Now, while Elsie was dancing the hours away in desperate danger of her life and to the peril of her reason, Mr. Ablethorpe and I had not been idle. That is, so far as was within our power to act or our knowledge to foresee. He had allowed me to judge of the state of the rings which had been passed through the furnace. I was still uncertain of their portent till he produced an oval plaque with the mark V.R. upon it. It was of brass, and had doubtless formed part of the single leathern sack which Harry Foster kept open so as to take on to Bewick anything which might be committed to his careen route.
There could be no doubt. We had found the murderer of Harry Foster—that is, we had only to find who made the bread at Deep Moat Grange in order to be sure of him. It was, indeed, a known thing that, save on a rare occasion, the Moat Grange people made their own bread—but whether in the shape of griddle-cakes, soda scones, or properly baked oven loaves, no one knew. But Mr. Ablethorpe and I were sure there would be no more difficulty. More than that we meant to find out—the clew was the first one which had really promised well, and we meant to follow it. That very night we got ready to go, even though Mr. Ablethorpe ought now to have been at home, preparing for his Sunday services, instead of doing detective business across country on the strength of a few calcined rings and a brass plate.
*****
It was about this time that my father, with torn and bleeding hands, was working desperately at the bar of iron. His knife was worn to a stump, but the open door of Elsie's cell tempted him with a terrible sense of the unknown which was passing outside. Besides, he could not tell at what moment Jeremy might return, and, shutting the door, shut off at the same time his hopes of escape and of helping Elsie, whom he saw already in the grasp of the midnight assassin.
Now if I were writing this to show what a hero I was, I should, of course, have put my own part in the forefront. But as I was at the time little better than a boy who does what he can, and it really was my father who helped Elsie the most—and had done for some time—I am not going to take away the credit from him. Mine is the proper sort of father, that a fellow can be proud of. I think I would have done all that he did if I had been there and had his chances. But then I wasn't, and I hadn't. So Mr. Ablethorpe and I had just come along as best we might—almost, but not quite, the day after the fair.
It was just before daybreak when my father worked his way through the bar, and the fragments fell outward—stonework, plaster, cut iron—all into the little cupboard. Of course, he had been working by the sense of touch for hours. Many a time he had drawn the rough home-made file raspingly across his wrist and hands. His face was stained with dungeon mud, his hair uncropped and matted, his beard tangled, and, as my mother said afterwards—
"If Mad Jeremy was a waur-looking creature than you, Joseph Yarrow, I am none surprised that he frighted ye a' oot o' your leggings and knee-breeks!"
When my father came out through the chamber which had so long been Elsie's he groped about to find the entrance, his heart thumping—so he owned to me—against his ribs lest the way should have been shut by the madman, and he no better off than he had been before—nay, infinitely worse, for the handiwork of the night would be sure to be discovered. He had worked in the dark—furiously—without thought of covering up his traces. But he had brought with him the iron bar which had been his means of direct communication with Elsie from cell to cell.
It was cold weather, and the first drive of February wind as he stood up in the ivy-covered ruin was, as my father expressed it, "like a dash of water in the face to a man." The next instant he was through the crumbling walls, startling the bats and sparrows with a shower of debris, and lo! there before him he saw the house of Deep Moat Grange—in a blaze!
Now comes out the deep and abiding loyalty of the man who had a name for little else than driving a bargain hardly and keeping it to the death. Perhaps, though, he looked upon it as that. Elsie had supported him, fed him, given him drink, furnished him with tools, and so now, though most men would have gone straight back to Breckonside to seek for assistance, Joseph Yarrow—of whom I am proud to call myself the son—struck right across the bridge and tore across the lawn among the lily clumps straight for the front door of the burning house.
The staircase and hall were already filled with a stifling reek, but my father could hear above him the crackling and dull roar of the flames, hungry—like many wild beasts.
It was not dark, for the chamber door above was open, and the light of the conflagration was reflected through. But plump in the middle of the staircase my father encountered a man. It was Mad Jeremy going out serenely enough, carrying the candle in one hand, and his precious melodeon in the other. He saw my father. My father saw him. With one intent to fight and slay they rushed at each other—Jeremy's wild screech mingling with my father's roar as of a charging bull.
Neither got home. My father's iron bar would doubtless have broken the madman's skull, but that, with his usual agility, he leaped to the side. Jeremy smashed the heavy candle over my father's head, and fled upstairs, not because he was afraid for himself, but in order to protect the melodeon from the blow he saw coming.
"Ye shall na get it," he shouted. "It's nane o' yours. I paid good money for it ower the counter o' your ain shop!"
And he fled upward through the flames, which seemed to wrap him round without doing any harm. They seemed his element.
*****
As I say, Mr. Ablethorpe and I came just too late. We had seen from afar the burning house—at least, we had seen the "skarrow" in the sky—the Grange itself lying (as all the world knows) at the very bottom of Deep Moat Hollow, with the pond on one side and the woods all about.
But once on our way, we had made haste, as indeed had many another. However, we started earlier than the others, though my father, living as it were next door, was far before any of us. Indeed, had it not been for him—— Well, I will go on with my tale.
We rushed across the drawbridge, which, just as he had done, we found down. We followed him across the lily plots. Right in the middle Mr. Ablethorpe came a cropper. I was on the look-out. It was not the first time that I had played at hide-and-seek there in difficult circumstances, though never with the windows above crackling and the flames licking the ivy and dry Virginia creeper off the walls, and the smoke so thick that the landscape was almost blotted out by it.
