Deep Moat Grange Part 20

"And the pursuers? Were you able to turn them off the track? I heard them pursuing."

I rea.s.sured him. So far as the pursuers went, he had nothing to fear.

Mr. Ablethorpe said that in that case he would go home and place the monstrance--I think he called it, but it doesn't seem the right word, does it?--in a place of safety. But as I had no time to lose, I would not let him go without telling me if he had heard anything of my father at the house of Deep Moat Grange.

"Joseph," he answered solemnly, "it is well enough known to you that all I heard there pa.s.sed into my knowledge under the sacred seal of the confessional, and that I am debarred from repeating a word, either yea or nay."

"But I want to know about my father!" I cried. "You shall not go without! He may have been murdered! And suspicion points to that house where you were found, in which, according to your telling, you received confessions from those who may have been guilty!"

"Joseph," he answered me, with an accent extremely pitiful, "indeed I cannot tell you! I am debarred!"

"Debarred or no," I cried, "you must tell me if you have heard anything about my father, or I will break your head with this iron hook!"

He could have taken me up in one hand and shaken me, but it was not with the weapons of an earthly warfare that he was fighting this present battle.

"If so, I must e'en bow to the blast," he said. "I am aware that my actions not being strictly in accordance with canon law, and kept a secret from my bishop, I am a legitimate object of your suspicion."

"Never mind that, Mr. Ablethorpe," I said. "Only tell me as a friend.

Remember how I helped you all I could before. If you know anything of my father. I must hear of it, and you must tell me."

He shook his head.

"Indeed, you cannot understand, Joseph," he repeated mournfully. "It is not to be expected that you should. I have not the authority to tell you. It is a sacred thing with me."

With the grasp of one hand I caught hold of the leathern case, and out came the thing he called the monstrance. It had a kind of gla.s.s top, which I had lifted up to get at the wafers.

"If you don't tell me," I shouted, "I'll send the whole flying into the Brom Water."

"That would be deadly sin--the sin of sacrilege, Joseph," he answered, trying to get the case from me; but I was too active and too near the wall. "Hold, Joseph--oh, my monstrance--my cibory!"

He was evidently in a great strait with his conscience. Curious what times some people have with their consciences! What a blessing mine never bothered me! I wonder what it feels like? Perhaps like when you have eaten a whole bushel of unripe gooseberries and wish you hadn't.

Something like that, I wager!

At any rate, he felt bad, and I was sorry for him.

So I didn't throw the monstrous thingborium away, because he thought so much about it. I kept a tight hold of it, though, and said--

"Well, then, tell me if you know anything about my father!"

Mr. Ablethorpe sat down with his head between his hands, and groaned.

"Perfectly legitimate--perfectly legitimate--from your point of view,"

he said. "What am I to do? Seal of the confessional! I can't do it, yet I must satisfy Joseph."

Then he hit upon something.

"You know where the Rev. Cecil de la Poer lives," says he. "He is my spiritual director."

I knew him. The Reverend Cecil was another of the ultra-High Churchers, who lived about three miles off, and was a gentleman's private chaplain. He was, if possible, ten times more set on thingboriums _et cetera_ than our Mr. Ablethorpe.

"Well," said the Hayfork, "I will write a private confession of all I know about the matter to my spiritual director. I will intrust you with the letter to deliver it to Mr. De la Poer. And if you open it, the sin will be on your head."

"That's all right," said I, cheerfully.

And he wrote something, and sealed, or, rather licked it, in an envelope which he had used for carrying his cards in. It was on one of these that he had written his confession. He went off home in a great hurry to put the thingborium into his safe, and I opened the letter to Mr. De la Poer behind the trunk of the first big tree.

All it said was just--

DEAR DE LA POER,--I have to communicate to you, under the seal of the confessional, that I have learned nothing whatever concerning Mr.

Yarrow, of Breckonside village, at the house of Deep Moat Grange or elsewhere.

Yours truly, R. ABLETHORPE.

So once more I had drawn blank.

