were
running that way and I could see that he was itching to be at it again
with Freddy.
"Tell your mother," he said, adjusting his spectacles on his nose, "and
please shut the door after you!"
Having thus obtained leave from the power-that-was, the matter was
broken to my mother. She only asked if we had told John, and being
assured of that, felt that her entire responsibility was cleared, and so
subsided into the fifth volume of Sir Charles Grandison, where thrilling
things were going on in the cedar parlour. It was my mother's favourite
book, but was carefully laid aside when my grandmother came--nay, even
concealed as conscientiously as I under my coat conveyed away the
bell-mouthed, silver-mounted blunderbuss which hung over the hat-rack in
the lobby. Buckshot, wads, and a powderhorn I also secreted about my
person.
On our way I catechized Agnes Anne tightly as to the nature of the
danger which had put her so suddenly in fear. But she eluded me. Indeed,
I am not sure she knew herself. All I could gather was that a letter
which had reached Miss Irma that morning, had given warning of trouble
of some particular deadly sort impending upon the dwellers in the house
of Marnhoul. When Agnes Anne opened the door of the hall to let the
sunshine and air into the gloomy recesses where the shadows still lurked
in spite of the light from the high windows, she had found a folded
letter nailed to the door of Marnhoul. The blade of a foreign-looking
knife had been thrust through it deep into the wood, and the stag's-horn
handle turned down in the shape of a reversed capital V--the spring
holding the paper firm. It was addressed to Miss Irma Maitland, and
evidently had reference to something disastrous, for all day Miss Irma
had gone about with a pale face, and a pitiful wringing action of her
fingers. No words, however, had escaped her except only "What shall I
do? Oh, what shall I do? My Louis--my poor little Louis!"
The danger, then, whatever it might be, was one which particularly
touched the boy baronet. I could not help hoping that it might not be
any plot of the lawyers in Dumfries to get him away. For if I were
obliged to fire off "King George," and perhaps kill somebody, I
preferred that it should not be against those who had the law on their
side. For in that case my father might lose his places, both as chief
teacher and as postmaster.
I got Agnes Anne to look after "King George," my blunderbuss, while I
went round to the village to see if anything was stirring about the
dwelling of Constable Jacky. She would only permit me to do this on
condition that I proved the gun unloaded, and permitted her to lock it
carefully in one cupboard, while the powder and shot reposed each on a
separate shelf outside in the kitchen, lest being left to themselves the
elements of destruction might run together and blow up the house.
I scudded through the village, passing from one end of the long street
to the other. Constable Jacky in his shirt sleeves, was peaceably
peeling potatoes on his doorstep, while with a pipe in his mouth Boyd
Connoway was looking on and telling him how. The village of Eden Valley
was never quieter. Several young men of the highest consideration were
waiting within call of the millinery establishment of the elder Miss
Huntingdon, on the chance of being able to lend her "young ladies" stray
volumes of Rollin's _Ancient History_, Defoe's _Religious Courtship_, or
such other volumes as were likely to fan the flame of love's young dream
in their hearts. I saw Miss Huntingdon herself taking stock of them
through the window, and as it were, separating the sheep from the goats.
For she was a particular woman, Miss Huntingdon, and never allowed the
lightest attentions to "her young ladies" without keeping the parents of
her charges fully posted on the subject.
All, therefore, was peace in the village of Eden Valley. Yet I nearly
chanced upon war. My grandmother called aloud to some one as I passed
along the street. For a moment I thought she had caught me, in spite of
the cap which I had pulled down over my eyes and the coat collar I had
pulled up above my ears.
If she got me, I made sure that she would instantly come to the great
house of Marnhoul with all the King's horses and all the King's men--and
so, as it were, spoil the night from which I expected so much.
But it was the slouching figure of Boyd Connoway which had attracted her
attention. As I sped on I heard her asking details as to the amount of
work he had done that day, how he expected to keep his wife and family
through the winter, whether he had split enough kindling wood and
brought in the morning's supply of water--also (most unkindly of all)
who had paid for the tobacco he was smoking.
To these inquiries, all put within the space of half-a-minute, I could
not catch Connoway's replies. Nor did I wait to hear. It was enough for
me to find myself once more safe between the hedges and going as hard as
my feet could carry me in the direction of the gate of Marnhoul.
No sooner was I in the kitchen with the stone floor and the freshly
scoured tin and pewter vessels glinting down from the dresser, than I
heard the voice of Miss Irma asking to be informed if I had come. To
Agnes Anne she called me "your big brother," and I hardly ever remember
being so proud of anything as of that adjective.
Then after my sister had answered, Miss Irma came down the stairs with
her quick light step, not like any I had ever heard. With a trip and a
rustle she came bursting in upon us, so that all suddenly the quaint old
kitchen, with its shining utensils catching the red sunshine through the
low western window and the swaying ivy leaves dappling the floor of
bluish-grey, was glorified by her presence.
She was younger in years than myself, but something of race, of
refinement, of experience, some flavour of an adventurous past and of
strange things seen and known, made her appear half-a-dozen years the
senior of a country boy like me.
"Has he come?" she asked, before ever she came into the kitchen; "is he
afraid?"
"Only of being in a house alone with two girls," said Agnes Anne, "but I
am most afraid of father's blunderbuss which he has brought with him."
"Nonsense," said Miss Irma, determination marked in every line of her
face. "We have a well-armed man on the premises. It is a house fit to
stand a siege. Why, I turned away three score of them with a darning
needle."
"Not but what it is far more serious this time!" she said, a little
sadly. By this time I was reassembling the scattered pieces of "King
George's" armament, while Agnes Anne, in terror of her life, was
searching on the floor and along the passages for things she had not
lost.
As soon as I had got over my first awe of Miss Irma, I asked her
point-blank what was the danger, so that I might know what dispositions
to take.
I had seen the phrase in an old book, thin and tall, which my father
possessed, called _Monro's Expedition_. But Irma bade me help to make
the ground floor of the mansion as strong as possible, and then come
up-stairs to the parlour, where she would tell me "all that it was
necessary for me to know."
I wished she had said "everything"--for, though not curious by nature, I
should have been happy to be confided in by Miss Irma. To my delight, on
going round I found that all the lower windows had been fitted with iron
shutters, and these, though rusty, were in perfectly good condition. In
this task of examination Miss Irma assisted me, and though I would not
let her put a finger to the sharp-edged flaky iron, it was a pleasure to
feel the touch of her skirt, while once she laid a hand on my arm to
guide me to a little dark closet the window of which was protected by a
hingeless plate of iron, held in position by a horizontal bar fitting
into the stonework on either side.
There was not so much to be done above stairs, where the shutters were
of fine solid oak and easily fitted. But I sought out an oriel window of
a tower which commanded the pillared doorway. For I did not forget what
I had seen when the Great House of Marnhoul was besieged by the rabble
of Eden Valley. It was there that the danger was if the house should be
attempted.
But I so arranged it, that whoever attacked the house, I should at least
get one fair chance at them with "King George," our very wide-scattering
blunderbuss.
In the little room in which this window was, we gathered. It made a kind
of watch-tower, for from it one could see both ways--down the avenue to
the main road, and across the policies towards the path that led up from
the Killantringan shore.
I felt that it was high time for me to know against what I was to fight.
Not that I was any way scared. I do not think I thought about that at
all, so pleased was I at being where I was, and specially anxious that
no one should come to help, so as to share with me any of the credit
that was my due from Miss Irma.
Agnes Anne, indeed, was afraid of what she was going to hear. For as yet
she had been told nothing definite. But then she was tenfold more afraid
of "King George"--mostly, I believe, because it had been made a kind of
fetish in our house, and the terrible things that would happen if we
meddled with it continually represented to us by our mother. Finally, we
arranged that "King George" should be set in the angle of the oriel
window, the muzzle pointing to the sky, and that in the pauses of the
tale, I should keep a look-out from the watch-tower.
"It is my brother Louis--Sir Louis Maitland--whom they are seeking!"
Miss Irma made this statement as if she had long faced it, and now found
nothing strange about the matter. But I think both Agnes Anne and I were
greatly astonished, though for different reasons. For my sister had
never imagined that there was any danger worse than the presence of
"King George" in the window corner, and as for me, the hope of helping
to protect Miss Irma herself from unknown peril was enough. I asked for
no better a chance than that.
"We have a cousin," she continued, "Lalor Maitland is his name, who was
in the rebellion, and was outlawed just like my father. He took up the
trade of spying on the poor folk abroad and all who had dealings with
them. He was made governor of the strong castle of Dinant on the Meuse,
deep in the Low Countries. With him my father, who wrongly trusted him
as he trusted everybody, left little Louis. I was with my aunt, the
Abbess of the Ursulines, at the time, or the thing had not befallen. For
from the first I hated Lalor Maitland, knowing that though he appeared
to be kind to us, it was only a pretence.
"He entertained us hospitably enough in a suite of rooms very high up in
the Castle of Dinant above the Meuse river, and came to see us every
day. He was waiting till he should make his peace with the English. Then
he would do away with my brother and----"
She paused, and a kind of shuddering whiteness came across the girl's
face. It was like the flashing of lightning from the east to the west
that my grandmother reads about in her Bible--a sort of shining of
hatred and determination like a footstep set on wet sand. "But no," she
added, "he would not have married me, even if he had kept me shut up for
ever in his Castle of Dinant on the Meuse!"
Then all at once I began very mightily to hate this Lalor Maitland,
Governor of the Castle of Dinant. I resolved to charge "King George" to
the very muzzle, wait till he was within half-a-dozen paces, and--let
him have it. For I made no doubt that it was he who was coming in
person to carry off Miss Irma and Sir Louis back again to his dungeons.
