[1]“Chuckies,” white pebbles used, in these primitive times, instead of marbles.
[1]“Chuckies,” white pebbles used, in these primitive times, instead of marbles.
CHAPTER XVIIITHE TRANSFIGURATION OF AUNT JEN
Never was anything seen like it in our time. I mean the transformation of Aunt Jen, the hard crabapple of our family, after the entrance of the Maitland children into the household of Heathknowes. Not that my aunt had much faith in Irma. She had an art, which my aunt counted uncanny, indeed savouring of the sin of witchcraft. It mattered not at all what Irma was given to wear—an old tartan of my grandmother’s Highland Mary days when she was a shepherdess by the banks of Cluden, a severe gown designed on strictly architectural principles by the unabashed shears of Aunt Jen herself, a bodice and skirt of my mother’s, dovelike in hue and carrying with them some of her own retiring quality in every line. It was all the same, with a shred or two of silk, with a little undoing here, a little tightening there, a broad splash of colour cut from one of my Uncle Rob’s neckcloths—not anywhere, but just in the right place—Irma could give to all mankind the impression of being the only person worth looking at in the parish. With these simple means she could and did make every other girl, though attired in robes that had come all the way from Edinburgh, look dowdy and countrified.
Also she had the simple manner of those who stand in no fear of any one taking a liberty with them. Her position was assured. Her beauty spoke for itself, and as for the old tartan, the slab-sided merino, the retiring pearl-grey wincey, their late owners didnot know them again when they appeared in the great square Marnhoul pew in the parish church, which Irma insisted upon occupying.
I think that a certain scandal connected with this, actually caused more stir in the parish than all the marvel of the appearance of the children in the Haunted House. And for this reason. Heathknowes was a Cameronian household. The young men of Heathknowes were looked upon to furnish a successor to their father as an elder in the little meeting-house down by the Fords. But with the full permission of my grandmother, and the tacit sympathy of my grandfather, each Sabbath day Miss Irma and Sir Louis went in state to the family pew at the parish kirk (a square box large enough to seat a grand jury). The children were perched in the front, Irma keeping firm and watchful guard over her brother, while in the dimmer depths, seen from below as three sturdy pairs of shoulders against the dusk of a garniture of tapistry, sat the three Cameronian young men of Heathknowes.
Nothing could so completely and fully have certified the strength of my grandmother’s purpose than that she, a pillar of the Covenant, thus complacently allowed her sons to frequent the public worship of an uncovenanted and Erastian Establishment.
But there was at least one in the house of Heathknowes not to be so misled by the outward graces of the body.
“Favour is vain and the eye of Him that sitteth in the heavens regardeth it not,” she was wont to say, “and if Rob and Thomas and Ebenezer come to an ill end, mother, you will only have yourself to thank for it!”
“Nonsense, Jen,” said her mother, “if you areprevented by your infirmities from talkin’ sense, at least do hold your tongue. Doctor Gillespie is a Kirkman and a Moderate, but he is—well, he is the Doctor, and never a word has been said against him for forty year, walk and conversation both as becometh the Gospel——”
“Aye, butisit the Gospel?” cried Jen, snipping out her words as with scissors; “that’s the question.”
“When I require you, Janet Lyon, to decide for your mother what is Gospel and what is not, I’ll let ye ken,” said my grandmother, “and if I have accepted a responsibility from the Most High for these children, I will do my best to render an account of my stewardship at the Great White Throne. In the meantime,youhave no more right to task me for it, than—than—Boyd Connoway!”
“There,” cried Jen, slapping down the last dish which she had been drying while her mother washed, “I declare, mother, I might just as well not have a tongue at all. Whatever I say you are on my back. And as if snubbing me were not enough, down you must come on me with the Great White Throne!”
Her aggrieved voice made my grandmother laugh.
“Well-a-well!” she said, in her richly comfortable voice of a mother of consolation, “you are of the tribe of Marthas, Jen, and you certainly work hard enough for everybody to give your tongue a right to a little trot now and then. You will have all the blessings, daughter Janet—except that of the peacemaker. For it’s in you to set folk by the ears and you really can’t help it. Though who you took it from is more than I can imagine, with a mother as mild as milk and a father——”
“Well, what about the father—speak of the—um-um—father and he will appear, I suppose!”
It was my grandfather who had come in, his face bronzed with the sun and a friendly shaving tucked underneath his coat collar at the back, witnessing that some one of his sons, in the labours of the pirn-mill, had not remembered the first commandment with promise.
His wife removed it with a smile, and said, “I’ll wager ye that was yon rascal Rob. He is always at his tricks!”
“Well, what were you saying about me, old wife?” said grandfather, looking at his wife with the quiet fondness that comes of half-a-century of companionship.
