Deep Moat Grange Part 3

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 l.u.s.ty old c.o.c.k 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 gra.s.s, 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 sc.r.a.ping trees and bushes like all possessed.

"And has n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 gra.s.s 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 'b.l.o.o.d.y 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 d.y.k.e as you pa.s.s 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 n.o.body 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 mis...o...b.. 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 gra.s.s 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?'