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Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett · English · Gutenberg #34017 · 557,404 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Deep Moat Grange

Author: S. R. Crockett


        
Release date: October 1, 2010 [eBook #34017]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34017

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEEP MOAT GRANGE ***




Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece: "Mr. Ablethorpe put up his hand to command silence.]





DEEP MOAT GRANGE


By

S. R. CROCKETT




HODDER & STOUGHTON

LONDON

MCMVIII




_Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome and London_




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I

THE EMPTY MAIL GIG


CHAPTER II

POACHER DAVIE


CHAPTER III

THE BAILIFF OF DEEP MOAT GRANGE


CHAPTER IV

THE GOLDEN FARMER


CHAPTER V

WE MEET DAFT JEREMY


CHAPTER VI

THICKER THAN WATER


CHAPTER VII

FAMILY DISCIPLINE


CHAPTER VIII

MISS APHRA'S CURATE


CHAPTER IX

ELSIE'S VISITOR


CHAPTER X

THE BROM-WATER MYSTERY


CHAPTER XI

THE IRON TRAPDOOR


CHAPTER XII

THE BRICKED PASSAGE


CHAPTER XIII

MEYSIE'S BAIRNS


CHAPTER XIV

BROWN PAINT--VARNISHED!


CHAPTER XV

THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES--A GIRL


CHAPTER XVI

MR. MUSTARD'S FIRST ASSISTANT


CHAPTER XVII

DREAR-NIGHTED DECEMBER


CHAPTER XVIII

THE HUNTERS OF MEN


CHAPTER XIX

I HOOK MY FISH


CHAPTER XX

CONCERNING ELSIE


CHAPTER XXI

A JACKDAW'S TAIL FEATHER


CHAPTER XXII

ELSIE'S DIARY


CHAPTER XXIII

WITHIN THE MONKS' OVEN


CHAPTER XXIV

THE BREAKING DAM


CHAPTER XXV

A LETTER FROM JOSEPH YARROW, SENIOR, TO HIS SON
  JOSEPH YARROW, JUNIOR


CHAPTER XXVI

COMRADES IN CAPTIVITY


CHAPTER XXVII

HARRIET CAW ON CLERICAL CELIBACY


CHAPTER XXVIII

SATURDAY, THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY


CHAPTER XXIX

THE CALLING OF ELSIE


CHAPTER XXX

HOW ELSIE DANCED FOR HER LIFE


CHAPTER XXXI

THE HERO PLAYS SECOND FIDDLE


CHAPTER XXXII

"THERE'S NAE LUCK ABOOT THE HOOSE"


CHAPTER XXXIII

CONFESSION


CHAPTER XXXIV

JEREMY ORRIN, BREADWINNER


CHAPTER XXXV

THE WITNESSING OF MISER HOBBY


CHAPTER XXXVI

THE HOUSE OF DEATH


CHAPTER XXXVII

I AM HEROIC


CHAPTER XXXVIII

A FIT OF THE SULKS


CHAPTER XXXIX

THE THING THAT SCRATCHED


CHAPTER XL

WANTED--A PENNY IN THE SLOT




CHAPTER I

THE EMPTY MAIL GIG

I was only a young fellow when these things began to happen among us,
but I remember very well the morning when it first came out about the
Bewick carrier.  He was postman, too, but had got permission to keep a
horse and cart so that he might make a good little bit by fetching
parcels and orders from town.  Town to us meant East Dene, and Bewick,
to which Harry went, lay away to the east among the woods and hills.
It was a lonesome place, Bewick, and, indeed, is still, though now they
have got a railway coming within eight miles or so.  But the mystery of
the Moat Wood happened before there was any talk of railways.

Harry Foster was his name--the carrier's, I mean--and a common one
enough in Northumberland.  Many a ride have I gotten on his cart, which
was a light one on springs--blue body, orange shafts, panelled with
red, and the shafts lined red.  You could tell the cart anywhere.  At
least any of the Breckonside boys could, quite a mile away.  And if it
was too far to see the cart, there was no mistaking Dappled Bess, the
carrier's horse, which was bright orange colour with white patches,
like the circus pony the clown rides.  You've seen that pony.  They
have one like that in every circus that has ever come to our town, and
there's few that pass Breckonside--Seager's, and Lord George's, and
Bostock's, the Original and the Real Original, both, and in old days,
so my father tells me, Wombwell's itself.  Oh, a great place for
circuses is Breckonside!

I will tell you about it.  Breckonside, where I live, is a good big
village about ten miles from the big town of East Dene, where there are
docks and a floating landing-stage, and a jail--everything modern and
up to date--with railways and electricity cars, and a theatre every
night almost, and tramcars that you can hang on behind, and mostly
everything that makes a boy happy--that is, for a day.

But still, give me Breckonside for steady.  Why, there's only one
policeman in Breckonside, and he owes my father for his grocer's
bill--oh, ever so much!  I shall not tell how much, but he knows that I
know.  More than that, he always tells his wife what he is going to do,
and where he is going to go, and she tells Mrs. Robb, her neighbour
over the hedge, and Mrs. Robb tells Mrs. Martin, and Mrs. Martin's
Tommy tells me, or else I lick him.  So we know.  We like our policeman
in Breckonside.  He can make lovely whistles out of bore-tree, and his
name is Codling.

You can see the sea from Breckon Hill, which is wooded to the top, only
by climbing up a tree.  And away to the north, Scotland way, you can
make out the hills called Cheviots, like a long, low, blue cloud.

But about the Bewick carrier, Harry Foster, the thing is just this, and
it is a Mystery.  I saw the red and blue cart come in--the piebald pony
lame, and the splashboard all leaves and blood, but no Harry Foster to
be seen anywhere.

It was catechism morning, when the school had to go in half an hour
earlier, and the Dissenter folk could keep away their children, if they
liked; and that always made Mr. Mustard, our schoolmaster, very
mad--hopping, indeed.  He did not admire Dissenters anyway, at the best
of times, because they had voted against him when he wanted to be
parochial officer, or something.  And it was just gall and squirm wood
(as Elsie said) for him to see Ned Tiger, the Wesleyan minister's son,
playing "plunkie" and "ringi" with marbles, when he, Henry Powell
Mustard, a good Churchman and parish clerk, had to be teaching
catechism to half-empty benches.  He would glower and rap with his cane
on the desk, and find fault--all the time with an eye on Ned Tiger (his
real name was Wheatly) and Ben Overton, who was a Baptist, and Peter
McNab and Sandy Auld (who, as you can see by their names, were
Presbyterians, and hit anybody who called them Dissenters, being of the
Scotch kirk and good fighters).

Mr. Mustard taught us our duty, how to walk humbly in our sphere, and
so forth, with a supple cane, and he whipped the girls, too, till I
stopped him.  But that comes after.  He whipped us all that morning,
without forgetting one, and at every good shot of Ned Tiger's alley-taw
he would scowl worse than ever and discover one more unfortunate to
wallop.

Yet he was a good teacher, and made good scholars; kind, too--out of
school, that is.  But as we only met him _in_ school, and with a black
frown running across-ways between his eyes, we declined to believe in
his kindness of heart, at any price.

"You are my subjects, great and little, bad or good," he used to preach
to us.  "In Breckonside school only the king, the head of the Church,
is greater than I.  Like him, I reward the virtuous, and I punish the
naughty!"

We thought within us that virtue must be scarce in Breckonside school.
For as yet but few of the rewards had come our way.  Of punishments
there was never any lack, as our skins well knew.

"Some rascals were in my garden last night," said Mr. Mustard, "to the
overturning of my potted geraniums.  The size of his boot was a number
six, like what are sold at Provost Yarrow's shop.  I will flog all the
boys with number six boots bought at The Shop, unless the culprit
confesses.  Show boots."

We showed them, putting them, as commanded, on the wooden desks with a
clatter that made the ink leap in the dirty bottles.  We did that on
purpose.

"Quiet, boys, till I compare them," said Mr. Mustard.  "Stand out,
you--Tommy Bottle--you have on number six!"

Tommy Bottle dug his knuckles into his eyeholes and whined: "Please,
sir, I was----"

"Don't answer me, sir!" cried Mr. Mustard; "how dare you?  Bring me the
long cane!"

"But, please, sir, I----"

"Thomas Bottle, your punishment is doubled!" shouted the master,
bringing the pointer down across Tommy's legs, as a kind of "lick and a
promise."  He needn't.  Tommy knew well enough what was coming.

"If you please, Mr. Mustard," I called out, "it was me that sold
Tommy's father that pair of boots this morning in my father's shop, so
Tommy couldn't have broken your flowerpots last night, with these boots
on his feet!"

"Eh, what!" cried the master, turning upon me; "well, Tommy is excused.
But the rest----"

The others provided with our sixes were, to wit, Frederick Allen, Widow
Allen's boy; Bob Grey, Eben Pringle, and Dorky Cobb--all poor boys.

But before punishment began I put my own before the master's eyes.
_They were number sixes_.

"If you punish Fred and Bob and Eben and Dorky, you must whip me, too,
Mr. Mustard," I said.  "And I shall have to tell my father, and he
won't like it, because nobody will come any more to our shop to buy
boots, if they are to be punished for it at school!"

I always called him Mr. Mustard, because I was the only boy in the
school who dared do it, and I knew he hated it.  But, you see, he was
afraid of my father.  Most people in Breckonside were afraid of my
father.

So I got them off at that time; but presently the master welted Bob
Grey for making a noise, though he knew perfectly well it was I who had
done it.  And the lesson was not over before he had got even with the
lot of them--Fred and Eben and Dorky and all--except me, of course.

I was always first on my bench; and that was the highest in the school.
You see, I wore the best coat, and Mr. Mustard got all his provisions,
his stationery, his coals, his bacon from my father's shop; and he was
supposed to settle his account once a year.  He gave my father a little
honey in exchange, when it was the time to draw the sections off from
the hives, but he never paid very much money.

So I could stay away from school when I liked, and so long as my father
did not find out, no harm ever came.  Mr. Mustard never asked a
question.  He took it for granted that I had been sent somewhere to
look after some of my father's little businesses.  The boys knew this,
and used to get me to take them into school if they were late or had
been "kipping"--girls, too, sometimes; though they did not play truant
regularly, as we did.  It was a good thing in Breckonside to be my
father's son.

Just after Scripture reading and catechism, if the vicar did not come
to examine us--which was not often--we had half an hour's play, while
the "Dissenters" had multiplication table and Troy weight, to keep them
aware of themselves.  So, while Mr. Mustard was rubbing his spectacles
and telling us not to be longer away than half an hour, I took out my
quill gun and cut a smart pellet with the end of it out of a slice of
potato.  Then I cut another with the opposite muzzle, and with my
pretty, tiny ramrod I shot it under the desk.  It took the end of Mr.
Mustard's nose neatly, making a red bull's-eye, for which Freddy Allen
was promptly whipped, because his mother was a widow and had no
influence with the School Committee.

Now I had promised _my_ mother to go to school that day, and not make
my father angry again.  Well, I had been to school, and had been _dux_
of the catechism, which was surely enough glory and honour for one day.
So soon, therefore, as we got out I made a rush down the street towards
the bridge where was Elsie's house--a little cottage by the bridge end,
all covered over with Virginia creeper and roses, though Nancy Edgar,
the "outworker" with whom she lived, was quite poor, and the neighbours
said it was a disgrace that she should make such a flaunting show, for
all the world as if she was rich and could afford to buy plants from a
nursery-man.  But everything that Nancy had given her, or found thrown
out as of no use, seemed to do with her, and grew to a marvel.

"I expect it is because I love them!" she said.  But privately I
thought it was because of Elsie.  She was ever such a nice girl, Elsie
Stennis, and I had kept friends with her, steady, ever since she came
to Breckonside from Thorsby.  For she is a town girl, Elsie, and her
father and mother are dead.  But no nonsense about her--no love and
stuff.  She was what they call pretty, too, but not set up about it in
the least, the way girls get.  You would have liked her just as I did.
Nearly every one did--except her grandfather.

Well, when I got to Nance Edgar's cottage, which stands back a bit from
the road, with a joiner's yard at one side, and the road to Bewick
stretching away on the other, I saw Elsie at the gable window.  She had
a book in her hand, her finger between the leaves.  "Come down, Elsie,"
I called up to her.  "I'm not going to school to-day.  Come and see the
new greenhouses they are building over at Rushworth Court.  I can get
you a ride in a dogcart all the way.  Our man Jake is going with a
cargo of paint.  Father has the order."

But Elsie wouldn't.  She said that it was all very well for me, who was
going to be as rich as ever was, to "kip," but that she meant to learn,
even though Mr. Mustard was a brute.

I said that was nonsense, and that I would give her half of all I had.
At any rate I urged her to come down now.  And just at that moment as I
was speaking, she pointed over my shoulder.  From the gable window she
could see something I could not.

"Do look--what's that?" she cried.  And her voice sounded pale.

It was Harry Foster's wagon, and I could see in a minute that something
was wrong.  Oh, it was easy to see that, even for a boy.  My ears sung
and I felt suddenly old.  But by a sort of instinct I got the piebald
pony by the bridle, which was trailing among her forefeet.  And I could
see she had been down, too.  Her knees showed that.  Poor Dappled Bess
never tried to get away.  She had terror in her eye, quite like a human
it was.  And she seemed to limp with all her feet at once.  I was sorry
for Bess.  She and I were friends, you see.  I used to ride her about
in our pasture on Sundays, to keep her from feeling lonesome.

But it was Elsie who cried out.  She had looked inside the mail cart.

"There's blood!" she gasped.  "O Joe!"

She didn't faint just when she was needed to do something, though she
did put her hand to her eyes, and, faith, I don't blame her.  She came
and said very quietly: "I'll take the horse's head, Joe--you look.  I
can't!"

Then I looked; and just as soon as I put my foot on the step I turned
sick.  But I didn't let on, being a big fellow and getting on for
seventeen.  There was a big, darkish pool, sort of half dried, under
the seat, and there were cuts that had been made with an axe scattered
all about, even on the soaky bottom of the cart.  The whip had been cut
right off three or four inches above the black japanned holder, and the
lash lay over the splashboard of the trap, which was all reddened, too,
and half covered with leaves.  I saw some flyfisher's hooks stuck in
the leather apron.  There were no mail bags, no parcels for Bewick
Upton--nothing at all in the post trap except what I have told.  And it
was quite enough for me.  I got down, and we all took the road to the
police station as quick as the pony could limp.  I did this because I
knew it was the proper place to go--not because old Silver-buttons
Codling was the least good.

And in the crack of a thumb I had the whole village after me--asking
questions, and wanting to look.  But I kept going on, calling out to
the folk to get out of the way.

Then my father came, and I stopped for him, and he looked the trap all
over very carefully, as if it were something he was going to take at a
valuation.

Then he said out loud: "This is a bad business; this is no accident.
It looks to me like murder!"

"MURDER!"

The vicar had bustled up.  He and my father almost tied for the first
place in Breckonside, and so it was a settled thing that if my father
thought one thing, the vicar, without any ill feeling, would take the
opposite view.

"And why, Mr. Yarrow, why, may I ask?  An accident is much more
admissible--in this quiet parish.  The horse has run away.  See how
lame he is, and the postman has cut wildly with an axe or other sharp
weapon in order to--to--to rid himself of the furious animal--to get
loose, in short, a foolish thing to do, I admit, but in such
circumstances--I do not see----"

"No, Mr. Alderson, that is just it, you do not see," said my father.
"There is this whip handle cut through six inches from the holder; what
do you make of that?"

"Well," said the vicar, looking for arguments in defence of his
parochial quiet, "there is the lash.  There has been an accident, you
see.  Perhaps poor Harry went suddenly out of his mind.  There is
insanity in the family.  He may have cut himself.  That would account
for the--the substance of a fluid nature resembling blood, and also for
the lash cut from the butt of the whip!"

My father took the stained thong in his fingers.  It was curiously
braided, plait laid over plait, rather flat than round, and exceedingly
neat.

"This is not the lash of Harry Foster's whip," he said.  "I ought to
know, because I sold him the whip.  This is a worked lash, and if I
mistake not I know the fingers that wrought that pattern."




CHAPTER II

POACHER DAVIE

There was no more thought of school that day--neither on the part of
Mr. Mustard nor of any of his scholars.  All the world (but not his
wife--by no means his wife) must needs go in search of Harry Foster and
his probable murderer.  It was the first real mystery ever known in
Breckonside.

Now the missing carrier and postman had no open enemies.  He was a
quiet, middle-aged man who had lived long in the village, a widower
without children; no man's foe, not even his own; a steady,
trustworthy, kindly man, "and," said Miss Harbishaw, the postmistress,
"to be trusted with untold gold," or, what was much more
(departmentally), with unsealed mail bags.

The telegraph was no doubt working hard to bring up officers from East
Dene, Clifton, and Thorsby, the big towns to the south.  Meantime,
however, all the male population of Breckonside poured northward.  But
Elsie and I got away the very first.

I wanted her to stay at home, but she would not.  She would be more
frightened alone in that house by the Bridge End, she said, than with
me.  So as I could not refuse Elsie many things, of course she had to
have permission to come.  Besides, she would have come at any rate,
permission or no permission.  It was difficult to be even with Elsie.
So I was very gracious and let her.

As soon as we were clear of the village and across the bridge, Elsie
and I came out upon Brom Common.  This is a rare place for Saturdays at
all times of the year, but specially in autumn, because of the brambles
that grow there.  Now it was all green and yellow with gorse bushes.
Artists painted it, coming all the way from East Dene and Thorsby to do
it.  And Elsie and I found it good to bird-nest in.  There were two
roads across the waste.  One to the left struck off just past Elsie's
cottage, and the other went to the right; that was the road which Harry
Foster must have taken the night before.  He had no calls to make on
the way.  The letters for that district would be delivered by the
walking post carriers going to Bewick Upton, and taking the farms and
houses on their way.

"Let's take the short cut--you know--the footpath over Moor Clint,"
said Elsie, pointing with her finger to a long low heathery ridge
through which the grey stone peeped.  A pale grey thing, like a piece
of twine, wimpled up it and ducked over the top.

"Very likely," I cried, "and miss anything that is on the road."

"We shan't miss anything," she said, giving me a look of disdain;
"don't you remember the leaves in the cart?  Where do you suppose they
came from?"

I had not thought of that.  Yes, of course, there was nothing of that
sort on the Bewick Upton road nearer than Sparhawk Wood, where the big
Moat Forest throws a spur across the Bewick road.  On the left-hand
road it was quite different.  There were trees nearly all the way,
right from the Bridge End of Breckonside.  But then, as official
postman, Harry Foster had his route marked out for him, and there was
nothing to take him toward the left--indeed, nothing but farms and
trout streams all the way to the Cheviots.

So, like dogs on a live scent, Elsie and I stretched across the moor by
the Moor Clint footpath as fast as our legs would carry us.  The rest
of the search parties from the village kept to the road, going slowly
and searching minutely.  But I was sure that Elsie was right, and that
whatever there was to find would lie beyond the array of dark-green fir
trees which stood like an army across our path.

It was kind of quaky, too, I admit, going along, getting nearer and
nearer all the time.  For, when you came to think about it, there might
be a murderer any where about there, waiting for you.  But Elsie did
not seem to mind.  Elsie always knew just what to do, and wasn't at all
backward about telling a fellow, either.

I forget if I have ever told you what Elsie Stennis was like.  Well,
nothing very particular at that time--only a tallish slip of a girl,
who walked like a boy, a first-rate whistler, and a good jumper at a
ditch.  She always had her hair tied behind her head with a blue
ribbon, and then falling all in a mess about her shoulders.  It
wouldn't stop still, but blew out every way with the wind, and was such
a nuisance.  I would have had it cut off, but Elsie wouldn't.  It was
yellowy coloured.

In spite of this, Elsie was a first-rate companion, nearly as good as a
boy, and just no trouble at all.  Indeed, I generally did what she
said, not because I didn't know as well, but because it kept her in a
better temper.  Her temper was like kindling wood, and I hate being
bothered, unless, of course, it is something serious.

You mustn't think we were so very brave going off like that to find out
about Harry Foster.  Only, you see, we had always lived in the country,
and didn't think that any one could run faster than we could.  In town
I was scared out of my life lest I should slip in front of a tramcar,
and even Elsie went pale the first time she went on one of the ferry
steamers.  But in the country we were all right.

Well, nothing happened till we got to the edge of Sparhawk Wood, where
we came to the road again, the road along which poor Harry had come
with his load of letters and parcels very early that morning, and
where, no doubt, the village people were even then searching for his
body.  I do not deny that when we felt our feet on its smooth, white
dust we went a bit slower, Elsie and I.  So would you.  We didn't
really mind, of course, but just we went slower.  And we saw to it that
the back track was clear.  Elsie picked up her skirts.  She was a good
runner--better than I was.  She said, after, she would have waited for
me, but--well, no matter.

We saw the long road like a gray ribbon laid across the brown and
yellow moor.  There was nobody there--no black heap, nothing.  Before
us we could not see far.  The highway took a turn and plunged into
Sparhawk Wood very suddenlike, and got dark and gloomy.  We stood on
the stile a while in the sunshine--I don't know why, and presently we
got an awful start.  For Elsie declared, and stuck to it, that she saw
something move among some bracken down by the burnside.

I got ready to run.  Perhaps I had even started, when Elsie called me
back.

"It is only Davie Elshiner, the night poacher," she cried.  "I can see
the patch on the left knee of his trousers.  Nance Edgar sewed it on.
I saw her."

