PART III

Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE DEW OF THEIR YOUTH

By

S. R. CROCKETT

Author Of

'The Lilac Sunbonnet,' 'The Black Douglas,' 'Strong Mac,'

'Rose Of The Wilderness,' etc.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON--MCMX

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,

Bread Street Hill, E.C., and

Bungay, Suffolk.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER I

PAGE

The Haunted House of Marnhoul 1

CHAPTER II

'In the Name of the Law!' 10

CHAPTER III

Miss Irma gives an Audience 18

CHAPTER IV

First Foot in the Haunted House 22

CHAPTER V

The Censor of Morals 33

CHAPTER VI

The Apotheosis of Agnes Anne 42

CHAPTER VII

The Doctor's Advent 51

CHAPTER VIII

Kate of the Shore 62

CHAPTER IX

The Eve of St. John 73

CHAPTER X

The Crowbar in the Wood 82

CHAPTER XI

Agnes Anne's Experiences as a Spy 87

CHAPTER XII

The Fight in the Dark 96

CHAPTER XIII

A World of Ink and Fire 101

CHAPTER XIV

The White Free Traders 109

PART II

CHAPTER XV

My Grandmother speaks her Mind 118

CHAPTER XVI

Castle Connoway 127

CHAPTER XVII

The Man 'Doon-the-hoose' 133

CHAPTER XVIII

The Transfiguration of Aunt Jen 138

CHAPTER XIX

Loaded-pistol Pollixfen 146

CHAPTER XX

The Real Mr. Poole 155

CHAPTER XXI

While we sat by the Fire 162

PART III

CHAPTER XXII

Boyd Connoway's Evidence 170

CHAPTER XXIII

The Sharp Spur 184

CHAPTER XXIV

The College of King James 193

CHAPTER XXV

Satan Finds 201

CHAPTER XXVI

Perfidy, thy Name is Woman! 209

CHAPTER XXVII

Then, Heigh-ho, the Molly!' 218

CHAPTER XXVIII

Love and the Logician 227

CHAPTER XXIX

The Avalanche. 233

CHAPTER XXX

The Vanishing Lady 244

CHAPTER XXXI

wice Married 254

CHAPTER XXXII

The Little House on the Meadows 262

CHAPTER XXXIII

And the Door was Shut 268

CHAPTER XXXIV

A Visit from Boyd Connoway 274

CHAPTER XXXV

The Valley of the Shadow 280

CHAPTER XXXVI

The Supplanter 288

CHAPTER XXXVII

The Return of the Serpent to Eden Valley 297

CHAPTER XXXVIII

By Water and the Word 305

CHAPTER XXXIX

The Wicked Flag 313

CHAPTER XL

The Great 'Tabernacle' Revival 322

CHAPTER XLI

In the Wood Parlour 330

CHAPTER XLII

The Place of Dreams 338

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PART I

CHAPTER I

THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF MARNHOUL

I, Duncan MacAlpine, school-master's son and uncovenanted assistant to

my father, stood watching the dust which the Highflyer coach had left

between me and Sandy Webb, the little guard thereof, as he whirled

onward into the eye of the west. It was the hour before afternoon

school, and already I could hear my father's voice within declaiming as

to unnecessary datives and the lack of all feeling for style in the

Latin prose of the seniors.

A score of the fifth class, next in age and rank, were playing at

rounders in an angle of the court, and I was supposed to be watching

them. In reality I was more interested in a group of tall girls who were

patrolling up and down under the shade of the trees at the head of their

playground--where no boy but I dare enter, and even I only officially.

For in kindly Scots fashion, the Eden Valley Academy was not only open

to all comers of both sexes and ages, but was set in the midst of a wood

of tall pines, in which we seniors were permitted to walk at our guise

and pleasure during the "intervals."

Here the ground was thick and elastic with dry pine needles, two or

three feet of them firmly compacted, and smelling delightfully of resin

after a shower. Indeed, at that moment I was interested enough to let

the boys run a little wild at their game, because, you see, I had found

out within the last six months that girls were not made only to be

called names and to put out one's tongue at.

There was, in especial, one--a dark, slim girl, very lissom of body and

the best runner in the school. She wore a grey-green dress of rough

stuff hardly ankle-long, and once when the bell-rope broke and I had

sprained my ankle she mounted instead of me, running along the rigging

of the roofs to ring the bell as active as a lamplighter. I liked her

for this, also because she was pretty, or at least the short grey-green

dress made her look it. Her name was Gertrude Gower, but Gerty

Greensleeves was what she was most frequently called, except, of course,

when I called the roll before morning and afternoon.

I had had a talk with Sandy Webb, the guard, as he paused to take in the

mails. My father was also village postmaster, but, though there was a

girl in the office to sell stamps and revenue licences, and my mother

behind to say "that she did not know" in reply to any question

whatsoever, I was much more postmaster than my father, though I suppose

he really had the responsibility.

Sandy Webb always brought a deal of news to Eden Valley. And as I had

official and private dealings with him--the public relating to way-bills

and bag-receipts, and the private to a noggin of homebrewed out of the

barrel in the corner of our cellar--he always gave me the earliest news,

before he hurried away--as it were, the firstlings of the flock.

"There's a stir at Cairn Edward," he said casually, as he set down his

wooden cup. "John Aitken, the mason, has fallen off a scaffolding and

broken----"

"Not his leg?" I interrupted anxiously, for John was a third cousin of

my mother's.

"No, more miraculous than that!" the guard averred serenely.

"His back?" I gasped--for John Aitken, as well as a relation, was a

fellow-elder of my father's, and the two often met upon sacramental

occasions.

"No," said Sandy, enjoying his grave little surprise, "only the trams of

his mortar-barrow! And there's that noisy tinkler body, Tim Cleary, the

Shire Irishman, in the lock-up for wanting to fight the Provost of

Dumfries, and he'll get eight days for certain. But the Provost is

paying the lodgings of his wife and family in the meantime. It will be a

rest for them, poor things."

It was at this moment that Sandy Webb, square, squat, many-wrinkled man,

sounded his horn and swung himself into his place as the driver, Andrew

Haugh, gathered up his reins. But I knew his way, and waited

expectantly. He always kept the pick of his news to the end, then let it

off like a fire-cracker, and departed in a halo of dusty glory.

"Your private ghost is making himself comfortable over yonder at the

Haunted House. I saw the reek of his four-hours fire coming up blue out

of the chimbly-top as we drove past!"

It was thus that the most notable news of a decade came to Eden Valley.

The Haunted House--we did not need to be told--was Marnhoul, a big,

gaunt mansion, long deserted, sunk in woods, yet near enough to the

Cairn Edward road to be visible in stray round towers and rows of

chimneys, long unblacked by fire of kitchen or parlour. It had a great

forest behind it, on the verges of which a camp of woodcutters and a

rude saw-mill had long been established, eating deeper and deeper in,

without, however, seeming to make any more difference than a solitary

mouse might to a granary.

We boys knew all about the Haunted House. Since our earliest years it

had been the very touchstone of courage to go to the gate on a moonlight

night, hold the bars and cry three times, "I'm no feared!" Some had done

this, I myself among the number. But--though, of course, being a

school-master's son, I did not believe in ghosts--I admit that the

return journey was the more pleasant of the two, especially after I got

within cry of the dwellings of comfortable burgesses, and felt the

windows all alight on either side of me, so near that I could almost

touch them with my hand.

