Deep Moat Grange Part 31

Elsie had the presence of mind not to appear to understand that he meant my father. It was, evidently, one of Jeremy's worst days. And Elsie wished that she had been able to get her knife back from my father, who had borrowed it the night before for a special piece of filing. The work was approaching completion, but just at the last moment he had come upon a bar of iron, buried, for what purpose he could not imagine, in the thickness of the wall. It ran diagonally, and would need to be cut in two places before there was any chance of the pa.s.sage being finished between their prison chambers.

But the bar once cut, and the pa.s.sage clear, my father, who, as part of his business, was learned in locks, did not antic.i.p.ate from Elsie's description any serious trouble. The iron door and patent safety lock of his own prison house, recently arranged for by Mr. Stennis--he remembered the transaction--was, of course, beyond him. But if all was as he had been given to expect, the fastenings of Elsie's door--which communicated with the oven corridor--were of quite another type, and need not detain him long.

It was a little after eleven of the day, as Elsie judged by the light, when Jeremy came back after a somewhat prolonged absence. He brought her a piece of made bread--by which he meant bread bought from one of the vans that pa.s.sed along the highway, but none of which came up to the Moat Grange.

"Hae," he said, smiling curiously, "there's for you! I hae nae time to be baking to-day. The maister's hame. Guid luck, an' lang life to him!"

He was speaking very curiously, laughing all the time--not offering threats and complaints as he had been doing before.

"And see!" he cried out, suddenly. "He has brought Jeremy a present wi' his ain hand--ay, wi' his ain hand he gied it him!"

And, lifting his finger, he drew it along three red weals on his brow and cheek, one after the other, ending at the corner of the jaw beneath the ear, from which a drop of blood trickled. And he laughed--all the time he laughed.

"A bonnie present," he repeated, "think ye not so, bonnie birdie? Ye never gat the like, and him your ain grandfather. Ah, but he's kind to Jeremy! And Jeremy will never forget it. Na--Jeremy followed him, like p.u.s.s.y cat after a plate of cream, to the March d.y.k.e, to the very door o' Bailiff Ball's house. Jeremy wadna let ony ill befall his maister this day. If a _wulf_, or a lion, or a bear had leaped upon Hobby Stennis, Jeremy wad hae strangled them like this--_chirt_--wi'

his hands, as easy as ony thing. Ay, he wad that! For the kind kind present he fetched his faithfu' servant, naebody shall lay a hand on Hobby Stennis this day--except, maybe, Jeremy himsel'--ay, maybe, juist Jeremy himsel'. Ow, ay, but a' in the way o' kindness! the same as Hobby himsel'!"

And with that he picked up his Jew's-harp and breathed a fierce anger and scorn into the familiar words that was positively shocking to listen to--

Be it ever so humble, There's no place like ho-o-o-me.

And he stopped to laugh between the lines. Elsie says that it fairly turned her cold to hear him. Though at that time she had, as she remembers, no fear for herself--which, when you come to think of it, was a very curious circ.u.mstance indeed. But then her turn was yet to come.

In Jeremy's absence, Elsie tried to tell my father all about it. But the coming and going of the madman that day were so uncertain, and his moods so dangerous, that she could not get matters half explained; nor yet any advice from my father, except not to cross the maniac, save in the last extremity. He offered to pa.s.s her back the knife, but Elsie, hearing that one end of the bar was already severed, and the other well through, refused, like the little brick she was, to take it.

Now, this part which follows can only be known imperfectly, because it concerns what happened when Hobby Stennis went back to his own house of the Moat Grange. There were two other sources of information--Jeremy's wild talk afterwards to Elsie, and certain signs and marks not easy of interpretation, which, however, tend to confirm in most points the madman's version.

After Mad Jeremy had come back from watching his master carefully into the house of the bailiff, he visited Elsie, and spoke the words, little rea.s.suring, which I have already written down.

Then going up to the great parlour, out of which opened Mr. Stennis's weaving-room, he lit a lire of wood, which burned with much cheerful blaze. In front of this he sat down, with his fiddle in his hand. He had only drawn the bow across it, and began to tune up when his master walked in.

