Deep Moat Grange

With impish spitefulness he set about gathering together all the orts and scraps of his own various disorganized meals, and brought them in, piled on a plate, to his master. Hobby Stennis was in no mood for amusement. He had his riding-whip still in his hand. He raised it, and, as one would strike a hound, he lashed Jeremy across the face. The madman did not flinch – he only stood, with a certain semblance of meekness, shutting his eyes as the blows descended, as a dog might. Once, twice, thrice, the whip cut across cheek and brow and jaw. Jeremy put up his fingers to feel the weals which rose red and angry. But he said nothing. Only his eyes followed his master as he went out.

Mr. Stennis, still furiously angry, threw plate and contents out of the window. They fell in the muddy, ill-cared-for yard. The plate shivered, and Jeremy, after whimpering a little like a punished child, went outside also, got on his knees, and patiently gathered them together again, swinging his head with the pitiable and impotent vengeance of a child. Only Mad Jeremy was very far indeed from being a child.

Muttering to himself, Mr. Stennis strode away across the drawbridge, which still bore the footmarks of the mob which, in the time of his illness, had crossed and recrossed it. Part of the balustrade had been kicked away, and hung by a tough twisted oak splinter, yawning over the Moat to the swirl of the wet February wind.

He walked forward, never hesitating a moment, his switch still in his hand, cutting at the brownish last year's brackens which, having doubled over halfway up the stem, now trailed their broad leaves in the bleak, black February sop.

Straight for Mr. Ball's the master of the Grange took his way. He followed the narrow path which, skirting the Backwater, crosses a field, and then drops over the high March dike into the road quite close to the cottage of Mr. Bailiff Ball. It was almost dinner-time, and with a word Mr. Stennis explained the situation. Mrs. Ball swept all the too genial horde of children into the kitchen, and set herself to serve a meal to the owner of the Grange and his bailiff.

The first plateful of Scots broth, with its stieve sustenance of peas, broad beans, and carrots, together with curly greens and vegetables almost without number, put some heart into Mr. Stennis – though his anger against Jeremy for the insult offered to him in his own house did not in the least cool.

"I always like broth that a man can eat conveniently with knife and fork," said Mr. Ball, striving to be agreeable. "Let me give you another plateful, sir."

But Mr. Stennis declined. The thought of Jeremy and his plate of orts returned to his mind and he choked anew with anger.

"I will teach him!" he said aloud, frowning and pursing his mouth.

Mr. Ball was far too wise a man to ask a question. He kept his place, worked the out-farms, deserved the confidence of his master, and convinced all the world that he had nothing to do with the ill-doings of the garrison at the "Big Hoose" by carefully guarding his speech. As a matter of fact, he made it his business to know nothing except in which field to sow turnips, and the probable price he would get for the wintering sheep that ate them out of the furrows.

Never was a man better provided with deaf and blind sides than Mr. Bailiff Ball. And, being a man with a family, he had need of them at Deep Moat Grange.

So he did not inquire who it was that Mr. Hobby Stennis meant to teach, nor yet what was the nature of the proposed lesson. If knowledge is power, carefully cultivated ignorance sometimes does not lack a certain power also.

Mr. Stennis ate of the boiled mutton which followed, and of the boiled cabbage withal – of potatoes, mealy and white, such as became the bailiff of several large unlet farms, and a man whose accounts had never been called in question by so much as a farthing.

Mr. Stennis ate of pancakes with jam rolled inside, and of pancakes on which the butter fairly danced upon the saffron and russet surfaces, so hot were they from the pan. He drank pure water. He refused to smoke, which Mr. Ball did every day and all day long. Mr. Stennis was an example – a man without vices.

Then these two, master and man – though by no means "like master, like man" – strolled about the fields discussing what was to be done with this parcel of bullocks, or what line of crops would do best on the Nether Laggan Hill, or the Broomy Knowe. Mr. Bailiff Ball wished heartily that his master would be gone. But he was not in a position to tell him so. At last, after two o'clock, Mr. Stennis suddenly, and without any preliminaries, bade him "good-day" and so betook himself through the misty willow copses along the Backwater, on which the haze of spring was greening already, towards the house of Deep Moat Grange.

*****

It was not the least of Elsie's troubles to keep herself "nice" in the back half of the monks' oven, near the bakehouse. Soap she had – a whole bar of it. And with the water which she dipped up from the trap-door behind her bed, she washed her single turn-over collar again and again – as well as her handkerchiefs and other "white things" – drying them rapidly and well in front of the dividing wall of the oven.

Starch, however, was beyond her, and ironing also. Still she was clean, which to Elsie Stennis was very near indeed to being godly. Jeremy had been idle for several days, but it chanced that that very Saturday morning he had set the furnace a-going, and had begun to prepare a batch of bread. Notwithstanding, he had been strangely unsettled. He had looked in several times on Elsie, even bringing in a little washing soda for her laundry work, but had departed always without saying anything of his intentions. Never on any occasion had he mentioned her fellow-prisoner, my father. And he, on his part, had strictly forbidden Elsie to say anything of their converse one with another. Not that Elsie would have done that in any case. She had too much the instinct of playing the game.

Usually when Jeremy came in, he would bring with him a Jew's-harp, and, curling himself up in one corner of the settle, he would extract tunes from that limited instrument with a strange weird combination of voice and twang of the metallic tongue.

Or with a mandolin, of which he had somehow become possessed, he would lean against the table, stretch his long legs, shake back his snaky curls, swinging his body to and fro, and improvise such music as never has been heard on earth before.

But ever and anon, between bursts of strange melody – for there was a certain attraction in every sound he produced – he would return to the subject of the new cargo of melodeons which had just been received at Yarrow's, down in the village. He would have one he declared, whatever old Hobby might say, the skinflint – who would not let poor Jeremy have a single goldpiece of all he had won for him by his own strong hands.

He would let him see, however, when he came back, who was master. And if he would not, then he, Jeremy Orrin, knew somebody – perhaps not so far away – who would give him not only one, but many melodeons, for one smell of the fresh air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A bonnie present," he repeated, "think ye not so, bonnie birdie? Ye never gat the like, and him your ain grandfather. Ah, but he's kind to Jeremy! And Jeremy will never forget it. Na – Jeremy followed him, like pussy cat after a plate of cream, to the March dyke, to the very door o' Bailiff Ball's house. Jeremy wadna let ony ill befall his maister this day. If a wulf, or a lion, or a bear had leaped upon Hobby Stennis, Jeremy wad hae strangled them like this —chirt– wi' his hands, as easy as ony thing. Ay, he wad that! For the kind kind present he fetched his faithfu' servant, naebody shall lay a hand on Hobby Stennis this day – except, maybe, Jeremy himsel' – ay, maybe, juist Jeremy himsel'. Ow, ay, but a' in the way o' kindness! the same as Hobby himsel'!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possibly the noise irritated Hobby Stennis's none too steady nerves. Possibly, also, he was nettled at Jeremy's insistent request for the loan of a couple of sovereigns in order to go down and "price" the new cargo of melodeons received at Yarrow's, in the village. They had been ordered by my father before his disappearance, to satisfy a temporary local musical fever, and had only just arrived.

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXIX

THE CALLING OF ELSIE

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

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

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

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

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

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