I arrived, a little in front of the Hayfork Parson, on the threshold of the door of Deep Moat Grange. And that is why I was the first to welcome a pair of Lazaruses risen from the dead—one, a girl, apparently truly dead, held in the arms of the wildest and most savage man I had ever beheld, upon whose shoulder her head reclined, and in whose menacing right hand was a rough bar of iron, pointed like a chisel.
I think he did not see well. Or, coming out of all that strangeness of the night, and the smoor and choking swirl of the smoke, he did not know his own son. At any rate, he rushed at me with Elsie still in his arms and the iron bar uplifted.
But Mr. Ablethorpe interposed from the flank, and catching him about the waist, disarmed him.
"Mr. Yarrow!" he cried, "this is Joseph, your own son!"
My father blinked at me a moment, vaguely. Then, quite suddenly, he thrust Elsie into my arms.
"There," he said, "take her. Be good to her. She calls you her 'Dearest Joe.' You will never deserve half your luck—you will never know it. But as sure as my name is Joseph Yarrow, I will take it upon me to see that you behave yourself decently well to that girl."
He was pretty much of a brick—father. At least, though he was only a grocer, I don't know anybody else's father I would change him for. And Elsie says so, too. I think, however—between ourselves—that he's just a bit gone on Elsie himself, and thinks I'm not half good enough for her.
Well, I'm not! I don't deny the fact; and as for Elsie—she encourages us both in the belief.
There's a bit more to tell about this part, though you might not expect it. It always makes me shiver to think of. But I could not help it. Nobody could—and anyway, the thing has got to be told. It is about Mad Jeremy, and what befell him when he fled upward through the smoke and flame, clambering by the balusters, my father says, more like a monkey than any human man.
And, by the way, I am not sure that he really was a man—except that a wild beast would not have been so clever, and the devil ever so much cleverer! Or, at least, he has the credit of being.
Did you ever see the burning of a great house—not in a city, I mean, but far in the country? Well, I have. There is not much to see till one is close by. A few pale, shivering flames, like the fires that boil the tea at a summer picnic—volumes of smoke rising over the parapet, mostly pale, and the sun serene above the scurry of helpless men, running this way and that, like ants when you thrust your stick into an ant hill to see what will happen. Hither and thither they go—all busy, all doing nothing. For one thing, water is lacking. The local fire brigade is always just about to arrive. If, by any chance, it does come, a boy with a garden squirt would do more good.
Well, it was like that on the morning of the eleventh of February. When the day did come at last, there was nothing mean about it—considered as an early spring morning in Scotland. It was of the colour of pale straw, with a glint low down like newly thatched houses before the winter's storm has had a turn at them.
Meanwhile, underneath, and looking so petty and foolish, was the crackling of the timbers, the falling in of the tiles, the smoke puffing and mounting like great strings of onions linked together, blue and stifling from the burning wood, white and steamy as the faggots slid outward into the moat, or fell with a crash into the pond.
All about swarmed a crowd of eager and curious folk. My father, as soon as he was recognized, and before he could condescend to tell his tale, had taken command, all soiled and bleeding as he was. I believe now that most there considered that he had rescued Elsie from the wild tribe after a desperate struggle, in which all the others had been annihilated. And it is characteristic of Breckonside, of the position my father held there, and especially of public sentiment with regard to the folk of the Moat, that no one for a moment dreamed that in so doing he had exceeded his legal right.
There was not much attempt at saving the building. Elsie had come a little to herself. At first she could say little, save that "her grandfather was dead—Mad Jeremy had killed him," which information did not greatly interest the people, save in so far as it detracted from my father's glory in having made a "clean sweep!"
Mr. Ball, whom everybody respected—in spite of the service in which he lived—caused a horse to be put between the shafts, and Elsie was conveyed home to Nance Edgar's by Mr. Ball himself. My father wanted her to go on to "the Mount." But Elsie no sooner heard the word mentioned, than, recovering from her swoon, she declared that "she would never set foot there—so long as—— No, indeed, that she would not!"
"So long as what, my girl?" my father asked, gently.
You really can't imagine how gentle my father was with her. It took me by surprise, as I did not, of course, yet know anything about the events which had drawn them together in the deep places underground.
"Because—because—just because!" she answered. "Besides, it is not fitting at present!"
"I understand—perhaps you are right," sighed my father, somewhat disappointed.
For all that, he did not understand a little bit. It was because of Harriet and Constantia Caw—especially Harriet. It is an eternal wonder how women misunderstand each other—the best, the kindest, and especially the prettiest of them.
I would gladly have gone with her, but, of course, that would have been too marked. Besides, I dared not face my mother without my father. There was a little fountain made of the mouths of lions on the terrace, which spouted out thin streams of water into a large oyster shell—the kind they callpecten, I think, only the round part as big as a horseshoe. And once Elsie was away with Mr. Bailiff Ball, I got father to wash his face and hands there, which were black and terrible with matted hair and hardened blood. So that my mother, for all her outcries, did not really see him at his worst, or anything like it.
The fire mounted always, but somehow in the light of day it did not seem real. The faces of all the folk as we returned from the water, were directed to the tower which was called Hobby's Folly. The gabled, crow-stepped mansion of the Moat had nothing very ancient about it—that is, to the common view. You had to know the older secrets of the monks for that. But at the angle overlooking the pond, Mr. Stennis had caused to be built a square tower in the old Robert the Bruce donjon fashion, each chamber opening out of the other. These communicated by ladders, which could be drawn up and all access prevented. At least that was the tale which the masons who were at the building brought back to Breckonside. The tower was square on the top and had low battlements, save at one corner where there was a kind of pepper-pot cupola in which—so they said—Hobby Stennis used to sit and count his gold.
At first I could not make out what it was that the folk were craning their necks upward to look at. Evidently it was on the far side, that nearest the small lake, and, of course, invisible from the court out of which my father and I were coming.