For though Irma had not called them that, I felt sure that she had been
shamefully used. And though I did not proclaim the fact, I knew the name
and address of a willing deliverer. I grew so anxious about the matter
that Agnes Anne three times bade me put down "King George" or I should
be sure to shoot some of them, or, most likely of all, little Louis in
his cot-bed up-stairs.
"However, at last we escaped" (Miss Irma went on), "and I will tell you
how--what I have not told to any here--not even to your good grandmother
or the clergyman. It was through our nurse, a Kirkbean woman and her
name Kate Maxwell, called Mickle Kate o' the Shore. Her father and all
her folk were smugglers, as, I understand, are the most of the farmers
along the Solway side. Some of these she could doubtless have married,
but Kate herself had always looked higher. The son of a farmer over the
hill, from a place called the Boreland of Colvend, had wintered sheep on
her father's lands. Many a sore cold morning (so she said) had they gone
out together to clear the snow from the feeding troughs. I suppose that
was how it began, but in addition the lad had ambition. He learned well
and readily, and after a while he went into a lawyer's office in
Dumfries, while Kate o' the Shore went abroad with the family of a Leith
merchant, to serve at Rotterdam. She wanted to save money for the house
she was going to set up with the lawyer's clerk. So, rather than come
back at the year's end, she took the place which the Governor of Dinant
Castle offered her, and he was no other than our cousin Lalor.
"In a little while Kate of the Shore had grown to hate our cousin. Why,
I cannot tell, for he always bowed to her as to a lady, and indeed
showed her far more kindness than ever he used to us. When we wanted a
little play on the terrace or a sweetcake from the town, we tried at
first to get Kate to ask for us. But afterwards she would not. And she
grew determined to leave the Castle of Dinant as soon as might be,
making her escape and taking us with her. Her Boreland lad, Tam Hislop,
had told her all about the estates and the great house standing empty.
So nothing would do but that Kate o' the Shore would come to this house
with us, where we would take possession, and hold it against all comers.
"'It is very difficult,' said Kate's friend, the Dumfries clerk, 'to put
any one out of his own house.' Indeed he did not think that even the
very Court of Session could do it."
"So during the governor's absence we brought little Louis from Dinant to
Antwerp, where we hid him with some friends of Kate's who are Free
Traders, and ran cargoes to the Isle of Man and the Solway shore. Kind
they were, stout bold men and appeared to hold their lives cheap
enough--also, for that matter, the lives of those who withstood them.
"Many of them were Kirkbean men, near kinsfolk of Kate o' the Shore, and
others from Colvend--Hislops, Hendersons and McKerrows, long rooted in
the place. But when we were in mid-passage, we were chased and almost
taken by a schooner that fired cannon and bade us heave to, but the
Kirkbean men, who had Kate o' the Shore with them, bade our boat carry
on, and engaged the pursuer. We could see the flash of their guns a long
distance, and cries came to us mixed with the thunderclap of the
schooner's guns. The Colvend men would have turned back to help, but
they had received strict orders to put us on shore, whatever might
happen, the which they did at Killantringan.
"After that" (Miss Irma still went on) "I had so much ado to look after
my brother, being fearful to let him out of my hands lest he should be
taken from me, that I only heard the names of a place or two spoken
among them--particularly the Brandy Knowe, a dark hole in a narrow
ravine, under the roots of a great tree, with a burn across which we had
to be carried. I remember the rushing sound of the water in the
blackness of the night, and Louis's voice calling out, as the men
trampled the pebbles, 'Are you there, sister Irma?'
"But long before it was day they had finished stowing their cargo. We
were again on the march and the men took good care of us, leaving us
here according to their orders with plenty of provisions for a
week--also money, all good unclipped silver pieces and English gold.
They bade us not to leave the house on any account, and in case of any
sudden danger to light the fire on the tower head!
"'For the present our duty is done,' said one of them, a kind of chief
or leader who had carried me before him on his own horse, 'but there may
be more and worse yet to do, wherein we of the Free Trade may help you
more than all the power of King George--to whom, however, we are very
good friends, in all that does not concern our business of the private
Over-Seas Traffic'--for so they named their trade of smuggling."
"I would like much to see this beacon," I said; "perhaps we may have to
light it. At any rate it is well to be sure that we have all the
ingredients of the pudding at hand in case of need."
CHAPTER IX
THE EVE OF ST. JOHN
We went up the narrow stair--that is, Miss Irma and I--because, since I
carried my father's blunderbuss, Agnes Anne would not come, but stopped
half-way, where the little Louis lay asleep in his cot-bed. On the top
of the tower, and swinging on a kind of iron tripod bolted into the
battlements, we found an iron basket, like that in which sea-coal is
burned, but wider in the mesh. Then, in the "winnock cupboard" at the
turn of the stair-head, were all the necessaries for a noble blaze--dry
wood properly cut, tow, tar, and a firkin of spirit, with some rancid
butter in a brown jar. There was even a little kindling box of foreign
make, all complete with flint, steel and tinder lying on a shelf,
enclosed in a small bag of felt.
Whoever had placed these things there was a person of no small
experience, and left nothing to chance. It was obvious that such a
beacon lit on the tower of the ancient house of Marnhoul would be seen
far and near over the country.
Who should come to our rescue, supposing us to be beset, was not so
clear. I did not believe that we could depend on the people of the
village. They would, if I knew them, cuddle the closer between their
blankets, while as for Constable Jacky, by that time of night he would
certainly be in no condition to know his right hand from his left.
"And the message fixed to the front door with the knife--of which my
sister told me," I suggested to Miss Irma, "what did it threaten?"
For in spite of her obvious reluctance to tell me even necessary
things, I was resolved to make her speak out. She hesitated, but finally
yielded, when I pointed out that we must decide whether it came from a
friendly or an unfriendly hand.
She handed it to me out of the pocket of her dress, the two of us
standing all the while on the top of the tower, the rusty basket
wheezing in the wind, and her blown hair whipping my cheek in the sharp
breeze from the north.
I may say that just at that moment I was pretty content with myself. I
do not deny that I had fancied this maid and that before, or that some
few things that might almost be called tender had passed between me and
Gerty Greensleeves, chiefly cuffing and pinching of the amicable
Scottish sort. Only I knew for certain that now I was finally and
irrevocably in love--but it was with a star. Or rather, it might just as
well have been, for any hope I had with Miss Irma Maitland, with her
ancient family and her eyes fairly snapping with pride. What could she
ever have to say to the rather stupid son of a village school-master?
But I took the paper, and for an instant Irma's eyes rested on mine with
something different in them from anything I had ever seen there before.
The contemptuous chill was gone. There was even a kind of soft appeal,
which, however, she retracted and even seemed to excuse the next moment.
"Understand," she said, "it is not for myself that I care. It is
for--for my brother, Sir Louis."
"But, Miss Irma, do not forget that I----" The words came bravely, but
halted before the enormity of what I was going to say. So I had perforce
to alter my formation in face of my dear enemy, and only continued
lamely enough, "I had better see what the letter says."
"Yes," she answered shortly, "I suppose that is necessary."
The letter was written on a sheet of common paper, ruled vertically in
red at either side as for a bill of lading. It had simply been folded
once, not sealed in the ordinary way, but thrust through sharply with
the knife which had pinned it to the wood, traversing both folds. The
knife, which I saw afterwards down-stairs, was a small one, with a
broadish blade shaped and pointed like a willow leaf. I had it a good
while in my hand, and I can swear that it had been lately used in
cutting the commonest kind of sailor tobacco.
The message read in these words exactly, which I copied carefully on my
killivine-tablets--
"The first danger is for this night, being the eve of Saint John.
Admit no one excepting those who bring with them friends you can
trust. Fear not to use the signal agreed upon. Help will be near."
Now this seemed to me to be very straightforward. None but a friend to
the children would speak of the beacon so familiarly, yet so
discreetly--"the signal agreed upon." Nor would an enemy advise caution
as to any being admitted to the house.
But Miss Irma had not passed through so many troubles without acquiring
a certain lack of confidence in the fairest pretences. She shook her
head when I ventured to tell her what I thought. She was willing to take
my help, but not my judgment.
The words, "Admit no one, _excepting those who bring with them friends
you can trust_," did not ring true in her ear. And the phrase, "the
signal agreed upon," might possibly show that while the writer made
sure of there being a signal of some kind, he was ignorant of its
nature.
In face of all this there seemed nothing for it but to wait--doors shut,
windows barred, "King George" ready charged, and the stuff for the
beacon knowingly arranged.
And this last I immediately proceeded to set in order. I had had
considerable experience. For during the late French wars we of Eden
Valley, though the most peaceful people in the world, had often been
turned upside down by reports of famous victories. After each of these
every one had to illuminate, if it were only with a tallow dip, on the
penalty of having his windows broken by the mob of loyal, but
stay-at-home patriots. At the same time, all the boys of Eden Valley had
full permission to carry off old barrels and other combustibles from the
houses of the zealous, or even to commandeer them without permission
from the barns and fences of suspected "black-nebs" to raise nearer
heaven the flare of our victorious bonfires.
With all the ingredients laid ready to my hand, it was exceedingly
simple for me to put together such a brazier as could be seen over half
the county. Not the least useful of my improvements was the lengthening
of the chain, so that the whole fire-basket could be hoisted to the top
of the tripod, and so stand clear of the battlements of the tower,
showing over the tree-tops to the very cliffs of Killantringan, and
doubtless far out to sea.
Last of all, before descending, I covered everything over with a thick
mat of tarred cloth, which would keep the fuel dry as tinder even in
case of rain, or the dense dews that pearled down out of the clear
heavens on these short nights of a northern June.
It is a strange thing, watching together, and in the case of young
people it is apt to make curious things hop up in the heart all
unexpectedly. It was so, at least, with myself. As to Miss Irma I cannot
say, and, of course, Agnes Anne does not count, for she sat back in the
shelter of a great cupboard, well out of range of "King George," and
went on with her knitting till she fell asleep.