Possibly the noise irritated Hobby Stennis's none too steady nerves.

Possibly, also, he was nettled at Jeremy's insistent request for the loan of a couple of sovereigns in order to go down and "price" the new cargo of melodeons received at Yarrow's, in the village. They had been ordered by my father before his disappearance, to satisfy a temporary local musical fever, and had only just arrived.

How exactly the thing happened is not known, but, at any rate, it is certain that Mr. Stennis refused to give Jeremy a farthing for any such purpose, and at the first sullen retort of the madman, turned fiercely upon him, wrenched from his hands the violin on which he had been fitfully playing and threw it on the fire. As the light dry wood caught and the varnish crackled, Mr. Stennis strode off, fuming, to his weaving-room to calm himself with a turn at the famous hand-loom. He sat down before it, and as the shuttle began to pa.s.s back and forth, his pa.s.sion fell away in proportion as the fascination of the perfect handicraft gained on him.

But Jeremy stood gazing fixedly at the burning fiddle till the last clear flame died out, and in the great fireplace only a double couch of red ashes preserved the shape of a violin.

But, meantime, in the weaving-room the shuttle said _click-clack_ in the great silence which seemed to have fallen all of a sudden upon Deep Moat Grange. In the red light, Jeremy stood erect, gazing entranced at the shape of his beloved instrument outlined on the hearth, and following one by one with his forefinger the ridged weals, from his cheek to his forehead and back again. And all about the twilight fell suddenly dim.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE CALLING OF ELSIE

Now, upon this very night of Sat.u.r.day, the tenth of February, the same upon which Mr. Ablethorpe had come to see me, Elsie had lighted her candle early. Jeremy had been generous in the matter of lighting, though more than once he had proved himself forgetful of food. As the easiest manner of providing in quant.i.ty, he had brought up from Miss Orrin's store-room a complete box of candles, which he had opened for her in a summary manner with the back of his knife and the toe of his boot.

Elsie was therefore able to follow the somnolent progress of the adventures of the late Nicholas, M.D., a gentleman whose travels had led him to the Island of Trinidad. In the interests of the "Huttonian Theory" he had visited its famous pitch lake, on which he had found cattle grazing peacefully, as on an English meadow. She had just reached the following pa.s.sage, and was nodding over it, the lines running together in the most curious manner, and her head sinking forward occasionally, only to be caught up with a sharp jerk, and the pa.s.sage begun again with renewed determination.

"No scene can be more magnificent than that presented on a near approach to the north-western coast of Trinidad. The sea is not only changed from a light green to a deep brown colour, but has in an extraordinary degree that rippling, confused, and whirling motion which arises from the violence of contending currents, and which prevail here in so remarkable a manner, particularly at those seasons when the Orinoco is swollen with periodical rains, and vessels are frequently some days or weeks in stemming them, or perhaps are irresistibly borne before them far out of their destined track."

This was not clear to Elsie, but she had read the pa.s.sage so often that the very whirling of these Orinocan currents, confused and rippling as they were, reacted subtly on her brain. She was just dropping over when a second and yet more soothing paragraph caught her eyes. (There is nothing like a volume of old travels for putting one to sleep--no extra charge for the prescription.)

"The dark verdure of lofty mountains, covered with impenetrable woods to the very summits, whence in the most humid of climates torrents impetuously rush through deep ravines to the sea"--this, carefully followed, beats sheep jumping over a stile all to fits--"between rugged mountains of brown micaceous schist"--sch--isssst--final recovery--"on whose cavernous sides the eddying surf dashes with fury. From the wonderful discoloration and turbidity of the water, Columbus sagaciously concluded that a very large river was near, and consequently--consequent-ly--a great continent!"

But to this continent Elsie never attained. She had succ.u.mbed to the sagacity of Columbus, and in a moment more her forehead rested peacefully upon the work of Mr. Nicholas, M.D., that renowned traveller.

Let a man or a woman learn this pa.s.sage by heart, so that asleep or awake he can recall it even when he forgets his own name, and it will not be labour lost. He will live long in the land. His sleep shall be sweet, swift, and easy. Like Elsie he will never reach the haven of Columbus--

"Not poppy nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsie syrrups of the world Shall ever medicine him to that sweete sleepe"

like to the prose which Mr. Nicholas, M.D., wrote as he approached the island of Trinidad.