But we followed the movement of the people, and there on the utmost pinnacle of the battlements, that outer corner which was higher than the rest and shaped like a miniature dome, his long legs twined about the broken stalk of the weathercock, and his melodeon in his hands, sat Mad Jeremy! Of the gilt weathercock itself nothing remained save the butt. With a single clutch of his great hairy hand, Jeremy had rooted the uneasy fowl out of its socket and hurled it far before him into the pond.
Up till now the flames had hardly reached the tower, and it seemed at least a possible thing that the maniac might be saved. But none of the Breckonsiders were keen about it. Only Mr. Ablethorpe and my father were willing to make any attempt to save him. Indeed, I was absolutely with the majority on this occasion, and could not, for my part, imagine a better solution than that which seemed to be imminent.
Nevertheless, the two tried to get into the tower from behind, but found all a seething mass of flames, which had swept across the whole main body of the building as if to swallow up Hobby's Folly for a lastbonne bouche. There was no arguing with such a spate of fire. There remained, however, a little low door, reported to be of iron, but which, being near to the water and exposed to the fury of damp westerly winds and the moist fogs off the pond, had probably rusted half away.
"The two tried to get into the Tower from behind, but found all a seething mass of flames.""The two tried to get into the Tower from behind, but found all a seething mass of flames."
"The two tried to get into the Tower from behind, but found all a seething mass of flames.""The two tried to get into the Tower from behind, but found all a seething mass of flames."
"Come, let us do our duty," said Mr. Ablethorpe; "here is a human life! Let us save it!"
But nobody but Mr. Yarrow, senior, followed him. I was with the majority on this point, as I have said before, and so stayed where I was. Besides, Mad Jeremy was so curious to see and hear. He laughed and sang, his shrill voice carrying well through the crackle of the rafters and the snap and spit of the smaller shredded fragments of flame. As soon as he caught sight of Mr. Ablethorpe and my father he began to hurl down the copings of the battlements upon their heads. So that in the end they had to desist from the attempt, though they had nobly done their best.
And all the while he sang. It was the trampling measure of "There's nae luck" that the madman had chosen for his swan song. Never had been seen or heard such a thing. As he finished each verse he would rise and dance, balancing himself on the utmost point of the cupola, his melodeon swaying in his hand and his voice declaring ironically that—
"There's nae luck aboot the hoose,There's nae luck ava,There's little pleasure i' the hoose,When oor guidman's awa'!"
Then he would laugh, and call out to the people beneath that the luck had come back.
"The guidman o' the Grange is safe!" he would cry. "He is at his loom, but never more will he weave, I ken. Jeremy has seen to that. And what for that, quo' ye? Juist to learn him that when Jeremy asks for his ain, he is no to be denied as if he were a beggar wantin' alms!"
Then he took a new tack, and launched into "The Toom Pooch"—which is to say, the "empty pocket"—a very popular ditty in the Scots language, and especially about Breckonside:
"An empty purse is slichtit sair,Gang ye to market, kirk, or fair,Ye'll no be muckle thocht o' there,Gin ye gang wi' a toom pooch!"
He finished with a shout of derision.
"Ye puir feckless lot!" he shouted down to the crowd beneath. "I ken you and Breckonside. Here's charity for ye! Catch a haud!" And he showered the contents of a pocket-book down upon their heads.
"Here are notes o' ten pound, and notes o' twenty, and notes o' a hundred! What man o' ye ever saw the like? Only Jeremy, Jeremy and his maister. They wan them a', playin' at a wee bit game wi' rich lonely folk. Jeremy was fine company to them. And whiles it ended in a bit jab wi' the knife in the ribs, and whiles in a tug o' the hemp aboot a lad's neck, if he wasna unco clever. But it was never Jeremy's neck, nor was the knife ever in Hobby's back till Jeremy—but that's tellin'! Oh, Hobby's a'richt. I saw him sitting screedin' awa' at his windin' sheet, and thinkin' the time no lang."
He rose and danced, singing as he danced—
"There's nae luck aboot the hoose,There's nae luck ava——"
The flames shot up like the cracking of a mighty whip. The madman felt the sting, and with a wild yell he launched himself over the parapet into the muddy sludge at the bottom of Deep Moat pond. He must have gone in head foremost, for he never rose. Only the melodeon, with the water trickling in drops off its bell chime in silver gilt, and the glittering tinsel of its keys, rose slowly to the surface among a few air bubbles and floated there among a little brownish mud.
The ruins of Deep Moat Grange were black and cold—almost level with the ground, also. For the folk had pulled the house almost stone from stone, partly in anger, partly in their search for hidden treasure. Elsie was home again in the white cottage at the Bridge End, and my father was attending to his business quietly, as if nothing had happened.
The authorities, of course, had made a great search among the subterranean passages of the monks' storehouses, without, however, discovering more than Elsie and my father could have told them. Mr. Ablethorpe was still silent. So, being bound by my promise to him, I judged it best to hold my peace also.
But in spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, the country continued in a ferment. The deaths of Mad Jeremy and Mr. Stennis, instead of quieting public clamour, made the mystery still more mysterious. The weird sisters remained at liberty, and the wildest reports flew about. None would venture out of doors after dark. Children were told impossible tales of Spring-heeled Jacks in petticoats, who (much less judicious than the usual bogie—"Black Man," "Hornie Nick," the lord of the utter and middle darkness), confounded the innocent with the guilty, and made off with good children as readily as with children the most advanced in depravity.
Of course, knowing what I knew, I had none of these fears. I understood why Mr. Ablethorpe had arranged for the carrying off of Honorine, Camilla, and Sidonia. They were, I knew, housed with the "Little Sisters of the Weak-Minded." But to me, as to others, Aphra remained the stumbling-block.