However, Miss Irma and I sat together in the jutting window, where, as
the night darkened and the curtains of the clouds drew down to meet the
sombre tree-tops, a kind of black despair came over me. Would "King
George" really do any good? Would I prove myself stout and brave when
the moment came? Would the beacon we had prepared really burn, and,
supposing it did, would any one see it, drowned in woods as we were, and
far from all folk, except the peaceable villagers of Eden Valley?
But I had the grace to keep such thoughts to myself, and if they visited
Miss Irma, she did the like. The crying of the owls made the place of a
strange eeriness, especially sometimes when a bat or other night
creature would come and cling a moment under the leaden pent of the
window.
Such things as these, together with the strain of the waiting on the
unknown, drew us insensibly together--I do not mean Agnes Anne--but just
the two of us who were shut off apart in the window-seat. No, whatever
her faults and shortcomings (too many of them recorded in this book),
Agnes Anne acted the part of a good sister to me that night, and her
peaceful breathing seemed to wall us off from the world.
"Duncan?" queried Miss Irma, repeating my name softly as to herself;
"you are called Duncan, are you not?"
I nodded. "And you?" I asked, though of course I knew well enough.
"Irma Sobieski," she answered. And then, perhaps because everything
inside and out was so still and lonely, she shivered a little, and,
without any reason at all, we moved nearer to each other on the
window-seat--ever so little, but still nearer.
"You may call me Irma, if you like!" she said, very low, after a long
pause.
Just then something brushed the window, going by with a soft _woof_ of
feathers.
"An owl! A big white one--I saw him!" I said. For indeed the bird had
seemed as large as a goose, and appeared alarming enough to people so
strung as we were, with ears and eyes grown almost intolerably acute in
the effort of watching.
"Are you not frightened?" she demanded.
"No, Irma--no, Miss Irma!" I faltered.
"Well, I am," she whispered; "I was not before when the mob came,
because I had to do everything. But now--I am glad that you are here"
(she paused the space of a breath), "you and your sister."
I was glad, too, though not particularly about Agnes Anne.
"How old are you, Duncan?" she asked next.
I gave my age with the usual one year's majoration. It was not a lie,
for my birthday had been the day before. Still, it made Irma thoughtful.
"I did not think you were so much older than your sister," she said
musingly; "why, you are older than I am!"
"Of course I am," I answered, gallantly facing the danger, and
determined to brave it out.
On the spot I resolved to have a private interview with Agnes Anne as
soon as might be, and, after reminding her of my birthday just past,
tell her that in future I was to be referred to as "going on for
twenty"--and that there was no real need to insert the words "going on
for."
Irma Sobieski considered the subject a while longer, and I could see her
eyes turned towards me as if studying me deeply. I wondered what she was
thinking about with a brow so knotted, and I knew instinctively that it
must be something of consequence, because it made her forget the letter
nailed to the door, and the warning which might veil a threat. She fixed
me so long that her eyes seemed to glow out of the pale face which made
an oval patch against the darkness of the trees. Irma's face was only
starlit, but her eyes shone by their own light.
"Yes, I will trust you," she said at last. "I saw you the day when the
mob came. You were ashamed, and would have helped me if you could. Even
then I liked your face. I did not forget you, and when Agnes Anne spoke
of her brother who was afraid of nothing, I was happy that you should
come. I wanted you to come."
The words made my heart leap, but the next moment I knew that I was a
fool, and might have known better. This was no Gerty Gower, to put her
hand on your arm unasked, and let her face say what her lips had not the
words to utter.
"I want a friend," she said; "I need a friend--a big brother--nothing
else, remember. If you think I want to be made love to, you are
mistaken. And, if you do, there will be an end. You cannot help me that
way. I have no use for what people call love. But I have a mission, and
that mission is my brother, Sir Louis. If you will consent to help me, I
shall love you as I love him, and you--can care about me--as you care
about Agnes Anne!"
Now I did not see what was the use of bringing Agnes Anne into the
business. At home she and I were quarrelling about half our time. But
since it was to be that or nothing, of course I was not such a fool as
to choose the nothing.
All the same, after the promising beginning, I was enormously
disappointed, and if only it had been lighter, doubtless my chagrin
would have showed on my face. It seemed to me (not knowing) the
death-blow to all my hopes. I did not then understand that in all the
unending and necessarily eternal game of chess, which men and women play
one against the other, there is no better opening than this.
But I was still crassly ignorant, intensely disappointed. I even swore
that I would not have given a brass farthing to be "cared about" by Irma
as I myself did about Agnes Anne.
Dimly, however, I did feel, even then, that there was a fallacy
somewhere. And that, however much human beings with youthful hearts and
answering eyes may pretend they are brother and sister, there is
something deep within them that moves the Previous Question--as we are
used to say in the Eden Valley Debating Parliament, which Mr. Oglethorpe
and my father have organized on the model of that in the _Gentleman's
Magazine_.
But Irma, at least, had no such fear. She had, she believed, solved for
ever a difficult and troublesome question, and, on easy terms, provided
herself with a new relative, useful, safe and insured against danger by
fire. Perhaps the underwriters of the city would not have taken the
latter risk, but at that moment it seemed a slight one to Irma Sobieski.
At any rate, to seal the new alliance, in all sisterly freedom she gave
me her hand, and did not appear to notice how long I kept it in the
darkness. This was certainly a considerable set-off against the feeling
of loneliness, and, if not quite content, I was at least more so. I
wondered, among other things, if Irma's heart kept knocking in a choking
kind of way against the bottom of her throat.
At least mine did, and I had never, to my knowledge, felt just so about
Agnes Anne. Indeed, I don't think I had ever held Agnes Anne's hand so
long in my life, except to pick a thorn out of it with a needle, or to
point out how disgracefully grubby it was.
CHAPTER X
THE CROWBAR IN THE WOOD
We sat so long that I grew hungry. And then forethought was rewarded.
For as I well knew, Agnes Anne had much ado to keep the house supplied
(and the larder too often bare with all her trying!), I had done some
trifle of providing on my own account. I had a flask of milk in my
pouch--the big one in the skirt of the coat that I always wore when
taking a walk in the General's plantations. Cakes, too, and well-risen
scones cut and with butter between them, most refreshing. I gave first
of all to Irma, and at the sound of the eating and drinking Agnes Anne
awakened and came forward. So I handed her some, but with my foot
cautioned her not to take too much, because it was certain that she
would by no means do her share of the fighting.
Both were my sisters. We had agreed upon that. But then some roses smell
sweeter than others, though all are called by the same name.
We had just finished partaking of the food (and great good it did us)
when Agnes Anne heard a sound that sent her suddenly back to her corner
with a face as white as a linen clout. She was always quicker of hearing
than I, but certain it is that after a while I did hear something like
the trampling of horses, and especially, repeated more than once, the
sharp jingle which the head of a caparisoned horse makes when, wearied
of waiting, it casts it up suddenly.
_They were coming._
We said the words, looking at each other, and I suppose each one of us
felt the same--that we were a lot of poor weak children, in our folly
fighting against men. At least this is how I took it, and a sick
disdain of self for being no stronger rose in my throat. A moment and it
had passed. For I took "King George" in hand, and bidding Irma see that
little Louis was sleeping, I ran up the stairs to the open tower-top.
Here I had thought to be alone, but there before me, crouched behind the
ramparts and looking out upon a dim glade which led down towards the
landing-place at Killantringan, was Agnes Anne. In answer to my question
as to what she was doing there, she answered at first that she could see
in the dark better than I, and when I denied this she said that surely I
did not think she was going to be left down there alone, nearest to the
assailants if they should force a passage!
One should never encourage one's real sister in the belief that she can
ever by any chance do right. So I said at once that whether she was
behind the door or sitting on the weathercock at Marnhoul Tower would
make no difference if the people were enemies and once got in.
"Hush!" she said. "What is that I hear now?"
And from away down the glade came slow and steady blows like those which
a man might make as he lifts his axe and smites into the butt. There was
a sort of reverberation, too, as if the tree were hollow. But that might
only be the effect of the night, the stillness, and the heavy covert of
great woods which lay like a big green blanket all about us, and tossed
every sound back to us like a wall at ball-play.
"Oh, if we could only see what they were doing--who they are?" I
groaned. "I could go out quite safely by the door in the tower, but then
who would fire off 'King George'?"
"Toc! Toc!" came the sounds. And then a pause as if the woodsman had
straightened himself up and was wiping his brow. The timing of the
strokes was very slow. Probably, therefore, the labour itself was
fatiguing. Sometimes, too, the axe fell with a different swing, as if
other hands grasped it, but always with the same dull thudding and
irritating slowness.
Then Agnes Anne made an astonishing proposition.
"See here, Duncan," she whispered, "let _me_ out by the little postern
door at the foot of the tower. Miss Irma can watch behind it to let me
in if I come running back, and you stay on the top ready with 'King
George.' I will find out for you everything you want to know." And I got
ready to say, brother-like, "Agnes Anne, you are a fool--your legs would
give way under you in the first hundred yards."
But somehow she saw (or felt) the speech that was coming, and cut me
short.
"No, I wouldn't either," she said hurriedly and quite boldly. "You think
that because I hate that great thing there filled with powder and slugs
(which even you can't tell when it will go off, or what harm it will do
when it does) that I am a coward. I am no more frightened than you are
yourself--perhaps less. Who was the best tracker when we played at
Indians and colonists, I should like to know? Who could go most quietly
through the wood? Or run the quickest? Just me, Agnes Anne MacAlpine!"
Well, I had to admit it. These things were true. But then they had
little to do with courage. This was serious. It was taking one's life in
one's hand.
"And pray what are we doing here and now?" snapped Agnes Anne. "If they
are strong enough to break in one of the doors, or get through one of
the windows, what can we do? Till we know what is coming against us, we
are only going from one blunder to another!"