“Only that Jen there had a will-o’-the-wisp of a temper and that I knew not how she got it, for you only go about pouring oil upon the waters!”
“As to that, you know best, guidwife,” he answered, smiling, “but I think I have heard of a wife up about the Heathknowes, who in some measure possesses the power of her unruly member. It is possible that Jen there may have picked up a thorn or two from that side!”
William Lyon caught his daughter’s ear.
“Eh, lass, what sayest thou?” he crooned, looking down upon her with a tenderness rare to him with one of his children. “What sayest thou?”
“I say that you and mother and all about this house have run out of your wits about this slip of a girl? I say that you may rue it when you have not a son to succeed you at the Kirk of the Covenant down by the Ford.”
The fleeting of a smile came over my grandfather’s face, that quiet amusement which usually showed when my grandmother opposed her will to his, and when for once he did not mean to give in.
“It’s a sorrowful thing—a whole respectable household gone daft about a couple of strange children;” he let the words drop very slowly. “Specially I was distressed to hear of one who rose betimes to milk a cow, so that the cream would have time to rise on the morning’s milk by their porridge time!”
“Father,” said Jen, “that was for the boy bairn. He has not been brought up like the rest of us, and he does not like warm milk with his porridge.”
“Doubtless—ah, doubtless,” said William Lyon; “but if he is to bide with us, is it not spoiling him thus to give way to suchlike whims? He will have to learn some day, and when so good a time as now?”
Aunt Jen, who knew she was being teased, kept silence, but the shoulder nearest my father had an indignant hump.
“Wheesht, William,” interposed grandmother good-naturedly, “if Jen rose betimes to get milk for the bairn, ye ken yoursel’ that ye think the better of her for it. And so do I. Jen’s not the first whose acts are kindlier than her principles.”
But Jen kept her thorns out and refused to be brought into the fold by flattery, till her father said, “Jen, have ye any of that fine homebrewed left, or did the lads drink it a’ to their porridges? I’m a kennin’ weary, and nothing refreshes me like that!”
Jen felt the artfulness of this, nevertheless she could not help being touched. The care of the still-room was hers, because, though my grandmother could go through twice the work in the day that her daughter could, the brewing of the family small beer and other labours of the still-room were of too exact and methodical a nature for a headlong driver like Mary Lyon.
My grandfather got his ale, of the sort just then beginning to be made—called “Jamaica,” because aquantity of the cheap sugar refuse from the hogsheads was used in its production. In fact, it was the ancestor of the “treacle ale” of later years. But to the fabrication of this beverage, Jen added mysterious rites, during which the door of the still-room was locked, barred, and the keyhole blinded, while Eben and Rob, my uncles, stood without vainly asking for a taste, or simulating by their moans and cries the most utter lassitude and fatigue.
William Lyon sat sipping his drink while Jen eyed him furtively as she went about the house, doing her duties with the silence and exactitude of a well-oiled machine. She was a difficult subject, my aunt Jen, to live with, but she could be got at, as her father well knew, by a humanizing vanity.
He sat back with an air of content in his great wide chair, the chair that had been handed down as the seat of the head of the house from many generations of Lyonses. He sipped and nodded his head, looking towards his daughter, and lifting the tankard with a courtly gesture as if pledging her health.
Jen was pleased, though for a while she did not allow it to be seen, and her only repentance was taking up the big empty goblet without being asked and going to the still-room to refill it.
During her absence my grandfather shamelessly winked at my grandmother, while my grandmother shook her fist covertly at her husband. Which pantomime meant to say on the part of William Lyon thatheknew how to manage women, while on his wife’s side it inferred that she would not demean herself to use means so simple and abject as plain flattery even with a “camsteary” daughter.
But they smiled at each other, not ill-content, and as my grandmother passed to the dresser she paused by the great oak chair long enough to murmur, “She’scoming round!” But my grandfather only smiled and looked towards the door that led to the still-room, pantries and so forth, as if he found the time long without his second pot of sugar ale.
He was something of a diplomat, my grandfather.
It was while sitting thus, with the second drink of harmless “Jamaica” before him, my aunt and grandmother crossing each other ceaselessly on silent feet, that a knock came to the front door.
Now in Galloway farm houses there is a front door, but no known use for it has been discovered, except tobea door. Later, it was the custom to open it to let in the minister on his stated visitations, and later still to let out the dead. But at the period of which I write it was a door and nothing more.
Both of these other uses are mere recent inventions. The shut front door of my early time stood blistering and flaking in the hot sun, or soaking—crumbling, and weather-beaten—during months of bad weather. For, with a wide and noble entrance behind upon the yard, so well-trodden and convenient, so charged with the pleasant press of entrants and exodants, so populous with affairs, from which the chickens had to be “shooed” and the moist noses of questing calves pushed aside twenty times a day—why should any mortal think of entering by the front door of the house. First of all it was the front door. Next, no one knew whether it would open or not, though the odds were altogether against it. Lastly, it was a hundred miles from anywhere and opened only upon a stuffy lobby round which my grandmother usually had her whole Sunday wardrobe hung up in bags smelling of lavender to guard against the moths.