But even this was soon to be removed.
On March the sixteenth, one month and five days after the burning of the house of Deep Moat Grange, the sheriff's court of Bordershire was held in the courthouse at Longtown. My father and I, with many people from Breckonside, were there, and practically all Bewick to a man. For great interest was felt in a case of night-poaching in which these two firm friends, Davie Elshiner and Peter Kemp, officially had repeatedly given each other the lie.
"There is rank perjury somewhere," commented the sheriff, "but as I cannot bring it home to any particular person, I must discharge the accused."
A certain subdued hush of various movement ran along the benches, as the listeners got ready to go. Sheriff Graham Duffus, a red-faced, jolly man, was conferring in hushed tones with the fiscal or public prosecutor, when two tall young men in irreproachable clerical attire pushed their way up the central passage, kept clear for witnesses by a couple of burly policemen at either end. A woman walked between them. She was tall, veiled, angular, and bore herself singularly erect, even with an air of pride.
The murmur of the people changed to an awe-stricken hush, as the woman lifted her veil.
It was Aphra Orrin, and she stood there between Mr. De la Poer and Mr. Ablethorpe!
"My lord," said Mr. Ablethorpe, in a clear and dominating voice, "I and my friend, Mr. De la Poer, are ordained clergymen of the Church of Scotland, Episcopal. We are not aware of the formula with which we ought to approach you, seated as a judge in a court of justice. But we are here because we know of no way more direct to carry out the wishes of this poor woman, whose conscience has been touched, and who by full confession, by condemnation, and by the suffering of punishment, desires to make what amends she can for the dreadful iniquities in which, for many years, she has been involved."
In a moment all present knew that it was a matter of the mysteries of Deep Moat Grange.
"Who is this woman?" asked Sheriff Graham Duffus, the jovial air suddenly stricken from his face. The fiscal had subsided into the depths of an official armchair. He reclined in it, apparently seated upon his shoulder blades, and with half-shut eyes watched proceedings from under the twitching penthouse of his brows.
"Her name is Aphra or Euphrasia Orrin," said Mr. Ablethorpe, "and she comes to make full confession before men, of what she has already confessed to me concerning the murders in which she has been implicated at Deep Moat Grange."
"And why," said the sheriff, "did not you yourself immediately inform the justice of your country?"
Mr. Ablethorpe turned upon Sheriff Duffus with a pitying look.
"I was bound," he said simply, "by the secret of the confessional!"
"In Scotland," said the sheriff severely, "we do not acknowledge any such obligation. But no matter for that, if now, even though discreditably late, you have by your influence brought this woman to make public confession!"
"I take my friend by my side to witness—I take Euphrasia Orrin—I take Him who hears all confessions which come from the heart, to witness that never have I put the least pressure on this poor woman's conscience! What she is now doing is by her own desire!"
The sheriff shrugged his shoulders, and the ghost of a smile flickered among the crafty wrinkles about the corner of the fiscal's mouth. His work was being done for him.
"You refuse the crumb of credit I was willing to allow you," said the sheriff. "Well, I put no limit to what any man's conscience may prescribe to itself, when once it begins to set up rules for its own guidance. Let us get to business. What has the woman to say?"
The woman had much to say. It was the early afternoon of mid-March when Aphra began to speak, and long before she had finished the court-keeper and his temporary assistant were lighting the dim gas jets arranged at wide distances along the wall.
Her crape veil thrown back over a bonnet showing a face, as it were, carven in grey granite, Aphra Orrin stood before her country's justice fingering a brown rosary. Every time she paused, even for a second, one could hear the click of the beads mechanically dropped from nervous fingers. Strong men's ears sang. It was as if the terrible things her lips were relating had been some history of old, long-punished crimes, the record of which she was recalling as a warning. Yet within what of soul she had, doubtless the woman was at her prayers.
Not once did she manifest the least emotion or contrition, still less fear. And she made her recital in the calmest manner, with some occasional rhapsodical language certainly, but with none of the madness which I should have expected.
She stood up, most like some formal, old-fashioned schoolmistress reciting a piece of prose learned by heart, without animation and without interest. The dry click of the beads alone marked the emphasis. The young Anglican priests towered one on either side, and the quivering silence of the crowded courthouse alone evidenced the terrible nature of the disclosures.
"I had a younger brother, dear to me far above my life" (this was Aphra Orrin's beginning). "He was the youngest of all—left to me in guard by a father who feared in him the wild blood of my mother. For my father had married a gipsy girl whose beauty had taken him at a village merrymaking. In the Upper Ward they do not understand that kind ofmésalliancein a schoolmaster. And so, for my mother's sake, he had to leave his schoolhouse, after fighting the battle against odds for many years.
"He died rich in his new occupation of cotton spinner, but he knew that the blood of my mother ran in all of us. Once, in a great snowstorm when the schoolhouse was cut off from all other houses—it was in the days soon after Jeremy (the youngest of us all) was born, my father awakened to find my mother leaning over him, the wood axe in her hand, murder in her eye. He had only time to roll beneath the bed, and seize her by the feet, pulling her down and so mastering her. He had to keep his mad wife, my mother, six days in the schoolhouse, with only himself for guard, till she could be taken to the asylum, where she died.
"After this shock my father soon followed her to the grave, and I was left with three poor girls on my hands, who could do nothing for themselves in the world—hardly even what I told them—and with Jeremy my brother. If it had not been for Jeremy, I might have managed better. But he spoiled it all. He was wild from his youth. The least opposition would arouse him to ungovernable fury. He would, like my mother, take up a knife, an axe, or whatever was at hand, and strike with incredible swiftness and strength.