Now this was most astonishing of our Agnes Anne. So I told her that I
had known that Irma was plucky, but not her. And she only said, very
shortly, "Better come and see!"
So we went down and told Irma. At first she was all against opening any
door, even for a moment, on any account. The strength of these defences
was our only protection. She would rather do anything than endanger
that. But we made her listen to the slow thud of the axe out in the
wood, and even as we looked the figure of a man passed across the glade,
black against the greyish-green of the grass, on which a thick rise of
dew was catching the starlight.
This figure wrapped in a sea-cloak, with head bent forward, passing
across the pale glimmer of the glade, sufficed to alter the mind of
Irma. She agreed in a moment, and locking the door of little Louis's
room, she declared herself willing to keep watch behind the little
postern door of the tower, ready to let Agnes Anne in again, on the
understanding that I should be prepared from the open window above to
deal with any pursuer.
I admit that in this I was persuaded against my judgment. For I felt
certain that though Agnes Anne could move with perfect stillness through
woods, and was a fleet runner, her nerve would certainly fail her when
it came to a real danger. And so great was the sympathy of my
imagination that I seemed already to feel the pursuer gaining at every
stride, the muscles of my limbs failing beneath me and refusing to carry
me farther, just as they do in a dream.
But Agnes Anne was serious and determined, and in the end had to have
her way. I can see the reason now. She knew exactly what she meant to
do, which neither Irma nor I did--though of course both of us far
braver.
We got the door open quite silently--for it was the one Irma had used
in her few and brief outgates. Then, shrouded in her school cloak of
grey, and clad, I mean, in but little else, Agnes flitted out as silent
as a shadow along a wall.
But oh, the agony I suffered to think what my father, and still more my
grandmother, would say to me because I had let my sister expose herself
on such an errand. Twenty times I was on the point of sallying forth
after her. Twenty times the sight of the pale face of Irma waiting there
stopped me, and the thought that I was the only protector of the two
poor things in that great house. Also after all Agnes Anne had gone of
her own accord.
All the same I shivered as I kneeled by the window above with the wide
muzzle of "King George" pointing down the path which led from the glade.
Every moment I expected to hear the air rent with a hideous scream, and
"King George" wobbled in my hands as I thought of Agnes Anne lying slain
in the glow-worm shining of that abominable glade, with that across her
white neck for which my conscience and my grandmother would reproach me
as long as I (and she) lived. One thing comforted me during that weary
waiting. The hollow thudding as of axe on wood never ceased for a
moment. So from that I gathered (and was blithe to believe) that the
alarm had not been given, and that wherever Agnes Anne was, she herself
was still undiscovered.
My eyes were so glued to that misty glade that presently I got a great
surprise. "There she is!" cried Irma, looking round the door, and I saw
a figure flit out of the dusk of the copse-covert within two yards of
the postern door. The next moment, without advertisement or the least
fuss, Agnes Anne was within. I heard the sliding of bolts, the hum of
talk, and then the patter of returning feet on the stair.
CHAPTER XI
AGNES ANNE'S EXPERIENCES AS A SPY
"Well, at first I did not think much about anything" (said Agnes Anne),
"except keeping quiet and doing what Duncan did not believe I could do.
But I knew the wood. It was not so dark as one would think, and once out
of the echo of the house walls I could hear far better. I leaned against
a larch, holding on to the trunk and counting the sticky rosettes on its
trailers to keep me from thinking while I listened. Twice I thought I
had made out exactly from which direction the sound came, and twice I
found I was mistaken. But the third time I followed the ditch under the
sunk fence till I came to the mound which is shaped like a green hat at
the end next the house. The thudding came from there--I was sure of it.
When I could hear men talking, I was (and I am not saying it to put
Duncan in the wrong) more glad than afraid.
"The bottom of the ditch was full of all sorts of underbrush--hazel and
birch roots mostly--growing pretty close as I found when once I got
there, but rustling horribly while I was getting settled. However, there
was nothing for it, if I wanted to find out anything, but to go on. So
on I went. I was close to the mound now, and could hear the voices.
"'Quiet there a moment!' said some one, 'I'll swear I heard a noise in
the ditch!'
"And as I crouched something like a blade of a sword or maybe a pike
came high above me stabbing this way and that. Twigs and leaves pattered
down, but I was safe behind the stump of a fallen tree. Presently the
steel thing I had seen glinting struck the dead and sodden wood of the
tree-trunk, and snapped with a sharp tang like a fiddle-string--a
hayfork it may have been, or one of the long thin swords such as are
hung up in the hall.
"But another and deeper voice--like that of a man somewhat out of
breath, said gruffly, 'Better get the job done! 'Tis only a fox or a
rabbit--what else would be out here at this hour?'
"And then, with the noise of spitting on the hands, the sound of the
heavy tool began again. It had a ring in it like steel on stone. I think
they had been chopping something with a pickaxe and had got through. For
now the clink was quite different, though that again might be because I
was nearer.
"'Have you found the passage? Surely it is long in showing?'
"That was the first voice again, the better educated one, I take it. He
spoke like a gentleman, like the General or even the Doctor himself,
though there was much rudeness in the voice of the other when he
answered him.
"'D'ye think I am breaking my back over this stone-door for fun?'
growled the man in panting gasps. 'If I imagined you were any hand at a
tool, you should have a chance at this one quick enough!'
"'Steady, Dick!' said the first, always in his pleasant tone, 'it can't
be far away at the farthest now!'
"'Hang it, it may not be there at all. Did you ever hear of a mouldy old
castle but had its tale about a secret passage? And did anybody ever see
one? Better make the woman speak, I tell you!'
"'Well,' argued the first suavely, 'it may come to that, of course. But
let us give this a good trial first. To it, Dick--to it!'
"'Aye, "To it, Dick--to it!" And your own arm up to the elbow in your
blessed pocket,' he grunted, and I could hear him set to work again with
an angry snarl. 'If this doesn't fetch it--well--there's always the
woman!'
"'Aye--but it _will_ do it this time,' said the man with the soft voice.
'I hear by the clink of the crow that you are nearly through. My uncle
used often to tell me about this. The big green mound is the ice-house
of Marnhoul. It was his father that made it, and the passage also to
connect with the cellar. See where it drains sideways into that ditch.
That is what makes the green stuff grow so rank about there!'
"Between the noise of the heavy crowbar and the dispute, I ventured to
edge a bit closer, so that at last I could make out the two men, and
beyond them something that looked like a figure of a woman lying under a
cloak. But all was under the dimness of the stars and the twinkling dew,
so that I could see nothing clearly.
"But what I had heard was enough, for in the middle of the worker's
gasping and cursing there came a sudden crash and a jingle.
"'She's through--I told you so. Uncle Edward was right!' cried the first
and taller man, while the other only stared at the sudden disappearance
of his tool, and stood looking blankly at his own empty hands.
"'What's to be done now?' said the tall man.
"'Lever it up with the nose of the pick!' growled the short thick man;
'here, you--hang on to that!'
"And then I knew that the sooner Duncan and 'King George' were down in
the cellar of Marnhoul House, the better it would be for our lives."
* * * * *
When Agnes Anne finished we sat a moment agape. But very evidently there
was no time to be lost. They would be among us before we knew it, if
once they got down into the passage. We tried to find out from Irma
where the cellar was, but she was sunk in terrible thoughts, and for a
long while she could say nothing but "Lalor Maitland--it is Lalor
Maitland, come to kill my poor Louis!"
And indeed it was difficult to get her aroused sufficiently to help us.
Left to herself I do not doubt that she would have gone up-stairs and
fled with the child in her arms in the hope of hiding him in the wood.
At last we got it out of her that the keys of the cellar were in the
great cupboard behind the door. She directed us to a double flight of
broad stairs. Irma had only looked into the cellar when she first came,
and had found it rifled, the barrels dry and gaping, full of dust,
dry-rot and the smell of decay.
But she too had heard her father tell of the passage to the ice-house,
and how he and his brothers had used it for their escapades when the
house was locked up and the keys taken to their father's room.
We went down--I leading with "King George" under my arm and the two
girls following. But on the stairway a sudden terror leaped upon Irma.
While we were all down in the cellar, might not Lalor and his companion
enter by the front door, or by some unguarded window. So she turned and
ran back to the little boy's room to defend him with an old pistol I had
found on the wall and loaded for her with powder and ball.
Then Agnes Anne and I made our way into the cellar. We had taken with
us the lantern, which we had hitherto kept covered, lest by the moving
of the light about the house we might be suspected of being on our
guard.
Hastily I made the tour of the great cellar. The back of the place was
full of the _debris_ of ancient barrels, some intact, some with gaping
sides, many held together with no more than a single hoop. But packed
together in one corner and occupying a place about one third of the
whole area of the floor was something very different. Tarpaulined,
fastened together by ropes, and guarded from damp by planks laid below
them, were some hundreds of kegs and packages--all, so far as I could
see, marked with curious signs, and in some cases the names of places.
One I remember, "Sallet Ooil--Apuglia," gave me a sense of such distance
and strangeness, that for a moment I seemed to be travelling in strange
countries and seeing curious sights, rather than going down to risk my
life in Miss Irma's quarrel with men I had never seen.
It was very evident that there could be but one place where the passage
Irma had spoken of (on her father's information) could debouch upon the
great cellar of Marnhoul. In the angle behind the mass of kegs was an
open space of some yards square, so clean that it looked as if it had
been recently swept.
Beyond this again and quite in the corner, there was a step or two
downwards, as if it were into the bowels of the earth. This was stopped
with a door of stone accurately arranged and fitted with uncommon skill.
And I could see at a glance that it was probably one of the same kind
that the men whom Agnes Anne had seen were engaged in bursting by stroke
of crow. I understood more than that. For there was all the winter in
Eden Valley scarce any other subject of talk than the Free Trade (which
is to say, plainly, smuggling), and concerning the various "ventures" or
boats and crews attached to some famous leader engaged in it.
