Deep Moat Grange

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?"