Not that I _saw_ anything! I knew from the first it was all nonsense. My

father had told me so a score of times. But having been reared in the

superstitious Galloway of the ancient days--well, there are certain

chills and creeps for which a man is not responsible, inexplicable

twitchings of the hairy scalp of his head, maybe even to the breaking of

a cold sweat over his body, which do not depend upon belief. I kept

saying to myself, "There is nothing! I do not believe a word of it! 'Tis

naught but old wives' fables!" But, all the same, I took with a great

deal of thankfulness the dressing-down I had got from my father for

being late for home lessons on a trigonometry night. You see, I was born

and reared in Galloway, and I suppose it was just what they have come to

call in these latter days "the influence of environment."

Well, at that moment, who should come up but Jo Kettle, a good fellow

and friend of mine, but of no account in the school, being a rich

farmer's son, who was excused from taking Latin because he was going to

succeed his father in the farm. Jo had a right to the half of my

secrets, because we both liked Gerty Greensleeves pretty well; and I was

certain that she cared nothing about Jo, while Jo could swear that she

counted me not worth a button.

So I told Jo Kettle about the Haunted House, and he was for starting off

there and then. But it was perfectly evident that I could not with these

fifth class boys to look after, and afternoon school just beginning. And

if I could not, I was very sure that he had better not. More than once

or twice I had proved that it was his duty to do as I said. Jo

understood this, but grew so excited that he bolted into school in a

moment with the noise of a runaway colt. His entrance disarranged the

attention of the senior Latiners of the sixth. My father frowned, and

said, "What do you mean, boy, by tumbling through the classroom door

like a cart of bricks? Come quietly; and sit down, Agnes Anne!"

This was my poor unfortunate sister, aged fourteen, whom a pitiless

parent compelled to do classics with the senior division.

Jo Kettle sat down and pawed about for his mensuration book, which he

studied for some time upside down. Then he extracted his box of

instruments from his bag and set himself to do over again a proposition

with which he had been familiar for weeks. This, however, was according

to immemorial school-boy habit, and sometimes succeeded with my father,

who was dreamy wherever the classics were not concerned, and regarded a

mere land-measuring agricultural scholar as outside the bounds of human

interest, if not of Christian charity.

In two minutes my father was again immersed in Horace, which (with

Tacitus) was his chief joy. Then Jo leaned nearer to Agnes Anne and

whispered the dread news about the Haunted House. My sister paled,

gasped, and clutched at the desk. Jo, fearful that she would begin,

according to the sympathetic school phrase, "to cluck like a hen,"

threatened first to run the point of his compasses into her if she did

not sit up instantly; and then, this treatment proving quite inadequate

to the occasion, he made believe to pour ink upon her clean cotton

print, fresh put on that morning. This brought Agnes Anne round, and,

with a face still pale, she asked for details. Jo supplied them in a

voice which the nearness of my father reduced to a whisper. He sat with

his fingers and thumbs making an isosceles triangle and his eyes gently

closed, while he listened to the construing of Fred Esquillant, the

pale-faced genius of the school. At such times my father almost purred

with delight, and Agnes Anne said that it was "just sweet to watch him."

But even this pleasure palled before the tidings from the Haunted House

as edited and expanded by Jo Kettle.

"Yes, Duncan had told him, and Sandy Webb had told _him_. There were

daylight ghosts abroad about Marnhoul. Everybody on the coach had seen

them----"

"What were they like?" queried Agnes Anne in an awestruck whisper; so

well poised, however, that it only reached Jo's ear, and never caused my

enraptured father to wink an eyelid. I really believe that, like a good

Calvinist with a sound minister tried and proven, my father allowed

himself a little nap by way of refreshment while Fred Esquillant was

construing.

Nothing loath, Jo launched headlong into the grisly. Through the matted

undergrowth of years, over the high-spiked barriers of the deer-park,

the Highflyer had seen not only the familiar Grey Lady in robes of

rustling silk (through which you could discern the gravel and weeds on

the path), but little green demons with chalk-white heads and long ears.

These leaped five-barred gates and pursued the coach and its shrieking

inmates as far as the little Mains brook that passes the kirk door at

the entrance of the village. Then there was a huge, undistinct, crawling

horror, half sea-serpent, half slow-worm, that had looked at them over

the hedge, and, flinging out a sudden loop, had lassoed Peter Chafts,

the running footman, whose duty it was to leap down and clear stones out

of the horses' hoofs. Whether Little Peter had been recovered or not, Jo

Kettle very naturally could not tell. How, indeed, could he? But, with

an apparition like that, it was not at all probable.

Jo was preparing a further instalment, including clanking chains, gongs

that sounded unseen in the air, hands that gripped the passengers and

tried to pull them from their seats--all the wild tales of Souter

Gowans, the village cobbler, and of ne'er-do-well farm lads, idle and

reckless, whose word would never have been taken in any ordinary affair

of life. Jo had not time, however, for Agnes Anne had a strong

imagination, coupled with a highly nervous organization. She laughed out

suddenly, in the middle of a solemn Horatian hush, a wild, hysterical

laugh, which brought my father to his feet, broad awake in a second. The

class gazed open-mouthed, the pale face of Fred Esquillant alone

twitching responsively.

"What have you been saying to Agnes Anne MacAlpine?" demanded my father,

who would sooner have resigned than been obliged to own son or daughter

as such in school-time.

"Nothing!" said Jo Kettle, speaking according to the honour that

obliges schoolboys to untruth as a mode of professional honour. Then

Jo, seeing the frown on the master's face, and forestalling the words

that were ready to come from his lips, "But, sirrah, I saw you!" amended

hastily, "At least, I was only asking Agnes Anne to sit a little farther

along!"

"What!" cried my father, with the snap of the eye that meant punishment,

"to sit farther along, when you had no interest in this classical

lesson, sir--a lesson you are incapable of understanding, and--all the

length of an empty bench at your left hand! You shall speak with me at

the close of the lesson, and that, sirrah, is now! The class is

dismissed! I shall have the pleasure of a little interview with Master

Joseph Kettle, student of mensuration."

Jo had his interview, in which figured a certain leathern strap, called

"Lochgelly" after its place of manufacture--a branch of native industry

much cursed by Scottish school-children. "Lochgelly" was five-fingered,

well pickled in brine, well rubbed with oil, well used on the boys, but,

except by way of threat, unknown to the girls. Jo emerged tingling but

triumphant. Indeed, several new ideas had occurred to him. Eden Valley

Academy stood around and drank in the wondrous tale with all its ears

and, almost literally, with one mouth. Jo Kettle told the story so well

that I well-nigh believed it myself. He even turned to me for

corroboration.

"Didn't he tell you that, Duncan? That was the way of it, eh, Duncan?"

I denied, indeed, and would have stated the truth as it was in Guard

Webb. But my futile and feeble negations fell unheeded, swept away by

the pour of Jo's circumstantial lying.

Finally he ran off into the village and was lost to sight. I have

little doubt that he played truant, in full recognition of pains and

penalties to come, for the mere pleasure of going from door to door and

"raising the town," as he called it. I consoled myself by the thought

that he would find few but womenfolk at home at that hour, while the

shopkeepers would have too much consideration for their tills and

customers to follow a notorious romancer like Jo on such a fool's

errand.

I cannot tell how that afternoon's lessons were got over in Eden Valley

Academy. The hum of disturbance reached even the juniors, skulking

peacefully under little Mr. Stephen, the assistant. Only Miss

Huntingdon, in the Infant Department, remained quiet and neat as a dove

new-preened among her murmuring throng of unconscious little folk.