"After we had lost our money—afterIhad lost it, that is—my own and my family's—it became my duty to provide for them more than ever. I had lost it, because richer people had revenged on me and on these four helpless ones my poor father's too rapid success. So I had no right to be squeamish as to means of vengeance on the rich.
"But while we were in the midst of some sad dreamy days at Bristol, Jeremy began to bring home money, for which he either would or could give no account. Nevertheless, I could not be sure which of the two it was. He was so wayward that if I ventured to ask for an explanation that would be a sufficient reason for his refusing it.
"I began, however, to notice that within a day or two after Jeremy's flush periods, there was always a hue and cry in the papers—a sailor robbed and his body found floating in the dock, a 'long course' captain knocked on the head, and the ship's money missing. Now Jeremy could never be kept away from the docks. Jeremy had plenty of money. Jeremy only laughed when I asked him how he earned so much without a trade.
"'I can play the fiddle!' he would answer, jeering at me.
"Yet, because there was no other money, and I could not let my sisters (who at least had done no wrong) suffer, I used what he brought. For neither, I was sure (and the thought comforted me), had Jeremy done wrong,because the mad can do no crime. The worst the law can do, is only to shut them up. And in the meantime the money was most convenient."
Here she paused, and a sort of groan ran all round the courthouse, as the meaning and scope of the woman's revelation began to dawn upon the packed audience. Aphra Orrin, being in her senses, had employed the madman, her brother, to murder right and left that the wants of her brood might be met!
There arose a hoarse mingled shout: "Tear her to pieces!" before which, however, Aphra never blanched. But the sheriff was on his feet in a moment. The fiscal commanded silence, ordering the court officer to apprehend all who disobeyed. For the wise lawyer could see well ahead, and knew that as yet they were only at the beginning of mysteries.
When silence was restored Euphrasia Orrin continued without losing a moment, neither amazed nor alarmed at the manifestation.
"At Bristol I perceived that all this would certainly end in an unpleasant discovery—yes, unpleasant" (she repeated the word as if in response to the threatening murmurs!). "I was not responsible for my poor brother, but I thought it would be well to remove him to a place where there were no docks and fewer temptations. I bethought myself of Leeds. We went there, but somehow Jeremy never took to Leeds. He wandered off by himself to London, associating with horse-coupers and gipsies by the way. Suddenly he disappeared. I heard no more of him till at our famine-bare garret a letter arrived containing a hundred pounds in Bank of England notes—and an address." Miss Orrin put her hand into a trim little reticule which was attached to her waist, and drew out a single sheet of paper, on which was written in a sprawling hand: "H. Stennis, Pattern Designer and Weaver, Burnside Cottage, Breckonside, Bordershire, N.B."
At this moment I noticed that Mr. Ablethorpe had for the first time left the side of the speaker—though Mr. De la Poer continued to stand on attention, his shoulder almost touching the dark veil which fell away to one side of Aphra's face, and threw into relief her determined chin. Mr. Ablethorpe was speaking to my father. My astonishment was still greater when I saw my father rise quietly and leave the courthouse. With a crook of his finger he summoned Rob Kingsman, and, without either of them paying the least attention to me, both left the room. Then I was certain that my father did not wish to attract attention by calling me away. Perhaps, also, he wanted first-hand evidence of what happened after he was gone. Anyway, he did not put himself at all out of the way at the thought of leaving me in the lurch at Longtown with the night falling. It was, of course, different from what it had been before the burning of Deep Moat Grange. People began to go the roads freely again.
Once more Mr. Ablethorpe took up his position. The sheriff had stopped taking notes, so absorbed was he in what he heard. As for the fiscal, he had never attempted to take any. He was enjoying the situation. This confession in open court was a thing unknown in his experience, and he was chiefly afraid lest the sheriff, little accustomed to this sort of thing, and probably anxious to get home for dinner, should cut short the sederunt.
"At this point," said Mr. Ablethorpe, who in a way assumed the position of counsel for his strange penitent. "I would put into your lordship's hands papers of some importance. They came from Dr. Hector, some of them, and some out of the safe in the cellar of the Grange."
The sheriff was not in the best of humours.
"I consider all this most irregular," he growled—"a court of justice is not a scene in a theatre!"
But Fiscal McMath, who was infinitely the stronger man of the two in character and conduct, turned upon him with a kind of snarl.
"Don't sink the ship for the extra happorth of tar, skipper," he said, in a low voice (which, however, sitting near, I could just catch), "give them rope—give them rope! We have been a long time at the job without hanging them!"
At this the sheriff was silent, only motioning Mr. Ablethorpe to give the papers to Mr. McMath.
Our fiscal, next to my father the best-known man in the county, was a greyish, grave man with twinkling eyes, mutton-chop side whiskers, a little, sly, tip-titled nose, with a dry bloom on the top of it, as if he liked his spirits neat. He never smiled, yet he was always smiling. His mouth, when about his duties, would be grave as that of Rhadamanthus, while within an inch of it a wrinkle twitched merrily away. His eyes could reprove a too light-hearted witness, or frown down an improperly jovial defendant, all the while that a mischief-loving sprite, hovering within, held his sides at the unseasonable jesting.
On this occasion, however, it was gravely enough that Mr. McMath adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles and proceeded to read.
"The Witnessing and last statement of Me, Howard Stennis, sometime weaver to my trade, afterwards laird of the lands of 'Deep Moat Grange,' near Breckonside—to which is added my last Will in my own handwriting.