CHAPTER XX

CONCERNING ELSIE

Now, I liked Mr. Ablethorpe, but after he had wrestled like that with his conscience, just to tell me that he knew nothing about the matter--well, I could have gone back and felled him. Why, his old conscience couldn't have made more fuss if he had known all about the murder--the hiding of the body--of a score of bodies, indeed. But then, with consciences, a fellow like me can't tell. It's like love, or sea-sickness, or toothache. If a fellow has never had them, he's no judge of the sufferings of those who have.

And that's what I always say to people when I hear of some new caper of the Hayfork Parson, or Rev. De la Poer, or any of that lot. "It's conscience," I say. "It takes them like that. It's uncommon, I grant, in Breckonside, but they've got it. So take a back seat, boys, and wait till the flurry's over!"

I am not going to go into detail of the search for my father, because what with the search for Harry Foster, and my father, and all that is yet to come, the book would just be all about folk trying to find out the mystery of the house on the farther side of the Deep Moat, and coming back, as they say in Breckonside, with their finger in their mouth.

Briefly, then, everybody searched and searched, but all to no purpose.

Mad Jeremy was proved to have been miles away, and Mr. Stennis safe in Edinburgh, dining with his lawyer. He came home as full of rage as he could stick, and he threatened to bring actions for "effraction" and breaking open of lock-fast places, trespa.s.s, damage to property, and I don't know what all. But none of these things came to anything.

He threatened, but did not perform. And as for me, in those days I had enough to do with my mother, who had fallen into a frail state of both mind and body--she who had been so robust. And if it had not been for Elsie, who took care of her, coming to our house to do it, and even biding the night, I don't know what would have become of my mother.

You see, she had never believed that anything serious had really happened to my father, or that he was dead. And when any one tried to argue her out of it, she said: "Tell me, then, who it was that let the mare into the yard?"

And we dared not give her the answer that was uppermost in all our minds--that it was the murderer who had done it with my father's master-key.

I did not see much of Elsie, though she was in the same house with me, for I had the business to attend to, just as if my father was there--to take his place, I mean. Because I knew that he would wish it, so that if he came back he would be proud not to be able to put his finger on anything, and say, "This has suffered in your hands, Joe!"

Of course, I had men from Scotland Yard, and others searching for a long time. But they did no good except to prove that my father had left the fair at Longtown in good time, carrying with him (what was very curious) not the money in gold or notes, but a cheque payable to bearer on the bank at Thorsby. Well, that cheque had never been presented. This was fatal to our theory. For if my father had been killed for booty, he could only have had an old silver watch on him, with the guard made of porpoise bootlaces, and perhaps five or six shillings in silver; because he always gave trysts and fairs and markets a bad name, especially those so near the border as Longtown.

They gathered, he declared, all the riffraff of two countries, besides all the Molly Malones and cutpurses that ever were born to be hanged.

This was all that could be got out of these wise men from London for the money I spent--my father's money, rather. They never traced him beyond half-way, where, at a lonely inn on the Crewe Moss, he had stopped to drink a cup of coffee and break a bite of bread before going farther.

Oh, I tell you that our big house, with its bricked yard, and all the fine, new outhouses, barns, storages for grain and fodder, was a lonesome place those days! And how much more lonesome the nights! I tell you that, after the men had gone home, the horses been foddered and bedded down in the stable, and the doors were locked (except the big centre one, which my mother would not allow to be touched), Bob Kingsman and I went about with a permanent crick in each of our necks, got by looking over our shoulders for a thing with a master-key, that could let in horses, and open doors, and leave no tracks behind it on the snow. It lurked in the dark when we turned corners, and many's the time we felt it spring on our shoulders out of the dusk of the rafters.

My, but Bob was scared! Me, too, when it came to pa.s.s--as it often did--that mother, in her moanings and wailings, sent me down to the yard gate to look for father. If anybody had spoken too suddenly to me then, I should have dropped. And as for Bob Kingsman, he slept in his little room with shuttered windows on both sides and barricaded doors, besides a perfect armoury of deadly weapons ready to his hand. He nearly shot himself more than once, monkeying with them.