Nevertheless, the knock sounded distinctly enough from the front door.
“Some of the bairns playing a trick,” said mygrandmother tolerantly, “let them alone, Janet, and they will soon tire o’t!”
But Jen had showed so much of the unwonted milk of human kindness that she felt she must in some degree retrieve her character. She waited, therefore, for the second rap, louder than the first, then lifted a wand from the corner and went “down-the-house,” quietly as she did all things.
Aunt Jen concealed the rod behind her. Her private intention was to wait for the third knock, and then open suddenly, with the deadly resolve to teach us what we were about—a mental reservation being made in the case of Baby Louis, who (if the knocker turned out to be he) must obviously have been put up to it.
The third knock fell. Aunt Jen leaped upon the door-handle. Bolts creaked and shot back, but swollen by many rainy seasons, the door held stoutly as is the wont of farm front doors. Then suddenly it gave way and Aunt Jen staggered back against the wall, swept away by the energy of her own effort. The wand fell from her hand, and she stood with the inner door handle still clutched in nervous fingers before a slight dapper man in a shiny brown coat, double-breasted and closely buttoned, even on this broiling day—while the strident “weesp-weesp” of brother Tom down in the meadow, sharpening his scythe with a newly fill “strake,” made a keen top-note to the mood of summer.
“Mr. Poole,” said the slim man, uncovering and saluting obsequiously, and then seeing that my aunt rested dumb-stricken, the rod which had been in pickle fallen to the floor behind her, he added with a little mincing smile and a kind of affected heel-and-toe dandling of his body, “I am Mr. Wrighton Poole, of the firm of Smart, Poole, and Smart of Dumfries.”
CHAPTER XIXLOADED-PISTOL POLLIXFEN
Now Aunt Jen’s opinion of lawyers was derived from two sources, observation and a belief in the direct inspiration of two lines of Dr. Watts, his hymns.
In other words, she had noticed that lawyers sat much in their offices, twiddling with papers, and that they never went haymaking nor stood erect in carts dumping manure on the autumnal fields. So two lines of Dr. Watts, applicable for such as they, and indeed every one not so aggressively active as herself, were calculated to settle the case of Mr. Wrighton Poole.
“Satan finds some mischiefFor idle hands to do.”
Indeed, I had heard of them more than once myself, when she caught me lying long and lazy in the depths of a haymow with a book under my nose.
At any rate Aunt Jen suspected this Mr. Poole at once. But so she would the Lord Chancellor of England himself, for the good reason that by choice and custom he sat on a woolsack!
“I’d woolsack him!” Aunt Jen had cried when this fact was first brought to her notice; “I’d make him get up pretty quick and earn his living if he was my man!”
My grandfather had pointed out that the actual Lord Chancellor of the moment was a bachelor, whereupon Aunt Jen retorted, “Aye, and doubtless that’s the reason. The poor body has nobody to do her duty by him!”
For these excellent reasons my Aunt Jen took a dislike to Mr. Wrighton Poole (of the firm of Smart, Poole, and Smart, solicitors, Dumfries) at the very first glance.
And yet, when he was introduced into the state parlour with the six mahogany-backed, haircloth-seated chairs, the two narrow arm-chairs, the four ugly mirrors, and the little wire basket full of odds and ends of crockery and foreign coins—covered by the skin of a white blackbird, found on the farm and prepared for stuffing—he looked a very dapper, respectable, personable man. But my Aunt Jen would have none of his compliments on the neatness of the house or the air of bien comfort that everything about the farm had worn on his way thither.
She drew out a chair for him and indicated it with her hand.
“Bide there,” she commanded, “till I fetch them that can speak wi’ you!” An office which, had she chosen, Jen was very highly qualified to undertake, save for an early and deep-rooted conviction that business matters had better be left to the dealing of man and man.
This belief, however, was not in the least that of my grandmother. She would come in and sit down in the very middle of one of my grandfather’s most private bargainings with the people to whom he sold his spools and “pirns.” She had her say in everything, and she said it so easily and so much as a matter of course that no one was ever offended.
Grandfather was at the mill and in consequence it was my grandmother who entered from the dairy, still wiping her hands from the good, warm buttermilk which had just rendered up its tale of butter. There was a kind of capable and joyous fecundity about mygrandmother, in spite of her sharp tongue, her masterful ways, the strictness of her theology and her old-fashioned theories, which seemed to produce an effect even on inanimate things. So light and loving was her hand—the hand that had loved (and smacked) many children, brooded over innumerable hatchings of things domestic, tended whole byrefuls of cows, handled suckling lambs with dead mothers lying up on the hill—aye, played the surgeon even to robins with broken legs, for one of which she constructed a leg capable of being strapped on, made it out of the whalebone of an old corset of her own for which she had grown too abundant!