"I, HOWARD STENNIS, being of sound mind, and desiring that after my death nothing should be left uncertain, have decided to put on record all that has occurred. This I do, not in the least to exculpate myself, because what I have done, I have done calmly and with intention aforethought.
"This paper is for the sole use of the heir whom I shall choose.
"If it be his will not to accept a fortune accumulated under these conditions or in the way I made mine, I have joined to this a paper with the names of those to whose heirs reparation can be made. But it is my present intention to seek rather some strong man, at war with other men—a hater of his kind, as I have good reason to be—who will continue my work after I am gone. So that in time, if the life of our instrument, Jeremy Orrin, be spared, one of the greatest fortunes of the age may be built up.
"From my youth I was called Miser Hobby. And that most unjustly. Because I wrought day and night that I might leave my one daughter Bell in a position of a lady. But she chose to throw my lifetime's work in my face. She left me without a word for a penniless boy in a uniform. My heart had been black and bitter before, but there had always been a bright spot upon it. That was Bell. Afterward it became black altogether, for I cast Bell out of my heart and sight like an untimely birth. I worked harder, yet for all that I wearied of the work. To be rich suddenly, to have all in my power, and to deny to Bell and her tramping rascal of a redcoat a sup of broth, a bite of bread—that alone I counted sweet. It would come to me some day, I knew.
"I looked about for a weapon—for the hand to strike. This I found in Jeremy Orrin. It was at the Tryst of Longtown, whither I had gone to deliver a web. There I saw a limber youth, very dark, turning somersaults on a scrap of carpet. He spread out his hands and walked on them. There was hair on the palms. The thumb was as long as the fingers, and he raised himself upon them as on steel springs. I saw him take a byre 'grape'—or fork of three thick prongs—and bend the three into one by the mere strength of one hand.
"Then that set me thinking of other things that these fingers might be taught to do. So, in a little inn, I made the tumbler's acquaintance, and I could see that at first he eyed me curiously. I could read such looks. I knew the wickedness that was in his heart. He meant to murder me on my way home!
"But first I gave him to drink as much as he would. Suddenly I turned my pockets inside out and let him feel the linings of my coat—there in that lighted room, to prove that he would not be twopence halfpenny the richer by the transaction. Then, leaning forward as if jesting, I made a proposition. By himself, I said, such a man could do but little. He was but a tracked beast without a den. See what it had brought him to, tumbling on a carpet for a living, and hungry withal! I would give him safety, a position, the high road between two market towns, neither of them yet reached by the railway, running before our very door.
"Finally, on the doorstep of the Red Lion, holding unstably by either lintel, a warning to all sober men like myself, I pointed out Riddick of Langbarns, who, as I knew, had that day sold his two-year-old horses to the tune of eight hundred pounds!
"Jeremy Orrin and I left the lighted town behind us. I am well aware even then that I put my life in his hands—how terrible was my danger I did not know. For the young man's wayward madness was as yet hidden from me, as from all the world except his elder sister. At the Windy Slap, a narrow wind-swept gully, and a wild enough scene at the best of times, I came out suddenly, and speaking to Riddick, who was on horseback, asked him civilly if he would need any sheets or tablecloths that year. For that I was making out my winter's orders. He knew me at once, and bade me get out of his sight for an arrant self-seeking miser that would keep a shivering man from a good glass of toddy at his own fireside!
"Then I lowered my prices till he checked his horse beside a bank (for I had been walking by his side), and while he strove to calculate cost and rebate in his drink-dozened brain, Jeremy quietly leaped up from behind, and clasped about his neck the broad-palmed, long-fingered, hairy hands that had crushed the byre trident. Riddick of Langbarns never spake word. We buried him decently in the kirkyard—in a grave that had that day been filled, laying him on the coffin of a better man than himself—even that of Ephraim Rae, elder in the Hardgate Cameronian Kirk. Face down we laid him—his nose to the name plate—and so filled in and replaced the sods. It was very secure—an idea of my own. No disturbance of the earth, or none that mattered. For who would ever seek for a lost man in the grave, where, that same day, another had been laid with all due funeral observances? It would be sacrilege. Afterwards, when we used this method, I always tried to be present at both interments. In fact, I got a name for my reverence and exactitude at burials. Also it gave me some useful thoughts upon the transitory nature of all things. Besides, I liked to watch the mourners' daylit faces and then think of Jeremy's twelve hours later, seen perhaps by the light of a late-rising, cloudy, out-worn moon!
"Good fortune such as this (the timely burial of Elder Rae, that is) we could not always depend upon. But as far as possible, of course, we arranged our business transactions so that they fell due on the day of a funeral, either at Over Breckonton or Breckonside. Bewick was of no use to us—the graveyard there having the fatal fault of being placed under the windows of the manse, and the minister being a bachelor, who never cared whether he went to bed at all or not, keeping his light burning till three of the morning. Such men have no right to be ministers. Still, for the time being, the other two parishes served us very well.
"I saw, however, that a change was becoming necessary, indeed imperative. Also, thanks to a certain drover of the name of Lang Hutchins, I had the money. It was most providential (I shall always so regard it) that at this very time the place and policies of Deep Moat Grange came into the market.
"Lang Hutchins was a pure windfall—a catch of Jeremy's. I had nothing to do with that. One night Jeremy walked into the weaving-room with a great leathern pocket-book.
"'Where did you get that?' I asked. I was, I remember, at the loom, and the pattern being an interesting one, the time had passed without my regarding its flight. It was, as a matter of fact, past one of the morning.
"'Lang Hutchins, the Bewick drover, gied it to me,' said Jeremy Orrin, 'and as there were nae funerals in Breckonside, and that minister man at Bewick willna put his candle oot, I had e'en to make Lang Hutchins up a bonnie bed in the gairden at the Grange o' the Moat!'