But in the senior school, though I never reported a boy to my father

(preferring to postpone his case for private dealing in the playground),

the lid of the desk was opened and snapped sharply every five minutes to

give exit and entrance to "Lochgelly." Seldom have I seen my father so

roused. He hated not to understand everything that was going on in the

school. He longed to ask me what I knew about it, but, according to his

habit, generously forbore, lest he should lead me to tell tales upon my

fellows. For, though actually junior assistant to my father, I was still

a scholar, which made my position difficult indeed. To me it seemed as

if the clock on the wall above the fireplace would never strike the hour

of four.

CHAPTER II

"IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!"

At last--at last! The door between the seniors and Mr. Stephen's juniors

was thrown open. My father, making his usual formal bow to his

assistant, said, "When you are ready, Mr. Stephen!" And Mr. Stephen was

always ready. Then with his back to the hinges of the door, and his

strong black beard with the greying strands in it set forward at an

angle, Mr. John MacAlpine, head-master of Eden Valley Academy, said a

few severe words on the afternoon's lack of discipline, and prophesied

in highly coloured language the exemplary manner in which any repetition

of it would be treated on the morrow. Then he doubled all home lessons,

besides setting a special imposition to each class. Having made this

clear, he hoped that the slight token of his displeasure might assure us

of his intention to do his duty by us faithfully, and then, with the

verse of a chanted psalm we were let go.

Class by class defiled with rumble of boots and tramp of wooden-soled

clogs, the boys first, the girls waiting till the outside turmoil had

abated--but, nevertheless, as anxious as any to be gone. I believe we

expected to tumble over slow serpents and nimble spectres coming

visiting up the school-loaning, or coiling in festoons among the tall

Scotch firs at the back of the playground.

We of the sixth class were in the rear--I last of all, for I had to

lock away the copybooks, turn the maps to the wall, and give my father

the key. _But_ I had warned the other seniors that they were not to

start without me.

And then, what a race! A bare mile it was, through the thick fringes of

woods most of the way--as soon, that is, as we were out of the village.

Along the wall of the Deer Park we ran, where we kept instinctively to

the far side of the road. We of the highest class were far in front--I

mean those of us who kept the pace. The Fifth had had a minute or two

start of us, so they were ahead at first, but we barged through their

pack without mercy, scattering them in all directions.

There at last was the gate before us. We had reached it first. Five of

us there were, Sam Gordon, Ivie Craig, Harry Stoddart, Andrew Clark and

myself--yes, there was another--that forward Gerty Greensleeves, who had

kilted her rough grey-green dress and run with the best, all to prove

her boast that, but for the clothes she had to wear, she was as good a

runner as the best boy there. Indeed, if the truth must be told, she

could outrun all but me.

The tall spikes, the massive brass padlock, green with weathering, in

which it was doubtful if any key would turn, the ancient "Notice to

Trespassers," massacred by the stones of home-returning

schoolboys--these were all that any of us could see at first. The

barrier of the deer-park wall was high and unclimbable. The massy iron

of the gates looked as if it had not been stirred for centuries.

But a tense interest held us all spellbound. We could see nothing but

some stray glimpses of an ivy-clad wall. A weathercock, that had once

been gilded, stood out black against the evening sky. The Grey Lady in

the rustling silk, through whom you could see the rain drops splash on

the gravel stones, was by no means on view. No green demons leaped these

sullen ten-foot barricades, and no forwandered sea-serpent threw oozy

wimples on the green-sward or hissed at us between the rusty bars.

It was, at first, decidedly disappointing. We ordered each other to stop

breathing so loudly, after our burst of running. We listened, but there

was not even the sough of wind through the trees--nothing but the

beating of our own hearts.

What had we come out to see? Apparently nothing. The school considered

itself decidedly "sold," and as usual prepared to take vengeance, first

upon Jo Kettle and then, as that youth still persisted in a discreet

absence of body, on myself.

"You spoke to Sandy Webb, the guard," said Gertrude-of-the-Sleeves,

scowling upon me; "what did he say?"

Before I could answer Boyd Connoway, the village do-nothing,

enterprising idler and general boys' abettor, beckoned us across the

road. He was on the top of a little knoll, thick with the yellow of

broom and the richer orange of gorse. Here he had stretched himself very

greatly at his ease. For Boyd Connoway knew how to wait, and he was

waiting now. Hurry was nowhere in Boyd's dictionary. Not that he had

ever looked.

In a moment we were over the dyke, careless of the stones that we sent

trickling down to afflict the toes of those who should come after us. We

stood on the top of the mound. Connoway disturbed himself just enough to

sit up for our sakes, which he would not have done for a dozen grown

men. He removed the straw from his mouth, and pointed with it to the

end chimney nearest to the great wood of Marnhoul.

We gazed earnestly, following the straw and gradually we could see,

rising into the still air an unmistakable "pew" of palest blue

smoke--which, as we looked, changed into a dense white pillar that rose

steadily upwards, detaching itself admirably against the deep green

black of the Scotch firs behind.

"There," said Connoway gravely, "yonder is your ghost mending his fire!"

We stood at gaze, uncomprehending, too astonished for speech. We had

come, even the unbelievers of us, prepared for the supernatural, for

something surpassingly eery, and anything so commonplace as the smoke of

a fire was a surprise greater than the sight of all Jo Kettle's

imaginations coming at us abreast.

Yet the people who owned the great house of Marnhoul were far away--few

had ever seen any of them. Their affairs were in the hands of a notable

firm of solicitors in Dumfries. How any mortal could have entered that

great abode, or inhabited it after the manner of men, was beyond all

things inexplicable. But there before us the blue reek continued to

mount, straight as a pillar, till it reached the level of the trees on

the bank behind, when a gentle current of air turned it sharply at right

angles to the south.

Now we heard the tramp of many feet, and beneath us we saw Jo Kettle

with half-a-dozen of his father's workers, and the village constable to

make sure that all was done in due and proper order. To these was joined

a crowd of curious townsmen, eager for any new thing. All were armed to

the teeth with rusty cutlasses and old horse pistols, which, when

loaded, made the expedition one of no inconsiderable peril.

The man with the crowbar applied it to the rusty chain of the padlock.

Two others assisted him, but instead of breaking the chain, the iron

standard of the gate crumbled into so much flaky iron rust, while

padlock and attachments swung free upon the other. It was easy enough to

enter after that.

"In the name of the law!" cried the constable, taking a little staff

with a silver crown upon it in his hand. And at the word the gate

creaked open and the crowd pressed in.

But the constable held up his hand.

"'In the name of the law,' I said. I _might_ have put it, 'In the King's

name,' but what I meant was that we are to proceed in decency and

order--no unseemly rabbling, scuffling, or mischief making--otherwise ye

have me to reckon with. Let no word of ghosts and siclike be heard. The

case is infinitely more serious----"

"Hear to Jocky wi' his langnebbit words!" whispered Boyd Connoway in my

ear.

"Infinitely more so, I say. It is evident to the meanest capacity--"

"Evidently!" whispered Connoway, grinning.

"--that a dangerous band of smugglers or burglars is in possession of

the mansion of Marnhoul, and we must take them to a man!"

These words brought about a marked hesitation in the rear ranks, a

wavering, and a tendency to slip away through the breach of the broken

gate into the road.

"Halt there," cried Constable Black, holding the staff of office high.