There was, in fact, no particular moral wrong attaching to the business
in Eden Valley or along the Solway shore high and low--rather a sort of
piety, since the common folk remembered that the excise had first been
instituted by that perjured persecutor of the Church, Charles II. Even
the Doctor, though he denounced the practice from the pulpit in
befitting words, did so chiefly on the ground that the attractions of
Free Trade, its dangers even, carried so many promising young men forth
of the parish, and a goodly proportion of them to return no more.
But for all that, I never heard that he refused to partake of the anker
of Guernsey which his lady found by chance in the milk-house among the
creaming-pans, or by the tombstones of his predecessors in the
"Ministers' Corner" of the kirkyard.
I looked at the means of defence, and hidden among the packages at the
back I found two good muskets and one or two very worn ones--yet all
bearing the marks of recent attention. So, since the smuggled casks
formed a kind of breastwork right round the steps--up from the passage
that was blocked by the stone door--it came into my head that I could
there set up a kind of battery and run from one to the other of them,
firing--that is, if the worst came to the worst and the passage were
forced. So, having plenty of powder and shot and the wrappings of the
lace packages making excellent wads, I set about loading all the
muskets. I knew that Agnes Anne would be afraid of what I was doing,
having had a horror of firearms ever since, as a child, she had seen
Florrie, our old dun cow, shot dead by Boyd Connoway to be our "mart" of
the year, and salted down for the winter's food in the big beef barrel.
Agnes Anne would never be induced to eat a bit of Florrie, though indeed
she was very good and sweet, because forsooth she had been used to milk
her and give her handfuls of fresh grass. Since then she had never
forgiven Boyd Connoway, and had never been able to look upon a gun with
any complaisance.
Yet when I told her to stand back and keep away from the powder horn and
the lantern (for it is none of the easiest to charge strange pieces in a
dark cellar) she said that she would stand by "King George" while I was
at hand--yes, and fire him off, too, if need were. Only I must show her
how to pull the trigger, and also adjust the muzzle so as to bear on the
steps by which the villains would come up!
This I relate to show how (for the time being) Agnes Anne was worked
upon. For, as all have seen, she was naturally of a very timorsome and
quavering disposition. At any rate I did get the muskets, all five of
them, loaded, and set in position with their noses cocked over the
squared bulwarks of Mechlin and Vallenceens, of Strasburg yarn, and
Italian silver-gilt wire.
And I can tell you they looked imposing in the light of the lantern,
though I was more than a little doubtful about some of them going off
without blowing themselves up. But it was no time to cavil about small
matters like that, and I said nothing about this to Agnes Anne, who, for
her part, continued to glance along the barrel of "King George" at the
stone door with the fixity of my father viewing a star through his large
brass spy-glass. Only Agnes Anne, being unable to keep one eye shut and
the other open, had to hold the lid of the unoccupied organ hard down
with her left hand, as if it too were about to bounce out on us like the
two men she had seen in the ice-house mound by the edge of the sunk
fence.
We waited a good while with the light of the lamp smothered--all, that
is, but barely sufficient to give air to the flame. And I tell you our
hearts were gigotting rarely. Even Agnes Anne had taken a sudden liking
to "King George," and would not let him go as I proposed to her, now
that all the other muskets were loaded and ready.
"You would do better service with the lantern," I told her, "you could
hold it up to let us see them better."
But she answered that the lantern could take care of itself. She was
going to do some of the real fighting, and so I should not scorn her any
more. But I knew very well that it was only a kind of hysteria and would
all go off at the dangerous moment. Down she would go on the floor like
a bundle of wet rags!
However, to encourage Agnes Anne (as one must do to a girl), I said that
she was not to fire till she saw the white of their eyes. I remembered
that my father, in speaking of some battle or other, told how the
general had given his men that order, so that they might not miss. I
thought it very fine.
But Agnes Anne said promptly that she would not wait for the white of
anybody's eyes. She would fire and run for it as soon as she saw their
ugly heads coming up out of the ground. This shows how little you can do
with a girl, even if she have occasional fits of bravery. And I do not
deny that Agnes Anne had, though not naturally brave like myself and
Miss Irma.
It was anywhere between five minutes and a century before we heard the
first stroke of the crow behind the barricade. It sounded dull and
painful, as if inside of one's head. At first we heard no talking such
as Agnes Anne had described at the entrance of the ice-house.
Also, as they had been a good while on the way; I believe that they had
found other difficulties which they had not counted upon in traversing
the passage. But they were very near now, for presently, after perhaps
twenty strokes we could hear the striker sending out his breath with a
"_Har_" of effort each time he drove his crow home.
It was very dark in the cellar, for we had covered the lamp more
carefully and almost ceased to breathe. But we saw through certain
chinks that our assailants had a light of some sort with them. We could
discern a faint glimmering all round the upper portion of the stone, and
stray rays also pierced at various places elsewhere.
The long line of light at the top suddenly split and seemed to break
open in the middle. There came a fierce "_Hech_" from the assailant, and
the point of his crowbar showed, slid, and was as sharply recovered.
Next moment it came again.
"Lever it!" cried the gruff voice, "if you have the backbone of a
windlestraw, lever!"
And after a short, hard-breathing struggle, the stone door fell inwards,
the aperture was filled with intense light, dazzling, as it appeared to
us--and in the midst we saw two fierce and set faces peering into the
dark of the cellar.
CHAPTER XII
THE FIGHT IN THE DARK
One of the peering faces was hot and angry, bearded too, which few then
used to do except such as followed the sea. The other was dark and
beaked like a hawk, so that the shadow of an aquiline nose fell on the
man's chin as he held the lantern high above his head.
At first we could only see them to about the middle of the breast, as
for a little space of time they stood thus, hearkening with their heads
thrust forward.
"Not a ratton--forward there, Dick!" said the man behind, and the man
with the bushy beard advanced, rising as he did so till I could see the
ties of tarry cord with which he looped up his corduroy small-clothes.
Now it was high time to act. The game had been played far enough.
"Hold there--stand!" I cried. "Not a step further or we fire!"
I suppose my voice was echoed and fortified by the hollow vault.
Certainly in my own ears it roared like the sound of many waters. At any
rate the men stood, dumb-stricken, the tarry sailorly man a little in
front with his mouth open and his yellow dog-teeth gleaming. The other,
he who had given the orders, held the lantern higher in the air almost
against the stones of the vault, so as to see over the barricade of
boxes and barrels.
"'Tis no more than the----" he was beginning. But he never got the
sentence completed. For I took good aim from a rest upon a package of
cloth, and let fly with the best of the muskets--but at the clear lowe
of the lantern, not at the man's face, as I had at first intended.
Somehow, a kind of pity came over me. I did not want to slay such men,
who, taken in their iniquity, must go right to their accounts. But the
lantern was hit clean, and the glass went jingling to the ground in a
hundred fragments.
I judge also that some of the slugs must have strayed a little, for out
of the darkness came curses and the voice of the commander crying on
Dick to get back--that they were too strong for only two men. But the
sailor man advanced till I could hear him actually pulling himself over
the breastwork, gasping (or, as we say, "pech-"ing) with the effort.
Then I ran along my battery, and directing the next two of the old
muskets to the arched roof, I fired them off, bringing down with a crash
handfuls of rough lime and small bits of stone, mingled no doubt with
the ricocheted bullets themselves. At any rate our tarry Galligaskins
soon had enough of it. He turned and made good his retreat towards the
stairs up which he had forced his way.
Then Agnes Anne, who had no chivalrous ideas of sparing anybody who came
assaulting the house of her friends, pulled the trigger of "King
George," and in a moment all lesser sounds were drowned in a roar loud
as of a piece of ordnance.
The blunderbuss had been trained on the opening with some care, and it
was lucky for the men that they happened to be in retreat, and so
presenting their backs at the time--lucky, also, that only buckshot had
been used instead of the bullets and slugs with which the other guns
were loaded. But even so it was enough. She was always careless and
scattery, our old "King George." And from the marks on the lintels
afterwards she had sprinkled her charge pretty freely. Also there were
tokens, besides the yells and imprecations of the assailants and the
threats of Galligaskins to come back and do for us, that both of them
(as Constable Jacky would have said) "carried off concealed about their
persons an indictable quantity of my father's good lead drops."
So far, good. Better than good, indeed--better than we had the least
reason to expect, all owing to my presence of mind, and the fortunate
nervousness of Agnes Anne--which, however, in the case under review,
Providence directed to a wise and good end. I was for running
immediately back up the stairs to put the mind of Miss Irma at rest, but
Agnes Anne, with that stubbornness which she will often manifest
throughout this history, withstood me.
"What is it now?" I asked her, somewhat impatiently, I am bound to
admit. For I was all in a sweat to tell Irma about my victory, and how I
fought--and also, of course, about Agnes Anne pulling the trigger of
"King George" at random in the dark.
"This is the matter," said she, "Irma can wait. But if we do not improve
our victory, they will be back again with a whole army of men before we
can wink."
"Well," I answered, "I will load the guns first and then go up!"
"Loading the guns is good," said Agnes Anne. "But before that we must
blind up this hole by which they climbed in. We will give them something
more difficult to break through in this narrow passage than a stone door
which they can make holes in with a crowbar!"
And I caught at the idea in a moment, wondering how I had not thought of
it myself. But of course, though I did not actually suggest it, Agnes
Anne could never have carried it through without me.
We set about the work immediately. I took the big stone they had
loosened with their tools and tumbled it down the well of the stairway,
where, after rebounding once, it stuck at the turn and made a good
foundation for the barrels, boxes and packages we threw down till the
whole space was choke full, and then I danced on the top and defied the
lantern-man and Dick to get through in a week.