And as neither of us were in the least afraid of Davie Elshiner, alive,
dead, asleep, awake, drunk, sober, or in any intermediate state, we
hailed him.  But he did not answer our shouts.  So we went to look.
And as we went I said to Elsie, "What if he has been a witness to the
deed and they have killed him, too!"

"Come on," she said, grabbing me, "let's see, any way--we can't stop
now!"

"_But suppose they should kill us!_"  I could hardly get the words out.
I was not frightened, only I seemed to lose my voice.  Funny, wasn't
it?  Elsie hushed me down quick, and said, nastily, that if I was
afraid I could take her hand or go home to nursie.

Afraid!  Me afraid!  Likely!  Would I have been there if I had been
afraid?  But it was Davie, right enough, and we were both relieved.  He
had a good backful of fish, regular preserved water beauties that never
could have been got except in the Duke's pools on the Bram Burn.  They
were all done up in fern leaves, as nice as ninepence, and as freckly
as Fred Allen's nose.  But Davie had stopped by the way after catching
them.  A flask and the remains of a loaf told why.

"Davie," said Elsie, shaking him; "wake up, man, we have something to
ask you!"

Davie opened his eyes.  He was dazed, not so much at the bright sun and
the heather--he was used to that--but at seeing us.  And he looked all
round about him to take his bearings.

"What are you doing so far from home?" he asked, sitting up on his
elbow.  "The dominie will thrash you!"

"Davie," said Elsie, "did you see Harry Foster this morning?"

Davie laughed with a funny chuckle he had, but which sounded awful just
then.  "Aye," he said, "I was in his cart, lassie.  He gied me a lift
to kirk or market--I will not be telling you which!"

"Davie," I said, "tell us.  This is no joke.  Harry Foster is very
likely murdered, and all the Queen's mail bags stolen.  A lot of money,
too, they were sending from the bank in East Dene to the new branch in
Bewick."

I knew that because I had heard my father say so.

Never did I see a man so struck as Davie.  His face changed.  The smirk
went out of it and it got gray, with the blue watery eyes sticking out
like gooseberries.

"Then if I cannot prove myself innocent," he gasped, "they will hang
me!"

"But you are innocent?" I asked eagerly.

"Ow, aye, I'm innocent enough," he said, "but can I prove it?  That's
the question.  There's a deal of folk, gameys and landlords, that has a
pick at poor Davie for the odd snare he sets and the big trout he
catches.  They'll nail this on him.  And I gave Harry two--three flies
newly busked," he added hoarsely, "did you hear?..."

"Yes," said I, "I saw them.  They were stuck in the leather apron."

Davie the poacher raised his hand in a discouraged way to his throat,
and caressed it, feeling it all over like a doctor.

"I'm feared ye are no worth thrippens!" he said.




CHAPTER III

THE BAILIFF OF DEEP MOAT GRANGE

Elsie and I cheered him.  We would do what we could, which truly was
not much.  But I promised for my father, whose arm was long in
Breckonside, reaching even to East Dene.  But the poacher shook his
head.

"They will get poor Davie.  They will put it on him--yes, for sure!" he
repeated.  And from this melancholy conclusion he was not to be moved.
He offered to accompany us, however, on our search.  And we were glad
of that, because we were quite sure of his innocence, and in such a
case the difference between three and two is very marked.  Two--you
want to get close and rub shoulders.  Three--you scatter and look the
hedges.

We advised the old poacher to hide his fish under the bank, but, with
strong good sense, he refused.

"They are Davie's only chance," he said, "there is just a possibility
that there's an _aw-li-bi_ in Davie's basket.  He has catched so many
of the Duke's trouts since three this morning that they may think he
could not have had the time to make away with a man as well!"

As we went he told us how the post carrier had got his mail bags from
Miss Harbishaw, the postmistress, on the stroke of three that
morning--"a fearful sight in a mustard-coloured flannel dressing
gown"--Davie described her.  He himself had stood on the other side of
the mail cart, well in the shadow.

"Did Miss Harbishaw see you?" Elsie asked.

"Well," said the poacher, "I would not just make so bold as to say.
She might have seen my legs, mixed up with Bess's piebald stockings.
But I keeped fairly quiet, not wanting her to spot the fishing basket
on my back."

Davie was not stupid, and he saw clearly enough that it was the best
thing he could do if Harry Foster were really dead, to go and help look
for his murderer.  So he came along with us, telling us of the talk he
had had with the carrier in his cart.

"I was telling stories, and we were wonderful merry!" he admitted.

"How far did you go with him?" we asked.

"To where the road dives into the wood like a rabbit!" he answered.
"Here!" he cried, suddenly throwing up his hand.

And there, plain enough to be seen, were the marks of Davie's boot
heels as he had leaped upon the bank from the post gig.

"Then I crossed the dyke and went down to the waterside."

From that point, as you may suppose, we followed carefully the marks of
the wheels.  The pony had been going no faster than a walk.  The tracks
were deeply impressed, and as it was damper under the trees, you could
even see where Piebald Bess had been sparing her lame foot, which, of
course, she would not have the chance of doing when pushed to a trot.

Then Davie came to a halt, Elsie just behind him.  There was nothing
particular, only the ground was pawed and cut about in little crescent
discs, as if a horse had got wearied standing and wanted to get on.
Then beyond that the wheel ruts were much deeper than before.

"He has talked to somebody, he has taken other passengers here," cried
Davie, "and I never heard them--fool that I was--thinking of nothing
but the Duke's silly trout in the burn yonder."

Without speaking we followed on, till the Brom Water, slow, deep, and
still, lay before us.  It was strictly preserved, and we boys dared not
visit it for fear of the fishery watchers and keepers, who were up to
all sorts of tricks to catch us.  Only old hands like Davie dared such
a thing, and even they chose their time.

The road went across a bridge, a high-arched, old-fashioned structure,
which I liked coming over in our light cart, because of the curious
"hunch" it gave you as if you were on a swing.  And close in by the
bridge and on the near side of it, we came at last on what we had come
out to look for--the signs of a struggle, the wheel tracks confused and
partly up on the bank, the traces of many feet, very indistinct owing
to the hard, dry ground, and (what took all our eyes) a dark irregular
patch on the left side of the road, which had filled and overflowed the
deep furrow of a track.

It did not need any doctor's certificate to tell us that that was
blood, and we knew very well that we stood where poor Harry Foster had
been foully dealt with.  But of the carrier himself we could see
nothing.  The pony had bounded ahead at full speed, and for Davie's
sake we thought it best not to go farther.  Because the people who were
coming along the Breckonside road might easily cover over the tracks or
destroy them, crowding to see.

So we went to meet the first of them at the place where Davie Elshiner
had wished his benefactor a good morning and jumped on the bank, with
the last jest on his lips.  We were just in time.  Codling, our fat
policeman, was there, and he took up Davie on the spot, warning him
that all he might say would be used against him.

"I don't care," said Davie.  "I will tell all I know, and that's little
enough--more shame to me for going after trouts with poor Harry so near
his end."

The village men scattered to search the wood and the waterside, finding
nothing but sundry "stances" where the angler had stood while fishing,
and the nook in which he had slept among the bracken, with the marks of
our feet as we went toward him from the stile.

We started off home without making any more discoveries, and as we went
Elsie pointed up to the firs above our heads.

"What sort of leaves were in the cart when we saw it?" she asked me
suddenly.

"Some kind of big, broad leaves--oak, I think," I answered, for indeed,
I had paid no very great attention.

"Well," she said, "will you please tell me where big, broad leaves came
from in Spar hawk Wood?"

And then I saw how true it was--the thing that she meant to say.  There
were only tall Scotch firs in the Sparhawk, and not a low-growing tree
or one with a leaf upon it!  Only pine needles and fir cones.

"We will come back in the morning," I said to Elsie, "and see what we
can find.  Piebald Bess never came back this road!"

"As, indeed, we might have seen before this by the single tracks," she
added.  And, indeed, it was no great discovery after all.  But old
Codling and the village men just took it for granted, and as many of
the farmers and even my father came in conveyances there was soon no
lack of tracks all over the road.

But Elsie and I kept our counsel and made tryst for the morning.  It is
terrible to get bitten with the wanting to find out things.  The more
you know the more you want to know.

Next morning it was still and clear, with a promise of heat.  Elsie had
asked Nance Edgar if she could go, but I had dispensed with asking my
father.  Indeed, so long as he was assured that I was the cleverest boy
in school, and at the top of the topmost class, he did not trouble much
about me, having other things on his mind.  And Mr. Mustard was always
ready to tell him all that.  Besides it was true.  I was not so clever
as Elsie, and I did not pretend to be.  But I could lick everybody in
Breckonside school into fits, and the master was cowed of my father.  I
think he would have let me sit on his tall hat!

This morning was a Friday, as I remember, and there were plenty of men
searching the moor, prowling about the woods, some with picks and
shovels, some just with their hands in their pockets.  They were
looking for Harry Foster.  The East Dene police, too, were all about
the edges of Sparhawk Wood, as important as if they knew all about it
but wouldn't tell.  One of them, posted by the big, black patch to keep
people off, first told us to go back, and then asked where we were
going.

Elsie merely told him that so far as she knew the road went further--on
to Bewick Upton, in fact.

"Are you the kids that came across the moor and found this--and the
prisoner?"

To make him civil we told him we were, but that Davie Elshiner was
surely innocent and would not harm a fly.

"That's as may be," said the policeman; "what did he say when you woke
him?"

We told the man that Davie was afraid of being suspected, having been
last seen with the missing man, also how he was sure that because he
was a known poacher people would not believe him.

"Aye," said the policeman, nodding his head dreadfully wisely, "indeed,
he was right to say that.  Ah, a bad conscience is our best friend!  It
is indeed!"  And everything we could say in favour of Davie seemed just
to tell against him, so that we had to be content with saying that he
was the person least likely to do such a thing, because he would
certainly be suspected, and that they might as well suspect us.

This last remark seemed to impress the policeman, who pulled out a fat
notebook and solemnly jotted it down before our eyes.

"It's a good rule in our business," he said slowly, "to suspect the
least likely persons.  Thank you very much for your interesting
communication--thank you very much, indeed!"

"Ah, you're dotty!" I called out to him in a sudden fume of anger, and
left him standing there and slowly buckling up the flap of the inside
pocket in which he had stowed away his precious notebook.

Now I am not going to pretend that Elsie and I found anything very
grand that day, for we didn't.  But at any rate we knew for certain how
Dappled Bess came home, and where the leaves came from.  It was all
simple enough and quite natural.  The poor beast had got a fright by
the bridge on the Bewick road.  She turned off it, therefore, as soon
as she could.  We found the wheel tracks leading away to the left along
a rough moor track.  The cart had been going fast, evidently empty or
at least very lightly laden.  For there was little depth to the
impression even in fairly mossy places, but the rocks and stones were
bumped and scarred with the iron tire as the wagon rebounded from side
to side.

We soon found ourselves making for the highway, which is known in our
parts as the Old Military Road.  It goes into Scotland to a place
called Longtown, and beyond that, they say, to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
But that I only knew from hearsay.  At any rate it was old, and so were
the woods all about it.  Centuries old they were, and the fine old
house among them was called Deep Moat Grange.  It stood right in the
middle, and had always been inhabited by rich folk.  But, only a few
years before, my father had done it all up for old Mr. Stennis, whom
they called the Golden Farmer, because of the great deal of money he
had made farming and dealing in cattle.  He was living there now, and
for that matter was Elsie's very own grandfather.  We called him the
Unnatural, because he would have nothing to do with her--all because of
something her mother had done long ago, before Elsie was so much as
born.  But he was a lusty old cock bird, and being rich was much
respected.  He bred first-rate sporting terriers that brought in a
power of money, my father said.  We knew all about him, too, that is as
much as any one knew, because Nance Edgar sometimes worked there by
favour of the farm bailiff, Mr. Simon Ball.

Elsie and I were standing at the turn of the road looking at the tracks
of the wheels which Harry Foster's cart had made in the grass, when who
should come up but the very man, Mr. Ball, the bailiff at Deep Moat
Grange.

He knew me, which was nothing extraordinary.  They say I am the image
of what my father was at my age, and, of course, everybody knows him.
If they don't, he tells them, and sees if he can do business with them.

Well, Mr. Ball came up and asked us what we were looking at, and when
we had told him, he blurted out all in a gabble that he had seen the
blue and red cart with the piebald mare come tearing over the moor road
yesterday morning.  He had been in the little "lantern" above the
drying-room at the corn mill, which is so high that you can see over
the tree tops and look right out on the moor.  He thought it was a
runaway, but when he had time to run down to the end of the avenue, he
could only see it like a little square dab rocking and lurching from
one side of the road to the other, and scraping trees and bushes like
all possessed.

"And has nobody come to tell you that poor Harry Foster is murdered?" I
said.

"I heard the men in the yard talking about some such suspicion," he
said quite calmly, "but nobody has been here.  You see, Master Yarrow,
our old gov'nor, Mr. Stennis, has been up in London for three days
seeing his lawyer, and he don't like folk coming about the Grange when
he is from home!"

"So I have heard," said I, "and he keeps some fine dogs there, too, to
see that they don't."

For my father had refused to deliver Mr. Stennis' goods, except at Mr.
Ball's house, which was on the main road, and no tearing dogs kept.

"Very like--very like," said Mr. Ball hastily; "and who may this fine
young lady be--your sister?  She seems to favour you, sir."

"Elsie Stennis," says I, "and if she had her rights you know very well
what she would be!  Your young mistress!"

"Elsie Stennis?" he gasped, "not poor Bell's daughter--and Robin's?"

"The same!"

"Bell and Robin Stennis--I mind them well.  But where, how----"

The bailiff stopped, all thrown out of gear, much more affected,
indeed, than when it was a question of Harry Foster's death.

"Well," he went on at last, "it's perhaps as well not asking.  I might
blurt things out.  But I hope--I may say that I pray--that the day may
come when you shall have your rights, young lady, and I shall see yon
crew sent about their business to a madhouse.  That's the fit place for
such as they!  There they go.  I must be off.  They will be at their
processioning again, and Mr. Stennis will never forgive me if they come
to a mischief or go off the premises!"

We did not know then what he was talking about, but we could hear over
the green tree tops the sound of a cornet playing a marching tune, and
marvellously well, too.




CHAPTER IV

THE GOLDEN FARMER

But that same night we got the full story, so far as she knew it, from
Nance Edgar.  It did not help us any in finding out what had become of
poor Harry the carrier and his mail bags, but because it involved
Elsie's father and mother I will admit that it interested me nearly as
much.

Nance Edgar was a weather-beaten woman of about fifty.  She had lived
nearly all her life in the fields, and was tanned like a leather
schoolbag for carrying books.  She was kindly, but you never could have
told it on her.  Only I knew because she had been kind to Elsie.

Afterwards I found out that often she would go supperless to bed that
Elsie might have something to eat when she came home from school.

But when Nance Edgar talked it was with the curious kind of quiet I
have noticed about the speech of gentlefolks.  The other field workers
said that she kept herself to herself.  But in the furrow, or on the
rig, she was kind to young ones or feeble folk who were not up to their
work.  So Nance, in spite of her aloofness, was not at all unpopular.
She always had work, too, because she could be trusted with anything.

So that very night I said to Elsie: "Let's have it out with Nance about
your people.  Your grandfather is as rich as can be.  There may be
money in it, and my father says you should never let that go a-begging.
Besides you ought to know about your father and mother.  It is only
respectable if you are asked."

"Oh, I know all that," said Elsie, mightily unmoved, "my mother married
her cousin and her father was angry.  She ran away.  My grandfather can
keep his old money.  Who wants it?  Not I!  I am happier with Nance."

This was very well, but if Elsie was not curious, I was.  So I cooed
and besought round Nance Edgar that night, till at last she told us
everything in her little kitchen, after the tea dishes had been washed
up and the coal fire was beginning to catch--the flame paying bo-peep
with the bars, and every now and then coming brightly out in a
triumphant jet of light, unexpected like a cuckoo clock, shining on
Elsie's yellow hair and Nance's calm, tired face as she told us the
story--

"Breckonside was not a big place twenty years ago (she said), even less
than it is now, but there is one house that is a-wanting.  That was
your grandfather's house, Elsie, him they call the Golden Farmer, that
lives now at the Grange in Deep Moat Hollow.

"It was up yonder beyond the church, and in the summer mornings the
tombstones were blithe to see, glinting rosy-coloured with the dew on
them, and the long, well-nourished grass hiding the inscriptions.  Now
you may go up the burnside to the turn of the road where the kirkburn
runs bonnie and clear down the hill.  The heather and the breckon grow
there together, and that they say gave its name to the
village--Breckonside.  At any rate, there where stood your
grandfather's cottage--he was a poor man then--ye will see a kind of
knowe or hillock, greener than the rest.  But of the house not one
stone is left upon another.  The kindly mould is over all.  The hemlock
and the foxglove, what we used to call 'bloody fingers,' grow tall and
red where lovers whispered cannily by the ingle nook, and of all that
well-set garden plot where Hobby the Miser--that is now Mr. Howard
Stennis--grew his weaving lint and dibbled his cabbages, only a single
lilac bush looks over the corner of the broken-down dyke as you pass by!

"But at that time it was a heartsome spot.  I mind it well; I was young
mysel'."  (Here Nance Edgar sighed and was silent awhile, looking at
the pouting bo-peep of the little blue flames between the hearth bars.)
"A-well, youth comes and youth goes, but at the last the greensward
covers it like Miser Hobby's cottage.

"Long they dwelt there, Miser Stennis and his daughter Bell.  She had
the name of being bonnie to look on in her young days, and many a lover
would fain have hung up his hat behind the kitchen door and taken his
seat at Hobby Stennis's table as his son-in-law.

"But Hobby was a far-seeing carle and a plain-spoken.  He had but one
word for all such.

"'When I hae a felt want for ony sons-in-law I will put a notice in
Editor Drake's weekly screed, or hae it intimated in the parish kirk!'

"There were ill reports even then about the miser.  Lights were seen
wandering up the hillsides above the cottage when the nights were mirk
and unkindly.  Hobby would be found far from home with a basket
gathering simples and medical plants--that is, by his way of it.  So he
grew to be counted a wizard, and had the name of money which is so
useful to a man in some ways, but more than all else makes the folk
jealous, too.

"It was less than natural that Hobby should always have the best lint
wherewith to weave the flowered tablecovers by which he made his fame.
Why should he have early potatoes a clear fortnight before the rest of
the Breckonsiders?  But chiefly it was the ill-will about money that
bred bad blood.  Over the door of the parish church of Breckonside they
had printed the motto, 'We serve the Lord.'  But the right words should
have been, 'We envy and grieve at the good of our neighbour.'  For when
the men thought of Miser Stennis's money bags they could have felled
him, and when the women saw Bell Stennis's bonnie face smiling over her
braw mantle, they set to work and bethought them what lie they could
tell about her.  All except me, and I was always by her side, as near
as might be, loving her more than my own flesh and blood.  And Bell
told me all that was in her heart, because you see we had been at
school together, sitting side by side on the same bench and sharing the
same apple and toffee stick.

"So I was the only soul that knew it beforehand, when Bonnie Bell
suddenly took matters into her own hand and gave Miser Hobby a
son-in-law he had never bargained for--a first cousin of her own, an
ensign in a marching regiment.  The two foolish ones ran to Gretna to
get married--I with them in the coach.  But I had to tramp it back on
my own feet, with Miser Hobby's malediction on my head as well as on
theirs.  You see he had spent money on the young fellow's commission
hoping to get him out of the road, as soon as he suspected what was in
the wind between Bell and him.

"But the regiment stayed on in Longtown just over the borders, and
nearly every day Frank Stennis and a company would come through the
countryside with feathers waving bravely in their bonnets, drawing in
the silly young by the glint of their accoutrements, or wiling them to
list by the merry noise of the pipe and drum that went before them and
set the pulses jumping even in weak women's hearts.

"But after Bell took the road to Gretna, and the white cat by the
Breckonside was left lonely, the miser never uttered word, but sat with
shut mouth at the weaving of the wonderful flowered napery, the secret
of which he alone possessed.  And if he could not weave himself a new
daughter with all his skill, at least he kept himself so busy that he
seldom minded the one he had lost.

"And then he took to leaving his weaving, which nobody could do as well
as he, and trying a new trade--that of cattle dealing and droving.  At
least, so it was said.  At any rate Laird Stennis would shut up the
cottage, and the sound of the weary shuttle would cease by the
waterside.  He would be seen riding to every market, cattle mart, horse
fair, lamb sale, wool sale, displenishing-roup within fifty mile, his
shoulders bent weaver fashion and his thin shanks legginged in untanned
leather.

"But what was the wonder of the folk of Breckonside to see Laird
Stennis, who could hardly abide his own kith and kin, suddenly bring a
great stalwart colt of a ne'er-do-well, Jeremy Orrin by name, home to
his house.  For the creature was hardly held accountable for his
actions.  He had once killed a man in a brawl at a fair and been tried
for his life, but had gotten off as being half an idiot, or what the
folk about the south of the Cheviots called a 'natural.'

"The two of them brawled together, and drank and carried on to be the
scandal of the place, till something happened--it was never known
what--but Miser Stennis was laid up with a crack in his skull, and the
Mad Jeremy tended him, gentle and tender as a mother they said.  But so
fierce with any one else that none, even the doctor, ventured near the
cottage.

"Still your mother's name was never mentioned, and when others spoke to
him of his daughter he would look round for fear of Daft Jeremy, who
was jealous of her they said.

"And your father--well, I misdoubt me that he was no better than he
should be.  And my poor Bell had but a sorrowful time of it, following
the regiment, and at last left behind when they embarked for the
Indies.  Then her father sent her word that having made her bed she
might lie on it.  She had no rights on him or on his money.