"I call upon you, every man, to assist his Majesty's officers. You are

special constables, as soon as I get time to swear you in. Praise be,

here's good Maister Kettle! He's a Justice of the Peace. He will hold

you to it now and be my witness if ye refuse lawful aid. Now, forward!

Quick march!"

And this formidable armed band took its way along the overgrown gravel

avenue up to the front of the great house of Marnhoul. We boys (and

Greensleeves close to my elbow) played along the flanks like

skirmishers. All our spiritual fears were abated. At the name of the

law, and specially after the display of the silver-crowned staff, we

entered joyously into the game. If it had only been the arm of flesh we

had to encounter, we were noways afraid--though it was a sad downcome

from the solemn awe of coming to grips with the prince of darkness and

his emissaries.

"You that have pistols that will go off, round with you to guard the

back doors!" cried Constable John Black. "It's there the thieves have

taken up their abode. The smoke is coming from the kitchen lum. I see it

well. The rest, not so well armed, bide here with me under the

protection of the law!"

And with that Constable Black, commonly called Jocky, elevated once more

his staff in the air, and marched boldly to the fatal door. He went up

the steps by which the Grey Lady was wont to descend to the clear

moonlight to take her airing in the wood. A little behind went Connoway,

in the same manner holding a "bourtree" pop-gun which he had just been

fashioning for some lucky callant of his acquaintance.

Almost for the first time in his life Boyd Connoway had all the humour

to himself. Nobody laughed at his imitation of Officer Jocky's pompous

ways. They would do it afterwards in the safety of their own dwellings

and about the winter fire. But not now--by no means now.

Even though supported by the majestic power of the law, the crowd kept

respectfully edging behind wall and trees. Their eyes were directed

warily upwards to the long array of windows from which (legend

recounted) the Maitlands of Marnhoul had once during the troubles of the

Covenant successfully defended themselves against the forces of the

Crown.

Now be it understood once for all, the inhabitants of Eden Valley were

peaceful and loyal citizens, except perhaps in what concerned the excise

laws and the ancient and wholesome practice of running cargoes of

dutiable goods without troubling his Majesty's excise officers about the

matter. But they did not wish to support the law at the peril of their

lives.

An irregular crackle of shots, the smashing of window glass in the back

of the mansion, with two or three hurrahs, put some courage into them.

On the whole it seemed less dangerous to get close in under the great

vaulted porch. There, at least, they could not be reached by shot from

the windows, while out in the open or under the uncertain shelter of

tree boles, who knew what might happen? So there was soon a compact

phalanx about the man in authority.

Constable Black, being filled with authority direct from the

Lord-Lieutenant of the County, certainly had the instinct of magnifying

his office. He raised his arm and knocked three times on the bleached

and blistered panels of the great front door.

"Open, I command you! In the name of the law!" he shouted.

After the knocking there befell a pause, as it might be of twenty

breaths--though nobody seemed to draw any. Such a silence of listening

have I never heard. Yes, we heard it, and the new burst of firing from

the rear of the house, the cheers of the excited assailants hardly

seemed to break it, so deeply was our attention fixed on that great

weather-beaten door of the Haunted House of Marnhoul.

Again Jocky, his face lint-white, and his voice coming and going

jerkily, cried aloud the great name of the law. Again there was silence,

deeper and longer than before.

At last from far within came a pattering as of little feet, quick and

light. We heard the bolts withdrawn one by one, and as the wards of the

lock rasped and whined, men got ready their weapons. The door swung back

and against the intense darkness of the wide hall, with the light of

evening on their faces, stood a girl in a black dress and crimson sash,

holding by the hand a little boy of five, with blue eyes and tight

yellow curls.

Both were smiling, and before them all that tumultuary array fell away

as from something supernatural. The words "In the name of----" were

choked on the lips of the constable. He even dropped his silver-headed

staff, and turned about as if to flee. As for us we watched with dazzled

eyes the marvels that had so suddenly altered the ideas of all men as to

the Haunted House of Marnhoul.

But for a space no one moved, no one spoke. Only the tall young girl and

the little child stood there, like children of high degree receiving

homage on the threshold of their own ancestral mansion, facing the

lifted bonnets and the pikes lowered as if in salutation.

CHAPTER III

MISS IRMA GIVES AN AUDIENCE

"My name is Irma Maitland, and this is my brother Louis!" Such were the

famous words with which, in response to law and order in the person of

Constable Jacky Black, the tall smiling girl in the doorway of the

Haunted House of Marnhoul saluted her "rescuers."

"And how came you to be occupying this house?" demanded Mr. Josiah

Kettle, father of Joseph the inventive. He was quite unaware of the

ghastly terrors with which his son had peopled the Great House, but as

the largest farmer on the estate he felt it to be his duty to protect

vested rights.

"In the same way that you enter your house," said the girl; "we came in

with a key, and have been living here ever since!"

"Are you not feared?" piped a voice from the crowd. It was afterwards

found that it was Kettle junior who had spoken.

"Afraid!" answered the girl scornfully, holding her head higher than

ever; "do you think that a few foolish people firing at our windows

could make us afraid? Can they, Louis?" And as she spoke she looked

fondly down at her little brother.

He drew nearer to his sister, looking up at her with a winning

confidence, and said in as manly a voice as he could compass, "Certainly

not, Irma! But--tell them not to do it any more!"

"You hear what my brother says," said the girl haughtily. "Let there be

no more of this!"

"But--in right of law and order, I must know more about this!" cried

Constable Jacky, lifting up his staff again. Somehow, however, the magic

had gone from his words. Every one now knew that his thunder had a

hollow sound.

"Ah, you are the _gendarme_--the official--the officer!" said the tall

girl, with a more pronounced foreign accent than before, making him a

little bow; "please go and tell your superiors that we are here because

the place belongs to us--at least to my brother, and that I am staying

to take care of him."

"But how did you come?" persisted the man in authority.

The tall girl looked over his head. Her glance, clear, cool,

penetrating, scanned face after face, and then she said, as it were,

regretfully, "There are no gentlefolk among you?"

There was the slightest shade of inquiry about words which might have

seemed rude as a mere affirmation. Then she appeared to answer for

herself, still with the same tinge of sadness faintly colouring her

pride. "For this reason I cannot tell you how we came to be here."

Mr. Josiah Kettle felt called upon to assert himself.

"I have reason to believe," he said pompously, "that I am as good as any

on the estate in the way of being a gentleman--me and my son Joseph. I

am a Justice of the Peace, under warrant of the Crown, and so one day

will my son Joseph--Jo, you rascal, come off that paling!"

But just then Jo Kettle had other fish to fry. From the bad eminence of

the garden palisade he was devouring the new-comer with his eyes. As for

me, I had shaken the hand of the lately adored Greensleeves from my arm.

The girl's glance stayed for an instant and no more upon the round and

rosy countenance of Mr. Josiah Kettle, Justice of the Peace. She smiled

upon him indulgently, but shook her head.

"I am sorry," she said, with gentle condescension, "that I cannot tell

anything more to you. You are one of the people who broke our windows!"

Then Josiah Kettle unfortunately blustered.

"If you will not, young madam," he cried, "I can soon send them to you

who will make you answer."

The young lady calmly took out of her pocket a dainty pair of ivory

writing tablets, such as only the minister of the parish used in all

Eden Valley, and he only because he had married a great London lady for

his wife.