"_Now_ go and tell your Irma!" said Agnes Anne, and I went, while she
stopped behind with the lantern and a gun to watch if anything should be
attempted against the cellar.
But I knew right well that no such thing was possible. Nothing short of
such a charge of gunpowder as would rive the whole house of Marnhoul
asunder would suffice to clear the staircase of the packing I had given
it. So Agnes Anne might just as well have come her ways up-stairs with
me. Still, I do not deny that it was thoughtful of her; Agnes Anne meant
well.
Irma had heard the firing, and I found her with her little brother in
her arms, sitting by the window of the parlour overlooking the pilasters
of the front door. She held little Louis wrapped in a blanket, and kept
both herself and him out of sight as much as possible behind the
curtain. But she had the horse pistol I had given her on the ledge of
the sill close at her hand.
She listened to my tale with a white intensity which was very pitiful.
Her eyes seemed so big that they almost overran her face, and there were
little sparks of light like fairy candles lit at the bottom of each.
"Lalor Maitland--it was no other man!" she said in an awed voice. "And
now he is wounded he will be furious. He has many men always in his
power. For he can make or mar a man in the Low Countries, and even bad
men will do much for his favour. He will gather to him all who are
waiting. They will be here immediately and burst in the doors. Oh, what
shall we do? My poor, poor Louis!"
"There is the woman whom Agnes Anne saw," I said. "Can you guess what
she has to do with it? They said they would try her if they did not
succeed."
"Why not light the beacon now?" said a voice from the door. It was Agnes
Anne, who, being left to herself, the thought had come to her in the
dark of the cellar, and had run up to propose it. For me, I was too much
occupied with Irma, and I am sure that Irma was far too troubled
concerning her brother to think about the beacon. Yet it was the obvious
thing to do, and if I had had a moment to spare I would have thought of
it myself. So Agnes Anne had no great credit, after all, when you come
to look at it rightly.
But the effect of the suggestion on Irma was very remarkable. It was as
if the voice of my sister actually raised her from the place where she
had been listlessly sitting with her brother in her arms. She snatched
the lantern from the hands of Agnes Anne and put little Louis back on
his pillow, bidding him stay there till the time should come for him to
get up.
"Are the bad men all killed, Irma?" he asked.
"We are going to bring the good people to help us!" she cried. And with
that she ran up-stairs, and I after her, in a great pother of haste. For
the candle in her hand was the only bit of fire we had, and I did not
want it blown out if I could help it.
CHAPTER XIII
A WORLD OF INK AND FIRE
The idea of Irma's danger on the open house-top and in the full glare of
the beacon acted on me like a charm--yet people will say that there is
nothing at all in such a relationship as ours. Why, I would not have
been half as much concerned for Agnes Anne! And as a matter of fact, I
had not been so anxious down there behind the barrels and packages in
the cellar, when Lalor Maitland and Galligaskins were coming at us.
Besides which, I knew that Irma, being unused to fire-building, would
only waste the excellent provision of kindling, and perhaps do us out of
our beacon altogether.
So having joined her, it was not long till we had the tarred cloth off,
and, through the interstices of the iron bucket, the little blue and
yellow flames began chirping and chattering. But as I pulled the basket
up to the height of its iron crane, the wind of the night sent the fire
off with a mighty roar. The tops of the nearer trees stood out, every
leaf hard and distinct, but the main body of the woods all about
Marnhoul remained dark and solid, as if you could have walked upon them
without once breaking through.
I stood there watching, with the chain still in my hand, though I had
run the ring into the hoop on the wall. We had been very clever so far,
and I was full of admiration for ourselves. But a bullet whizzing very
near my head, struck the basket with a vicious "scat," doing no harm,
of course, but extending to us an urgent invitation to get out of range,
that was not to be disregarded.
Irma was close beside me, following with her eyes the mounting crackle
of the beacon, the sudden jetting of the tall pale flames that ran
upward into the velvet sky of night. For from a pale and haunting grey
the firmament had all of a sudden turned black and solid. Middle shades
had been ruled out instantly. It was a world of ink and fire.
But that sharp dash of danger cooled admiration in my heart. I caught
Irma by the shoulders and, roughly enough, pulled her down beside me on
the platform behind the stone ramparts. For a moment I think she was
indignant, but the next thankful. For half-a-dozen balls clicked and
whizzed about, passing through the square gaps that went all round the
tower, as if the wall had had a couple of teeth knocked out at regular
distances every here and there.
Very cautiously we crawled to the stair-head, leaving our invisible
enemies cracking away at the fire basket, knocking little cascades of
sparks out of it, indeed, but doing no harm. For the beacon was
thoroughly well alight, and the chain good and strong.
As we descended the ladder I went first so as to help Irma. She was a
little upset, as indeed she might well be. For it was quite evident that
the number of our assailants had singularly increased, and we did not in
the least know whether our signal would do us any good or not.
"It may waken Boyd Connoway," I thought, "but that will be all. He will
come sneaking through the wood to see what is the matter so as to tell
about it, but he never used a weapon more deadly than a jack-knife with
a deer-horn handle."
As Irma's foot slipped on the bottom rung of the ladder, I caught her as
she swayed, and for a moment in that dark place I held her in my hands
like a posy, fresh and sweet smelling, but sacred as if in church. She
said, without drawing herself away, at least not for a moment longer
than she need, "Duncan, you saved my life!"
I had it on my tongue tip to reply, "And my own at the same time, for I
could not live without you!"
When one is young it is natural to talk like that, but my old awe of
Miss Irma preserved me from the mistake. It was too early days for that,
and I only said, "I am glad!" And when we got down there was Agnes Anne,
with her finger on her lip, watching little Sir Louis sleeping. She
whispered to me to know why we had made such a noise firing on the top
of the tower.
"It isn't like down in the cellar," she said, "you came as near as you
can think to wakening him!"
I was so astonished that I could not even tell Agnes Anne that she would
soon find it was not we who had done the firing. The most part of the
guns were in the cellar any way, as she might have remembered. Besides,
what was the use? She had caught that fell disease, which is
baby-worship.
Instead, I posted myself in the window, my body hidden in the red rep
curtain, and only my eyes showing through a slit I made with my knife as
I peered along the barrel of "King George." I had resolved that with an
arm of such short "carry," I would not fire till I had them right
beneath the porch, or at least coming up the steps of the mansion.
It was in my mind that there would be a brutal rush at the door,
perhaps with pickaxes, perhaps with one of the swinging battering-rams I
had read of in the Roman wars, that do such wondrous things when cradled
in the joined hands of many men.
But in this I was much mistaken. The assailants were indeed rascals of
the same tarry, broad-breeched, stringfasted breed as Galligaskins of
the cellar door. But Galligaskins himself I saw not. From which I judge
that Agnes Anne had sorted him to rights with the contents of "King
George," laid ready for her pointing at the top of the steps by which an
enemy must of necessity appear.
But they had a far more powerful weapon than any battering-ram. We saw
them moving about in the faint light of a moon in her last quarter just
risen above the hills--a true moon of the small hours, ruddy as a fox
and of an aspect exceedingly weariful.
Presently there came toward the door two men with a strange and shrouded
figure walking painfully between them, as if upon hobbled feet. I could
see that one of the men was the tall man of the cave, he in whose hand I
had smashed the lantern. I knew him by a wrist that was freshly
bandaged, and also by his voice when he spoke. The other who accompanied
him was a sailor of some superior grade, a boatswain or such, dressed in
good sea cloth, and with a kind of glazed cocked hat upon his head.
It was a very weird business--the veiled woman, the dim skarrow of the
beacon, the foxy old moon sifting an unearthly light between the
branches, everything fallen silent, and our assailants each keeping
carefully to the back of a tree to be out of reach of our muskets.
They came on, the two men leading the woman by the arms till they were
out of the flicker of the flames both outside and under the shadow of
the house.
Then the tall man, whom in my heart I made sure to be Lalor Maitland, as
Irma said, held up his bandaged hand as a man does when he is about to
make a speech and craves attention.
"I have been ill-received," he cried, "in this the house of my
fathers----"
"Because you have striven to enter it as a thief and a robber!" cried
Irma's voice, close beside me. She had passed behind me, slid the bolt
of the window, and was now leaning out, resting upon her elbows and
looking down at the men below. She was apparently quite fearless. The
appearance of her cousin so near seemed somehow to sting her.
"Your brother and yourself are both under my care--I suppose,
Mademoiselle Irma, you will not deny that?"
"We were," Irma answered, in a clear voice; "but then, Lalor Maitland, I
heard what the fate was you were so kindly destining for me after having
killed my brother----"
"And I know who put that foolishness into your head," said Lalor
Maitland; "she regrets it at this moment, and has now come of her own
will to tell you she lied!"
And with a jerk he loosened the apron which, as I now saw, had been
wrapped about the head of the swathed figure. I shall never forget the
face of the woman as I saw it then. The uncertain flicker of the flames
and sparks from our beacon (which, though itself invisible, darkened and
lightened like sheet lightning), the dismal umbery glimmer of the waning
moon, and the pale approach of day over the mountains to the east, made
the face appear almost ghastly. But I was quite unprepared for the
effect which the sight produced upon Irma.
"Kate," she cried, "Kate of the Shore!"
The woman did not reply, though there was an obvious effort to speak--a
straining of the neck muscles and a painful rolling of the eyes.
"Yes," said Lalor calmly, as if he were exhibiting a curiosity, "this is
your friend to whom you owe your escape. She was doubtless to have
received a reward, and in any case we shall give her a fine one. But if
you will return to your protector, and come with me immediately on board
the good ship _Golden Hind_, which in some considerable danger, is
beating off and on between the heads of Killantringen--then I promise
you, you will save the life of our friend Kate here. If not----" (He
waved his hand expressively.)
"You dare not kill her," cried Irma; "in an hour the country will be up,
and you will be hunted like dogs."