"So a year or two slipped by, and maybe another five or six to the back
of that, and still no word of Bell.  When, true as I am telling ye, who
but Bell brought back word of herself.  Faith, and it was strange word!
I mind it clear as yesterday, for it was me, Nance Edgar, that am this
day old and done, who gat the first glint of her.

"It was a fine summer morn, early in June, and the clouds in the sky to
the east were just the colour of the first brier rosebuds in the hedge
by the roadside.  I came up the brae like a Untie and as free o' care,
for my heart was light in those good days.  There stood the cot of
Breckonside before me, shining white in the sun.  For the miser, though
he spared most other things, never was a sparer of good whitewash.  I
was just beginning to listen for the _click-clack_ of Hobby's shuttle,
when down by the waterside methought I saw a ferlie.

"Fegs, I said to myself that surely the old times had come back again,
and that the wee folk were disporting themselves once more in broad
daylight.  For, on the grass by the burn a bonnie bit bairn ran hither
and thither waving its hands and laughing to the heavens for very
gladness.  The night had been calm, a 'gossamer night,' as the gipsy
folk call it, and from hedge to hemlock, and from lowly bracken to tall
Queen o' the Meadow, the silver threads were stretched taut like the
cordage of some sea-going ship.  The dew shone silver clear on ilka
silken strand, and the blobs o' it were like pearls and diamonds in the
morning sun.

"And aye the longer I stood the wilder the bairn ran and skipped
lightfoot as a fairy herself.  'Bonnie--bonnie--oh, bonnie!' she cried,
clapping her hands and laughing, 'see mither, mither, are they no unco
bonnie?'

"Then, by the side of the beck, as if, being wearied with travel, she
had set her down to take a drink of the caller burn water, I saw a
woman sit.  She was beneath a bush of hazel, and her head was resting
tired-like on her hand.  So, being back there in the shadow, I had not
noticed her at the first, being taken up, as was small wonder, with the
sight of that bonnie yellow-haired bairn flichtering here and there
like a butterfly in the sun.

"Then the wee lass saw me and ran whatever she could to me.  She took
my hand and syne looked up in my face as trustful-like as if she ha'
kenned me all her days.

"'Here woman,' she cried, 'come and wake my minnie to me, for I canna.
She winna hearken when her wee Elsie speaks to her.'

"Hand in hand we went up to the poor thing, and even as I went a great
fear gripped me by the heart.  For the woman sat still, even when my
step must have sounded in her ear.  I laid my hand on her, and, as I am
a living woman, she was clay cauld.  The bairn looked ever up into my
face.

"'Can you no waken my mither, either?' she said wistfully.

"'No,' said I.  'No, my puir, wee lassie!'  For truth to tell, I kenned
not what to say.

"'Will minnie never waken?' she asked again, bright as a button.

"'I fear not, bonnie lassie,' said I, and the tear was in my eye.

"Then the elf clapped her hands and danced like a yellow butterfly over
the lea.

"'Then she willna greet any more!  She willna be hungry any more.  She
will never need bite o' meat nor thread o' claes for ever and ever
mair.'  She lilted the words almost as if she had been singing a tune.
'She will be richt pleased, my minnie.  For, oh, she grat sair and
often!  She carried me in her arms till her ain feet were hurted and
she could gang nae farther.  Late yestreen she sat doon here to wash
them, and I sat, too, and after that she cuddled me in her airms.  Are
ye no richt glad for my minnie?'

"I telled her that I was glad, for naught less would satisfy her,
though even as I spak the words the sob rose in my throat.

"And as we stood there, looking at the woman sitting with her face on
her hands, what should happen but that the auld miser should come
hirpling to the door, and there, too, looking over his shoulder, was
Daft Jeremy, that the village bairns were wont to cry at and call the
'Mounster.'

"'What hae ye there, Nance Edgar?' the old man cried, shaking his stick
at me; 'keep away from my door with your doxies and changeling bairns.'"

"But I was civil to him for his age's sake, and also because of the
witless man that was looking over his shoulder.  For it is not good to
cross such as the Lord has smitten in their understanding, and so do my
own folk never.

"'It is a woman, Laird Stennis,' quoth I, 'that hath set herself down
to die by your burnside.'

"'Die,' cried he, with a queer scream most like a frighted hen flying
down off the baulks, 'what word is that to speak?  A woman dead by my
burnside--what richt had she there?  Who has taken such a liberty with
Hobby Stennis?'

"'Nay, that you can come and see for yourself,' said I, a little
nettled at the carle's hardness of heart.  So the auld miser, bent and
stiff, came hirpling barehead down the path, and behind him, looking
most uncanny, danced Daft Jeremy, combing his hair with a weaver's
heckle and muttering to himself.  The morning sunshine fell fair on
this strange couple, and when she saw him the little maid let go my
hand and ran to Laird Stennis.  She would have taken his hand, but he
pushed her off.  Whereat, she being affronted, the witch caught at his
stick and pulled it away from him before he could resist.  Then she gat
astride and played horses with it on the green grass of the burnside
dell.  It was like an incantation.

"But without heeding her the old man went to the woman, and, lifting up
her head, looked steadfastly in her face.

"'God in his heaven be merciful,' he cried, 'it is my daughter Bell!'

"Then the 'mounster' laughed loud and long, and wrapping his 'heckle'
in a wisp of paper, he played a tune upon it with his mouth, dancing
round and crying, 'There's her right for ye--ye said she hadna a right,
Laird Stennis!  Ye were that hard ye refused the woman room to die at
your dykeside.  But Bell has come hame to claim her own.  Coffin and
clay--coffin and clay!  Sax foot of clean kirkyard sods!  Faith, I wish
a' Daft Jeremy's enemies had the same, nae mair and nae less.  But it's
as weel as it is, Laird Stennis--for Jeremy cannot be doing with grown
women about the noose o' Breckonside.  And it's him that has the say
now, ye ken!'

"But the old man answered nothing, good or ill.  He only stood and
looked down at his daughter, muttering to himself words that sounded
like 'Bell has comed hame....  My bairn has comed back to me at the
last!'

"So in time the miser buried his daughter decently, and took the little
lass hame to him to bring up.  But when this came to be talked of in
the countryside, there was a well-to-do woman in Dumfries toon, a
Mistress Comly or Comline, that was some kin to Bell Stennis through
her mother, and when she heard o' the bit bairn shut up in that
lonesome house with only a miser and a daft man, she had heart pity on
her, and as soon as she had shut her shop one Saturday afternoon, off
she set to Breckonside in a pony cart that she used to bring her goods
up from the port quay.

"It was but a coldrife welcome she gat at the white house of
Breckonside, but sorrow a bit Margaret Comline cared for that.  She
tied up her sonsy beast, that was, like herself, fat as pats of butter,
to the yettpost of the miser's garden.  And when he came to the door
himself, she did not take a couple of minutes in telling the auld runt
her business, plump and plain.

"'I hae comed to ask ye to put away that daft man,' she said, 'and get
a decent woman for a house-keeper, Laird Stennis.'

"'Meanin' yourself, Margar't Comline,' interrupted the miser, with a
cunning smirk.  He had shut the door in her face, and was conducting
negotiations through a crack.

"'_Me_ be your housekeeper!' cried the visitor, 'me that is a ratepayer
and a well-considered indweller in the burgh o' Dumfries.  Man, I would
not cross your doorstep though ye were Provost.  But I hear that ye hae
this bit bairn in the hoose, and a lassie bairn, too (that's full
cousin's daughter to myself).  I have come to tell ye that it is
neither Christian nor decent to bring up the wee thing but and ben wi'
a kenned ill-doer like Daft Jeremy, that has twice been tried for his
life for the shedding of blood!'

"From behind the closed inner door of the cothouse there came a
high-pitched angry cry that garred the very blood run chill as ice in
Margaret Comline's veins.  I mean that the thought of it did
afterwards.  For at the time she just looked about her to see that
Donald, her pony, was not far away, and that the road was clear to the
light market cart in case that she had to make a break for it.  She had
eke a sturdy staff in her hand, that the loons of the port kenned
bravely the weight of.

"It was the voice of the man-wanting-wit, crying out to be at her, that
she heard.

"'She has ta'en from me my guid name,' his words reached her through
the very stone and lime of the house, 'and she wad take the bonnie
siller oot of the black chest that you and Jeremy keep so carefully.
Gie the woman the bit lassie bairn, Laird Stennis, and let her travel.
For less will not serve her, and forbye a bairn is only an expense and
an eating up o' good meat in any man's house!'

"And while the din was at its height in the cot, there came a sound to
Mistress Comline's ear that garred her kind heart loup within her.  It
was like the whimpering of a bairn that is ill used and dares not cry
out loud.  And with that she for gat her fear of the strange fool, Daft
Jeremy, and with her naked hands she shook the door of the cothouse of
Breckonside till the iron stinchel clattered in its ring.

"'The magistrates o' Dumfries shall ken o' this or I am a day aulder!'
she cried in to them.  'Gie me the lassie or the preventive men shall
hear of the barrels ye hae hidden in the yard.  Supervisor Imrie shall
be here and search every inch high and low if ye lay as much as a
finger on the innocent bairn!'

"And even as she cried out threatenings and shook the stout oaken door
so that the leaves almost fell asunder, Margaret Comline heard a noise
behind her, and whipped about quickly with her heart in her mouth, for
she thought it was Daft Jeremy come out to slay her.

"But instead it was the wee lass herself that had escaped by a kind of
a miracle through the window of the 'aumry' or pantry closet.  For
Laird Stennis had it closed with a board, grudging the expense of
glass.  The lass was greeting and laughing at the same time, feared to
the marrow of her bits of bones, but yet crouse withal.  Mistress
Comline marvelled to see her.

"'I hae left the stead of my teeth in his hand, I wot!' she said, as
Mistress Comline helped her into the light cart at the roadside.

"'And see what I brought with me,' she added as they drove away.  It
was a shagreen leather pocketbook like those which well-to-do farmers
carry, or rich English drovers that come to the cattle trysts to buy
for the English market.  And Mistress Comline, struck with fear lest
she should be taken for a thief, would have turned back, but that at
that very moment, out of the door of the cot, there burst a terrifying
figure--even Daft Jeremy himself, a great flesher's knife uplifted in
his hand.  He was scraiching out words without meaning, and looked so
fleysome that the decent woman e'en slipped the shagreen purse into her
reticule basket and laid whiplash to Donald till that pampered beast
must have thought that the punishment of all his sins had overtaken him
at once.

"The 'mounster' pursued after them with these and such like affrighting
outcries to the very entering in of Longtown.  And never had Margaret
Comline, decent woman, been so glad to recognize Her Majesty's
authority as when she saw Supervisor Imrie with two-three of his men
come riding up from the Brig-End and out upon the green grass of the
Terreggles Braes.  But she said nothing, only gave them a good day in
passing, and bade them 'beware o' the puir "naiteral," Daft Jeremy,
that was in one o' his fits o' anger that day!'

"'Sic a fierce craitur should be in the Towbooth.  He is a danger to
the lieges,' said Supervisor Imrie, adding more cautiously, 'That is,
were it no that he would be a cess on the burgh and pairish!"

"When Mistress Comline gat to her own door she first delivered Donald
into the hands of her serving prentice, Robin Carmorie, as stout and
blythe a lad as ever walked the Plainstanes.  But the wee lass she took
by the hand up to her own chamber, and there she stripped her to the
skin and washed her and put fine raiment on her, new from the
shop--aye, and did not rest from her labours till she had gathered
every auld rag that she found on her and committed them to the flames,
as if they had been art and part in the wizardry of Laird Stennis, her
grandfather, and the coming ill-repute of the white cothouse on the
brae-face of Breckonside.

"But, fearing she knew not clearly what, she sealed the shagreen
pocket-book up in a clean white wrapper and laid it aside in her
drawer, saying to herself, 'If this be honestly come by the laird is no
the man to forget to ca' in for his ain.  And if no----"  Here a shake
of the head and a shrewd smile intimated that the contents of the
pocket-book might one day be useful to its finder, little Elsie
Comline, as she was now to be named.

"'And wha has a better richt!' the shopkeeper would add, perhaps to
salve her conscience in the matter.

"But, indeed, it was but seldom, the pocket-book once safe in the
drawer, that she thought about the matter at all.  For Margaret Comline
was a busy woman of affairs, having under her serving lassies and
prentice loons, a shop on the ground floor of a house in the Vennel,
and a well-patronized stall in the market.  All day she went to and
fro, busily commending her goods and reproving her underlings with
equal earnestness and point.  Sunday and Saturday the wrinkle was never
off her brow.  Like Martha in the Scripture, she was careful and
troubled about many things.  She read but seldom, and when she did her
memory retained not long the imprint of what she read.  So that our
young monkey, Elsie, being fresh from the mischief-making of the
grammar school, where she was drilled with a class of boys, used to
shift the marker of woven silk back ten pages or so in the godly book
over which her foster mother fell asleep on Sabbath afternoons.  By
which means Mistress Comline was induced to peruse the same improving
passage at least fifty times in the course of a year, yet without once
discovering, or for a moment suspecting the fact.

"For all that, she saw to it that Elsie did her nightly school tasks,
recommending the master to 'palmie' her well if she should ever come to
school unprepared.  But, being a quick and ready learner, the young
lass needed the less encouragement of that kind.

"As she grew older, too, Elsie would upon occasions serve a customer in
the shop, though Margaret Comline never allowed her to stand on the
street among the babble of tongues at the market stalls.  In a little
time she could distinguish the hanks of yarn and thread, the webs of
wincey, and bolts of linen as well as her mistress, and was counted a
shrewd and capable hand at a bargain before she was fifteen.

"All this time her grandfather, the old miser Hobby, lived on in the
little white house up among the fir-woods of Breckonside, growing ever
harder and richer, at least according to the clashes of the country
folk.  By day, and sometimes far into the night, the click of his
shuttle was never silent, and, being an old man, it was thought a
marvel how he could sit so long at his loom.  And still Daft Jeremy
abode with him and filled his pirns.  Sometimes the 'naiteral' would
sit on the dyke top at the end of the cottage and laugh at the farmers
as they rode by, crying names and unco words after them, so that many
shunned to pass that way in the gloaming, for fear of the half-witted,
strong creature that mopped and mowed and danced at the lonely gable
end.  And they were of excellent judgment who did so.

"For Riddick of Langbarns disappeared frae the face o' the earth, being
last seen within half a mile of Laird Stennis's loaning, and, less than
a month after that, Lang Hutchins, who came to Longtown with all his
gains frae a year's trading padded inside his coat, so folks said,
started out of Longtown at dusk and was never seen in Breckonside
again.  There were those who began to whisper fearsome things about the
innocent-appearing white cot at the top of the Lang Wood o' Breckonside.

"Yet there were others again, and they a stout-hearted majority, who
scoffed, and told how Riddick had been seen in market carrying more
than his load of whisky, and that as for Lang Hutchins, had he not
dared his Maker that very day to strike him dead if he spoke not the
truth--all that heard him well knowing that even as he uplifted his
hand he lied in his throat.

"Nor was Elsie wholly forgotten by her only near of kin.  Twice or
thrice a year there came from the cottage a web of fine cloth, woven as
only Laird Stennis could weave it, with the inscription written plainly
thereon, 'To be sold for the benefit of the upkeep of my granddaughter,
Elsie Stennis.'

"After his accident, which nobody could explain and, indeed, few dared
to ask about, Laird Stennis took a disgust at the Weaver's Cot by the
burnside.  He got his miserly money out, and with it he bought the
estate of Deep Moat Hollow, that had been in the market for long--and
they say that he got it for a song, the late owner's need being great
and money terrible scarce.  Then he and Daft Jeremy removed thither,
and they had Jeremy's sister, a queer old maid (madder, they said, than
himself), to keep house for the pair of them.  Then the Laird Stennis
rode ever the more to market and tryst, and waxed ever the richer,
laying field to field, as is forbidden in the Holy Book.  Then good
Mrs. Comline died, and, though I was no better than a field worker, I
posted off to Dumfries, and took ye home to dwell with me in this house
which is my very own.  All for fear that your grandfather would claim
you and take you to bide in the same house as Mad Jeremy and his
sisters.  Oh, yes, there are more of them, and, indeed, by what I can
see and hear the place is like an asylum.  Such antics were never heard
tell of, and the poor creatures going dressed like zanies out of a
booth at the Thorsby wakes."

Then we both cried out to Nance to know if she had seen these strange
people, and to tell us what they were like.

"Seen them?  Of course," she answered.  "Do not I work there week in,
week out for Bailiff Ball, who is a good man and honest in his
payments."

"Tell us about Daft Jeremy," we said, both speaking together, in a
fashion we had.

"Jeremy Orrin," said Nance, thoughtfully, giving the fire a poke with
her clog; "well, at times the creature is fairly sensible.  They say he
will talk of wonders he has seen on the deep, and in foreign
parts--evil deeds and worse talk that makes the blood run cold to
listen.  To look at--oh, he is a wild-looking fellow, with long black
hair all any way under his broad bonnet--something between a gipsy and
a black-corked minstrel at a fair."

"And his sister?"

"Oh," said Nance shortly, "I know little of her.  She is old enough to
be the mother of the lot, and if any of them have any sense it is Aphra
Orrin--or Miss Orrin, as Mr. Stennis makes all call her.  She is sixty,
if she is a day.  But she plays with her brood of antic lunatics all
about the gardens, singing and making a mock of religion.  Grown women
they all are, but like so many scarecrows in their dress.  Laird
Stennis, they say, wanted their sister to send them to a home for such
like.  But she would not, and Jeremy was against it, too, so there they
bide, a disgrace to all the countryside, though harmless enough, God
knows."

Then Elsie's eyes met mine.  We nodded as Nance finished her tale.
Both of us knew that we meant to go and see for ourselves to-morrow
what mysteries were contained within the Deep Moat in the Grange Hollow.




CHAPTER V

WE MEET DAFT JEREMY

The next morning, bright and early, Elsie and I were up and out.
Indeed, I was throwing up stones at her window when she was already
dressed and out in the little back garden feeding the hens.  Of course
I know I should have tried to dissuade Elsie from going on such an
errand.  But I knew that would only make her all the keener to go.
And, indeed, once she had taken a thing in her head she would go
through with it in spite of everything.

Poor Harry Foster and his fate was always in the background of my mind.
But not so much, as I could see, in Elsie's.  Now I like my father well
enough, as fathers go.  He is a grocer, not at all mysterious, but
makes lots of money.  Now if, instead, he were the Red Rover of the
Seas--well, bless me if I would give twopence to find out about him.

But of course Elsie is different.  She always was different from every
one else, and now she was keen as a terrier at a rat hole to find out
all about the Stennises, and the queer crew that was battening on her
grandfather, old Hobby, the Golden Farmer of Deep Moat Hollow.

Before I saw her, Elsie had made Nance's breakfast, shared it, and seen
her off to her work.  Nance was in great demand.  She could act as
foreman or grieve on occasion, and people who wanted their work quickly
done, like my father, used often to give Nance as much as a shilling a
day extra for coming to them.

I don't think either of us had much thought of finding out about poor
lost Harry Foster.  How could we, with all those city detectives, from
East Dene and Thorsby, even (they whispered) from Scotland Yard itself,
ranging everywhere like pointer dogs over the heather?

Indeed we were almost like dogs on a scent ourselves, so keen were we
to see with our eyes the mysterious Grange and all the queer folk
there.  I hardly think we would have turned aside to look at Harry
Foster himself, had he been lying in his last bloody sleep, as plain as
in a waxwork.  But we were not tried.  Nothing of the kind happened.

As we went across the moor, every low spiky arch of bramble and tuft of
gorse was shining and sparkling.  The wren and the gowdspink were
preening themselves and shaking off the dews that fell on their
feathers as they fussed to and fro about their nesting business.  Then
we dived into Sparhawk Wood, and came out again on the country
cross-road along which Bailiff Ball had seen Dappled Bess plunging
madly with her empty cart.  The Brom Water flowed still as a canal on
our left, down towards the Moat Pond.  It was certainly heartsomer to
be out under the sky and the crying whaups, with the blue Cheviots
looking over the tree tops, than in Grange Longwood, where somebody
might be watching you from behind every bush and you none the wiser.

But before we came to the Bridge End, where we had found the marks of
the struggle that first morning, Elsie had an idea that if we struck
across the road and kept round the edge of the Brom Water, we would
escape the bailiff's cottage and stand a good chance of seeing Deep
Moat Grange without being discovered by anybody.

When we got there it was only about six in the morning, and eerie
enough in the gloomy bits, where you could not see a handsbreadth of
sky, and nasty things, which you told yourself were only rabbits, would
keep moving and rustling in the undergrowth.

I would have been glad to go back even then, because after all, it was
silly.  Just imagine--mad folks, and murderers, maybe, skulking in
coverts!  I am as brave as anybody when all is open and I have a chance
to run.  I am too old to believe in ghosts, of course; but for all that
there are queer things to be seen in old green droopy woods like that
of Deep Moat Hollow.  The trees whisper and seem to know such a lot.
After about an hour I get shivers down my back.

But it was no use arguing with Elsie.  She went on first, and I guarded
the rear--that being the most dangerous position.  And I did it well,
for I declare I got crick in the neck just with looking over my
shoulder.

So we crept and crept, foot by foot, looking and testing everything.
And it was as well.  Because, quite without warning, the thick bushes
ceased, and there we were on the edge of a deep trench with very black
water at the bottom.  The sides were steep and green with grass.  But
on the other bank all was green and yellow, with spreading lawns and
Lent lilies growing, and a woman in a short skirt, coming and going
among them, with a gardening spade in her hand.