"I shall be glad of the name and address of the persons to whom you

refer!" said Miss Irma (for so from that moment I began to call her in

my heart).

"The factors and agents for this estate," Josiah Kettle enunciated

grandly. The writing tablets were shut up with a snap of disappointment.

"Oh, Messrs. Smart, Poole & Smart," she said. "Why, I have known them

ever since I was as high as little Louis."

Then she smiled indulgently upon Mr. Kettle, with something so easily

grand and yet so sweet that I think the hearts of all went out to her.

"I suppose," she said, "that really you thought you were doing right in

coming here and firing off guns without permission. It must be an

astonishing thing for you to see this house of the Maitlands inhabited

after so long. I do not blame your curiosity, but I fear I must ask you

to send a competent man to repair our windows. For that we hold you

responsible, Mr. Officer, and you, Mr. Justice of the Peace--you and

your son Jo! Don't we, Louis?"

"I will see to that myself!" a voice, the same that had spoken before,

came from the crowd. Miss Irma searched the circle without, however,

coming to a conclusion. I do think that her glance lingered longer on my

face than on any of the others, perhaps because Gerty Greensleeves was

leaning on my shoulder and whispering in my ear. (What a nuisance girls

are, sometimes!) So the glance passed on, with something in it at once

calm and simple and high.

"If any of the gentlefolk of our station will call upon us," she went

on, "we will tell _them_ how we came to be here--the clergyman of the

parish--or----" here she hesitated for the first time, "or his wife."

Instinctively she seemed to feel the difficulty. "Though we are not of

their faith!" she added, smiling once more as with the air of serene

condescension she had shown all through.

Then she nodded, and swept a curtsey with an undulating grace which I

thought to be adorable, in spite of the suspicion of irony in it.

"Good-bye, good people," she said, letting her eyes again run the

circuit of the sea of faces, reinforced by those who had been firing

their blunderbusses and horse-pistols (now carefully concealed) so

uselessly at the back windows of the house. "We are obliged for your

visit. Salute them, Louis!"

Obediently the child carried his hand to the curls on his brow in the

same fashion I had seen soldiers do at the militia training on the

Dumfries sands, but with the same smilingly tolerant air of receiving

and acknowledging the homage of vassals which both of them had shown

from the beginning.

Then Miss Irma smiled upon us all once more, nodded to me (I am sure of

it), and without another word, shut the door in our faces.

CHAPTER IV

FIRST FOOT IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE

To understand what a sensation these strange events made in Eden Valley,

it is necessary that you should know something of Eden Valley itself and

how it was governed.

Governed, you say? Was it not within the King's dominions, and governed

like every other part of these his Majesty's kingdoms? Had we of the

Wide Valley risen against constituted authority and filled all Balcary

Bay between Isle Rathan and the Red Haven with floating tea-chests?

Well, not exactly; but many a score of stealthy cargoes had been carried

past our doors on horse-back, pony-back, shelty-back--up by Bluehills

and over the hip of Ben Tudor. And often, often from the Isle of Man

fleet had twenty score of barrels been dropped overboard just in time to

prevent the minions of the law, as represented by H.M. ship _Seamew_,

sloop-of-war, from seizing them. So you will observe that the revolt of

Eden Valley against authority, though not quite so complete as that of

the late New England colonies, yet proceeded from the same motives.

Only, as it typo happened, the tea-chests which were spilt in Boston

Harbour were finished so far as the brewing of tea was concerned, while

the kegs and firkins dropped overboard were easily recoverable by such

as were in the secret. In a day or two, the tide being favourable and

the nights dark enough, these same kegs would be found reposing in bulk

in the recesses of Brandy Knowe, next by Collin Mill--save for a few,

left in well defined places--one being left at the Manse for the Doctor

himself. That was within the very wall of the kirkyard, and under the

shadow of the clump of yews which had dripped upon the tombstones that

covered at least three of his predecessors. A second reposed under the

prize cabbages belonging to General Johnstone (who, as a young officer

of Marines, had simulated the courage of Admiral Byng before Minorca,

and like that gallant seaman, narrowly escaped being shot for his

pains). General Johnstone's gardener knew well where this keg was

hidden. But it contained liquid well-nigh sacred in the eyes of his

master, and he had far too much common-sense ever to presume to find it.

A third came to anchor under a peat-stack belonging to Mr. Shepstone

Oglethorpe, the only Episcopalian within the parish bounds, and the

descendent of an English military family which had once held possession

of the Maitland estates during the military dragonnades of Charles II

and James II, but had been obliged to restore the mansion and most of

the property after the Prince of Orange made good his landing with his

"Protestant wind" at Torbay. Enough, however, remained to make Mr.

Shepstone Oglethorpe the next man in the parish after the minister and

the General. He was, besides, a pleasant, gossipy, young-old, fluttery

bachelor--a great acquisition at four-hours tea-drinkings, and much more

of a praise to them that do well than any sort of a terror to

evil-doers.

These three constituted the general staff of our commonwealth, and in

spite of occasional forgetfulnesses as to the declaration of the

aforesaid kegs, parcels of French silks and Malines lace, to H.M.'s

Supervisor of Customs, King George had no more loyal subjects than

these highest authorities in Eden Valley, ecclesiastical, military and

civil. Then, after due interval, came the farmers of Eden Valley,

honest, far-seeing, cautious men, slow of action, slower still of

speech--not at all to be judged by the standard of the richest of them,

Mr. Josiah Kettle. He was, in fact, a mere incomer, who had been

promoted a Justice of the Peace because, on the occasion of the last

scare as to a French invasion, he had made and carried out large and

remunerative contracts for the supply of the militia and other troops

hastily got together to protect the Solway harbours from Dryffe Sands to

the Back Shore.

The siege of the Haunted House of Marnhoul happened on a Friday, the

last school-keeping day of the week. Saturday was employed by the parish

in digesting the news and forming opinions for the consumpt of the

morrow. Meantime there was a pretty steady stream of the curious along

the Marnhoul road, but the padlock had been replaced, and only the

broken bar bore token of the storm which had passed that way.

On Sunday, however, a small oblong scrap of white attracted the

attention of the nearer curious. It was attached, at about the level of

the eyes, to the unbroken bar of the gate of Marnhoul, and on being

approached with due care, was found to bear the following mysterious

inscription--

"Sir Louis Maitland of Marnhoul, Bart., and Miss

Irma Sobieski Maitland receive every afternoon from

2 to 5."

Marnhoul, Galloway, June 21.

"Keep us a'!" was the universal exclamation of Eden Valley as it read

this solemnizing inscription. It was generally believed to be a

challenge to the lawyers and the powers in general to come at these

hours and turn the young people out.

And many were the opinions as to the legality of such a course. Law was

not generally understood in the Galloway of that date, and though the

Sheriff Substitute rode through the village once a month to spend a

night over the "cartes" with his friend the General, he too only laughed

and rode on. He was well known to me at the head of his profession, and

to have the ear of the Government. Such studied indifference, therefore,

could only be put down to a desire to wink at the proceedings of the

children, illegal and unprecedented as these might be.

But I must now say something about my own folk.

Though undoubtedly originally Highland, and, as my father averred, able

to claim kindred with the highest of his name, the MacAlpines had long

been domiciled in the south. My father was the son of a neighbouring

minister, and had only escaped the fate of succeeding his father in the

charge by a Highland aversion to taking the sacrament at the age when he

was called upon to do so--in order that, by the due order of the Church

of Scotland, he might be taken on his trials as a student in Divinity.