So kindly was the eye that could flash fire on an argumentative Episcopalian parson—and send him over two pounds of butter and a dozen fresh-laid eggs for his sick wife—that (as I say) even inanimate objects seemed to respond to her look and conform themselves to the wish of her finger tips. She had been known to “set” a dyke which had twice resolved itself into rubbish under the hands of professionals. The useless rocky patch she had taken as a herb garden blossomed like the rose, bringing forth all manner of spicy things. For in these days in Galloway most of the garnishments of the table were grown in the garden itself, or brought in from the cranberry bogs and the blaeberry banks, where these fruits grew among a short, crumbly stubble of heather, dry and elastic as a cushion, and most admirable for resting upon while eating.
Well, grandmother came in wiping her hands. It seems to me now that I see her—and, indeed, whenever she does make an entry into the story, I always feel that I must write yet another page about the dear, warm-hearted, tumultuous old lady.
She saw the slender lawyer with the brown coatworn shiny, the scratch wig tied with its black wisp of silk, and the black bag in his hand. He had been taking a survey of the room, and started round quickly at the entrance of my grandmother. Then he made a deep bow, and grandmother, who could be very grand indeed when she liked, bestowed upon him a curtsey the like of which he had not seen for a long while.
“My name is Poole,” he said apologetically. “I presume I have the honour of speaking to Mistress Mary Lyon, spouse and consort of William Lyon, tacksman of the Mill of Marnhoul with all its lades, weirs, and pendicles——”
“If you mean that William Lyon is my man, ye are on the bit so far,” said my grandmother; “pass on. What else hae ye to say? I dinna suppose that ye cam’ here to ask a sicht o’ my marriage lines.”
“It is, indeed, a different matter which has brought me thus far,” said the lawyer man, with a certain diffidence, “but I think that perhaps I ought to wait till—till your husband, in fact——”
“If you are waiting for Weelyum,” said Mary Lyon, “ye needna fash. He is o’ the same mind as me—or will be after I have spoken wi’ him. Say on!”
“Well, then,” the lawyer continued, “it is difficult—but the matter resolves itself into this. I understand—my firm understands, that you are harbouring in or about this house a young woman calling herself Irma Sobieski Maitland, and a child of the male sex whom the aforesaid Irma Sobieski affirms to be the rightful owner of this estate—in fact, Sir Louis Maitland. Now, my firm have been long without direct news of the family whom they represent. Our intelligence of late years has come from their titular and legal guardian, Mr. Lalor Maitland, Governor of the district of the Upper Meuse in the Brabants. Now wehave recently heard from this gentleman that his wards—two children bearing a certain resemblance to those whom, we are informed, you have been harbouring——”
My grandmother’s temper, always uncertain with adults with whom she had no sympathy, had been gradually rising at each repetition of an offending word.
“Harbouring,” she cried, “harbouring—let me hear that word come out o’ your impident mouth again, ye upsettin’ body wi’ the black bag, and I’ll gie ye the weight o’ my hand against the side o’ your face. Let me tell you that in the house of Heathknowes we harbour neither burrowing rats nor creepin’ foumarts, nor any manner of unclean beasts—and as for a lawvier, if lawvier ye be, ye are the first o’ your breed to enter here, and if my sons hear ye talkin’ o’ harbourin’—certes, ye stand a chance to gang oot the door wi’ your feet foremost!”
“My good woman,” said the lawyer, “I was but using an ordinary word, in perfect ignorance of any——”
“Come na, nane o’ that crooked talk! Mary Lyon is nae bit silly Jenny Wren to be whistled off the waa’ wi’ ony siccan talk. Dinna tell me that a lawvier body doesna ken what ‘harbouring rogues and vagabonds’ means—the innocent lamb that he is—and him reading theCourierevery Wednesday!”
“But,” said the solicitor, with more persistent firmness than his emaciated body and timorous manner would have led one to expect, “the children are here, and it is my duty to warn you that in withholding them from their natural guardian you are defying the law. I come to require that the children be given up to me at once, that I may put them under their proper tutelage.”
“Here, William,” my grandmother called out, recognizing the footsteps of her husband approaching, “gae cry the lads and lock the doors! There’s a body here that will need some guid broad Scots weared on him.”
But the lawyer was not yet frightened. As it appeared, he had only known the safe plainstones of Dumfries—so at least Mary Lyon thought. For he continued his discourse as if nothing were the matter.