"I rose instantly to my feet. This was indeed terrible. I had a vision (which I have often seen in reality since) of Jeremy scratching the earth with his fingers, and creeping about on the black soil like some unclean beast, leaving marks easy to be read by the first passer-by. We should be discovered. Jeremy would be tracked, and I saw in appalling perspective two gibbets, and on one the murderer, and on the other his master—the same Miser Hobby who had thought to make a lady of his daughter; now Howard Stennis, Esquire—both raised to the dignity of the hempen cravat.
"For a moment I did not know what to do—yes, even I, to whom plans occur like oaths to a bad, foul-mouthed, swearing man such as Lang Hutchins, one who had defied his Maker the very day his soul, was required of him.
"'Buried in the garden at Deep Moat Grange!' I repeated to myself. 'The place out of habitation, a prey to every poacher, the gardens and orchards overrun by vagrant boys!' Ah—even in that word it had come to me!
"Deep Moat Grange was for sale! But then I had not enough money to buy it, and I could not face the raising of a mortgage—the possible scrutinies! At that moment Jeremy Orrin tossed carelessly at me a long, many-caped overcoat, such as long-distance coachmen used to wear in the days when twice a day the 'Dash' and the 'Flying Express' passed Breckonside, and I was a boy in knee breeches and a blue bonnet. I could feel that the coat was well padded though not heavy. And there in the weaving-room of the little cottage, I drew out of the lining hundreds and hundreds of packets of five-pound notes, all English, and mostly long in use, like those which pass from hand to hand among drovers. I could see that no one of them had recently been in a bank. There would, therefore, be no awkward record of the numbers. Moreover, Lang Hutchins had come north suddenly (so Jeremy told me) after quite a year of running the southern markets.
"It was as safe as could be—all but the garden plot at Deep Moat Grange, where in one particular oblong the earth had been raked with the split and blackened nails of Jeremy's fingers.
"After that, there was no letting that spot out of our sight till I had got the lawyer work finished—I mean that of the vendor's representatives of Deep Moat Grange. I was my own lawyer and factor, that is, so far as the district was concerned. I had a kinsman in Edinburgh who went over all the agreements and so on, for me, just to see that everything was in order.
"All the time I was away Jeremy watched, resolved that if any one manifested overmuch interest in the scratched soil at the bottom of the lawn where the rhododendrons begin, he or she should find a quiet resting-place beside them. But, barring one slight accident, into the details of which I deem it useless to enter (being but a poor man and not worth in the gross three solvent halfpence) no one looked near the lawn or the old orchard.
"At last Deep Moat Grange was mine. Deep Moat Grange was paid for in untraceable money—I had examined every note. Jeremy and I moved in, and having heard all that he had to say about his sister Aphra, I sent a hundred pounds to her—and our address. Jeremy said that would bring her. We felt—or at least I, who knew the ways and thoughts, the chatterings and clatterings of Breckonside, felt that there was need for a good, careful, managing woman there. From what Jeremy told me, I was certain that Euphrasia Orrin was that woman.
"She was. I could not have chosen better. Yet, for all that, the madman had deceived me in the way that all such have, with a cunning far above that of sane and grave persons, such as myself.
"Euphrasia or Aphra Orrin (as she was called) arrived in a few days. But she brought with her three hare-brained sisters, concerning whom, if their brother had breathed so much as one word, neither Aphra nor any of them should ever have set foot within my door. I should have claimed my granddaughter, at that time cared for by a decent working woman named Edgar—and for whose upkeep I subscribed according to my means. I should have taken her, I say, and trained her up to fulfil my needs. Between us, Jeremy and I could have done it.*
* "I say nothing of the return and death of my daughter Bell. Save that she left the parish and returned burdened with a brat, her coming had no interest for me, though the neighbours made a foolish work about it, going so far as to give me an ill name on account of my treatment of her!"
"But Aphra was a clever woman, and as soon as I saw her, and as soon as she had spoken with Jeremy, I knew for certain that there would be no turning her out. She meant to stay at Deep Moat Grange, and stay she would and did, she and her yelping litter of she-whelps. Of her I only asked one thing, that she should confine their vagaries to the space contained between the pond and the moat. The house had now been put into some repair, the drawbridge restored, and we were safe within our own guards and barriers. As for the country clatter, we took no heed to that. Besides, whenever there was a fair or promising market, it was agreed that (for my character's sake) I should be found with my lawyer in Edinburgh, or in the company of some other decent, producible people.
"The advantages of the Grange for our business are manifold. Firstly, should this fall into the hands of a successor actuated by a like hatred of humanity and lack of moral prejudice, and supposing him to be served by the same able though irresponsible tools which I have used, I would point out that from either road, that to Bewick to the right or that through the woods to Longwood on the left, there is direct water carriage to the secluded lawn beneath Deep Moat Grange. In case of necessity, supposing that the 'accident' has befallen on the Bewick road, you can load your boat by the bridge near to the darkest part of the wood behind the Bailiff's houses, and then, sculling lightly, you are carried all the way by the current of the Backwater without leaving a trace. If the game has been played on the highway to the right, then there is equally good going across the pond. It is recommended that the boat, being probably heavily burdened, should return by the north side, where I have planted certain rows of weeping willows, which not only afford a grateful shade, but are seemly in the circumstances.
"It was, however, Miss Orrin (a clever woman in her way) who had the best idea as to the final disposition of the frail but compromising relicts of mortality, thus appropriately transported under my weeping willows to their final resting beds. She made perennial flower pots of them, and nowhere could be seen such display of varied beauty as she obtained from cold, useless clay!