Somehow I knew at once that that was Daft Jeremy's elder sister, Aphra
Orrin, the one who was not so mad as the others, and kept house for
Elsie's grandfather.

She came quite near.  We could have tossed a dog biscuit to her
feet--could, that is--somehow, I didn't want to.  It might have
startled the poor lady, and besides I hate making oneself conspicuous.

Over the lily patches and the flower beds we got glimpses of a
red-tiled house, low and old, all overgrown with ivy about the gables
and porches.  It had small windows with criss-cross panes, and smoke
was coming out of one of the chimneys, though it was yet so early.
That I took to be the kitchen of Deep Moat Grange.

The canal seemed to go all the way round, and to join on to the pond
which we could see glimmering beyond the house, looking gray through a
fringe of willows.

The place was nested in woods and water, like a dabchick's nest, yet
for all that comfortable and fair to see with its lawns and greenery
set about it.  I looked at Elsie to see if she was feared.  But not
she.  Instead, there was a queer, eager look, and her eyes kept
glittering, as if you could have struck a match at them.  Then all at
once it struck me that Elsie was going to be pretty; but I resolved to
say nothing about that for the present.

It was thinking about her mother that did it, I expect.  And that is a
funny thing, too.  For I care about my mother, and sometimes look
eager, like Elsie; but it is when I tease her to tell me what we are
going to have for dinner.  Elsie was different.  She said "S-h-h-h-!"
whenever I moved; and once, when a stick cracked underfoot, turned and
gave me a look, which would have speaned a foal.

"You fidgety worm--_can't_ you be quiet," that look said.

We went on watching the house and the woman watering the flower beds.
Nance had told us that the old housekeeper always did that herself.  No
hireling was allowed to put a spade in the soil of the Grange garden.
Very soon we had proof that she was quite mad.  The Lent lilies grew
about in great clumps, flourishing strong and high--a brave show.  The
gaunt old woman waved the rose of her watering can over each with a
kind of ritual, like what I have since seen the priests use in Catholic
churches.  Then she kneeled down and prayed--yes, prayed to the lilies.
Actually I saw her--and so did Elsie.

But that was not all.  Out of the house there came a company of three
other women, one behind the other.  They had their hair down their
backs, and long cloaks with gold and silver patches covered them.  Each
was carrying something narrow and black in her arms.  At first they
were too far away for us to see clearly, but as they came nearer, I
gasped and caught at Elsie's hand.  The long black things were little,
tiny coffins, neatly modelled, and covered with black cloth all
complete with fringe, name-plates, and cords.  A little to the side,
capering and dancing, flinging his legs high in the air, and blowing a
merry marching tune on a soldier's clarionet, pranced Daft Jeremy.
Every now and then he would stop blowing to give the brass instrument a
shake.  Then he would laugh and egg on the women with the coffins to
dance also.  But they went along quite peaceably, keeping their
countenances wonderfully, and making quaint signs with their hands.
They marched round and round, the idiot laughing and blowing while the
elder woman with the gardening spud went on praying, paying no
attention whatever to them, till they came to a rude altar, just two
upright posts and a stone laid across them, quite at the end of the
garden, opposite to where we were.

Upon this they laid the coffins down, and the women-creatures kneeled.
But the monster with the clarionet leaped up between the coffins nimbly
as a jackanapes, crossed his legs, and began to play.

Now I cannot tell whether it was because of the little elevation on the
crossbar of the altar which enabled him to spot us, or if I moved; but
in another instant Mad Jeremy seemed to spring down, swift and
unexpected, and before we could move, he had jerked out a big "gully"
knife, and rushed to the canal bank, leaped into the middle, driving
the black scum of the water every way, and almost before we could think
he was upon us.

The madman made for me first with the big knife uplifted, and but for
my ducking and running in, there would have been an end of me on the
spot.  We fell, and his weapon now being in his way, he let go, and I
felt the grip of immense hands about my neck.  That had almost been my
last memory on earth.  For though Elsie had seized the knife and was
about to kill the madman, it would have been too late so far as I was
concerned.

But out of the undergrowth, as if he had been watching, came a little
quick-tripping old man, bow-backed and wizened, who called, "Jeremy!
Jeremy!" in a high, piping key.

At the sound the madman lifted himself up from my neck, as if moved by
a spring, and stood before the little man smiling and sucking his
thumb--for all the world like a child caught stealing sugar.

The little old man pointed to the moat.  "Go back as you came!" he said.

The "mounster" threw himself into the black water without a complaint.
I saw him come out on the opposite side dripping, and with long threads
of green scum trailing about him.  He never looked round once, but made
for the house.

Then the little old man turned fiercely upon Elsie and me, with a kind
of cold hateful sneer on his face.

"And now, my pretties," he said, "what may you be seeking in Deep Moat
Hollow?"




CHAPTER VI

THICKER THAN WATER

Now I do not deny that I was frightened out of my life by the sudden
appearing of the Golden Farmer.  But it was different with Elsie.
Perhaps it ran in the blood.  For, though most people in Breckonside
were feared of my father and his long arm, I am not--no, nor ever could
be.  And so, in that moment of panic, it was given to Elsie to be able
to speak serenely to her grandfather.

Yet I could see that the little man was all in a fume of anger, and
kept it badly down, too.

"What are the two of you doing here?" he cried, dancing about and
shaking his stick at us.  "Where do you belong, and what ill purpose
fetched ye to Deep Moat Grange?"

"One question at a time," said Elsie, standing quietly before him, with
one thumb tucked in a leather strap about her waist.  "'Who are we?'
say you.  I will tell you, grandfather----"

"Grandfather----!"

You should have seen the little wizened man jump at the word.

"Grandfather!" he repeated in a kind of skirl, or scream, as of a
bagpipe.  "Ye are no blood kin of mine---!"

"Am I no?" said Elsie.  "I am Bell Stennis's daughter, and a daughter,
too, of one Ensign Stennis, a British officer----"

"A devil--a black devil," cried the wizened little man, shaking his
stick, as it were, at the four winds of heaven; "bride-bed or
bairn-cot, shroud or bier, I have no word to say to any connected with
Bell Stennis or the man that she counted her husband----!"

"Except to give her a decent burial, as ye did," said Elsie.  "I have
seen her name on the stone in Breckonside churchyard, and the space for
your own beneath----!"

"Any one with eyes might have seen as much.  But surely I am not
expected to own you for a granddaughter just because ye have looked
over the cemetery wall!"

"Neither have you a right to be angry because Joe Yarrow and I look
across the ditch at the flower beds of Deep Moat Grange----"

There appeared to be some hidden sting in this saying of Elsie's.  For
a moment the old man looked perfectly murderous.  But he quickly
recovered himself.

"Faith," he cried, "but it would have been telling your mother, if
indeed she be my daughter Bell--if she had had the gift o' the gab like
you!  But that's no proof.  I have ever been a silent man myself!"

"Maybe you had need, grandfather!" cried Elsie merrily, as if it were
all a joke, even when I knew that our lives hung, of a certainty, in
the balance between his goodwill and his anger at our intrusion.
Certainly, however, Elsie had a curious power over the old man, and
instead of getting angry, he actually laughed, a queer, crackling
laugh, caught perhaps from living so long among mad folk.  I have heard
doctors out of lunatic asylums laugh like that.  There is nothing so
catching as crack-brainedness.  A lot of people have it at
Breckonside--maybe because the East Dene Asylum is so near.  Perhaps
not.

"I see," said old Mr. Stennis, "that you have upon your body day-linen
of my weaving.  That is a waste.  I only weave now to amuse myself, and
sometimes for the great of the land--because no one can weave like
Hobby Stennis.  Therefore the webs I have sent that old wretch Mrs.
Comline in the town of Dumfries, and now yearly to Nance at the
bridge-end, ought to have been put carefully away, and not cut up to
make fal-lals for a daft hempie of your age!  Nance ought to know
better.  She is old enough and ugly enough for that!"

"Then if I am your daughter's daughter, as I see you admit," said
Elsie, taking his words as an admission, "let us go across and view the
bonnie flowers over yonder, the bedded tulips, the Lent lilies, and all
the flowers of the spring."

Then, for the first time the old man had a look of fear, almost of
revolt.

"Lassie," he cried, "ye have no knowledge of what you ask.  Bide where
you are, and go your way backward from this side of the moat."

He bent toward us as if whispering, though he had no need, all being
clear behind and around us for a long way on every side.

"There are folk that are not canny on yon side of the moat!" he said,
with the same curious shrinking look over his shoulder.  "I can hardly
manage them myself!"

"Nonsense," said Elsie, "take us across, and be done with it.  Is it
not your own land, your own flowers, and I your nearest of kin?"

"Aye," said the old man, shaking his head, "it will be true enough.  Ye
mind me of Bell's mother--my wife that was.  God rest her soul--and her
tongue!  Ye are never a Stennis.  And High Heaven pity the man that is
going to run away with you, as I did with your grandam!"

Elsie indicated me with her thumb.

"Joe is," she said coolly.

The Golden Farmer turned and looked me over from head to foot, and I
own that with the thought of all we had seen and all that we might yet
see, I shook like a leaf.  I never had Elsie's assurance, or, more
properly, cheek, but followed obediently, and I must own that generally
it came out all right when I did as Elsie told me.

"Then I pity him," quoth her grandfather, grimly; "but since you will,
follow me."

And he led the way, first to the tree where he had tethered his beast,
and afterwards to the narrow wooden bridge, like a drawbridge in
chivalry books, which spans the oily black water of the moat.

I came behind with Elsie.  All the time I kept putting my hand on her
arm to stop her.  For I believed that we should never, never cross that
bridge again.  If Elsie had no fear of her grandfather, I had!  And
besides, there was Jeremy Orrin with his big knife.  Such at least was
the idea that kept recurring to my disturbed brain.  I could see him
swimming the moat with it yet, wild to get at us.  There were also the
mad sisters, and all the linked terrors of Deep Moat Grange.

But not the least bit of notice did Elsie take.  She shook my hand off
her arm, and told me that if I was afraid I could go back to the school
green and play marbles with the little boys.

So of course I said no more, but came meekly behind Elsie, and she
followed her grandfather.  He was leading his horse, that lifted its
feet gingerly at the crossing of the wooden bridge, not liking the
noise, as horses are wont to do on gangways of ships and when they lead
them into trucks at railway stations.

In another minute Elsie and I stood within the Moat.  And turning
round, what was my horror to see the bridge rising slowly into the air
behind me, and in a little house at the side, bent double over a wheel,
I caught sight of the "mounster," Jeremy Orrin, with a grin on his face
and all his dark ringlets shaking and dancing.

As we went past he set his head out and called these words after us:

"Rats in a trap!" he cried, "rats in a trap!"

And I can tell you that I for one felt just as he said.

But Elsie followed her grandfather step for step and took no notice.
You would have thought she was the crowned queen of the place.




CHAPTER VII

FAMILY DISCIPLINE

As nobody had seen Deep Moat Grange since it had been taken over by Mr.
Hobby Stennis and the crew he had gathered about him, it may be as well
to describe it as I saw it--now that it is swept from off the face of
the earth.

The old, many-gabled, brick-built house was ivy-covered--in poor
repair, but clean.  Curious-looking, stocking-shaped contrivances
cowled the chimneys, or such of them as were used.  The Grange was set
so deep in the woods that when the wind blew with any violence, and
apparently from any quarter, it raced and gusted and whirled down the
chimneys so as to blow the faggots out on the hearths.

But without and within the house, it was anything but dirty.  That is,
so far as I--no great judge, mayhap--could make out.  At times Jeremy
Orrin, who now followed us, laughing and jeering, could work like a
demon, clearing up some debris.  And Mr. Stennis kept poking his nose
here and there into the outhouses and cart sheds with a curious,
dithering thrill of apprehension, not at all like a master coming back
to his own house, or looking if his servants' work were well performed.
Still, if he looked for dirt, he found none.  No, nor anything
else--except in the great barn, empty of everything (for the horse's
oats and bedding were kept in the stable).  Here Mr. Stennis, tripping
along with his tread of a frightened hen, lifted a huge curtain of corn
sacks, thick and heavy, made after the pattern of those at church doors
abroad, and we went in.

As soon as we stood on the beaten floor of hard earth, we could not
take our eyes from what we beheld at the upper end.  There was a kind
of altar, rudely shaped, with a table and a cross, all as if hewn with
an axe out of live wood, and painted black.  On the table were the
little black coffins, each small as baby's toys, which we had seen the
mad women carry through the garden.  Each of these had now a candle
burning upon it.  But the central light, a little larger than the rest,
was protected about the flame by a curious contrivance made of red
paper glued upon bits of stick which gave it (from where we stood) the
appearance of a crimson lantern.

For the first time, I think Elsie was now a little frightened.  And no
wonder, for suddenly we saw something appear in the dark of the big
empty barn, amid a curious pervading smell that I took to be incense,
but which might have been cockroaches.  I liked bravely for Elsie to
feel like that.  For she had been just all too secure and cock-a-hoop
up till now.

What we saw was a row of kneeling figures singing a strange wordless
chant, something between the wind in a score of keyholes and distant
dog kennels on a moon-light night.  At any rate, it tried the little
girl's stomach.  Because, quite suddenly she pitched forward on my
shoulder and cried: "O Joe, get me out of this!"

Then the next moment, just like thrusting a stick into a wasp's byke,
each of the black kneeling figures had snatched her candle and made
after us.

I don't know what might have happened.  To me it was like a nightmare
till we found ourselves in the open courtyard again.  This had seemed
creepy enough to me before.  But now it was just like our own back
green, as homelike and as pleasant, with the open air and the waving
woods and all.

Within the barn we heard elricht squeaks and cries, like those of bats.
But outside the door, holding the heavy curtain back, so that we could
get out easily, stood a tall, masculine woman with gray, smoothly
brushed hair, dressed in a black blouse and skirt that had something
under them which looked like the haircloth covering of the chairs in
our second best parlour at home--the kind my father sits in and smokes
over his books and cash-box.  She was the woman with the short skirt we
had seen watering the lilies when we looked across the black and oily
moat.

"This is Miss Orrin, my housekeeper," said Elsie's grandfather
automatically.

"Aphra Orrin!" said the lady, with a prim intonation, tossing her head
like one hurt in her pride, "one who hath been raised up to be a mother
to the orphan and the shelterless, to avenge the witless and those at
whom fools make a mock!  _Be quiet, you there!_"

She sent the door of the barn clashing into its place with her foot,
and with the click of the well-oiled wards the screeching behind it
redoubled.

The tall woman sighed and folded her arms across her breast.  There was
a certain weary dignity about her, and at first I could not believe
that she was really out of her mind, as all in Breckonside averred.
"They are worse than usual to-day," she said, with a careless nod of
the head in the direction of the barn, "but that will teach them.  They
shall stay there till I come and fetch them out!  No food for such as
they!"

She turned about and called hurriedly: "Jeremy!  Jeremy!"

Then the big black man with the ringlets, the onyx eyes and gipsy's
skin, came bounding toward us.  He seemed to arrive from the direction
of the moat, but from much farther round and nearer to the house than
the bridge by which we had crossed.  He was grinning and holding his
hands behind him, like a child who fears to be punished.  I soon
noticed that he was far more afraid of his sister than he had been of
Mr. Stennis and his riding whip.

"Show your hands!"  The tall woman spoke in a tone of command.  Jeremy
stood grinning before her.  Then quite suddenly he began to cry.  Big
tears rolled down his face.

"I haven't--I haven't, indeed, Aphra!" he whimpered.  "I have only been
sailing boats on the moat!  Indeed, I have!"

"_Show your hands!_"

She spoke so shortly that the great, cleanly built powerful giant
fairly quaked before her.

"I will--I will!" he repeated.  "Yes, Aphra!"

And all the time he was evidently rubbing them together as hard as he
could.  I could see his shoulders and elbows working.  Then the tall
woman, losing all patience, snatched at his arms and pulled the hands
sharply forward.  The marks of earth between the fingers and about the
nails were obvious.  But Jeremy still continued to rub off the little
pellets of mould, raising his fingers and looking at them with an air
of surprise, as if he wondered how in the world the dirt had got there.

"You have been digging again!" cried Miss Orrin; "this is the third
time, and you are well aware of the penalty!"

"Oh, no, no!" cried the big man, catching her by the skirt, which she
swept away from him, the tears fairly rolling down his cheeks.  "Whip
me, if you like, Aphra, but----"

"Go and shut yourself up in the dark hole," she said firmly; "see you
shut the door tight.  I shall come round and lock it after a little!"

The great lout went away _boo-hooing_ like a "soft" schoolboy whom a
sturdier comrade has sent home provided with something substantial to
tell his mother.  Anything more unlike the idea which we, in common
with all Breckonside, had formed of the dreaded "mounster" of the Moat
Grange, could not well be imagined.

Then his sister turned to us, and in the most conventional way possible
she asked us to go into the house "to drink a dish of tea!"

It was hardly the hour for this, but our long morning's jaunt in the
open air and varied excitements had not at all taken away our
appetites.  We were literally as hungry as hunters.

I think, if Elsie and I had kept all our wits about us, that we should
have refused such an invitation.  But children often do very bold
things through sheer thoughtlessness and curiosity.  And we were little
more than children, for all our age.

But it all turned out well for us--indeed, even better than that.  We
had supped so full of surprises that day, that at this point I think
hardly anything would have sufficed us or come up to our demands!
Perhaps an introduction to a company of sheeted ghosts, or an
invitation to take afternoon tea with blood-boltered Banquo, might have
filled the bill of our expectation.

As it fell out, nothing was ever more dull and orderly, Miss Orrin
showed us into a neatly arranged parlour, with the usual stuffy smell
from unopened windows.  She left us a minute alone to examine the
knick-knacks, while she went elsewhere, doubtless to arrange matters
with her erring brother Jeremy.  We were still in the dark as to the
crime he had committed, and, each remaining seated on the edge of a
chair, looked about us curiously, with our ears at a permanent full
cock.

Miss Orrin had pulled up the blinds, and through them we could see the
wide green lawn, broken here and there by the dense plots of lilies,
which almost formed groves in some places.  The parlour was a large
room, covered with faded yellow paper, bearing traces of a blue flower,
perhaps wreaths of forget-me-nots, but all so faint that it was only a
strong imagination which could again body them forth.  The furniture
was chiefly of old black oak, with an extraordinary number of chests
with various ornamental work round the walls.  These had been covered,
presumably by Miss Orrin, with bright-coloured chintz of a salmon-pink
edged with frills and furbelows which somehow cheapened the high,
antique mantelpiece, the quaint corner cupboards, and the tall,
high-backed open chairs ranged at equal intervals about the room.

I am not sure if I have described all this aright.  For, indeed, the
vague stuffy smell took us by the throats.  Both Elsie and I were glad
when Mr. Stennis came back and bustled about, sniffing, growling, and
opening windows and doors.

One of these, that to the left of the wide fireplace, gave into a small
room full of curious wooden machinery to which our eyes were instantly
attracted.

"The old weaver's hand does not forget its cunning--the trade by which
he made his siller!" said Mr. Stennis, with a faint shadow of a smile,
the first we had seen cross his anxious face.

He showed us beautiful pieces of ornamental fabric, upon one of which
he was at present engaged, and even entered into a long explanation as
to his methods of working.  Finally he sat down before the intricate
spider's web, and with a skilled click and wheeze sent the shuttle
flying for our benefit.  I stood back a good way, but Elsie remained
close beside him.  And I could not have believed it, if I had not seen
it--how in the joy of work the "laird" died out of the man, and the
little bow-backed weaver came again plain to the eye.

I turned about, conscious of some unknown interruption.  There was a
faint creaking of the door, and through it I could see Miss Orrin, a
tray with tea dishes in her hands, glaring speechlessly at Elsie.  The
young girl had laid an unconscious hand on her grandfather's arm.  She
was asking him to explain something in the manipulation.  But on the
face of the woman who stood without, watching, I surprised cold Death,
and as it were, Hell following after.

I felt that we had no real business in that house, neither Elsie nor I,
and that the sooner I got her safe back to Nance Edgar's, the better
pleased I should be.  But Elsie was a difficult girl to shift till she
took it into her own head.  Then with a beaming smile Miss Orrin came
into the parlour and began to lay the cloth.

"Ye will be hungry, bairns," she said, with a curious nervous laugh,
which reminded us unpleasantly of her sisters.

"Yes!" we answered together.  But somehow I wasn't.  The hunger had
left me.




CHAPTER VIII

MISS APHRA'S CURATE

We had scarcely started our tea, and hunger was still keen upon Elsie,
when there came a noise of calling, quite different from the howling of
mad folk, or the mocking laughter or ugly whine of Jeremy.  Miss Orrin
poured out tea with a kind of grim _aplomb_.  If I had been afraid that
she meant to poison us--or at least Elsie, I was soon undeceived.  The
amount of tea that she poured down her own throat was astonishing in
the extreme.  There were, however, certainly several sorts of cake that
she would not allow her master, Mr. Stennis, to touch, on pretext of
indigestion, but which she pressed upon us.  And it was all that I
could do, by kicking her shins beneath the table, to keep Elsie from
accepting.

I managed it all right, though.  They might have been as harmless as my
father's acid drops.  But after all there was only one Elsie, and I was
not going to run any risks.

There was a distant sound of calling across the moat, and at the noise,
Mr. Stennis frowned, an ugly look coming over his face, while on the
contrary the sound had a still more extraordinary effect upon Miss
Orrin.  Her eyes gleamed more softly, losing for a moment their
iron-gray expression.  Her hands went up instinctively to the thin
little corkscrew curls which bobbed at either side of her face.

In ten seconds the fierce, angular old maid looked ten years younger.
Love, vanity, self-consciousness--ye are wondrous things.