“I came here in a friendly spirit, madam,” he said, “but I have good reason to believe that every male of your household is deeply involved in the smuggling traffic, and that several of them, in spite of their professions of religion, assaulted and took possession of the House of Marnhoul for the purpose of unlawfully concealing therein undutied goods from the proper officers of the crown!”
“Aye, and ken ye wha it was that tried to burn doon your Great House,” cried my grandmother—“it was your grand tutor—your wonderfu’ guardian, even Lalor Maitland, the greatest rogue and gipsy that ever ran on two legs. There was a grandson o’ mine put a charge o’ powder-and-shot into him, though. But here come the lads. They will tell ye news o’ your tutor and guardian, him that ye daur speak to me aboot committing the puir innocent bairns to—what neither you nor a’ the law in your black bag will ever tak’ frae under the roof-tree o’ Mary Lyon. Here, this way, lads—dinna be blate! Step ben!”
And so, without a shadow of blateness, there stepped “ben” Tom and Eben and Rob. Tom had his scythe in his hand, for he had come straight from the meadow at his father’s call, the sweat of mowing still beading his brow, and the broad leathern strap shining wet about his waist. Eben folded a pair of brawny arms across a chest like an oriel window, but Rob alwayscareful for appearances, had his great-grandfather’s sword, known in the family as “Drumclog,” cocked over his shoulder, and carried his head to the side with so knowing an air that the blade was cold against his right ear.
Last of all my grandfather stepped in, while I kept carefully out of sight behind him. He glanced once at his sons.
“Lads, be ashamed,” he said; “you, Thomas, and especially you, Rob. Put away these gauds. We are not ‘boding in fear of weir.’ These ill days are done with. Be douce, and we will hear what this decent man has to say.”
There is no doubt that the lawyer was by this display of force somewhat intimidated. At least, he looked about him for some means of escape, and fumbled with the catch of his black hand-bag.
“Deil’s in the man,” cried Mary Lyon, snatching the bag from him, “but it’s a blessing I’m no so easy to tak’ in as the guidman there. Let that bag alane, will ye, na! Wha kens what may be in it? There—what did I tell you?”
Unintentionally she shook the catch open, and within were two pistols cocked and primed, of which Eben and Tom took instant possession. Meanwhile, as may be imagined, my grandmother improved the occasion.
“A lawvier, are you, Master Wringham Poole o’ Dumfries,” she cried? “A bonny lawvier, that does his business wi’ a pair o’ loaded pistols. Like master, like man, I say! There’s but ae kind o’ lawvier that does his business like that—he’s caa’ed a cut-purse, a common highwayman, and ends by dancing a bonny saraband at the end o’ a tow-rope! Lalor Maitland assaulted Marnhoul wi’ just such a band o’ thieves and robbers—to steal away the bairns. This will beanother o’ the gang. Lads, take hold, and see what he has on him.”
But with one bound the seemingly weak and slender man flung himself in the direction of the door. Before they could move he was out into the lobby among the lavender bags containing Mary Lyon’s Sunday wardrobe, and but for the fact that he mistook the door of a preserve closet for the front door, he might easily have escaped them all. But Rob, who was young and active, closed in upon him. The slim man squirmed like an eel, and even when on the ground drew a knife and stuck it into the calf of Rob’s leg. A yell, and a stamp followed, and then a great silence in which we looked at one another awe-stricken. Mr. Wringham Poole lay like a crushed caterpillar, inert and twitching. It seemed as if Rob had killed him; but my grandfather, with proper care and precautions drew away the knife, and after having passed a hand over the body in search of further concealed weapons, laid him out on the four haircloth chairs, with a footstool under his head for a pillow.
Then, having listened to the beating of the wounded man’s heart, he reassured us with a nod. All would be right. Next, from an inner pocket he drew a pocket-book, out of the first division of which dropped a black mask, like those worn at the assault upon Marnhoul, with pierced eyeholes and strings for fastening behind the ears. There were also a few papers and a card on which was printed a name—
“Wringham Pollixfen Poole”; and then underneath, written in pencil in a neat lawyer-like hand, were the words, “Consultation at the Old Port at midnight to-morrow.”
At this we all looked at one another with a renewal of our perturbation. The firm of Smart, Poole and Smart had existed in Dumfries for a long time, andwas highly considered. But in these troubled times one never knew how far his neighbour might have been led. A man could only answer for himself, and even as to that, he had sometimes a difficulty in explaining himself. One of the firm of lawyers in the High Street might have been tempted out of his depth. But, at any rate, here was one of them damaged, and that by the hasty act of one of the sons of the house of Heathknowes—which in itself was a serious matter.