He had also, about that date, further complicated matters by marrying my

mother, Grace Lyon, the penniless daughter of a noted Cameronian elder

of the parish of Eden Valley.

In order to support her, and (after a little) _us_, John MacAlpine had

accepted a small school far up the glen, from which, after a year or

two, on the appointment of Dr. Forbes to the parish, he had followed his

old college friend to Eden Valley itself. Under his care the little

academy had gradually been organized on the newest and best scholastic

lines known to the time. Even for girls classics and mathematics played

a prominent part. Samplers and knitting, which had previously formed a

notable branch of the curriculum, were banished to an hour when little

Miss Huntingdon taught the girls, locked in her own department like

Wykliffites in danger of the fires of Tower Hill. And at such times my

father almost ran as he passed the door of the infant school and thought

of the follies which were being committed within.

"Samplers," he was wont to mutter, "samplers--when they might be at

their Ovid!"

My mother--Gracie Lyon that was--had none of the stern blood of her

Cameronian forebears, nor yet my father's tempestuous Norland mood. She

was gentle, patient, with little to say for herself--like Leah,

tender-eyed (in the English, not in the Hebrew sense)--and I remember

well that as a child one of my great pleasures was to stroke her cheek

as she was putting me to sleep, saying, "Mother, how soft your skin is.

It is like velvet!"

"Aye," she would answer, with a sigh gentle as herself, "so they used to

tell me!"

And I somehow knew that "they" excluded my father, but whom it included

I did not know then nor for many a day after.

But my grandmother, my mother's mother--ah, there indeed you were in a

different world! She dwelt in a large house on the edge of the Marnhoul

woods. My grandfather had the lease of the farm of Heathknowes, with

little arable land, but a great hill behind it on which fed black-faced

sheep, sundry cattle in the "low parks," and by the river a strip of

corn land sufficient for the meal-ark and the stable feeding of his four

stout horses. Also on my father's behalf my uncles conducted the lonely

saw-mill that ate and ate into the Great Wood and yet never got any

farther. There might be seen machinery for making spools--with

water-driven lathes, which turned these articles, variously known as

"bobbins" and "pirns," literally off the reel by the thousand. It was a

sweet, birch-smelling place and my favourite haunt on all holidays.

William Lyon, my grandfather, had had a tempestuous youth, from which,

as he said, he had been saved "by the grace of God and Mary Lyon."

"Many a sore day she had with me," he would confess to me, for he took

pleasure in my society, "but got me buckled down at last!"

As my grandmother also kept me in the most affectionate but complete

subjection, the fact that neither one nor the other of us dared disobey

"Mary Lyon" was a sort of bond between us. Yet my grandmother was not a

very tall nor yet to the outward eye a powerful woman. You had to look

her in the eye to know. But there you saw a flash that would have cowed

a grenadier. There was something masterful and even martial in her walk,

in the way she attacked the enemy of the moment, or the work that fell

to her hand. All her ways were dominating without ever being

domineering. But in the house of Heathknowes all knew that she had just

to be obeyed, and there was an end to it.

When my father and she clashed, it was like the meeting of Miltonic

thunderclouds over the Caspian. But on the whole it was safe to wager

that even then grandmother got her way. John MacAlpine first discharged

his Celtic electricity, and then disengaged his responsibility with the

shrug of the right shoulder which was habitual to him. After all, was

there not always Horace in his pocket--which he would finger to calm

himself even in the heat of a family dispute?

A great school-master was my father, far ben in the secrets of the

ancient world--and such a man is always very much of a humanist. My

grandmother, alert, clear, decided on all doctrinal points,

argumentative, with all her wits fine-edged by the Shorter Catechism,

could not abide the least haziness of outline in religious belief.

She did not agree with my grandfather's easier ways, but then he did not

argue with her, being far too wise a man.

"Eh, William," she would say, "ye will carry even to the grave some rag

of the Scarlet Woman. And at the end I will not be surprised to find ye

sitting on some knowetap amang the Seven Hills!"

But at least my grandfather was a Cameronian elder, in the little kirk

down by the ford, to which the Lyons had resorted ever since the days of

the societies--long before even worthy Mr. MacMillan of Balmaghie came

into the Church, ordaining elders, and, along with the pious Mr. Logan

of Buittle, even ordaining ministers for carrying on the work of the

faithful protesting remnant.

But my father, John MacAlpine, both by office and by temperament,

belonged to the Kirk of Scotland as by law established. So indeed did

nine-tenths of the folk in the parish of Eden Valley. The band of

Cameronians at the Ford, and the forlorn hope of Episcopalians in their

hewn-stone chapel with the strange decorations, built on the parcel of

ground pertaining to Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe, were the only

non-Establishers in the parish. Yet both, nevertheless, claimed to be

the only true Church of Scotland, claimed it fiercely, with a fervour

sharpened by the antiquity of their claims and the smallness of their

numbers. This was especially true of the Cameronians, who were ever

ready to give a reason for the faith that was in them. The

Episcopalians lacked the Westminster Catechisms as a means of

intellectual gymnastic. So far, therefore, they were handicapped, and

indeed reduced to the mere persistent assertion that they, and they

alone, were the apostolic Church, and if any out of their communion were

saved, it must only be by the uncovenanted mercies of God.

Yet, though not within the sacred triangle of gentility (as it was known

in Eden Valley), of which the manse, the General's bungalow, and the

residence of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe occupied the three angles, my

grandmother was the first caller upon the lonely children in the great

house of Marnhoul.

I shall never forget her indignation when I went in to the dairy and

told her in detail what had happened--of the forcing of the gates, and

the firing upon the back windows. My grandfather, seated within doors,

in his great triangular easy-chair at his own corner of the wide

fireplace, looked up and remarked in his serene and far-off fashion that

"such proceedings filled him with shame and sorrow."

The words and still more the tone roused my grandmother.

"William Lyon," she said, standing before him in the clean middle of the

hearth which she had just been sweeping, and threatening him with the

brush (she would not have touched him for anything in the world, for she

recognized his position as an elder). "Hear to ye--'shame and sorrow'!

Aye, well may ye say it. Had I been there I would have 'sinned and

sorrowed' them. To go breaking into houses with swords and staves, and

firing off powder and shot--all to frighten a pair of poor bairns!

Certes, but I would have sorted them to rights--with tongue, aye, and

with arm also."

And at this point Mary Lyon advanced a step so fiercely and with such

martial energy, that, well inured as my grandfather was to the generous

outbursts of his wife, he moved his chair back with a certain alacrity.

"Mary," he remonstrated, "Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe was with them. So at

least I understand, and also Mr. Kettle, who is a Justice of the

Peace--these in addition to the constable----"

He got no further. My grandmother swooped upon the names, as perhaps he

expected. It was by no means the first time that, in order to draw off

the hounds of his wife's wrath, he had skilfully drawn a red herring

across the trail.

"Shepstone--Shepstone!" she cried, "a useless, daidling body! What was

he ever good for in this world but to tie his neckcloth and twirl his

cane? Oh aye, he can maybe button his 'spats'! That is, if he doesna get

the servant lass to do it for him. And Josiah Kettle! William, I wonder

you are not shamed, goodman--to sit there in your own hearth-corner and

name such a hypocrite to me----"

"Stop there, Mary," said her husband; "only a man's Maker has the right

to call him a hypocrite----"

"Well, I am an Elder's wife, and I'll e'en be his Viceroy. Josiah Kettle

_is_ a hypocrite, and I hae telled him so to his face--not once, but a

score of times. He has robbed the widow. He has impoverished the orphan.