"If it's that interfering curate from Over Breckonton, I'll throw him
into the moat!  I'll have the dogs on him," growled Mr. Stennis,
"always poking his nose in when he is least wanted!"

Then he turned to his housekeeper, and detecting her busy fingers, he
said with a sneer--

"What, prinking again!  I see.  Only the beneficed clergy have any
chance with you, Miss Aphra!"

"Beneficed!" she cried.  "Ah! poor lad, I wish he were!  If I had my
will it would not all go to that lazy vicar, who never does a ha'pworth
of good, but rides to hounds and preaches his father's sermons, because
he cannot make one for himself."

"Ha!" cried the old man, "be off with you, young ones.  Miss Orrin is
going to receive spiritual direction and absolution."

The tall old woman started up, her right hand upon the bread knife, as
if she could have killed her master with it on the spot.

"Well would it be for you, Hobby Stennis, if you did the like!" she
said, restraining herself with difficulty.  "But there's Mr.
Ablethorpe, and he must not be kept waiting!"

"Of course not, Miss Orrin," said Mr. Stennis sneeringly.  "It were a
pity indeed that he should--and he come so far to administer spiritual
consolation to conscious sinners!"

Then the old woman was roused to fury.

"Sinner am I?" she said, going up and bending her body till her face
came within an inch of two of that of the old man, who was seated,
pretending to go on with his tea.  "Sinner am I?  Well, I do not deny
it.  But at least, if sinner I be, it is that I may find a home and a
livelihood for those three poor things, whom God hath bereft of their
reason!  But as for you--for what do you sin--sin till the sand of the
sea could hardly tell the multitude of your crimes, poured from the
hand like water, a grain for a sin?  For money--yes, for dirty gold!
For money which you dare not spend, and for gear which you dare not
show!  Answer me that!  And if sinner I be--I have never heard or read
that the Gospel is not for sinners!  Do I not need it the more, Hobby
Stennis?  And the young man is a good young man, and speaks to me of
high things--such as I need much, and you more!"

"Have your shown him your Mumbo-Jumbo worship in the barn?  Or your
sisters, kneeling before the little coffins--all that flummery?  You
ought to be ashamed--you, Aphra Orrin, you, a woman of sense, and able
to know better!"

"And if I told Mr. Ablethorpe all, he would understand," retorted the
old maid.  "He would understand that those who cannot know God must be
content with such a God as they can understand!"

Mr. Stennis laughed, but there was a false ring in his laughter.

"Aye," he said, "doubtless there are a great many things which the good
young man, Mr. Ablethorpe, cannot understand.  Did you ever, by chance,
try to teach him a little gardening?"

"No, and well for you, Hobby Stennis!" cried the woman, still
threateningly.

"Well or ill," said the old man, "I go to see these bairns across the
bridge and safe on their way home.  Then to my weaving!  Where is
Jeremy?"

"How should I know were Jeremy is--on some of your errands, doubtless!"
she cried.  "Come, I will let down the drawbridge myself.  Also I shall
see to it that you offer no indignity to the one honest man who deigns
to enter your house."

This quarrel between the two most sane inhabitants of Deep Moat Grange
let me deeper into the secrets of that evil dwelling than anything
else.  At least, so I thought at the time.  But I found afterwards that
all I thought I knew had but lain on the surface.  I had conceited to
find Shallow Moat Grange, and lo! the name was no misnomer.  The moat
was Deep, indeed.

All the same, it was like coming out of a heated room, with many people
therein, into the silence and chill of the winter stars, to get one's
head outside that abominable house of the Grange.  How good to pass by
the lily clumps, and feel one's feet on green grass again!  It seemed
to me that even the dull and sullen moat could be crossed, if you only
took it determinedly enough.  We had seen Jeremy come over and return,
and so surely could we, fleeing (if need were) for our lives.

But there was no need at present.  Miss Orrin had thrown a white shawl
about her head and shoulders, and drawn a pair of tight silk lacy
"mits" over her bony wrists.  She made straight for the drawbridge,
walking at least ten yards in front of us--apparently that she might
get the first word with the fine young man in clerical attire who stood
waiting on the further bank.

"I am sorry to have kept you, sir," she said, in a voice which I could
not have believed to be hers, had I not seen her lips moving as we
arrived; "I will let down the bridge in a moment.  Mr. Stennis has been
entertaining some relatives of his own, and did not wish to be
disturbed."

"I hope that I am not intruding!" called out the young man from the
farther bank.  "I can easily look in again.  It will not be the least
trouble, I assure you!"

"Not for the world," cried the old woman hastily; "in a moment the
bridge will be down."

And she rushed to the little wheelhouse, to let go the chain with a
relieving motion of her foot.  And immediately the ponderous affair
came clanking to the ground, locking into the pawls at the other side
with the pleasant _sloop_ of well-oiled machinery.

Then it was our turn to be introduced.  Mr. Ablethorpe came across the
wood with the firm tread of an athlete.  He held out his hand first to
Miss Orrin, who bowed over it, as if she would have loved to raise it
reverently to her lips.

Then he shook hands with Mr. Stennis, who took the matter cavalierly
enough, immediately turning on his heel and going off in the direction
of his weaving-room, which had an additional entrance from the front.
The young curate was apparently well enough accustomed to such
treatment, and thought nothing of it, but Miss Orrin bit her thin lips
and looked daggers at the bowed head of the old weaver-farmer as he
trudged away.

"Halloo, Joseph Yarrow," said Mr. Ablethorpe lightly, as he ruffled my
head with his hand.  (I understood well enough to take off my cap to a
clergyman.)  "Joe Yarrow, I know your father.  And I think--yes, I
think--" (he put a lot of accent on the _think_) "Master Joseph, you
ought to be at school.  Shall I tell your father, Joseph?  If I did, I
make no doubt that he would give you a coat of a few colours, mainly
black and blue.  Ha! ha!"

But he had that light way with him, which made us quite sure that he
would do nothing half so mean as to tell either my father or Mr.
Mustard the schoolmaster.

"And who is this young lady?" he said, looking at Elsie, who was tall,
and when taken short like that had a kind of "distant" look which made
people think she was haughty.  But she looked very nice that way--what
people call pretty and "chic" (whatever that may be).  I could see that
Mr. Ablethorpe was interested in her directly.  I could have knocked
his head off!  Cheek, indeed!

"She lives with a poor working woman," said Miss Orrin, who had no
doubt noticed the interest as well as I, "one named Nance Edgar, not
very far out of Breckonside village.  But not in your parish, Mr.
Ablethorpe.  Will you come this way, Mr. Ablethorpe?  There is tea
ready for you."

But Mr Ablethorpe had his own time of doing things, and with such a
girl as Elsie in front of him, he was not in a hurry.

"Lives with a poor woman, does she?--Nancy--Nancy--what name did you
say?" he went on in the tone in which people ask for additional
information.

But I was not going to stand this--from Miss Orrin or any one, about my
Elsie.

"This is Miss Elsie Stennis," I said, with what of dignity I could
compass with my inches, "the only grand daughter of Mr Stennis, the
owner of this property."

"But how?" said the young man, looking, as I thought, a little
reproachfully at Miss Orrin; "I was not seriously aware that Mr.
Stennis had any relatives alive."

"This girl has been represented as the child of his daughter Isabella,"
said Miss Orrin, "but Mr. Stennis, doubtless for excellent reasons, has
never acknowledged her as such!"

"But the church records and the registrar have, though," said I.  "You
can speak to old Mr. Askew, if you like--he knows!"

"You can go now," said Miss Orrin, with dignity, cutting me short, "and
remember that you are not to return till you have received an
invitation.  Mr. Stennis will overlook your conduct on this occasion,
in consideration of your youth and ignorance.  But you will know better
the next time, and no such excuse will be accepted."

As Mr. Ablethorpe passed me he nodded his blonde curly head at me,
twinkled his eye, and said: "Tell your father that I am going to look
him up one of these days.  I want a subscription for our Organ Fund,
but I won't say anything about where I found you--I promise you that."

He looked at Elsie, too, as if he had meant to say something jokingly
to her also, but thought better of it.  Then he lifted his hat and
passed away across the green lawn side by side with Miss Orrin.  They
wove their way among the clumps of lilies till they were lost to view,
and I could see that they were talking earnestly together.

And from the barn, very lonesome across the black water of the moat,
came the indignant hooting of the mad sisters still shut up behind the
barred door, with the black altar and the little coffins.




CHAPTER IX

ELSIE'S VISITOR

It was a night or two after our first and (for the time being) last
visit to Deep Moat Grange.  Elsie and I had arrived back at Nance's,
our hands and even our arms laden with flowers.  For Nance had been at
home all day, and so Elsie and I had been taking a holiday--I from
lessons, and Elsie from looking after the house.  We had gone wandering
over the long whinny knowes which stretch away to the south, till, from
the top of Brom Beacon, one can see the ships crowding into the docks
of East Dene and Thorsby, collier and tug and tall sea-going brig,
every ship after her kind.

It was a day to be remembered, and as a matter of fact neither of us
has forgotten it.  We crossed Brom Water where it was as broad as a
lake.  Our conveyance was a penny flatboat, running on a chain, which
chain hauled itself up wet and dripping from the bed of the river.  A
little farther on we stretched ourselves out on the greensward upon a
green knoll above a railway cutting.  We talked.  We were silent, and
listened to the the wind among the leaves and the hum of insects among
the lime trees and meadow plants.  Mr. Mustard was not at all in our
thoughts.  Nor yet my father in mine.  Only one thing troubled me--the
knowledge that in the autumn I must leave Breckonside and go to
college.  College itself I did not mind about.  There was a certain
amount of fun in being a student--or so I had always been told.  What I
really did mind about was leaving Elsie.

It would be--I knew it by instinct--like cutting off a part of my own
body to go walking lonely on Saturdays when we had so often loitered in
company, thinking that the good days would never cease, wanting nothing
better, nothing other than just what we had.  Ah!  I had a prevision
that day that Elsie and I had better make the most of our time during
this summer.  For the winter would try our friendship.

What I did not foresee was how suddenly Elsie would grow up.  Yet she
had always done things suddenly--from boxing my ears to deciding to
continue her studies at home.  She did the latter that very day, and in
the evening she announced to Nance that she was not going back to
school.

"Very well," said Nance, not in the least surprised.  Indeed, with her
own limited education, she had often wondered why Elsie had prolonged
hers so unnecessarily.

It was pleasant in Nance's cottage by the Bridge End of Breckonside.
The house was, as perhaps I have already explained, overwhelmed in a
perfect show of creeping flowers, not all of them yet in their full
bloom of colour, but always spreading up to the chimneys and throwing
abroad reckless tendrils that brushed the face as one entered the
little wooden porch.

Nance was busy with the supper dishes, and Elsie had come down after
"giving her hair a tidy," as she had been commanded by Nance to do.

"Who do you think has been here the day?" said Nance suddenly.

And I knew in a minute, but Elsie guessed her grandfather.

"The young English minister from Over Breckonton."

"Yes," Nance went on to give details, finding that nobody exclaimed at
her news; "as fine an Englisher as ever was, with a bit cambric
handkerchief that wad hae been little use to a man wi' a cauld in his
heid, and a black cane wi' real silver bands.  Extraordinary civil he
was, and bode near an hour talkin' to puir auld Nance, and speirin'
where ye were, Elsie, and what time ye wad be hame!"

I looked at Elsie.  She was busily engaged in tying up some sprays of
early heath, which we had gathered on the steep sides of Brom Beacon.
She did not seem to be listening.  But she heard well enough, as her
words proved.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Ralph Ablethorpe!  Joe and I met him by chance on the way
to my grandfather's the other day."

Now the vixen knew very well that there would be no more question of
the "coming of the Englishy minister" after an announcement like that.
Nance was all agog to hear of the wonders of Deep Moat Grange, which
she had never seen except from the outside, and news of the mad people
my lassie's granddad had gathered about him.  Small wonder, either!
For, indeed, no one had crossed the Moat for years except the
High-Church curate, who (as they said) went periodically to "confess"
Miss Orrin.

Even such things as coals and provisions were brought by the bailiff to
the end of the drawbridge in sacks, and from thence carried across on
the back of the powerful Jeremy, the same Jeremy whom we had seen that
day weeping like a child.

But it was then that I began first to understand what absence at
college might cost me.  I looked at Elsie.  She was still tying up the
little pink bundles of "bell heather," but her face was held down, and
there was a little conscious flush upon her cheek.  I had never thought
it before, and it came on me like a judgment.  Elsie was pretty.

I did not exactly wish she hadn't been, but oh, I did wish that nobody
had been able to see it but myself!

That English curate, with his curly poll and clear blue eyes, rode me
like a nightmare.  I resolved to break his head, handsome as it
looked--aye, if he were the best man that ever stepped in shoe leather,
and had climbed all the mountains in Switzerland and given all that he
got for doing it to the poor, as they said he had done.  I did not care
how good he was.  I was desperate at the thought of losing Elsie.  Not
for love--oh no, thank you.  I had more sense than that.  But just to
go about with, and be my little 'panion, as she had always said she
would be, and as I expected her to remain.

But the curate did not let grass grow under his footsteps.  It was only
two days before he was back again at the little cottage at the Bridge
End.  Nance had work that day, and if I had not had the sense to play
truant he would have found Elsie by herself, as no doubt he expected to
do.  But I was there seated on the table, swinging my legs.

He began at once saying how sorry he was that Nance was out, and that
he had so much enjoyed the talk with her the other day.  But under my
breath I kept saying, "Liar!  Liar!"  Because I knew quite well that he
was coming of purpose to see Elsie, and the thought gave me catchings
of the breath when I thought of going to college.  I wasn't jealous a
bit, of course, only I couldn't bear to think of any other fellow being
friends with Elsie.

But after awhile I began to like the parson better.  He had heard that
I could bowl more than a bit, and he asked me to make one of the team
he was getting up to play the second eleven of East Dene.  I took to
him more after that, and really he did not talk to Elsie oftener than
he did to me.  More than that, he did not make me feel in the way.

But it was all no go.  From deep down in my heart there kept bobbing up
the feeling that somehow I was to lose Elsie, and that this young
parson with the curly head would be the cause of it.  Of course, I was
going on to eighteen, and a big fellow for my age, with a moustache you
could see by looking for it.  But this was a full-grown man of
twenty-four at the least--for all that his shaven face and sort of
painted-window hair made him look any age from that of a choir boy to
that of a holy angel.

He asked about Elsie's grandfather, saying that he had struggled long
and vainly to get him to come to church, or at least to communion, but
without success.  More than that, he seemed to be keeping Miss Orrin
from attending the parish church of Over Breckonton.  Miss Orrin, so it
seemed, had good instincts--she was well affected toward religion, but
something always seemed to hold her back.  At a certain point she
became silent, and he, Ralph Ablethorpe, could do nothing more with
her.  This resistance he hoped, however, to overcome one day.  It was
his duty to study the welfare of every soul in his parish, and also of
those wandering and foldless sheep who were cared for by nobody.

I had it on my tongue tip to say that there were many who cared for
souls when they were connected with comely bodies, for that was the
kind of thing that my father was always saying.  He took himself for an
advanced thinker whenever he quarrelled with our vicar, but between
times he was as good a conservative as anybody, and stood up for law
and order like the chucker-out of a bar-room.

Elsie had not much to say about her people.  She never had.  But I told
him, as I always did any one who asked, that her father had been an
army officer, and her mother the only daughter of the Golden Farmer,
only that neither the one nor the other of them could stand the old
man's ways.

Then the young parson, as I found to be his custom, started in to
defend the absent, which is all right when the "absent" is anyway
decent.

"Yes," he said, "Mr. Stennis's habits are certainly eccentric.  I
cannot deny that.  But after all he does a lot of good in rather
creditable circumstances.  He gives shelter to four poor lunatics whom
a sisterly love has preserved from the living death of a common asylum."

I told him plainly that I thought it would be much better for
themselves, and infinitely so for the countryside, if they were all
shut up in the nearest asylum under proper care.

"What do you mean?" says he, rather startled.  For I could see by the
changing of his countenance that he, too, had seen strange things.  As,
indeed, he was bound to do, if he kept his eyes open at all, going to
Deep Moat Grange as often as he did.

But then, you see, he was a simple sort of young man, and never
thought, or at least said, any evil of anybody.

Then he suggested that we would walk home together, and though I had
meant to stay at the cottage all day, I actually went.  But I soon got
him into a hot argument with my father (who could argue the handle off
the village pump) about doctrine and sacraments, and things that a boy
has to learn about in school till he hates the very name of them.  At
least, if he has a master like old Mr. Mustard.  Then I up and shinned
out of the back door as quick as I could, lest father should ask me
where I was going, and send me kiting all over the country with one of
our delivery vans.  I found Elsie looking out of the window and very
pensive.

So I told her to her face that she was thinking of that curly-headed
curate, and she answered me (as, of course, she would naturally do)
that whether she was or wasn't, it was no business of mine.

Then I vowed I would make it my business.

"Then make it!" says she, and turned away very haughty and went and
sulked in Nancy's little room, which was off the big kitchen.  It was
as much as I could do to keep from turning on my heel and walking away,
never more to return.  But I knew that it was wrong to yield to
passion.  So I was noble and stopped where I was.

Instead I began to sweep up the cinders about the grate and get
everything ready for tea, even to scouring the teapot and things.  I
used coarse, common powder, and this I moistened by a coarse and
familiar method.  The act brought Elsie out promptly.  Just bounding
she was.  Mad was no name for it.  She called me all the names she
could think of, but she didn't sulk any more.  I thought she wouldn't.
That always fetches her.  She knows I do it a-purpose to make her
angry, but she can't help it--not one time in a thousand.  Elsie is
built that way, and from what I have seen quite a lot of women are.

It works far better than taffying up to them, or doing the dreadful
humble.  Get them spitting mad, and they will love you ever after, or
at least for quite a while.




CHAPTER X

THE BROM-WATER MYSTERY

It is wonderful how soon a thing is forgotten, or at least put on a
shelf in people's memories.  Poor Harry Foster, for example!  There was
a man now--a man murdered in the discharge of his duty, if ever a man
was.  And after a month or two another man was travelling the same road
with a new mail cart and new sacks of letters, as quiet as water going
down a mill-lade.  The only difference was that he started a while
later in the morning than poor Harry, after it was daylight, in fact,
so that the Bewick people had to wait, often till midday, before they
got their letters.

And when they made complaint to the Postmaster-General, or some other
big-wig, he up and said to them, "You Bewickers, it is open to you to
choose one of yourselves to bring up the mails from Breckonside,
running the risk of Harry Foster's fate and providing a sufficient
guarantee for any loss the post office run by Her Royal High Majesty
may sustain."

Something like that he said.  But no Bewicker offered.  Of course
not--why, they had skin creeps at the very thought.

"So," says the post official big-wig, "you Bewick cowards, be good
enough to shut up and take your letters when they are sent out to you."

Still there were people who kept thinking about poor Harry for all
that.  And I was one of them.  Elsie did not seem to care so much, or
at least so long.  Did you never observe that you can't keep a girl
long interested in the same thing, unless you keep on telling her all
the time how much prettier she is getting to look?  But I did not know
even that much, not then.  I was just mortal green--green as father's
spare pasture field after three days' steady rain and one of May
sunshine.  And, indeed, to tell the truth outright, I thought
altogether too much at that time about people, and too little about my
Latin and Greek prose, as Mr. Mustard, who was a good classic himself,
often told me.  He said I should rue it.  But I can't say I have ever
gone as far as that.  Not to date, anyway.  Perhaps I may some day,
when I start reading Latin to pass the time.

The adventure grew more interesting to me after the policeman and
detectives had one by one all cleared off.  The affair was "classed,"
as the French say in their crime books--I learned my French out of
these, and a jolly easy way, too--that is, the police were not going to
do anything more in the matter, unless something fresh turned up.  And
it would have to be something mighty fresh, too, to move them.  They
had all got so sick of the whole business.

There was just one thing that kept me back.  That was, I was nearly
sure that Elsie's grandfather had something to do with the whole series
of crimes of which the death of poor Harry was only the last and the
most senseless.  Perhaps not Mr. Stennis directly, but somebody about
Deep Moat Grange.  So, of course, I did not want to bring Elsie into it
if I could help it.  Because if her grandfather was a murderer, and if
all the missing drovers and absconding cattle dealers were laid to his
account, and he hanged for it, it would be clearly impossible for Elsie
to go on living with Nance Edgar at the Bridge End.  And as I was not
yet ready to make other arrangements for her (besides being mortally
afraid of the curate), I said nothing to any one--least of all to Elsie
herself.

I think I had suspected everybody for miles round in turn--from Mr.
Codling the policeman to the vicar himself.  As for poor Mr. Ball, I
had him so completely under observation, and was so sure of his guilt,
that when the unfortunate bailiff went out only to fodder the cattle, I
followed stealthily in his footsteps, sure that the secret of the
mystery lay in the range of cattle sheds or under the pigs' feeding
troughs.  In the end I only managed to get a welting from father for
coming home all muddy from head to foot--and not pleasant mud at that.

But really I did not mind.  I was always glad when I got home safe.
Now I know that I was taking my life in my hands every minute.  Even
then I had glimmerings of the fact.  The folks of Breckonside might
say, as they always did, that the killing of poor Harry was the work of
some chance tramps, who would be far away by the next morning.  But
putting everything together, just as Sherlock Holmes used to do, I
couldn't make it out at all.  I had his spirit, but not his luck--no,
not by any means his luck.