My grandfather, therefore, judged it well that the lawyers in Dumfries should be informed of what had befallen as soon as possible. But Mr. Wringham Pollixfen Poole, if such were his name, was certainly in need of being watched till my grandfather’s return, specially as of necessity he would be in the same house as Miss Irma and Sir Louis.
None of the young men, therefore, could be spared to carry a message to Dumfries. My father could not leave his school, and so it came to pass that I was dispatched to saddle my grandfather’s horse. He would ride to Dumfries with me on a pillion behind him, one hand tucked into the pocket of his blue coat, while with the other I held the belt about his waist to make sure. I had to walk up the hills, but that took little of the pleasure away. Indeed, best of all to me seemed that running hither and thither like a questing spaniel, in search of all manner of wild flowers, or the sight of strange, unknown houses lying in wooded glens—one I mind was Goldielea—which, as all the mead before the door was one mass of rag-weed (which only grows on the best land), appeared to me the prettiest and most appropriate name for a house that ever was.
And so think I still.
CHAPTER XXTHE REAL MR. POOLE
So in time we ran to Dumfries. And my grandfather put up at a hostelry in English Street, where were many other conveyances with their shafts canted high in the air, the day being Wednesday. He did not wait a moment even to speak to those who saluted him by name, but betook himself at once (and I with him) to the lawyers’ offices in the High Street—where it runs downhill just below the Mid Steeple.
Here we found a little knot of people. For, as it turned out (though at the time we did not know it), Messrs. Smart, Poole and Smart were agents for half the estates in Dumfriesshire, and our Galloway Marnhoul was both a far cry and a very small matter to them.
So when we had watched a while the tremors of the ingoers, all eager to ask favours, and compared them with the chastened demeanour of those coming out, my grandfather said to me with his hand on my shoulder, “I fear, Duncan lad, we shall sleep in Dumfries Tolbooth this night for making so bauld with one of a house like this!”
And from this moment I began to regard our captive Mr. Poole with a far greater respect, in spite of his pistols—which, after all, he might deem necessary when travelling into such a wild smuggling region as, at that day and date, most townsbodies pictured our Galloway to be.
We had a long time to wait in a kind of antechamber, where a man in a livery of canary and blackstripes, with black satin knee-breeches and paste buckles to his shoes took our names, or at least my grandfather’s and the name of the estate about which we wanted to speak to the firm.
For, you see, there being so many to attend to on market day, they had parted them among themselves, so many to each. And when it came to our turn it was old Mr. Smart we saw. The grand man in canary and black ushered us ben, told our name, adding, “of Marnhoul estate,” as if we had been the owners thereof.
We had looked to see a fine, noble-appearing man sitting on a kind of throne, receiving homage, but there was nobody in the room but an old man in a dressing-gown and soft felt slippers, stirring the fire—though, indeed, it was hot enough outside.
He turned towards us, the poker still in his hand, and with an eye like a gimlet seemed to take us in at a single glance.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong the day?” he cried in an odd sing-song; “what news of the Holy Smugglers? More battle, murder, and sudden death along the Solway shore?”
I had never seen my grandfather so visibly perturbed before. He actually stammered in trying to open out his business—which, now I come to think of it, was indeed of the delicatest.
“I have,” he began, “the honour of speaking to Mr. Smart the elder?”
“It is an honour you share with every Moffat Tam that wants a new roof to his pigstye,” grumbled the old man in the dressing-gown, “but such as it is, say on. My time is short! If ye want mainners ye must go next door!”
“Mr. Smart,” said my grandfather, “I have comeall the way from the house of Heathknowes on the estate of Marnhoul to announce to you a misfortune.”
“What?” cried the old fellow in the blanket dressing-gown briskly, “has the dead come to life again, or is Lalor Maitland turned honest?”
But my grandfather shook his head, and with a lamentable voice opened out to the head of the firm what had befallen their Mr. Poole, how he had come with pistols in his bag, and gotten trodden on by Rob, my reckless uncle, so that he was now lying, safe but disabled, in the small wall cabinet of Heathknowes.
I was expecting nothing less than a cry for the peace officers, and to be marched off between a file of soldiers—or, at any rate, the constables of the town guard.
But instead the little man put on a pair of great glasses with rims of black horn, and looked at my grandfather quizzically and a trifle sternly to see if he were daring to jest. But presently, seeing the transparent honesty of the man (as who would not?), he broke out into a snort of laughter, snatched open a door at his elbow, and cried out at the top of his voice (which, to tell the truth, was no better than a screech), “Dick Poole—ho there, big Dick Poole!—I want you, Dickie!”
I could see nothing from the next room but a haze of tobacco smoke, which presently entering, set the old man in the dressing-gown a-coughing.
“Send away thy rascals, Dick,” he wheezed, “and shut that door, Dickie. That cursed reek of yours would kill a hog of the stye. Hither with you, good Dick!”