Fegs, if I were a man, I could not keep my hands off him, and, 'deed, I

have hard enough work as it is. If there was a man about the house worth

his salt----"

"Forgive your enemies----" suggested my grandfather, "do good----"

"So I would--so I would," cried my grandmother, "but first I would give

the best cheese out o' the dairy-loft to see Josiah ducked head over

heels in Blackmire Dub! Forgive--aye, certainly, since it is commanded.

But a bit dressing down would do the like o' him no harm, and then the

Lord could take His own turn at him after!"

Thus did my grandmother address all who came into contact with her, and

there is every reason to believe that she had more than once similarly

exhorted Mr. Josiah Kettle, rich farmer and money-lender though he was.

Yet it is equally certain that if Mr. Kettle had been stricken with a

dangerous and deadly malady which made his nearest kin flee from him, it

would have been my grandmother who would have flown to nurse him with

the same robust and forcible tenderness with which she oversaw the

teething and other ills incidental to her daughter's children.

"As for Jocky Black," continued my grandmother, "the pomp of the

atomy--'In the name of the law,' says he--I'd law him! I would e'en nip

his bit stick from his puir twisted fingers and gie him his paiks--that

is, if it were worth the trouble! As for me, get me my bonnet, Jen--my

best Sunday leghorn with the puce _chenille_ in it--I must look my

featest going to a great house to pay my respects. And you shall come

too, Duncan!" (She turned to me with her usual alertness.) "Run home and

tidy--quick! Bid your mother put on your Sunday suit. No, Jen, I will

_not_ take you to fright the poor things out of their wits. Afterwards,

we shall see. But at first, Duncan there, if he gets over his blateness,

will be more of their age, and fear them less."

"If all I hear be true," said my Aunt Jen, pursing up her mouth as if

she had bitten into a crab apple, "the lassie is little likely to be

feared of you or any mortal on the earth!"

"Maybe aye--maybe no," snapped my grandmother, "at any rate be off with

you into the back kitchen and see that the dishes are washed, so as not

to be a show to the public. You and Meg have so little sense that whiles

I wonder that I am your mother."

"You are not Meg's mother that I ken of!" her daughter responded

acridly.

"I am her mistress, and the greater fool to keep such a handless hempie

about the house! You, Janet, I have to provide for in some wise--such

being the will of the Lord--His and your father's there. Now then,

clear! Be douce! Let me get on my cloak and leghorn bonnet."

My grandmother being thus accoutred, and I invested with a black jacket,

knee-breeches, shoes, and the regulation fluffy tie that tickled my

throat and made me a week-day laughing stock to all who dared, Mistress

Mary Lyon and I started to make our first call at the Great House of

Marnhoul.

CHAPTER V

THE CENSOR OF MORALS

As my grandmother and I went down the little loaning from Heathknowes

Farm she had an eye for everything. She "shooed" into duty's path a

youngling hen with vague maternal aspirations which was wandering off to

found a family by laying an egg in the underbrush about the saw-mill.

She called back final directions to her daughter Jen and maidservant

Meg, and saw that they were attended to before she would go on. She

looked into the saw-mill itself in the by-going, and made sure that Rob

McTurk was in due attendance on the whirling machinery which was turning

off the spools, as it seemed to me, with the rapidity of light. She

inquired as to the whereabouts of her husband.

"Oh, he was in a minute since!" said the politic Rob, who knew very well

that my grandfather had climbed into the bark storage loft, and was at

that moment sitting on a bundle, with a book in his hand and content in

his heart at having escaped the last injunctions of his wife.

"Well, then," said Mistress Mary Lyon, "tell him from me----" And, as

usual, a long list of recommendations followed.

"I'll see to it that he hears," said Rob McTurk imperturbably, knowing

full well that his master could by no means help hearing, since my

grandmother, in order to drown the noise of the whirling spindles and

clattering cogs, had raised her voice till her every word must have

penetrated to the pleasant, bark-scented place where, under his solitary

skylight, Mr. William Lyon was so calmly reading his favourite _Memoirs

of the Life of Thomas Boston of Ettrick_.

Besides my clothes, there were two things which interfered with the

happiness of my jaunt. One was the presence of a third and most

uncertain party to the affair--our rough, red house-collie Crazy, and

the other was a doubt as to the way in which we would be received. For,

be it remembered, I had seen Miss Irma Maitland shut the great door at

the top of the Marnhoul steps on the raging crowd of assailants, and I

wondered if we would not also find it slammed in our faces.

I had, however, confidence in my grandmother.

On the way to the padlocked gate at the entrance of the avenue which led

to the Haunted House, my grandmother had abundant room for the exercise

of her gifts. Never was there a woman who came across so many things

that "she could not abide."

Such, for instance, were Widow Tolmie's ideas as to disposal of her

nocturnal household rubbish on the King's highway. Into the Tolmie house

went Mistress Mary Lyon, well aware that words would have no avail. In a

minute she had requisitioned broom, bucket, and "claut," or byre-rake.

In other three minutes all was over. Widow Tolmie had a clean frontage.

The utensils had been washed and hung up, and my grandmother was

delivering a lecture from one of the most frequently-quoted texts which

are not to be found in Holy Writ, while she drew again upon her strong,

energetic old hands the pair of lisle thread "mitts" she had taken off

in order to effect her clean sweep.

After she had duly lectured the Widow Tolmie, she bade her in all amity

"Good-day," and started to reform Crazy, who had been gyrating furiously

across her path, trying apparently to bite his tail out by the roots.

Crazy was, it appeared, a useless, good-for-nothing beast, a disgrace to

a decent Elder's house, and I was ordered to stone him home.

Now I did not particularly wish Crazy to go with us to the Great House.

I thought of the smiling carelessness of the girl's face I had seen

there. Crazy might, and very likely would, misbehave himself. But still,

Crazy was my friend, my companion, my joy. _Stone Crazy!_ It was not to

be thought of. He would certainly consider it some new kind of game and

run barking after the missiles. I therefore shot so far beyond that the

pebbles fell over the hedge, till my grandmother, whose sole method was

an ungainly cross between a hurl and a jerk, took up the fusillade on

her own account, with the result that Crazy was wrought up to the

highest point of excitement, and, as I had foreseen, brought each stone

back to my grandmother, barking joyously and pulling at her skirts for

her to throw again.

"And just wait till I get you home," gasped Mrs. Mary Lyon, shaking her

rough white head, "there shall a rope be put about your neck, my lad!"

But whether for the purpose of mere tying up, or to carry out the

extreme sentence of the law, I did not gather. I resolved that, in the

latter case, Crazy should come with me to the school-house. There was a

place I knew of there, a crib at the end of the stick-cellar, which at a

pinch would do admirably for Crazy. And I felt sure that Crazy, wholly

incompetent at his own business of shepherding, would be a perfect

"boys' dog" and a permanent acquisition to the Academy of Eden Valley.

There was, of course, my father to consider. But I did not stop to think

of that. The classics and Fred Esquillant were enough for him at the

moment.

As she passed various cottage doors my grandmother had several bouts

with joiners who blocked the road with unfinished carts and diffusive

pots of red paint, with small wayside cowherds in charge of animals

which considered the hedge-rows as their appointed pasturage, with boys

going fishing who had learned at school that a straight line is the

shortest distance between two points, and who practised their Euclid to

the detriment of their neighbours' fences.