This, however, was what I made out.  Harry had jogged on till he met
with some one whom he knew, that is, almost immediately after he parted
with Davie Elshiner, the poacher.  He had talked, parleyed, and then
accepted company.  Then some one of these, sitting on the back seat of
the dog cart, had covered up his mouth and butchered him most foully.
After that no more was to be learned.  The light vehicle which had
bounded from side to side of the narrow drove-road had certainly been
empty.  I am no Sherlock Holmes, but my father and I know about horses
and local conveyances.  And we could see by the rebounding, the one
wheel climbing the bank, and the other sinking in the slough, that if
any one had been inside--nay any _thing_, the contents of the cart, be
they what they would, must have been emptied out.

But Harry, the mail bags, even the parcels for Bewick, had completely
disappeared.  Nothing except the empty cart and the broad plane-tree
leaves were ever seen again.  It seemed so simple a thing to trace--a
dead body, accounted no easy thing to make away with even
professionally, a dozen bags of letters--many with negotiable values,
of which the issuing bank had, luckily, reserved the numbers--tobacco
in tins, cigarettes in boxes, sweets, sugar in cones, even a Stilton
cheese for the old bachelor, Major Templand (retired), who cried out
more about the loss of his Welsh rabbit than all the others put
together.  Clues--there were balls and wads of clues!  Only, none of
them led anywhere.  Neither did the woods, through which there was no
track of anything previous to those made by Mr. Stennis's pony the
following day.  Nothing either way along the road.  No, I could put my
hand on nothing and nobody.  And I gave it up at last, sure
nevertheless that it was somewhere about the house of Deep Moat that
the solution must be looked for.

And, indeed, some light, such as it was, came from the last quarter
from which it could be expected.

Mr. Ablethorpe arrived one fine summer afternoon at our place in
Breckonside.  I was playing in the backyard, half a dozen dogs tumbling
over me.  It had been intended that I should go out that afternoon with
a van, but somehow one of the men had got back earlier from his morning
round, and had been re-dispatched as more trustworthy.  Also idleness
in a boy was bad enough, but in a man paid weekly wages--insupportable.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Yarrow," cried the curate in his hearty voice,
loud but not a bit preachy--I give him that due--"can I have your Joe
an hour or two?"

"Have him and keep him, the lazy whelp," cried my father from the back
shop, where he was busy writing up his books in his shirt sleeves.
Then, laying down his pen where it would not roll over the page (which
always roused him to crisply expressed anger), he came out to meet the
young curate from the neighbouring parish of Breckonton.  Upper or Over
Breckonton was still more dependent on my father than my native
Breckonside.  There were other ways of getting supplies at Breckonside,
at least for a time.  But Over Breckonton was wholly dependent on my
father's vans, carrier's carts, and general delivery of goods.

They shook hands with some heartiness.  For though my father had a
standing quarrel with both vicars he was always on the best of terms
with the curates.

"What might you want him for, Mr. Ablethorpe?"

"Oh," said Mr. Ablethorpe, "the farmers are busy with their moor hay,
you see, and I thought if Joe and I----"

"Say no more," cried my father, "you shall have him.  And if he does
not work like a good 'un, you tell it to me, that's all!  I see now why
the farmers of your parish call you the 'Hayfork' Minister!"

"Oh, they call me that, do they?" said the curate, not at all
disguising his pleasure in the nickname, "well, I'm no great preacher,
you know.  So it is as well to make oneself of use some way!"

"That's right--that's right," cried my father, "I hope you will put a
little of that teaching into the lazy bones of my young whelp.  Joe!
Ah, Joe, you villain!  Come here!  Don't skulk!"

As my father did really know where I was (and also because I was an
obedient boy with a reverence for the fifth commandment of the
Decalogue), I came immediately, greatly to the disappointment of the
dogs, who thought themselves in for a good long romp.  I found Mr.
Ablethorpe explaining to my father that we were just going to call in
at Brom Common Farm, to give Caleb Fergusson a lift with his hay--that
Caleb was an old man, and would be the better of the assistance of two
pairs of sturdy arms.  Furthermore, it would keep Joe in training for
the next cricket match--Breckonton and District _v._ Upper Dene
Hospital it was.

"I don't know exactly how long we shall be, I tell you frankly," said
the curate.  "If old Caleb has nearly finished, Joe and I may take a
walk before coming home.  It won't do to have him getting slack, lying
about the yard like this."

"That's all right," said my father, who was aching to get back to his
books, and wished nothing better than to have me taken off his hands,
"all serene!  Don't you fret, Mr. Ablethorpe.  Joe will be in good
keeping along of you.  I wish I could say as much of him always.  He is
a wandering, good-for-nothing wretch!"

That, you see, was my father's way of talking.  He didn't mean anything
by it.  But the words just flowed naturally from him, and he could no
more help abusing me, or, indeed, any of his men, than taking a snooze
when sleepy in the afternoon.

The curate, who knew that barking keeps the teeth open and so prevents
biting, simply laughed and said, "Well, come along, Joe!  You are under
my care and authority for this day, at any rate."

As for me, I was glad enough.  For, but for Elsie, and the thought of
my going to college in the late autumn, I liked Mr. Ablethorpe very
well, as, for that matter, did nearly every one who knew him--except
his vicar, who did not appreciate a young man being so popular;
"stealing the hearts of his congregation from him," as he expressed it.

I was still gladder, because I knew that that afternoon there was not
the least chance of seeing Elsie.  She had gone up to read Latin and
piles of hard books with Miss Martha Mustard, the dominie's sister, who
was said to be far more learned even than he.  At any rate, though not
what you would call "honeysuckle sweet," she had at least a far better
temper.

The curate and I set out.  It was the selfsame road that Elsie and I
had taken earlier in the year, on the May morning when we were the
first to look inside poor Harry Foster's blood-stained mail cart.

But now the leaves were turning and drying, already brown at the edges,
and splotched with yellow and green along the webbing inside.  Soon our
feet were on the heather, and I watched the curate to see if he would
turn his head to take a look across at the little creeper-hidden cot at
the Bridge End, where Elsie was not.  But either he was on his guard,
or he was as well aware as I myself of her absence.  At any rate he
never turned his head, but swung along with a jolly hillman's stride
which it took me all my pith and length of limb to keep pace with.

And as we went he improved the occasion.  Not like a common minister,
who asks you if you have been a good boy and always tell the truth.
Silly questions, as if the man had never been a boy himself!

But the curate said: "Now, look here, you are getting out of the way of
going to church, just because of your father's silly quarrel with the
vicar of your parish.  That may be well enough for your father.  He is
a grown man, and can judge about these things as well as you or I.  But
it is different with a young fellow.  He gets into bad habits.  Oh,
yes, I know you go sometimes to the Presbyterian chapel" (he actually
used the word chapel!), "but you do that because Miss Stennis is your
friend, and though, of course, anything is better than nothing----"

"It's as good as----" I was beginning hotly, when he interrupted me.

"Yes, yes," he cried hastily, "of course that is all right for those
who are in it.  But you are a Churchman and the son of a Churchman.
_I_ don't go hunting Presbyterians all over two parishes.  But when I
see a Churchman, and the son of a Churchman, in danger of
drifting--well, I step over the line of my duty and speak my mind."

I answered nothing, for after all clergymen have a monopoly of that
kind of talk.  But I kept my wits about me.  I thought he was going to
ask me to come regularly to his church so as to keep me away from
Elsie, but not a bit of him.

"What I want you to promise me is that when you go to Edinburgh you
will lose no time in looking up a friend of mine, Harry Ryan, who has a
church on the South Side.  If you don't he will look you up.  But I
want you to go, on the principle of one volunteer being worth two
pressed men.  More than that, it will do you good, and if you have left
any friends here in Breckonside they will, I am sure, be glad that you
are being looked after a bit.  I don't mean that your liberty will be
interfered with in the least.  It won't be interfered with half enough
in these lecturing barrack-rooms they call Scotch universities.  But
any way, don't be afraid.  Harry Ryan will see you through."

Well, I could say no less than that I would do as he said.  And when I
heard that Mr. Ryan was a good "cover," as well as a safe bat and
change bowler, I thought I would risk it.  Afterwards I found it would
have been one of the best things I could do.  Though, mind you, for all
that there may have been some thought of Elsie in the back of Mr.
Ablethorpe's mind.  For there were heaps and heaps of pretty girls at
Mr. Ryan's church, as I found out when I visited the city--all sorts,
swell girls, villa girls, and shop girls (these last the prettiest).
And he may have thought that among so many I would be almost certain to
forget Elsie.  He _may_, I say.  I don't know that he did.  Only--I
should in his place.

Well, my curate, he went on like sticks a-breaking all about the
difference between church and chapel, and how, though the Presbyterians
were by law established in Scotland, they were only chapel people after
all.  And that there was only one Church, properly so called.  Oh, a
lot like that.  And he got quite hot about it, because he had been in
Scotland himself, and had been called a Dissenter by the parish
minister.  He had never got over this, and even now the remembrance of
it made him ruffle up his hair like tossing moist meadow hay.  Then he
would start in to explain about it all over again.

I didn't mind, for I thought: "The more he cares for things like that
'Postolic Succession and 'Down with John Knox,' the less time will he
have for meandering about Elsie."  So I was pleased all right with what
he said, though I didn't listen much.  However, I promised to go to his
friend's church in Edinburgh, and not to any of the Presbyterian
"schism-shops."  That was what he called them, for he pitched into them
proper.  Then he was as pleased as Punch, and looked upon me with a
sort of air as if he owned me.  I bet he took me for a brand plucked
from the Presbyterian burning.  You see, on the border of the two
countries it is different from anywhere else.  It is like drawing a
chalk line, and both sides, Piskies and Presbies, spar up to it.  They
are always letting out at each other, while thirty miles inland they
don't care a jujube about the matter, and even play golf together and
smoke pipes on the sly after sermon.  This is truth, and you can put it
between the leaves of the Holy Book and swear on it.

Well, I told the curate I would go to his friend Harry Ryan's
church--St. James the Less was the name of it.  But I didn't say _how
often_ I would go!  It is always well to keep a sort of anchor out,
grappled in the hinterlands of your conscience, when you are promising
in the dark, as I was that time.

All this time, when Mr. Ablethorpe was improving me and leading me in
the way of the Thirty-nine Articles (no, not exactly--I forgot--he
didn't like them; he thought he could have made much better ones, but
in the way of the catechism and Prayer Book), we were legging it across
big bare Brom Common.  He would stop and argue, keeping me looking
straight at him till the water came into my eyes.  Then on he would go
again, more set than ever on making a good Churchman out of me.  I
never saw anybody quite so certain that he was right as Mr. Ablethorpe.
Why, he would have taken his Davy that even the best of Dissenters
would only get into a kind of half-way house, back-stairs heaven, and
might count themselves lucky if they were not sent flying altogether.

But all this got us over the ground pretty quick, and we were at old
Caleb Fergusson's before we knew it.  Then, just as we were going into
the stackyard I remembered that old Caleb was a Presbyterian, and of
the worst and toughest kind--Free Kirk elder right through to the back
seam of his coat.  So I asked curate how that was, and how he
reconciled helping old Caleb with his conscience and all that he had
been drilling into me.

But Mr. Ablethorpe only said, "Caleb Fergusson is a Presbyterian, it is
true, and very obstinate and blinded.  But he has a farm at too dear a
rent, and has lost the only son who helped him in the working of it.
So I go sometimes to give him a hand."

It was not a very logical explanation after what he had just been
unlading into me.  But all the same I liked him the better for
it--jolly well, too.

We found Caleb just at the end of stacking his meadow hay, and very
testy.  He had his old wife out to help him.  She was tottering on the
edge of a rick, half-way up, and all the other help he had was a small
boy grandson, whom he was making sorry that he had ever been born.  I
thought Caleb would have been glad to see us, and so I dare say he was.
But his crusty Scotchness would not let him show it.  Show it?  No fear.

He let Mr. Ablethorpe take his fork, it is true, and ordered down his
wife from the stack with the grumble that she had left "the hale affair
as saft as saps!"

Then he turned and rated the curate for not coming earlier, if he meant
to be any use.

"But it's just like you English Kirkers," he said.  "Ye are at the fore
wi' your chants and vain ceremonies, but when it comes to the halesome
milk o' the Word--faith, but your coo's dry!"

I stood aghast.  I expected such a volley from the fervid curate as
would sweep the daring old man off the shafts of his red farm cart.
But I did not know Mr. Ablethorpe yet.

"I am sorry, Caleb," he said meekly; "I meant to come earlier, but I
had a few calls to make and a service to take----"

"Service, quo' he," snorted the old Free Kirker; "the rags o' Rome!"

"And besides," continued the curate, without troubling himself with the
taunt, "there was so heavy a dew this morning that I did not think you
would be leading till the afternoon!"

"Nae mair we wad, if Providence had left us the means o' waitin' till
the hay was decently won.  But what can a puir auld bereaved couple
dae, hirplin' at death's door, baith the twa o' them?"

By this time I was on the stack, and the Hayfork Minister was sending
me up armful after armful to settle into its place.

"Tramp, will ye!" shouted the old man; "that wife o' mine has gotten
nae heavier on her feet than a cricket on the hearth, or a spider that
taketh hold wi' her hands and is in king's pailaces!  Tramp, laddie!"

So, as Mr. Ablethorpe forked the hay, I stepped sturdily round, till I,
too, was fain to strip to my shirt, and even moisten the sweet-smelling
bog hay with the sweat of my brow.

And while we worked old Caleb stood by, and, as he expressed it,
"tightly tairged the Apiscopian on doctrine and the Scriptures."  Mr.
Ablethorpe was certainly at a disadvantage in a theological argument
conducted from a hay cart (with a borrowed horse) against an assailant
sitting crumbling tobacco into a pipe on the safe eminence of an
upturned wheelbarrow.

[Illustration: "While we worked Old Caleb ... tightly tairged the
'Apiscopian' on Doctrine and the Scripture."]

But the humility with which he listened to the old elder amazed me.  It
was not that he agreed with him.  He carefully guarded against that.
But he accepted many of the old Scot's positions, merely gliding in a
saving clause by way of amendment, to salve his conscience, as it were,
between two forkfuls of hay.  Even these, however, were of no effect.
For not only was Caleb a little deaf, but he never waited for a reply,
and by the time that Mr. Ablethorpe had added his rider Caleb was far
into yet another argument destined to the final destruction of the
"rags of Rome, and all sic as put their trust in them!"

When work was over for the day, Mr. Ablethorpe would not stay for tea.
He had to go farther, he explained, after dabbling his face in the
water of the pump trough and wiping it with the fine white cambric
handkerchief which I had so scorned.

Caleb accompanied us to the gate, and I looked for a profusion of
grateful thanks.  But I did not know my Scotsman.  All he said was
only, "The neist time ye come to gie a body a half-day fowin'
(forking), come at an hour when we will get some wark oot o' ye!"

The curate laughed, and shook him by the hand cordially.

"A good old man," he said, as we walked off, "but dreadfully confirmed
in his delusions."

"Why did you not tell him what you told me?" I made bold to ask.

Mr. Ablethorpe turned quickly and clapped me on the shoulder.

"I have not faith enough to remove mountains," he said, "but with a
spade I can sometimes make a show at moving a molehill where it ought
to go."

We continued on over the moor toward the Brom Water, where was the
place that Poacher Davie Elshiner had done his fishing that morning of
the loss of poor Harry Foster.

I asked Mr. Ablethorpe what we were to do there, and warned him that I
had no wish to go nearer to the house of Deep Moat.  So that if he
counted on visiting his penitent Miss Aphra Orrin he would have to go
alone.

"I am perturbed in my mind, and that's the truth," he said.  "There is
something strange along the branch of the river which flows into the
Moat.  I walked home that way yesterday, and I wish for your presence
and assistance.  Two can do so much more than one.  Also, you know the
locality, as well I know.  I look to you to help me to solve the
mystery which, to my mind at least, hangs over Brom Water."




CHAPTER XI

THE IRON TRAPDOOR

The Hayfork Minister, who had laboured with equal determination to save
the crop of a true-blue Presbyterian and to make me a good Churchman,
evidently knew his way about the precincts of the Grange.  He stepped
through a gap in the hedge, jumped a half-dry ditch, and wound his way
through the scattering brambles and underbrush as if he had been in his
own garden plot.

No coward, the Hayfork!  It took me all my time to keep up with him,
and I am a good jumper, too--nearly as good as Elsie.

We went down the side of the Moat Backwater.  It is a curious place.
It is not, you understand, the Brom Water itself.  That comes down from
the hills and wimples away across the plain, full of good fish, both
trout and salmon, according to their season.  But the Moat Backwater
connects the pond or little loch which lies in front of the windows of
the Grange with the Brom.  Whether the connection is absolutely
natural, or whether it was originally made by the hand of man, I cannot
tell.  Neither, so far as I know, can anybody else.  But in some places
it certainly looks like the latter.

At any rate, whenever the Brom is in flood, it "backs up," as it were,
into the Backwater, and so runs into the pond.  It fills the Moat
itself like a tide, and I believe on a few occasions it has even been
known to overflow the greensward where the clumps of lilies are, right
up to the steps of the front door!

There is, of course, always some water in the Lane, which trenches the
meadows and runs canalwise through the fringing woods.  But at ordinary
times the water in the Lane, as much of it as there is, finds its way
toward the Brom, owing to the feeding of the Grange Pond by local
streamlets.  But in times of rain the current runs the other way.  Then
the Backwater runs brown and turgid into the pond till the lilies tug
at their green anchor chains and the Moat itself is lipping full of
black, peaty water from the hills.

To-day as we plunged into the shadow of the woods along the side of the
Backwater, it held no more water than a burn in the summer
heats--little and still clear, the minnows and troutlets balancing and
darting, joggling each other rudely from beneath favourite stones, or
shouldering into well-situated holes in the bank, like people
scrambling for seats at a play.  Then a few yards farther on would come
a deep brown pool with a curious greenish opal sheen lying like a scum
on the surface, for all the world like two-coloured silk.  This was the
reflection of the leaves above.  Very dense they were, so that the
light could hardly filter through between.  Along the burnside it was
generally lighter.  But the trees clustered deep and thick about the
pools, as I suppose they do all the world over, whenever they get the
chance.

"The water is lower than I have ever seen it!" I said, as it might be,
just for something to say.  But Mr. Ablethorpe did not answer a word.
I could see him looking eagerly about him, evidently searching for
something he had seen before, but for the moment could not find again.

I could not for the life of me imagine what it could be, nor yet why he
had been so keen to have me with him.  It was not that he was afraid.
That was plain enough.  For he had been this way before, and that quite
recently.  I knew by his spying this way and that for landmarks.  And I
knew quite certain that it was not just that I might give him a hand
with old Caleb Fergusson's harvest that he had asked me off from my
home work, or home play, whichever it might be.

All at once he stopped, sat down on a log, pulled out his knife and
began to whittle at a branch of oak.  Whatever it was he was looking
for, he had either found it, or decided to give up the search.

We were sitting on a fallen tree trunk, close to the edge of the
Backwater, and the pool beneath us was almost dry.  The Lane ran out of
sight, getting smaller and smaller in what I have heard called
"perspective"--that is, straight as if ruled on paper with a straight
edge.

Then the Hayfork Minister asked me if I saw anything particular about
the water.  I told him what I have just written, but I could not for
the life of me remember the word "perspective."  He understood all
right, though.

"Good," he said, "and does that suggest nothing else to the bold and
inquiring mind of my friend Joseph?"

After looking awhile I answered that it seemed to me as if somebody had
cut the canal with spades just as Tim O'Hara and Mike Whelan did the
ditching and draining on my father's forage parks the winter before
last.

"Right again, Joe!" he said, pleasedlike, and rumpled up my hair in a
way I don't let anybody do--except Elsie, who does as she likes,
whether I like it or no.  I pulled away my head angrily.  But the
Hayfork Minister never minded.

"I can't tell you whether this has been dug out with a spade or not,"
he said, putting a point on the oaken cudgel with his big "gully" knife
(think of a minister with a knife like that!), "but this I can tell
you, that the hand of man has been here or hereabouts!"

And with that he leaned over the edge right among the weeds and began
scraping away at the bank.  It was coated over pretty regularly with a
greyish mud which had come down with the last emptying of the pond.
This was done periodically, with the avowed purpose of clearing out the
Moat and Backwater.  Mr. Ball saw to it, under the personal
superintendence of Mr. Stennis.  And all that day the mad people at the
Grange were kept within doors, and the policies were strictly guarded.
For the scour of the water escaping down the channel brought with it
multitudes of fish--not very large, it is true, but sufficient to be a
temptation to every boy within miles.  Such, however, was the terror
inspired by the inhabitants of Deep Moat Grange, and especially by Daft
Jeremy, that those who were bold enough to come at all, rather braved
the dangers of the Duke's keepers at the infall of the Backwater into
the Brom, than dared to set a foot within those woodland shadows where
they knew not what terrors might lurk.

The Hayfork Minister went on knocking off big flakes of dried mud with
the point of his stick.  Then, whistling softly, he started to polish
something with vigour.  At first I could not in the least see what he
was after, but soon a good big square of reddish metal was laid bare.
It was not upright in the bank, but leaned a little back, was very deep
set, and I could see that it had been intended to slide in grooves.  At
the time I had no idea as to why it had been put there.  But now I know
that it must have been constructed for purposes of irrigation.

There was, in fact, an old vegetable garden and orchard, still partly
enclosed with crumbling walls, not two hundred yards off through the
woods.  And there is little doubt that it had been the intention of
some former travelled master of the Grange to cultivate his table
vegetables and fruits on the system of Southern Europe.

All, however, was now desolate.