And after a clinking of glasses and the trampling of great boots on the stairs, an immense man camein. His face was a riot of health. His eyes shone blue and kindly under a huge fleece of curly black hair. There was red in his cheeks, and his lips were full and scarlet. His hand and arm were those of a prizefighter. He came in smiling, bringing with him such an odour of strong waters and pipe tobacco that, between laughing and coughing, I thought the old fellow would have choked. Indeed, I made a step forward to pat the back of his dressing-gown of flannel, and if Mary Lyon had been there, I am sure nothing would have stopped her from doing it.
Even when he had a little recovered, he still stood hiccoughing with the tears in his eyes, and calling out with curious squirms of inward laughter, “Dick, lad, this will never do. Thou art under watch and ward down at the pirn-mill of Marnhoul! And it was a wench that did it. Often have I warned thee, Dick! Two pistols thou hadst in a black bag. Dick—for shame, Dick—for shame, thus to fright a decent woman! And her son, Rob (I think you said was the name of him), did trample the very life out of you—which served you well and right, Dickie! Oh, Dickie, for shame!”
The big man stood looking from one to the other of us, with a kind of comical despair, when, hearing through the open door between the old gentleman’s room and his own, the sounds of a noisy irruption and the clinking of glasses beginning again, he went back, and with a torrent of rough words drove the roysterers forth, shutting and locking the door after them.
Then he came strolling back, leaned his arm on the mantelpiece, and bade my grandfather tell him all about it. I can see him yet, this huge ruddy man, spreading himself by the fireplace, taking up most ofthe room with his person, while he of the flannel dressing-gown wandered abouttee-heeingwith laughter—and, round one side or the other, or between the legs of the Colossus, making an occasional feeble poke at the fire.
It was curious also to see how my grandfather’s serene simplicity of manner and speech compelled belief. I am sure that at first the big man Dick had nothing in his mind but turning us out into the street as he had done the roysterers. But as William Lyon went on, his bright eye grew more thoughtful, and when my grandfather handed him the slip with the name of Mr. Wringham Pollixfen Poole upon it, he absolutely broke into a hurricane of laughter, which, however, sounded to me not a little forced and hollow—though he slapped his leg so loud and hard that the little man in the dressing-gown stopped open-mouthed and dropped his poker on the floor.
“It seems to me,” he cried shrilly, “that if you hit yourself like that, Dick Poole, you will split your buckskin breeches, which appear to be new.”
But the big man took not the least notice. He only stared at the scrap of paper, and then started to laugh again.
“Oh, don’t do that!” cried his partner. “You will blow my windows out, and you know how I hate a draught!”
And indeed they were rattling in their frames. Then the huge Dick went forward and took my grandfather by the hand.
“You are sure you have got him?” he inquired; “remember, he is slippery as an eel.”
“My wife is looking after him—my three sons also,” said William Lyon, “and I think it likely that the stamp he got from Rob will keep him decentlyquiet for a day at least. You see,” he added apologetically, “he drave the knife into the thick of the poor lad’s leg!”
“Wringham?” cried the big man, “why, I did not think he had so muckle spunk!”
“Is he close freend of yours?” my grandfather inquired a little anxiously. For he did not wish to land himself in a blood-feud with the kin of a lawyer.
“Friend of mine!” cried the big man, “no, by no means a friend—but, as it may chance, some sort of kin. However that may be, if you have indeed got Pollixfen safe, you have done the best day’s work that ever you did for yourself and for King George, God bless him!”
“Say you so?” said my grandfather. “Indeed, I rejoice me to hear it. I have ever been a loyal subject. And as to the Maitland bairns—you see no harm in their making their home with my goodwife, where the lads can take care of them—in the unsettled state of the country!”
The senior partner at last got in a poke at the fire, for which he had been long waiting his chance.
“And you, Master Lyon, that are such a good kingsman,” he kekkled, “do you never hear the blythe Free Traders go clinking by, or find an anker of cognac nested in your yard among the winter-kail?”
“Mr. Smart,” said the big man, “this is a market day, but I shall need to ride and see if this is well founded. You will put on your coat decently and take my work. Abraham has already as much as he can do. Be short with them—they will not come wanting to drink with you as they do with me! If what this good Cameronian says be true at this moment, as Ihave no doubt it was when he left Marnhoul, the sooner I, Richard Poole, am on the spot the better.”
So he bade us haste and get our beast out of the yard. As for him he was booted and spurred and buckskinned already. He had nothing to do but mount and ride.