Elsie slept. Time pa.s.sed. My father filed and sawed in his recess, muttering to himself, his head nearly through into the dark cupboard; but one ear cast ever backward for the first grate of Mad Jeremy's key in the lock of his door.

Before him he could see the thin line of light which was the crack of the cupboard door. Beyond that sat Elsie with her head on her book, her mind a thousand leagues away.

But between my father and the sleeping girl there was that bar of iron, the upper part of which, by reason of some twist, was giving far more difficulty than the under.

So it came about that, without daring to make himself heard, my father was a witness of the final scene in the oven chamber behind the monks'

bakehouse. He had a bar of iron against his shoulder and a file knife in his right hand, but for all that he was helpless to render any a.s.sistance till he should have cut through the thick diagonal of metal, and so made a way for himself into the dark cupboard.

All at once, my father, lying p.r.o.ne on his breast and sawing at the obstruction as best he could, with his arms in a most uncomfortable position for working--being higher than his head--became aware of an additional light in the room which he could before see only dimly illuminated by Elsie's candle.

A man had opened the outer fastenings. His dark shadow crossed the crack of light which was the edge of the cupboard door ajar. There was also a flash of a brighter light for a moment in my father's eyes, which was the swinging of the lantern the man carried. He laid his hand on the young girl's shoulder, and with a cry which went to Joseph Yarrow's heart, Elsie came back from the Orinoco, to find Mad Jeremy looking down upon her.

"Sleepin'?" he chuckled, "and over her book, the bonnie bairn! She's a teacher, a la.s.sie dominie--they tell me. But Jeremy will learn her something this nicht that is better than a' the wisdom written in the buiks. Be never feared, la.s.s.

"Ye are the heiress.

And I am the heir."

"But come ye wi' me, la.s.sie, and this nicht we will drink o' the white wine and the red, till the bottom faa's oot o' the stoup. I promised it to you that, when I gat the melodeon, I wad play ye the mony grand tunes--and ye wad dance--dance, Elsie, dance, my bonnie, like a star through the meadow-mist or a dewdrap on a bit rose-leaf when the west winds swing the tree!"

All this time Elsie, gazing amazed at the man, rested silent in an awful consternation. She had never seen Mad Jeremy like this. His curly hair now hung straight and black. Perspiration stood in beads on his brow. He breathed quick and heavy, with a curious rattle in the throat. Slowly Elsie rose to her feet. She stood between my father and his view of the apartment, as it were, cutting it off. He bit his hand to keep him from doing or saying anything, knowing himself to be impotent, and that the best he could do was just to wait. Otherwise, Mad Jeremy would simply have come round and despatched him first. For never (says my father) did murder so plainly look out of a man's eyes as that night in the oven chamber.

Mad Jeremy took Elsie by the wrist.

"Come, la.s.sie," he cried, with a lightsome skip of the foot--for, indeed, the man could not keep still a moment--"come awa'! The gray goose is gone, and the fox--the fox, the auld bauld cunnin' fox--is off to his den-O--den-O--den-O!"

And, with a turn of his lantern, he threw the candle Elsie had left burning upon the floor, trampled it out fiercely, and then, with one hand still on Elsie's wrist and the lantern swinging in the other, strode out, shouting his version of the refrain: "And the fox--the fox--the auld, yauld, bauld fox, is off to his den-O!"

But my father had been listening keenly for the click of the key in the lock. He had not heard it. The way to freedom, to help Elsie, lay open if only--ah, if only that bar would give way. And once more, in a kind of fury, he precipitated himself upon the stubborn, twisted iron.

Once outside, the freshness of the air fell upon Elsie like a blow in the face. So long confined below in her cell built of the hard whinstone of the country outcrops, she had forgotten the grip and sweetness of the wind which comes over the Cheviots--fresh and sweet even though it bring with it the snell sting of snow-filled "hopes" and the long d.y.k.e backs ridged with lingering white of last year's storms.