Yet the iron plate in the bank, though mud-covered and rusty, had not
stuck altogether.  Indeed, looking at it closely, it was not difficult
to see that it had recently been used.  With the Hayfork Minister at
one end of the oak branch, and myself at the other, we soon made it
budge with a smothered heave-ho! and revealed a regularly bricked
tunnel leading apparently into the bowels of the earth.

"That is where you are to go, my son!" said Mr. Ablethorpe.

"Me!"

Mr. Ablethorpe nodded, and scraping away some leaves behind the fallen
tree on which we had been sitting together, he disinterred a coil of
stout cord, not thick, but very strong, with a red thread running
through it.  "This has served," he said, "for heavier weights in more
dangerous places!"

And without more ado he proceeded to knot it about my waist, as if he
had been accustomed to nothing else all his life.  But I objected.
Indeed, I had reason.  For suppose Mad Jeremy, or Aphra Orrin, or Mr.
Stennis himself were to come while I was up there--what then?

"You leave that to me, Joe," said the Hayfork Minister; "there is not
one of them that would dare to touch me--no, nor you--while you are in
my company."

This was good enough to hear, and, in its way, comforting.  But,
somehow, at such a time the mind craves for proofs more absolute.  Or
to be somewhere else.  Particularly the latter.

I think Mr. Ablethorpe saw something of my dismay on my face, for
immediately he stopped what he was doing, put his hand on my shoulder,
and said, "Joe, would I send you into any danger I would not be ready
to share myself?"

"No, I believe not, sir!" said I.  For though he worried me like fun
about being the right sort of Churchman, he was a rare good sort
himself, man and Churchman, too.  At least I know about the first, and
as for the Churchman, I am willing to take that on trust.

"Well, now," said he, "that's settled.  In you go!"

"But what am I to do when I get in there?" I asked.  For I had thought
that he was going to give me a proper explanation of everything--the
whys and the wherefores, and all about it.

"You are to crawl, Joe," he said, "because you can get in and I cannot,
Joseph!  That's the worst of going in for athletics at school, Joe--it
makes you grow such a whopping size afterwards when you stop them.  So
you are to crawl up there for me, and as soon as you find anything, you
are to give the rope a tug, and I will pull you out!  For it isn't so
easy as it looks to crawl backward down a hole of that size."

"But suppose," I faltered, my imagination rampant, and my voice failing
me at the same moment, "suppose--that I should come on--on poor Harry
Foster--with--with his throat cut--oh, what should I do?"

"You won't--more's the pity," he answered, quite coolly.  "If Harry had
been in there, and you and I sitting here, we should have known it long
ere this.  No such luck!  Still, what you may _find_, is quite worth
the trial.  We shall at least learn something!"

Now I don't think that, since the visit Elsie and I paid to Deep Moat
Grange, I was quite so eager to "learn something" as I had been.  But
it was no use being a coward with the Hayfork Minister.

"In you go, Joe," he said, lowering me by the rope to the black mouth
of the passage, "in with you, eel!  And if you find anything portable,
gave a tug, and if you want to come out _very_ suddenly, give two tugs."

I was halfway in as he said these words, and I instantly gave two tugs,
but he only said, "Now, no monkey tricks, Joe.  This is serious.  Up
with you.  Remember I am here!"

I was not at all likely to forget it.  But I had much rather he had
been head foremost up that narrow tunnel, and I out in the green aisles
of the forest waiting for him with a rope in my hands.




CHAPTER XII

THE BRICKED PASSAGE

Now I don't know whether you have ever been up a drain pipe which just
takes you, and no more.  I suppose you have--in nightmares, after
supping on cold boiled pork and greens, or some nice little digestible
morsel like that.  But really awake, and with the birds singing on the
trees, the winds lightly scented with bog myrtle and pine and bracken
breathing all about you--to be told to shove yourself up a built rabbit
hole, not knowing what you may come on the next time you put out your
hand!--Well, Hayfork Minister or no Hayfork--I had the hardest row to
hoe that time!  I don't think any fellow, even if he has climbed all
the mountains that are, has any right to let a boy in for a thing like
that without telling him beforehand.  And smiling about it all the
time, as if he were merely sending you into Miss Payne's to buy
butter-scotch!

I felt as if I could have killed him the first half-dozen "creeps" I
took.  And what was the worst of his cheek, he shoved me behind with
the oak branch, which he had sharpened, and said, "Go on!"

If I could have got him then--up a drain--me with that same oak goad, I
would have given it to him--cheerful, I would.  Cheerful is no name for
it!

Inside the tunnel the bricks were not all of the same size.  Some had
dropped a little and pinched my shoulders.  Some were wanting
altogether.  And that fiend of a Hayfork, at the mouth, all safe
outside with the rope's-end in his hand kept singing up to me, "A-a-all
right--a-a-right--it will get wider as you get farther in!"

Much he knew!  Had he been up, I'd like to know?

However, he was right as it happened--right without knowing anything
about it.  The passage did widen a bit.  I found offshoots--smaller
passages leading I don't know where.  And I didn't put in my hand to
feel, having a dislike to be bitten by water rats--or any other kind of
rats.  And it was an awful "ratty" place that, by the smell of it.

Also, for all that Mr. Ablethorpe said, I was in mortal fear of coming
across poor Harry's leg, or of Mad Jeremy arriving and "settling" Mr.
Ablethorpe, without my knowing anything about it.  And when I came
out--I should find myself face to face with the oily curls, the
sneering lip, and--specially, with the knife I had seen gleaming in his
teeth when he swam the Moat to make an end of Elsie and me.

I wasn't frightened, of course.  Only I just thought what a fool I was
to be there.  I am not the first, nor will I be the last to think the
same thing--when, like me, they are doing something dreadful noble and
heroic.

There were curious side passages, as I say, on each side of the tunnel
along which I was crawling--oh, so slowly.  Some of these were narrow
and smooth, where a brick had fallen out, and smelled "rat" yards off.
I did not meddle with these.  But there were bigger offshoots, too,
properly bricked round and as tight as ninepence--no rats there.

Well, it was in one of these that I came on my first treasure-trove.  I
felt a lot of things all tied together in a rough bag or cloth--heavy,
too, and of course all clammy with moisture or mould or something like
that.  No wonder--I felt all green-mouldy myself, after only a minute
or two.

I tugged at the rope, and, almost before I knew it, I was out again in
the dancing speckle of the sunshine sifted through the leaves.  Blinded
by the sudden glare which sent blobs of colour dancing across my
eyeballs, as if I had looked at the sun, I did not realize for a moment
that I had brought anything with me.

"Let go!" I heard Mr. Ablethorpe say, and I was quite unconscious what
I was holding on to.  Yet what I had found was little enough to the
eye--a piece of rough sacking, roughly sewn about a quantity of
metallic objects which jingled as Mr. Ablethorpe cut the outer covering
open with his big "gully" knife.

"Money!" the thought came natural to a boy; "have I disinterred a
treasure?"

And for the moment I was all ready to go back again to look for more.

But the blade went on cutting, and presently the contents tinkled out
upon the bank--about a dozen and a half of copper rings, rather thick,
and each made with a hook at the bottom.  I could not imagine what they
were for.

But Mr. Ablethorpe bounded upon them, examining each one before putting
it in his pocket.  Lastly he looked at the piece of canvas in which
they had been wrapped, long and carefully.

"Ah!" he said, "that, I think, will do!"

And he closed the iron sliding door carefully, as it had been before,
and thrusting his fingers into the shallow pool, he lifted up double
handfuls of oozy mud and plastered it all over the entrance.

"When that is dry," he said, "it will take a clever man to tell where
you have poked your nose this afternoon, Joseph!"

This seemed likely enough and satisfactory, from his point of view.
But, as for me, I wanted very much to be told what it was all about.

So I asked him what it was I had found, and why he wanted me to crawl
up there, at any rate.

"You found some copper rings and a piece of dirty canvas," he said,
"neither more nor less.  And I asked you to go up there because I was
too fat to go myself.  Were you nearly at the end, think you?"

I told him no--that the passage seemed to widen as it went farther on.
I think that at these words he was nearly replacing the rope, which he
had begun to coil, round my waist again.

But he looked at his watch, and shook his head.

"We have not the time to do it safely," he said; "but--let us see--if
it widens as you say, Joseph, it is very likely that it has another
opening."

He took a small plan out of his pocket, a tiny little measuring scale,
nodded once or twice, and then began slowly to pace through the wood at
right angles to the course of the Backwater.

All at once he dropped to the ground as if shot.  I judged it best to
efface myself, too, and that promptly.  So I crawled behind a big pine
tree, about whose roots the male ferns were growing tall, and, putting
their thick scaly stems aside with my hand, I lay watching the heels of
the boots which Mr. Ablethorpe wore.

He kept quite still, apparently intent upon something I could not see.
Now, of course (you will not have noticed it), but I am very curious
about things that don't concern me in the least--not to talk about, you
understand, but just to _know_.  So, as the ferns grew pretty
continuously, and the pines held close together, shooting their
indigo-blue umbrellas into the sky, I wriggled along till I could lay
my hand on one of the minister's boot heels.

It was a foolish thing to do, for it nearly made him cry out.  I saw
him set his teeth to shut in the sound.  He had a nerve, the Hayfork
Minister, but I could see from his look that he would give it to me
after for coming on him like that.  However, it was some fun to see him
in a funk.

And, indeed, with reason!  For not more than a dozen yards down the
slope, between us and the wall of the old orchard, I saw Mad Jeremy, on
his knees, digging with his fingers, eager as a terrier at a rat hole.

Then I called to mind the mysterious crime of which Miss Aphra had
found him guilty, and her stern accusation, "You've been digging
again!" the day Elsie and I were at the Grange.  Last of all, his
repeated denial, his attempts to rub off the earth pellets, his
sentence, tears, and punishment.  Yes, I saw him digging with his
fingers just as his sister had said.

Jiminy, how I wished I was at home!

I might wish, indeed, but there we were stuck and had to wait--Mr.
Ablethorpe and I--till Mad Jeremy, having finished his task, stamped
down the sods he had edged up at either side, and set with care a great
square flagstone in its place.

Then he stood rubbing his hands together and grinning for some minutes,
evidently well pleased with himself.  A voice far away called:

"Jeremy!  Jeremy!"

At the sound the smile was stricken from his face.  The madman looked
guiltily at his hands, and seeing the condition in which they were, he
made straight for the Backwater, passing us within (I declare) four
yards.  But the bracken was thick and tall, and we lay close, so that
Jeremy failed to see us.  Besides, his mind was evidently ill at ease.

The voice from the direction of Deep Moat Grange continued to call:
"Jeremy!  Jeremy!"  He did not reply, and we could hear him mutter,
"What shall I say?  What shall I say if she finds out?"

Then, having pulled round the long tails of his coat, one after the
other, he dried his hands carefully, held them up to see that they were
clean, and took his way up the side of the Backwater toward the
drawbridge, whistling as he went.

For me, I was scared out of a year's growth.  But the Hayfork Minister,
lifting himself out of the ferns, and dusting lightly the knees of his
black cord trousers, pointed to the great flagstone on which the turf
showed ragged edges, and said gravely: "The secret is there.  That is
the other end of the tunnel!"

He meant, I felt sure, to send me in again, in spite of all that we had
seen.

As for me, however, I resolved to keep very clear of the Hayfork
Minister.  He was a nice man, Mr. Ablethorpe, and a pleasure to know.
But to be in a drain pipe for his sake, with the fear of Mad Jeremy
meeting one face to face half-way up, put too high a price on his
friendship.  I resolved, therefore, in future to cut Mr. Ablethorpe's
acquaintance.




CHAPTER XIII

MEYSIE'S BAIRNS

At the time I had no idea how difficult this would be.  But at any rate
I wanted to find out for certain what it was that I had found.  He
could give me no other answer than that I would know in good time, and
that in the meantime we were going to old Caleb Fergusson's for tea.

Now I make no objections to tea at any time--that is, a proper
sit-down, spread-table, country tea--not one of those agonies at which
you do tricks with a cup of tea, a plate, the edge of a chair, and a
snippet of bread.  I knew that at the Fergusson's I would find plenty
to eat and drink.

We slid back through the woods, rising higher all the time as the land
trended toward the moor.  Then out and away across the road I could see
far away to the right the roofs of Breckonside, shining like silver
after a shower which must have passed over them, the winding Brom
Water, the threaded roads, pale pink in colour, the dry stone dykes
dividing the fields.  Never had my native village seemed so small to
me.  Perhaps because I had just been in some considerable danger, a
thing which enlarges the mental horizon.  I looked for Elsie's house
down there.  But though I could see the silver glint of the water, I
could not make out the cottage at the Bridge End.  There was a mist,
however, creeping up from the sea, so that in a little while, even as I
looked, the whole valley became a pearl-grey lake, with only the tall
ash trees and the solitary church spire standing up out of the smother.

We found old Caleb, an infrequent smile on his face, leaning over the
bars of his yard gate.

"Them that hasna their hay weel covered," he chuckled, "runs a chance
o' gettin' it sprinkled a wee!"

"Then," said Mr. Ablethorpe, "you owe me something for the afternoon's
work I gave you!"

"Yon!" cried the old man, ungratefully, "caa ye that half a day's wark?
But I'm far frae denyin' that, sic as it was, it helped.  Ow, ay, it
was aye a help!  And at ony rate the hay's under cover--some
thack-and-rape, and some in the new-fangled shed.  But what's your
wull?  Ye are no seekin' wages, I'm thinkin'.  Maybe ye want me to turn
my coat and come doon to your bit tabernacle?  Aweel, ye may want."

"Oh, no," said Mr. Ablethorpe, smiling.  "I was just hoping that
perhaps your good wife would brew us a cup of tea.  I think both Joe
and I would be the better of it."

You should have seen how the old farmer's face lit up.  Hospitality was
a beautiful thing to him.  He rejoiced in that, at least.  And if, as
some folk say--not Mr. Ablethorpe--an elder is the same as a bishop,
then the old Free Kirker had at least one of the necessary qualities.
He was "given to hospitality."  Whether he was, as is also required,
"no striker," I would not just like to say, or to try.

But Caleb took us indoors out of the slight oncoming drizzle, which was
beginning to spray down from the clouds, or creep up from the
valleys--I am not sure which.  At any rate, it was there,
close-serried, wetting.

Now heretofore I had only seen Mrs. Caleb when she was ordered down
from the long stack under the zinc-roofed shed, which her husband was
never tired of declaiming against as "new-fangled," yet to which he
owed that night the safety of his crop.

Mrs. Caleb was a good twenty years younger than her lord, still,
indeed, bearing traces of that special kind of good looks which the
Scots call "sonsiness."  Susan Fergusson at five-and-forty was sonsy to
the last degree.  Her husband, twenty years older, was sun-dried and
wind-dried and frost-bitten till he had become sapless as a leaf blown
along the highway on a bask March day, when the fields are full of
sowers, and the roads cloudy with "stoor."

"Come ben!  This way, sir--and you, too, Joe," she cried, opening a
door into an inner room, "ye will no hae seen Meysie's bairns?"

As I had never even heard of Meysie, I certainly had not.

But the goodwife's next words enlightened me.

"Caleb, ye see, was marriet afore he took up wi' me.  'Deed, his lassie
Meysie is maybe aulder than I am mysel'--and a solit, sensible woman.
But this is the first time her bairns hae comed sae far to see me!"

She flung the door open, and there, sitting one on a sofa, and the
other on a footstool by the fire, I saw two grown-up young ladies--so
at least they appeared to me.  And I began to fear that my tea was
going to cost me dear.  For at that time conversation was a difficult
art to me with anyone whom I could neither fight nor call names.

The girls--twenty or twenty-two they seemed--oh, ever so old--looked
just as if they had been doing nothing.  That is, the one with the
straight-cut face, very dignified, who made a kind of long droopy
picture of herself on the sofa, was reading a book, or pretending to,
while the other on the stool did nothing but nurse her knees and look
out at the window.

That was the one I liked best, though, of course, not like Elsie--I
should think not, indeed.  But she was little, she had a merry face,
and I am sure she had been laughing just before we came in.  Indeed, I
am none so sure that she had not been listening at the keyhole and made
a rush for the footstool.

"Bairns," said Mrs. Caleb the Second, "this is the Englishy minister,
and a kind friend o' us auld folk.  Though Caleb, your gran'dad, gies
him awfu' spells o' argumentincation aboot things I ken nocht aboot!
'Deed, I wonder whiles that Maister Ablethorpe ever looks near us
again!"

"Oh, no," said the Hayfork Minister, smiling, "it takes two to make an
argument, and I never argue with Mr. Fergusson.  I only receive
instruction, as a younger from an elder!"

"Hear to him," cried the goodwife, "he doesna mean a word he is
sayin'--I can aye tell by the glint in his e'e."

Then she introduced the girls in due form.  One, the tall tired-looking
girl on the sofa, was Constantia, and the little merry one was named
Harriet.  To my great astonishment they were of the same age, being
twins.

It seemed as if I were to be left out altogether, but Harriet looked
across at me and asked demurely if I were going to be a minister, too.

She was making fun of me, of course, and that is what I do not allow
any girl to do.  Only Elsie, and she is really too serious to abuse the
privilege--not like this Harriet.  I could see in a minute that she was
a regular magpie--a "clip," as they say in Breckonside.

Meanwhile, Constantia did not say very much.  She gave Mr. Ablethorpe
her hand as if she were doing him a valuable kindness.  And at this I
could hear her sister gurgle.  The next minute, Harriet was on her
feet, and, taking me by the shoulder, she said: "Come on, Joe--Joe is
your name, isn't it?  That's good, for it's just the name I like best
of all boys' names.  Come on and help Susan Fergusson to get tea."
That was the way she spoke of her grandmother--off-hand and kindly,
with a glint of fun more in the manner than in the words.

"What's your other name?" I asked, because I did not like to call her
Harriet so suddenly.  Besides, I did not know how Elsie might take to
all this.  I was sure they would like one another no end.  Because they
were both the same kind of girl--jolly, so that almost any boy could
get on with them.  At least, that was what I thought at the time, not
knowing any better.

"Caw," she said; "that is my name; same as a crow says 'Caw--Caw--Caw!'
You needn't be surprised, I couldn't help it being my father's name.
But it's short, and if you should forget it, you have only to go out
and stand beneath a rookery, and you'll remember it in a minute.  That
is, unless you are deaf."

Then I told Harriet Caw my name, Joseph Yarrow, which she thought
funny.  And she gave me bread to cut while she stood by me and buttered
it--doing everything so quickly, and talking all the time, that indeed
it was very nice.  And I wished Elsie had been there to laugh at
Harriet's jokes, which seemed very funny to me then.  But, oh, how
stupid and feeble they seemed when I came to tell them to Elsie after!
And Elsie wasn't a bit amused, as I had hoped.  Girls hardly ever seem
to get on with other girls as a fellow thinks they will.  It is
different with men.  Now I got on first-class with Mr. Ablethorpe, even
when I thought--but it's no matter about that now.

Well, it was a tea!  The table was loaded from one end to the other.
There were soda scones, light and hove up so as to make your teeth
water.  There were farrels of oat-cake, crisp and curly, with just the
proper amount of browning on the side where the red ashes of the fire
had toasted it.  Four or five kinds of jams there were, all better one
than the other.  Old Caleb came in and ate quickly, sermonizing Mr.
Ablethorpe all the time, and as long as he was there we were all as
quiet as mice.  But I am sure everyone was glad when he rose, tumbled
things about on the window seat in search of his blue bonnet (which
only he of all the countryside still wore), and finally went out to the
hill.  Before going he warned us to behave and to remember that, _such
as he was_, we had one who deemed himself a minister among us.

But as soon as we were alone, up jumped Harriet Caw, and catching me
round the waist, she cried, "Dance, Joseph--dance, Joe!  He's gone.
Never mind Granny Susan.  She does not count!"

That was actually the way she spoke of her grandmother--or
step-grandmother, rather.  And, indeed, that good lady only laughed,
and, shaking her head at the minister, repeated, what I afterwards
found to be her favourite maxim--that "young folk would be young folk."
The philosophy of which was that they would get over it all too soon.

The Hayfork Minister nodded back to Susan, and I was not sorry to see
him (as I thought) much taken up with the picture-book girl, as in my
heart I called Constantia.  For in our house at home, up in the attic,
there are a lot of old "Annuals" and "Keepsakes"--oh, I don't know how
old, all in faded watered-silk covers loose at the back--some faded and
some where the colour has run, but choke full of pictures of scenery,
all camels and spiky palms and humpy camels, with "Palmyra" and
"Carthage" written beneath time about.  But these are not half bad,
though deadly alike.  The weary parts are the pictures of
girls--leaning out of windows before they have done their washing and
hair-brushing in the morning.  I should just like to see my father
catch them at it.  That was called "Dreaming of Thee."  And there were
lots of others.  "Sensibility" was a particularly bad one.  She was
spread all over a sofa, and had a canary on her finger.  She had saved
it from a little snappy-yappy spaniel--only just, for two tail feathers
were floating down.  And there were two big dewdrops of tears on her
cheeks to show how sorry she was for the canary bird--or, perhaps, for
the spaniel.

Anyway, it was the only time I ever really liked a spaniel.

Well, I needn't describe the others.  At any rate, if you've ever seen
the "Keepsake" kind of young women, you won't have forgotten them.  You
will cherish a spite, especially if you have had to stay in one room
and choose between looking at them and flattening your nose against the
window-panes, down which the water is running in big blobs, during a
week of wet holiday weather.

Constantia was a "Keepsake" girl.

I suppose it must be, as it is with snakes.  Some like them and some
not.  I don't.  But I will never deny (not being, like Elsie, a girl)
that Constantia was good looking.  If (and the Lord have mercy on your
soul!) you really liked that sort of thing, Constantia was just the
sort of thing you would like.