All this had passed so quickly that I had hardly time to think on the strangeness of it.OurMr. Poole, he to whom my uncle Rob had given such a stamp, was not the partner in the ancient firm of Smart, Poole and Smart of the Plainstones. Of these I had seen two, and heard the busy important voice of the third in another room as we descended the stairs. They were all men very different from the viper whom my grandmother had caught as in a bag. Even Mr. Smart was a gentleman. For if he had a flannel dressing-gown on, one could see the sparkle of his paste buckles at knee and instep, and his hose were of the best black silk, as good as Doctor Gillespie’s on Sacrament Sabbath when he was going up to preach his action sermon. But our Mr. Wringham Pollixfen Poole—I would not have wiped my foot on him—though, indeed, Uncle Rob had made no bones about that matter.
CHAPTER XXIWHILE WE SAT BY THE FIRE
Through the deep solitude of Tereggles Long Wood, past lonely lochs on which little clattering ripples were blowing, into a west that was all barred gold and red islands of fire, we rode. Or rather grandfather and I went steadily but slowly on our pony, while beside us, sometimes galloping a bit, anon trotting, came big Mr. Richard Poole on his black horse. Sometimes he would ride off up a loaning to some farm-town where he had a job to be seen to, or rap with the butt of his loaded whip at the door of some roadside inn—the Four Mile house or Crocketford, where he would call for a tankard and drain it off, as it were, with one toss of the head.
It was easy to be seen that, for some reason of his own, he did not wish to get to Heathknowes before us. Yet, after he had asked my grandfather as to the children, and some details of the attack on the house of Marnhoul (which he treated as merely an affair between two rival bands of smugglers) he was pretty silent. And as we got nearer home, he grew altogether absorbed in his thoughts.
But I could not help watching him. He looked so fine on his prancing black, with the sunset glow mellowing his ruddy health, and his curious habit of constantly making the thong of his horsewhip whistle through the air or smack against his leg.
I had met as big men and clever men, but one so active, so healthy, so beautiful I had never before seen. And every time that a buxom wife or a well-lookingmaid brought him his ale to the door of the change-house, he would set a forefinger underneath her chin and pat her cheek, asking banteringly after the children or when the wedding was coming off. And though they did not know him or he them, no one took his words or acts amiss. Such was the way he had with him.
And about this time I began to solace myself greatly with the thought of the meeting there would be between these two—the false Poole and the true.
At last we came in the twilight to the Haunted House of Marnhoul, and Mr. Richard made his horse rear almost as high as the unicorn does in the sign above the King’s Arms door, so suddenly did he swing him round to the gate. He halted the beast with his head against the very bar and looked up the avenue. The grass in the glade was again covered with dew, for the sky was clear and it was growing colder every minute. It shone almost like silver, and beyond was the house standing like a dim dark-grey patch between us and the forest.
“This gate has been mended,” he remarked, tapping the new wooden post that had come down from the mill a day or two before.
“I saw to that myself, sir,” said my grandfather. “I also painted it.”
“Ha, well done—improving the property for your young guests!” said Mr. Richard, and then quite suddenly he turned moodily away. All at once he looked at my grandfather again. “You had better know,” he said, “that the girl will have no money. So she ought to be taught dairymaking. I am partial to dairymaids myself! If she favours the Maitlands, she ought to make a pretty one.”
My grandfather said nothing, for he did not likethis sort of talk, and was utterly careless whether Miss Irma were penniless or the greatest heiress in the country.
Then the long whitewashed rectangle of the Heathknowes office-houses loomed above us on their hill. In a minute more we were at the gate. My grandfather called, and through the door of the kitchen came a long vertical slab of light that fell in a broad beam across the yard. Then one of the herd-lads hurried across to open the barred “yett” and let us in.
“Is all safe?” said my grandfather.
“As ye left him,” was the answer. “The mistress and the lads have never taken their eyes off him for a moment!”
“Take this gentleman’s horse, Ben,” said my grandfather. But Mr. Richard preferred to be his own hostler, nor did he offer to go near the house or speak a word of his business till he had seen his splendid black duly stalled.
Then my grandmother was summoned, the children brought down, and immediately stricken, Sir Louis with an intense admiration of the great strong man in riding boots, and Miss Irma with a dislike quite as intense. I could see her averting her eyes and trying to hide it. But over all the other women in the house he established at once a paramount empire. Even my Aunt Jen followed him with her eyes, so much of the room did he take up, so large and easy were his gestures, and with such a matter-of-course simplicity did he take the homage they paid him.
Yet he seemed to care far more about Miss Irma than even my grandmother, or the fellow of his name whom he had ridden so far to see.
He asked her whether she would rather stay where she was or come to Dumfries, to be near the theatreand Assembly balls. As for a chaperon, she could make her choice between Mrs. Hope of the Abbey and the Provost’s lady. Either would be glad to oblige the daughter of a Maitland of Marnhoul—and perhaps also Mr. Richard Poole.
Then, after hearing her answer, he asked for pen and paper and wrote a few lines—