"Personally, I have always been opposed to the general uselessness of graveyards and cemeteries. Nothing is better suited to enrich the soil than the material which Jeremy supplied. It is far before phosphates, about which there has been so much talk these last years. So I was greatly content when Miss Orrin—to whom of necessity I had to confide the secret of Jeremy's unfortunate tendencies, in order that she might use her influence to direct it for our mutual advantage—discovered a means at once of security and of utility by planting masses of lilies in heart-shaped plots all about, wherever Jeremy had found it necessary to disturb the soil. I believe that Miss Orrin attached some subtle meaning to the lilies. Indeed had I not prevented her, she would even have made the plots of the shape and size of coffins—which certainly shows a trace of the family failing.
"But this was, of course, impossible. I had, how ever, good reason to be content with our new arrangement. The old, difficult (though perfectly safe) interment in a doubly tenanted grave, with all its annoyances of being on the spot myself, of scaling walls and keeping Jeremy to his labour, was all done away with. Deep Moat certainly became, as it were, a self-contained factory for spinning the money which is the god of this world. Ah, it was a peaceful and a happy time. Within and without, everything went like clockwork. I began to be respected, too—at a certain distance from home, that is. For I had taken care to engage the simplest and honestest soul in the world for my grieve or bailiff, and when Jeremy and I were not out on our more immediate business, Simon Ball and I frequented markets and bought all that was necessary for the home farm. To be exact, he bought and I paid.
"But the beginning of evil days was at hand. I have always noticed it. Man cannot long be left in peace, even among the most favoured surroundings. Now I was doing no harm to any soul or body in all the surrounding parishes. Instead I did what good I could—spoke fairly and civilly, contributed freely to charities, helped more than one of my impoverished neighbours. But I will not conceal it from my successor (who alone is to read this manuscript) that all my good will was in vain, so far as gaining the affection and respect of the countryside was concerned. Yet for this, personally, I can conceive no reason. Those whom Jeremy took charge of were invariably strangers—men of loud, brawling character, generally semi-drunkards, trampling all laws of a quiet and respectable demeanour under their feet.
"While I myself, giving shelter to these poor creatures, the sisters Orrin—who without me would have been hunted from city to city—I, Howard Stennis, whose only dissipation or distraction was to weave the thronging fancies of flower and fruit into my napery—was no better respected than an outlaw dog. They called me the Golden Farmer, but it was with a sneer. None would willingly linger a moment to speak with me, not so much as one of Bailiff Ball's tow-headed urchins. If one of them met me in a lonesome path, as like as not he would set up a howl and dodge between my legs, running, tumbling, and making the welkin ring, as if I had been some black evil bogie!
"Yet, I am a man who all his life has loved children, and (with a few exceptions) carefully observed the courtesies as between man and man. When I consider how I have been served by friends and neighbours, many of whom I have repeatedly obliged, I am filled with surprise that I have kept the sphere of my operations so remote from my insulters. But then I have always, save perhaps in the case of my daughter Bell, been a forgiving man. Even now I cherish no enmity against those whose machinations have caused me to be suspected.
"It was about this time, when the first-planted lilies were beginning to sprout for the third season, that Jeremy, nosing, as usual, here and there, discovered the ancient underground rooms across the drawbridge. Immediately I saw the use they would be to us. Having been well brought up myself, I had always regretted the necessity of sending so many, mostly careless and godless men, to their account unwarned and unprepared. Such of them as could be induced to disgorge further sums of money besides those carried on their bodies might at least have some space for reflection and repentance. What I did not foresee was that the Orrins, with their low, mad-folks' cunning, would make use of these nests of chambers and hiding-places for their own ends, and thereby endanger everything which I had so wisely and so laboriously thought out.
"But for all that it was, as I have said, the beginning of the evil days.
"And as usual it was owing to my own carelessness. I have enough common sense to know that, nine times out of ten, men have themselves to thank for the misfortunes which befall them. It is only the born fool who goes from house to house and from friend to friend maundering about ill luck and an unkind Providence. Good luck, at least, is generally only the art of looking a good way ahead.
"I was away in Edinburgh, for the almanac told us that we were approaching the date of the Bewick Wakes. Jeremy was to make the acquaintance of a certain Lammermuir farmer with a well lined pocket-book. The lily bed, under which he was to lie, would just have made out Miss Aphra's pattern neatly—a thing concerning which she was most particular. I will not give his name; if this falls into the hands of a worthy successor he may one day scent the 'shot' out for himself. He speaks broad Lammermuir, wears glasses hooked round his ears, like a college professor, and generally has cut himself while shaving in more than one place. But at any rate he had a respite for the time being.
"For, without my knowledge, and quite apart from all my well-ordered designs, Jeremy in a mad, fierce fit fell suddenly upon the mail carrier betwixt Breckonside and Bewick. Very early in the morning it was done, and the place unsuitable and quite unsafe, being close by the bailiff's cottage. But that was not the worst. The mare belonging to the carrier postman (I knew him well, a decent quiet man, Henry Foster by name) ran wide and wild, made a circuit of the Deep Moat property and turned up in front of the school-house at Breckonside, the mail gig all blood and leaves, just as the innocent bairns were going in to say their morning's lessons.
"The rest of the business Jeremy had carried through well enough. He had sculled the body of Foster, properly covered with bark and brushwood, and laid it comfortably in the place intended for the Lammermuir farmer. He had taken the mail bags, such as appeared to have anything of value in them, turned them inside out, burned them in his baker's furnace, and hidden away the rings (which he could not melt) in some of his privatecaches.
"Yet when I asked him why he had done the deed at all, he would only reply, 'I saw Harry passing by, just when I had done whetting my knife, and I thought I would try it on him!'"