"Oh, it is not I," said Lalor calmly, "I do not love the shedding of
blood, and that is why I am here now. But consider those stout fellows
yonder. They are restive at having to wait for their pay, and the loss
of their captain, wounded in aiding me in obtaining my rights in a quiet
and peaceable manner, has by no means soothed them. I advise you,
Mistress Irma, to bring down the boy and let us get on board while there
is yet time. No one in the house shall be harmed. But listen to
Kate--Kate of the Shore. She will speak to you better than I! But first
we must perform a little surgical operation!"
And with that he whipped out a bandanna handkerchief, which had been
knotted and thrust into her mouth in the manner of a gag.
"Now then," he said, "put a pistol to her head, Evans! Now, Kate, you
have told many lies about your master, the late Governor of the fortress
of Dinant. Speak the truth for once in a way. For if you do not tell
these foolish children that they have nothing to fear--nay more, if you
cannot persuade them to quit their foolish conduct and return to their
rightful duty and obedience, it will be my painful duty to ask Evans
there, who does not love you as I do, to--well, you know what will
happen when that pistol goes off!"
But even in such straits Kate of the Shore was not to be frightened.
"You hear me, Miss Irma," she said, "I know this bad man. He is only
seeking to betray you as he betrayed me. Defend your castle. Open not a
window--keep the doors barred. They cannot take the place in the time,
for they have the tide to think of."
"I expected this," said Lalor, with a vaguely pensive air, "it has ever
been my lot to be calumniated, my motives suspected. But I have indeed
deserved other things--especially from you, Irma, whom (though your
senior in years, and during the minority of my ward Sir Louis, the head
of the house), I have always treated with affectionate and, perhaps, too
respectful deference!"
"Miss Irma," cried Kate of the Shore, "take care of that man. He has a
pistol ready. I can see the hilt of it in his pocket. You he will not
harm if he can help it, but if that be your brother whom I see at the
fold of the window-hanging, bid him stand back for his life."
"Drop your pistol, Evans," commanded Lalor Maitland, "this part of the
play is played out. She will not speak, or rather what she says will do
us no good. Women are thrawn contrary things at the best, Evans, as I
dare say you have noticed in your Principality of Wales. But take heed,
you and your precious defenders, I warn you that in an hour the house of
Marnhoul shall be flaming over your heads with a torch that shall bring
out, not your pitiful burghers from their rabbit-holes, but also the men
of half a county.
"Hear me," he raised his voice suddenly to a strident shout, "hear me
all you within the house. Give up the girl and the child to their legal
protectors, and no harm shall befall either life or property. We shall
be on shipboard in half-an-hour. I shall see to it that every man within
the castle is rewarded from the Maitland money that is safe beyond seas,
out of the reach of King George! Of that, at least I made sure, serving
twice seven years for it in the service of a hard master. I offer a
hundred pounds apiece to whoever will deliver the boy and the maid!"
This was a speech which pleased me much, for it showed that from the
stoutness of our defence, and the many guns which had been shot off,
Lalor was under the impression that the house was garrisoned by a proper
force of men--when in truth there was only Miss Irma and me--that is,
not counting Agnes Anne.
CHAPTER XIV
THE WHITE FREE TRADERS
But the country was by no means so craven as Lalor supposed. There were
bold hearts and ready saddles still in Galloway. The signal from the top
of the beacon tower of Marnhoul was seen and understood in half-a-dozen
parishes.
Not that the young fellows who saw the flame connected it with the two
children who had taken refuge in the old place of the Maitlands. In
fact, most knew nothing about their existence. But their alacrity was
connected with quite another matter--the great cargo of dutiable and
undutied goods stored away in the cellars of Marnhoul!
There was stirring, therefore, in remote farms, rattling on doors,
hurried scrambling up and down stable ladders. Young men on the
outskirts of villages might have been seen stealing through gardens,
stumbling among cabbage-stocks and gooseberry bushes as they made their
way by the uncertain flicker of our far-away beacon to the place of
rendezvous.
Herds rising early to "look the hill" gave one glance at the red dance
of the flames over the tree-tops of Marnhoul great wood, and anon ran to
waken their masters.
For in that country every farmer--aye, and most of the lairds, including
a majority of the Justices of the Peace--had a share in the "venture."
Sometimes the value of the cargo brought in by a single run would be
from fifty to seventy thousand pounds. All this great amount of goods
had to be scattered and concealed locally, before it was carried to
Glasgow and Edinburgh over the wildest and most unfrequented tracks.
The officers of the revenue, few and ill-supported, could do little.
Most of them, indeed, accepted the quiet greasing of the palm, and
called off their men to some distant place during the night of a big
run. But even when on the spot and under arms, a cavalcade of a couple
of hundred men could laugh at half-a-dozen preventives, and pass by
defiantly waving their hands and clinking the chains which held the kegs
upon their horses. The bolder cried out invitations to come and drink,
and the good-will of the leaders of the Land Free Traders was even
pushed so far that, if a Surveyor of Customs showed himself pleasantly
amenable, a dozen or more small kegs of second-rate Hollands would be
tipped before his eyes into a convenient bog, so that, if it pleased
him, he could pose before his superiors as having effected an important
capture.
The report which he was wont to edit on these occasions will often
compare with the higher fiction--as followeth:--
"Supervisor Henry Baskett, in charge of the Lower Solway district,
reports as follows under date June 30th: Found a strong body of
smugglers marching between the wild mountains called Ben Tuthor and
Blew Hills. They were of the number of three hundred, all well
mounted and armed, desperate men, evidently not of this district,
but, from their talk and accoutrement, from the Upper Ward of
Lanerickshire. Followed them carefully to note their dispositions
and discover a favourable place for attack. I had only four men with
me, whereof one a boy, being all the force under my command.
Nevertheless, at a place called the Corse of Slakes I advanced
boldly and summoned them, in the King's name and at the peril of
their lives, to surrender.
"Whereat they turned their guns upon us, each man standing behind
his horse and having his face hidden in a napkin lest he should be
known. But we four and the boy advanced firmly and with such
resolution that the band of three hundred law-breakers broke up
incontinent, and taking to flight this way and that through the
heather, left us under the necessity of pursuing. We pursued that
band which promised the best taking, and I am glad to intimate to
your Excellencies, His Majesty's Commissioners, that we were
successful in putting the said Free Traders to flight, and capturing
twenty-five casks best Hollands, six loads of Vallenceen, etc.,
etc., as per schedule appended to be accounted for by me as your
lordship's commissioners shall direct. In the hope that this will be
noted to our credit on the table of advancement (and in this connect
I may mention the names of the three men, Thomas Coke, Edward Loval,
Timothy Pierce, and the boy Joseph McDougal, whom I recommend as
having done their duty in the face of peril), I have the honour to
sign myself,
"My Lords and Hon. Commissioners of H. M. Excise,
"Your obedient, humble servant,
"Henry Baskett (Supervisor)."
The other view of this transaction I find more concisely expressed in a
memorandum written in an old note-book belonging to my Uncle Tom.
"Baskett held out for forty best French, but we fobbed him off with
twenty-five low-grade Rotterdam--the casks being leaky, and some packs
of goods too long left at Rathan Cave, which is at the back of the
isle, and counted scarce worth the carrying farther. The night fine and
business most successful--thanks to an ever-watchful Providence."
The reader of these family memoirs will perhaps agree with me that, if
any one could do without an ever-watchful Providence troubling itself
about him, that man was my Uncle Tom.
While, therefore, we in the House of Marnhoul were in the wildest
alarm--at least Agnes Anne was--forces which could not possibly be
withstood were mustering to hasten to our assistance. The tarry jackets
of the _Golden Hind_ would doubtless have rushed the front door with a
hurrah, as readily as they would have boarded a prize, but Lalor
Maitland ordered them to bring wood and other inflammable material. At
least, so I judge, for presently I could see them running to and fro
about the edges of the wood. They had now learned the knack of keeping
in shelter most of the way. But I did not feel really afraid till I saw
some of them with kegs of liquor making towards the porch. There they
stove them in, and proceeded to empty the contents on the dry branches
and fuel they had collected. The matter was now beginning to look really
serious. To make things worse, they were evidently digging out the
bottom of our cellar-stair barricade, and if they succeeded in that they
would turn our position and take us in the rear.
So I sent down Agnes Anne (she not being good for much else) to the
cellar to see how things were looking there, bidding her to be careful
of the lantern, and to bring back as many of the five muskets as she
could carry, so that I might keep the fellows in check above.
Agnes Anne came flying back with the worst kind of news. A great flame
of fire was springing up out of the well of the staircase into which we
had tumbled the barrels and boxes. It threatened, she said, to blow us
sky-high, if there were any barrels of powder among the goods left by
the smugglers.
At any rate, the flame was rapidly spreading to the other packages which
had formed our breastwork of defence, and was now like to become our
ruin.
For, once fairly caught, the spirit would flame high as the rigging of
Marnhoul, and we should all be burnt alive, which was most likely what
Lolar Maitland meant by his parting threatening.
"And it is more than likely," Agnes Anne added, "that some of the
barrels burst as we threw them down the stairs, and so, with the liquor
flowing among their feet, the assailants got the idea of thus burning us
out."
At all events something had to be done, and that instantly. So I had
perforce to leave Agnes Anne in charge of "King George" again,
cautioning her not to pull the trigger till she should see the rascals
actually bending to set fire to the pile underneath the porch of the
front door. I also told her not to be frightened, and she promised not
to.
Then I went down to the cellar. The heat there was terrible, and I do
not wonder that Agnes Anne came running back to me. A pillar of blue
flame was rising straight up against the arched roof of the cellar. I
could hear the cries of the men working below in the passage.
"Hook it away--give her air--she will burn ever the brisker and smoke
the land-lubbers out!"