CHAPTER XIV

BROWN PAINT--VARNISHED!

We had a merry afternoon and laughed--eh, how we laughed!  I heard all
about the girls, how they had just been at school, and how Constantia
had just come home, full up of all the perfections, and deportment, and
the 'ologies, and how many men wanted to marry her--were dying to, in
fact!  That might be all right.  It was Harriet who told me--though
that does not make it any the more likely to be true (I am sorry to
say).  For I can see that that young woman was trying to take me in all
the time.

"But for the parson, we would have a dance!" whispered Harriet; "but as
he will sit there and tell Stancy about her 'azure' eyes till all's
blue, you and I can go for a walk instead--shall we?"

I didn't want to, you may imagine.  The difficulty was how to say No.
Indeed, Harriet never asked me.  She had put on a smart little summer
hat, and we were out on the moor quicker than I can write it.

"Mind you," she said, laying her hand confidingly (as I then thought)
on my arm, "don't you ever dare to tell Stancy that her eyes are like
to the vault of heaven, or like forget-me-nots wet with dew, or like
turquoises, or the very colour of her sky-blue silk scarf.  For, first
of all, it's not true, and it is wrong to tell lies.  More than that,
she will tell _me_.  And I like--well" (she added this bit softly,
taking a long look at me) "never mind what I like.  Perhaps it's as
well that you shouldn't know."

Then she kicked away a pebble with the toe of one tiny boot and
appeared to be embarrassed.  I think, now, that she knew she had a
pretty foot.

Anyway I began to be conscious she was a nice girl, and to be sorry for
her--a way men have.  Men are such wise things, and not vain at all.

Don't think I forgot.  I was always just going to tell her about Elsie,
when she darted off into something else.  She was constantly doing
that--a most ill-regulated and disconcerting girl.  I knew she would
certainly have been interested in Elsie.  The two had so much in common.

We were going through some straggling trees on the edge of Brom Common,
when Harriet stopped and turned her eyes on me, as if she would have
drowned me in them.  I didn't know before that they were so big and
dark and shiny--especially in dusky places.  Harriet Caw knew, however.

"What colour are my eyes," she demanded.  "Quick, now, don't cheat!"

"I don't know!" I said truthfully.  "I never noticed."

Then she got mad.  You see, I had no experience and didn't know enough
to make a shot at it.  For girls always notice eyes--or think they do.
And when they go to see a man condemned in court for extra special
murder, they sigh and say, "What very nice eyes he has--who would have
thought it?"

And if he had been tried by a jury of girls, he would have got off
every time--because of these same nice eyes.  That is why the justice
of a country is conducted by men.  One reason, at least.

"Well, then, look!" she cried, making them the size of billiard balls
right under my nose.  It was, I own, rather nice, but trying.  I had a
feeling that Elsie would not have liked it, really.

So I said, "Come out where a fellow can see them then!"  And made as if
to go out on the moor.  But Harriet Caw didn't care about the moor,
being a town girl, as I suppose.

"No, here--tell me now!" she said.

So as I had to say something, I told her they were the colour of brown
paint.

That was true.  They were, but she was quite mad, and gave my arm a
fling.  This surprised me, and I said--

"Why, I thought that you were the kind of girl who never cared to be
told about her eyes, and stuff of that kind.  You said just now about
Miss Constantia's----"

"Never mind about M--iss Con-stan-ti-a's," she said, making the word as
long as she could--she was mad now and patting the short, stiff heather
with her little bronze boot; "attend to me, if you please.  And so you
think my eyes are the colour of brown paint; is that the best you can
do?"

I thought a while, and she kept glaring up at me till I felt like a hen
with its beak to a chalk line--I forget the word--something you are
when you go on a platform and do silly things the man tells you.

So, hoping she would stop, I said at last, "Well, perhaps they are more
shiny, like brown paint--varnished."

But this didn't please her either.  Indeed, it was difficult to please
Harriet Caw at all.  She said that I was twice as stupid as a cow, and
asked where I had lived all my life.

"In Breckonside," I said, but I added that I had often been with my
father at East Dene.  And once I had crossed the ferry all by myself
and spent Easter Monday at Thoisby itself.

"Humph," she said, wrinkling up her nose with great contempt.  "I
suppose that you have never even heard of London."

I told her "Yes, of course."  And that I could tell her the number of
its inhabitants.

But this she didn't seem to think clever, or, indeed, to care about at
all.

She only said, "Are all country boys as stupid as you are?"

To be called a boy like that made me angry, and I ran after her,
determined to pay her out.  I was going to show her that country boys
could just be as sharp as there was any need for.

But quick as I was, this city girl was quicker, and she slipped across
the road almost at the very place where we had found the last traces of
poor Harry Foster.  She dived among the underbrush by the stile, and I
lost sight of her altogether.

But the next moment I heard a cry.  You had better believe I wasted no
time till I got there.  I ran, opening a good, stout clasp knife that
father had given me--or, if not "given" exactly, had seen me with, and
not taken away from me.  It comes to the same thing.

Well, just a little away across a green glade, all pine needles and sun
dapplings, stood Mad Jeremy, and he had Harriet Caw by the arm.  I went
at him as fast as I could--which was a silly thing to do, for, of
course, with his strength he could have done me up in two ticks of a
clock.  Only, as mostly happens when one does fine things, it was all
over before I thought.

[Illustration: "Just a little way across a green glade--stood Mad
Jeremy--he had Harriett Caw by the hand."]

But when Mad Jeremy saw me, or, perhaps, before (I do not want to take
credit for anything that isn't my due), he let go of Harriet Caw,
saying just "She isn't the pretty one!  What is she doing here?"  And
with a skip and a jump he was gone.  That is, so far as I could see.

Then Harriet swooned away in my arms, toppling over like a ladder
slipping off the side of a house.  At least, I suppose that is what
they call it.  But at that time I had had no experience of swoons.  For
Elsie never went on like that.  At all events, Harriet Caw clutched me
about the neck, her fingers working as if they would claw off my
collar, and she laughing and crying both at once.  Funny it was, but
though it made a fellow squirm--not altogether so horrid as you might
think.  But I did not know what to do.  I tried hard to think whether
it was the palms of her hands or the backs of her ears that you ought
to rub, or whether I should lay her down or stand her up against a
tree.  I knew there was something.  Then I got in a funk lest, after
all, it should be the soles of her feet.

But Mad Jeremy had not altogether gone away.  He had been watching, and
now popped his head and shiny ringlets round a tree trunk, which
brought me to myself.

"Ah--ha!" he cried, "I'll tell the pretty one about these goings on!"

And, quick as a flash, that brought Harriet Caw to herself, also.  It
did better than splashing water or rubbing hands.  The moment before
she had been all rigid like a lump of wood in my arms.  But as soon as
the words were out of Mad Jeremy's mouth, she was standing before me,
her eyes flashing lightning, and her elbows drawn a little in to her
sides.

Mad?  Well, rather.  She was hopping, just.

"So _I'm_ not the pretty one," she said--whispered it, rather, with a
husky sound, like frying bacon in her voice.  "Oh, I see--that's why my
eyes are like brown paint--varnished!  Well, who's the pretty one?
Answer me that!"

"I think he must mean Elsie!" I said, telling the truth just as briefly
as I could.

"Elsie--oh, indeed!  Elsie is the pretty one, is she, Master Joe?"

"Yes," I said, "she is!"

I was going on to tell her how much she would like Elsie, and how Elsie
would love her, when suddenly Harriet Caw turned and marched off.  I
was going to follow her--indeed, I had to.  For I wasn't going to be
left in that gloomy glade with only the great tits and Mad Jeremy
hiding among the trees.

But Harriet Caw turned round, and called out, "Go to Elsie, I don't
want you!  I dare you to speak to me!  I will kill you, if you touch
me!"

I told Harriet quite reasonably that I would not touch her for mints of
money, and that all I wanted was just to find Mr. Ablethorpe, and pick
up the parcel I had left at her grandfather's before going home.

It must have looked funny enough if any one had seen us.  Well, Mad
Jeremy did.  For we could hear peal upon peal of wicked, sneering
laughter pursue us, as we went in single file across the road, over the
stile, and across the moor.

At the stile over the highroad I came up closer to Harriet, owing to a
slight hesitation on her part, and the switch she gave her skirts to
escape the contagion of my touch, was something to see.  I had always
thought I was something of a favourite wherever I went.  So I took the
worse with such treatment.

However, I put it down to Harriet Caw's having been brought up in
London.  My father always told me to watch out for London folk--you
never could tell what they would be up to.  Certainly not with Harriet.




CHAPTER XV

THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES--A GIRL!

Mr. Ablethorpe appeared to have had a much better time of it with Miss
Constantia than I had had with her sister--perhaps, because she was
younger by some minutes, and was quite conscious of being pretty, so
didn't need to be told.  Yet, when you come to think of it, I had done
a heap more for Harriet Caw, than the Hayfork Minister for her sister.
Had I not rushed to defend her from no less a foe than Mad Jeremy?  And
there were precious few in the two parishes of Breckonside and
Breckonton who would have done the like.  So she need not have run
upstairs when she got home, pushing her step-grandmother aside and
saying: "Out of the way, Susan Fergusson!"  Neither had she any need to
slam the door of her room, for it was her twin sister's as well as
hers, at any rate.

And though I did not like Constantia so well to start with, I must say
that her conduct was a great contrast to that of her sister Harriet.  I
could not help remarking it.  She came quite peaceably to the door with
Mr. Ablethorpe.  Then she went back and found his hat for him, which he
had forgotten.  And she stood smiling and waving adieux under the
bunches of purple creepers about the porch--like--well, I declare, like
the picture of "Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye!" in the "Keepsake" book.

And then, thinking it over, I took it all back and preferred in my
heart the slam of Harriet's door.  There was more meaning to it.

But Mr. Ablethorpe did not appear to notice.  He thought that he had
sown good seed on very promising soil.

"She seemed quite in favour of the Eastward position," he said
thoughtfully, "and she understands our argument in favour of the
'Missale Romanum' and with regard to irregularly ordained clergy.  The
rest may follow in time."

And as for me, I hoped to goodness it would.

After that the Hayfork was very thoughtful all the way to the
crossroads, where we separated, he to return to his lodging in Over
Breckonton and I to go back to father's.  Well, not just directly, of
course.  I had to look in at Nance Edgar's cottage at the Bridge End.
It was my duty.  Elsie was there, sitting reading by the window.  She
had been doing German or something with the schoolmaster's sister, and,
for a wonder, was quite pleased to see me.  She mostly wasn't, if I
interrupted her when she was "studying."  "Studying" with Elsie
consisted in neither talking yourself, nor letting any other body talk.

The first thing that struck me was how much prettier Elsie was to look
at than Harriet Caw, and, of course, than her sister.  I told her so,
thinking that she would be pleased.  But instead, she faced about at
once and laid down her book.

"Who is Harriet Caw?" she asked in a kind of icebergy voice, quite
differently pitched from her usual.

Then I began, pleased as a kitten with a wool ball, to tell her all
about it--how Mr. Ablethorpe had come and asked me off for the day from
my father, how we had gone and helped at the haymaking.  Then I made
out a long yarn about finding the little package of rings which Mr.
Ablethorpe had taken so carefully away with him.

"But they were more yours than his!" cried Elsie suddenly; "you should
have brought them here to me.  Then we would have found out what they
were, and if they had anything to do with the--with Harry Foster.  We
were the first who found out anything, and now you go off with Mr.
Ablethorpe----"

"Yes, Elsie," I said, a little taken aback by her tone, "but he seemed
to know all about where to look, and he wouldn't tell me anything,
though I asked."

"No, of course not," said Elsie sharply; "there will be a reward, you
may depend.  Then he will get it instead of you!"

I cried out against this, saying that she was not fair to Mr.
Ablethorpe.  But at the bottom of my heart I was not a bit sorry.  The
Hayfork Minister had such a curly head, and people made such a fuss
about him--especially the women--that I wasn't a bit sorry to find that
Elsie was not of their mind.

This gave me some assurance to go on.

"Well, and what did you do after that?" she said.  And I was all on
fire to tell her about the two granddaughters of Caleb Fergusson, who
came all the way from London--how we had tea with them, how Mr.
Ablethorpe stayed and talked with the one who thought no end of
herself--that is to say, with Constantia, while I was compelled to go
and keep the other one, Harriet, from getting into mischief.

At the very first word Elsie sat up straight in her chair.  Then, even
though I said nothing (it was no use entering into details) about
Harriet Caw's taking my arm, Elsie pinched her lips and turned up her
nose.

"You would like her awfully!" I said.  "She's as nice as can be."

"Oh!" was all that Elsie said, and she reached for the knitting which
lay within reach.

"Very likely!" she added as she adjusted the stitches, some of which
had slipped off, owing to my having sat down on it when I first came in.

"Yes," I continued, in a kind of quick, fluttering voice--I could hear
so much myself--"she comes from London, but she does not put on any
airs.  _And she does not like me at all!_"

"Ah," said Elsie, "and pray how did you find that out?"

So I told her all about Harriet running away because I was so stupid,
and her meeting with Mad Jeremy.  I said as little about my going at
him with an open knife as I could.  For, after all, that was a foolish
thing to do.  But I told Elsie about Harriet Caw fainting, and as much
as I could remember about Harriet running home and slamming herself in
her room.

And all the time the atmosphere in that room was getting more and more
chilly, while Elsie herself would have frozen a whole shipful of beef
and mutton right through the tropics.

"Well," I said when I had finished my tale, "she may have got a temper,
but she is a nice girl and you will like her.  We shall go and see her
to-morrow--I told her about you, Elsie."

She flashed a look at me--like striking a vesta at night, it was.

"And pray, what did you tell her about me?"

"I told her that you were pretty--so did Mad Jeremy.  And I told her,
besides, that you would be sure to take to one another.  Now, will you
go and see her to-morrow?"

Slowly Elsie gathered up all that belonged to her in Nance Edgar's
little sitting-room--her books, her work, and a hat that had been
thrown carelessly on a chair.

"No," she said, the words clicking against one another like lumps of
ice in a tumbler, "no, I will not go and call upon Miss Harriet Caw,
from London.  But there is nothing to prevent your going, Mr. Joseph
Yarrow!"

And she in her turn swept out and slammed the door.

I sat there in Nance Edgar's winking firelight looking at my fingers
one by one, and not sure of the count.

If any one will please tell me what a girl will say or do in any given
circumstances--well, I'll be obliged to him, that's all.  I don't
believe any fellow was ever so abused and browbeat in one day by girls
before.  And all for nothing.  That is the funny part of it.  For what
had I done?  Answer me that, if you please.  Nothing--just nothing!




CHAPTER XVI

MR. MUSTARD'S FIRST ASSISTANT

Yes, I was surprised.  But there were several other and greater
surprises waiting me.  I got one the very next day.

I met Dan McConchie on his way home from school, at the dinner hour.
He was kicking his bag before him in the way that was popular at our
school, where all self-respecting boys brought their books in a strap.
Girls had green baize bags and always swung them like pendulums as they
talked.  But boys, if they had to have bags, used them as footballs.
This was what Dan was doing now.

He said, "Halloo, Joe Yarrow, your girl's gone and been made a teacher.
You had better come back.  Old Mustard is as sweet to her as sugar
candy.  She is teaching the babies in the little classroom--'A b--ab!
B a--baa!'"

He imitated the singsong of the lowest forms.

Now I put no faith in Dan or any other McConchie.  But I clumped him
hard and sound for presuming to talk about Elsie at all or call her "my
girl."

Then I met little Kit Seymour, a girl from the south, who had reddish
hair, all crimpy, and spoke soft, soft English as if she were breathing
what she said at you.  She lisped a little, too, was good-looking
(though I did not care for that), and did not tell lies--had not been
long enough in Breckonside to learn, I expect.

At any rate she told me in other words what I had just clouted Dan for.
Early the morning before, the school had been astonished to find Mr.
Mustard giving Elsie a lesson--when they came to spend a half hour in
the playground at marbles and steal-the-bonnets.  Their wonder grew
greater when, as the bell rang, Elsie was found installed in the little
schoolroom, which hitherto had been used chiefly for punishments and
doing copybook writing.  She was given the infant classes, and had been
there all day, so I was told, with Mr. Mustard popping in and out
giving her instructions, and smiling like a fusty old hawk that has
caught a goldfinch which he fears some one will take away from him.

Of course I did not care a button for Mr. Mustard.  But he had always
been the Enemy of Youth so far as we were concerned.  And it gave me a
queer feeling, I can tell you, to think of Elsie--my Elsie--teaching
alongside that snuffy old badger.  He was neither snuffy nor yet very
old, but that is the way I felt toward him.  Elsie, too--at least she
used to.  But I could bet it was all the doing of that hook-nosed
sister of his--Betty Martin Mustard, we called her, though her name was
only Elizabeth, and not Martin at all.

Little Kit Seymour kept on lingering.  She was smiling mischievously,
too, which she had no business to do.  And she wouldn't have done it
long if she had been a boy.  It got sort of irritating after a while,
though I wasn't donkey enough to let her see it.  I knew better.

I just said that I hoped she, Elsie, would like school-teaching, and
that my father had always said that was what she should go in for.  But
Kit went on swinging her green baize bag, like I've seen them do the
incense pot in Mr. Ablethorpe's church up at Breckonton.  Father would
have skinned me alive if he knew I had gone there.  He was a Churchman,
was father, but death on incense pots, confessions, and all apostolic
thingummies, such as Mr. Ablethorpe was just nuts on.  He had even
stopped going to church at home because our old vicar had said that the
Anglican Church was a church catholic.  I bet he didn't mean any harm.
He was a first-rate old fellow.  But my father waited behind and told
him out loud that the Church of England is a Protestant church, and
"whoever says it isn't is a liar!"

That caused a coolness, of course.  Yet I believe they both meant the
same thing.  For our vicar wasn't one of Mr. Ablethorpe's sort, but
just wanted to let people alone, and was content if people left him
alone.  But all things about churches made our Breckonside folk easily
mad--being, as I said before, actually on the border-line, or at least
very near to it.

Little Kit Seymour, with her lisp and soft south country English, was a
smart girl.  I knew very well she was seeing how I would take the news
about Elsie.  However, she did not get much change out of me.

"You aren't coming back to school again?" she said next, looking at the
toe of her boot.

"Oh, I don't know that," I told her; "old Mustard is well up in
mathematics and mensuration----"

"What's mensuration?"  She said "men_th_uration," and curiously enough
it sounded rather nice.  But if a boy had done it everybody would have
laughed.  Some things are all in favour of girls--others again not.
Girls can't go into the army or the navy.  Most boys can't, either.
But they think they can for a year or two, and that does just as well.
They can talk big about it till the fit goes off.

Well, I got rid of Kit Seymour.  She went on to school, and as she
parted from me she said: "Well, I thuppose we shall be theeing you down
there by and by!"

She meant at the school--because Elsie was there.  But I had something
else in my mind.  I was keen to find out whether Elsie had gone there
because of our quarrel about Harriet Caw.  The fault, of course, in any
other girl, would have been Elsie's.  For she would not listen to any
justification--not even to the truth.  But I never blamed Elsie.  I
only thought she had been led into it by old Betty Martin--Mr.
Mustard's sister--who is so ugly that it gives you a gumboil only to
look at her.

Now the school of Breckonside--Mr. Mustard's, that is--lies right up
against the woods on a sloping piece of land, from which the grass has
long been worn off by generations of children playing.  There is
another little yard with some grass at the back.  That is where the
girls play, and across it with its gable to the big schoolhouse is the
little class-room where Elsie was teaching.

It was right bang in the woods.  So I knew very well I could lie hidden
along the branch of a tree and look in at the window.

Mean, you say!  Not a scrap.  Elsie and I had always been such friends,
like brother and sister, that surely I had a right to look after her a
bit.  Of course, if she had known she would have let out at me--scolded
I mean.  But all the same she would have found it quite natural.

So I went and got hold of a ripping good place in a kind of sunk fence.
Here I found, not a beech, but the trunk of an old willow that had bent
itself down into the dry ditch as if feeling for the water.  It was
just the shape, too, and when I lay down on my face it fitted me better
than my bed.  There was even a rising bit at the bank for me to hook my
feet round.  You never saw anything so well arranged.  The hazel bushes
hid me from above, too, and unless you fairly stepped on me there was
nothing to be seen.  I had only to put aside some leafy shoots to rake
the whole three windows of the little infant school.

Mean?  I tell you not a bit.  Why, I was really the only protector
Elsie had got, and though she was mad with me just at that moment, it
made no difference.  Besides I had got an idea--I did not get them
often, and so hung on the tighter to those I did find.  And this one
had really been forced upon me.  It was that somehow Elsie was the key
to all the mysteries, and that through her would come the solution of
everything we had been trying to find out.  Also--though this I would
not for the life of me have mentioned to Elsie herself--that some peril
hung imminent over her, and of this I should soon have proof if I
wanted any.

Now it is curious how different both things and people look when you
are watching them--as it were unbeknown.  It is something like looking
through between your legs at a landscape.  You see the colours
brighter, naturally, and as for the people--none of them do anything
unless as if with some horrid secret purpose.  When Mr. Mustard wiped
his brow with a spotted handkerchief, or knocked a fly off the end of
his nose, I was lost in wonderment what he meant by it.  When he called
Elsie to come down for her own private lessons in the big school-house,
I watched carefully to see that he had not a weapon concealed under his
rusty coat tails.  I suppose policemen and detectives get used to this
sort of thing, but certainly I never did.

Then I had always thought that we all started for 

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