Some few of the boxes in the front tier were already on fire, and still
more were smouldering, but the straightness of the vent up which the
flame was coming, together with the closeness and stillness of the
vault, made the flame mount straight up as in a chimney. I therefore
divined rather than saw what remained for me to do. I leaped over and
began, at the risk of a severe scorching, to throw back all the boxes
and packages which were in danger. It was lucky for me that the
smugglers had piled them pretty high, and so by drawing one or two from
near the foundation, I was fortunate enough to overset the most part of
it in the outward direction.
But the fierceness of the flame was beginning to tell upon the
building-stone of Marnhoul, which was of a friable nature--at least that
with which the vault was arched.
Luckily some old tools had been left in the corner, and it struck me
that if I could dig up enough of the earthen floor or topple over the
mound of earth which had been piled up at the making of the underground
passage, the fire must go out for lack of air; or, better still, would
be turned in the faces of those who were digging away the barrels and
boxes from the bottom of the stair-well.
This, after many attempts and some very painful burns, I succeeded in
doing. The first shovelfuls did not seem to produce much effect. So I
set to work on the large heap of hardened earth in the corner, and was
lucky enough to be able to tumble it bodily upon the top of the column
of fire. Then suddenly the terrible column of blue flame went out, just
as does a Christmas pudding when it is blown upon. And for the same
reason. Both were made of the flames of the French spirit called cognac,
or brandy.
Then I did not mind about my burns, I can assure you. But almost
gleefully I went on heaping mould and dirt upon the boxes in the well of
the staircase, stamping down the earth at the top till it was almost
like the hard-beaten floor of the cellar itself. I left not a crevice
for the least small flame to come up through.
Then I bethought me of what might be going on above, and the flush of my
triumph cooled quickly. For I thought that there was only Agnes Anne,
and who knows what weakness she may not have committed. She would never
have thought, for instance, of such a thing as covering in the flame
with earth to put it out. To tell the truth, I did think very
masterfully of myself at that moment, and perhaps with some cause, for
not one in a thousand would have had the "engine" to do as I had done.
When I got to the top of the stairs, I heard cries from without, which
had been smothered by the deepness of the dungeon in which I had been
labouring to put out the fire. For a moment I thought that by the
failure of Agnes Anne to fire off "King George" at the proper moment,
the door had been forced and we utterly lost. Which seemed the harder to
be borne, that I had just saved all our lives in a way so original and
happy.
But I was wrong. The shouting came not from the wicked crew of the
privateersman, but from the shouting of a vast number of people, most of
them mounted on farm and country horses, with some of finer limb and
better blood, managed by young fellows having the air of laird's sons or
others of some position. None of these had his face bare. But in place
of the black highwayman masks of the followers of Galligaskins, these
wore only a strip of white kerchief across the face, though, as I could
see, more for the form of the thing than from any real apprehension of
danger.
Indeed, in the very forefront of the cavalcade I saw our own two cart
horses, Dapple and Dimple, and the lighter mare Bess, which my
grandfather used for riding to and fro upon his milling business. I had
not the least doubt that my three uncles were bestriding them, though I
never knew that there were any arms about the house except the old
fowling-piece belonging to grandfather, with which on moonlight nights
he killed the hares that came to nibble the plants in his cabbage
garden.
Soon the sailors and their abettors were fleeing in every direction.
But, what took me very much by surprise, there was no firing or cutting
down, though there was a good deal of smiting with the flat of the
sword. And at the entrance of the ice-mound I saw a great many very
scurvy fellows come trickling out, all burned and scorched, to run the
gauntlet of a row of men on foot, who drubbed them soundly with cudgels
before letting them go.
Seeing this, I opened the window and shouted with all my might.
"Apprehend them! They are villains and thieves. They have broken into
this house and tried to kill us all, besides setting fire to the cellar
and everything in it!"
The men without, both those on foot and those on horseback, had been
calm till they heard this, and then, lo! each cavalier dismounted and
all came running to the door, calling on us to open instantly.
"Not to you any more than to the others!" I cried. For, indeed, I saw
not any good reason. It appeared to me, since there was no real
fighting, that the two parties must be in alliance, or, at least, have
an understanding between them.
But Agnes Anne called out, "Nonsense, I see Uncle Aleck and Uncle
Ebenezer. I am going to open the door to them, whatever you say!"
So all in a minute the house of Marnhoul, long so desolate and silent,
wherein such deeds of valour and strategy had recently been wrought,
grew populous with a multitude all eager to win down to the cellar. But
Agnes Anne brought up my three uncles (and another who was with them)
and bade them watch carefully over the safety of Louis and Miss Irma.
(For so I must again call her now that she had, as it were, come to her
own again.)
As for me they carried me down with them, to tell all about the attempt
to burn the goods in the cellar. And angry men they were when they saw
so many webs of fine cloth, so many bolts of Flanders lace, so many kegs
of rare brandy damaged and as good as lost. But when they understood
that, but for my address and quickness, all would have been lost to
them, they made me many compliments. Also an old man with a
silver-hilted sword, who carried himself like some great gentleman, bade
me tell him my _name_, and wrote it down in his note-book, saying that I
was of too good a head and quick a hand to waste on a dominie.
And, indeed, I was of that mind (or something very much like it) myself.
An old haunted house like Marnhoul to defend, a young maid of high
family to rescue (and adopt you as her brother for a reward) did somehow
take the edge off teaching the Rule of Three and explaining the _De
Bello Gallico_ to imps who cannot understand, and would not if they
could.
PART II
CHAPTER XV
MY GRANDMOTHER SPEAKS HER MIND
"There is no use talking" (said my grandmother, as she always did when
she was going to do a great deal of it), "no, listen to me, there is no
use talking! These two young things need a home, and if _we_ don't give
it to them, who will? Stay longer in that great gaol of a house, worse
than any barn, they shall not--exposed day and night to a traffic of sea
rascals, thieves and murderers, _they shall not_----"
"What I want to know is who is to keep them, and what the safer they
will be here?"
It was the voice of my Aunt Jen which interrupted. None else would have
dared--save mayhap my grandfather, who, however, only smiled and was
silent.
"Ne'er you mind that, Janet," cried her mother, "what goes out of our
basket and store will never be missed. And father says the same, be sure
of that!"
My grandfather did say the same, if to smile quietly and approvingly is
to speak. At any rate, in a matter which did not concern him deeply, he
knew a wiser way than to contradict Mistress Mary Lyon. She was quite
capable of keeping him awake two-thirds of the night arguing it out,
without the faintest hope of altering the final result.
"The poor things," mourned my grandmother, "they shall come here and
welcome--that is, till better be. Of course, they might be more grandly
lodged by the rich and the great--gentlefolk in their own station. But,
first of all, they do not offer, and if they did, they are mostly
without experience. To bring up children, trust an old hen who has
clucked over a brood of her own!"
"Safer, too, here," approved my grandfather, nodding his head; "the
tarry breeches will think twice before paying Heathknowes a visit--with
the lads about and the gate shut, and maybe the old dog not quite
toothless yet!"
This, indeed, was the very heart of the matter. Irma and Sir Louis would
be far safer at the house of one William Lyon, guarded by his stout
sons, by his influence over the wildest spirits of the community, in a
house garrisoned by a horde of sleepless sheep-dogs, set in a defensible
square of office-houses, barns, byres, stables, granaries, cart-sheds,
peat-sheds and the rest.
"And when the great arrive to call," said Aunt Jen, with sour insight,
"you, mother, will stop the churning just when the butter is coming to
put on your black lace cap and apron. You will receive the lady of the
manse, and Mrs. General Johnstone, and----"
"And if I do, Jen," cried her mother, "what is that to you?"
"Because I have enough to do as it is," snapped Jen, "without your
butter-making when you are playing the lady down the house!"
Grandmother's black eyes crackled fire. She turned threateningly to her
daughter.
"By my saul, Lady Lyon," she cried, "there is a stick in yon corner that
ye ken, and if you are insolent to your mother I will thrash you
yet--woman-grown as ye are. Ye take upon yourself to say that which none
of your brothers dare set their tongue to!"
And indeed there is little doubt but that Mary Lyon would have kept her
word. So far as speech was concerned, my Aunt Jen was silenced. But she
was a creature faithful to her prejudices, and could express by her
silence and air of injured rectitude more than one less gifted could
have put into a parliamentary oration.
Her very heels on the stone floor of the wide kitchen at Heathknowes,
where all the business of the house was transacted, fell with little
raps of defiance, curt and dry. Her nose in the air told of contempt
louder than any words. She laid down the porridge spurtle like a queen
abdicating her sceptre. She tabled the plates like so many protests,
signed and witnessed. She swept about the house with the glacial chill
which an iceberg spreads about it in temperate seas. Her displeasure
made winter of our content--of all, that is, except Mary Lyon's. She at
least went about her tasks with her usual humming alacrity, turning work
over her shoulder as easy as apple-peeling.
Being naturally lazy myself (except as to the reading of books), I took
a great pleasure in watching grandmother. Aunt Jen would order you to
get some work if she saw you doing nothing--malingering, she called
it--yes, and find it for you too, that is, if Mary Lyon were not in the
house to tell her to mind her own business.
But you might lie round among grandmother's feet for days, and, except
for a stray cuff in passing if she actually walked into you--a cuff
given in the purest spirit of love and good-will, and merely as a
warning of the worse thing that might happen to you if you made her
spill the dinner "sowens"--you might spend your days in reading anything
from the _Arabian Nights_ in Uncle Eben's old tattered edition to the
mighty _Josephus_, all complete with plans and plates--over which on
Sundays my grandfather was wont to compose himself augustly to sleep.
Well, Miss Irma and Sir Louis came to my grandmother's house at
Heathknowes. Yes, this is the correct version. The house of Heathknowes
was Mary Lyon's. The mill in the wood, the farm, the hill
pastures--these might b
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