But nothing of great moment occurred till, on the same knoll from which

he had summoned us to view the smoke of the ghost's afternoon fire at

Marnhoul, we encountered Boyd Connoway. He was stretched at length, as

usual, one leg crossed negligently over the other. He had pivoted his

head against a log for the purpose of seeing in three directions about

him--towards the Great House, and both up and down the main road. A

straw, believed to be always the same, was in his mouth.

A red rag to a bull, a match to tinder, are weak metaphors--quite

incapable of expressing a tenth of what my grandmother felt at the sight

of the pet idler of Eden Valley.

She rushed instantly to the assault, much as she would have led a

forlorn hope. The dragoons who plunged their swords into great mows of

straw in Covenanting barns, the unfortunates who pursued a needle

through a load of hay, were employed in hopeful work when compared with

Mistress Mary Lyon, searching with her tongue in this mass of

self-sufficiency for any trace of Boyd Connoway's long-lost conscience.

"Why are you not at home?" she cried; "I heard Bridget complaining as I

came by, that she could not feed the pig because she had nobody to bring

her wood for her boiler fire--and she in the middle of her blanket

washing!"

The husband whom fate and her own youthful folly had given to Bridget

Connoway, took off his battered and weather-beaten hat with the native

politeness of a born Irishman. He did not rise. That would have been too

much to expect of him. But he uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the

other way about.

"Mistress Lyon," he said indolently, but with the soft, well-anointed

utterance of the blarneying islander, which does not die away till the

third generation of the poorest exile from Erin, "now, misthress dear,

consider!"

"I have considered you for seven years, and seven to the back of that,

Boyd Connoway, and you are a lazy lout! Every year you get worse!"

My grandmother counted nothing so stimulating as truth spoken to the

face. She acted, with all save her male grandchildren, on the ancient

principle that "Praise to the face is an open disgrace!" And Boyd, in

his time, had been singularly exempt from this kind of disgrace, so far

as my grandmother was concerned.

"But consider, Mrs. Lyon," he went on tranquilly, while my relative

stood in the road and eyed him with bitter scorn, "there's my wife, now

she's up early and late. She's scrubbing and cleaning, and all for

what?--just that yonder pack o' children o' hers should go out on the

road and come trailing back in ten minutes dirtier than ever. She runs

to Shepstone Oglethorpe's to give his maid a help in the mornings, all

for a miserable three shillings a week. She takes no rest to the sole of

her foot, nor gives nobody any either! Poor Bridget--I am sorry for

Bridget. 'Take things easier, and you will feel better, Bridget,' I say.

'Trust in Providence, Bridget!' 'Think on what the Doctor said three

Sundays but one ago from the very pulpit.' And would ye believe me,

Mistress Lyon, that poor woman, being left to herself, threw all the

weights at me one after the other--aye, and would have thrown the scales

too if I had not come away!"

Here Connoway sighed and stretched himself luxuriously, rubbing the

stiff fell of his hair meditatively as he did so.

"Ah, poor Bridget," he continued, with pathos in his voice, "Bridget is

so dreadfully unresigned, Mistress Lyon. Often have I said to her, 'Be

resigned, Bridget--trust in Providence, Bridget!' But as sure as I point

out Bridget's duty, there is something broken in our house!"

"Pity but it was your head, Boyd Connoway! Come away, child!" cried my

grandmother, "quick--lest I do that man an injury. He puts me in such a

state that I declare to goodness I am thankful I have not a poker in my

hand! Now there's your grandfather----"

But she went no further in the discussion of her own lesser household

burden. For there right in front of us was the great gate, the battered

notice to trespassers, the broken standard on which the padlock, now

removed, had worn a rusty hollow, and in its place we read the little

white notice concerning the hours at which the mistress of the mansion

could receive visitors.

"Oh, the poor young things!" said my grandmother, her anger (as was its

wont) instantly cooling, and even Boyd Connoway dropping back into his

own place as perhaps a necessary factor in an ill-regulated but on the

whole rather bearable world.

The gate creaked open slowly. My grandmother drew herself up. For did she

not come of the best blood of the Westland Whigs, great-granddaughter

of that Bell of Whiteside, kinsman of Kenmure's, who was shot by Lag

on the moor of Kirkconnel, near to the Lynn through which the Tarff

foams white?

For me, I was chiefly conscious of the bushes and shrubs on either side

the avenue, broken and trampled in the tumultuous rush of the populace

on the day of the discovery. I felt guilty. By that way Gerty

Greensleeves and I had passed, Gerty very close to my elbow. And now,

like the rolling away of a panorama picture in a show, Gerty

Greensleeves, and all other maids save one, had passed out of my life.

Or so, in my ignorance, I thought at the time.

For no woman ever passes wholly out of any man's life--that is, if he

lives long enough. She steals back again with the coming of life's

gloaming, with the shadows of night creeping across the hills, or the

morning mists swimming up out of the valley. Sometimes she is weeping,

but more often smiling. For there is time enough, since the man last

thought of her, for all tears to be wiped from her eyes. But come she

will. Yet sometimes it is not so. She does not smile. She only stands on

the threshold of a man's soul with reproachful eyes, and lips drawn and

mute. Then it is not good to be that man.

But in those days, being a boy, carried along in the waft of my

grandmother's skirt, I knew nothing about such things.

I watched my grandmother take the antique knocker between her fingers,

noting with housewifely approval that it had recently been polished. I

have seldom passed a more uncomfortable time of waiting, than that

between the resounding clatter of grandmother's knocking reverberating

through the empty house, and the patter of feet, the whispering, and at

last the opening of the door.

Then I saw again the tall girl with the proudly angled chin, the crown

of raven curls, and the pair of brave outlooking eyes that met all the

world with something that was even a little bold.

I had been afraid that my grandmother, so indiscriminating in her

admonitions, might open fire upon this forlorn couple, isolated in the

great haunted house of Marnhoul. But I need not have troubled.

My grandmother had the instinct of caressing maternity for all the

young, the forlorn, the helpless. So she only opened her arms and cried

out, "Oh, you dears--you poor darlings!"

And the little boy, moved by the instinctive yearning of all that needed

protection, of everything of tender years and little strength towards

the breast that had suckled and the hands that had nursed, let go his

sister's hand and ran happily to my grandmother. She caught him in her

arms and lifted him up with the easy habitual gesture of one long

certified as a mother in Israel. He threw his little arms about my

grandmother's neck, nestling there just as the rest of us used to do

when we were in any trouble.

"I like you! You are good!" he said.

Miss Irma and I were therefore left eye to eye while Louis Maitland, in

spite of his title, was so rapidly making friends with the actual head

of our family.

Irma eyed me, and I did the like to Miss Irma--that is, to the best of

my ability, which in this matter was nothing to hers. She seemed to look

me through and through. At which I quailed, and then she appeared a

little more content.

With the child still in her arms, and her voice, lately so harsh in

rebuke, now tuned to the cooing of a nesting dove, my grandmother

introduced herself.

"Child," she said to Miss Irma, "I am your nearest neighbour. Who should

come to welcome you if not I? You will find me at the farm of

Heathknowes. It is my goodman's saw-mills that you hear clattering from

where you stand, and I am come to see if there is anything I can do to

help you."

"I thank you----" began the girl, and then hesitated. She had meant to

declare that they wanted for nothing, perhaps to indicate that the wife

of a tenant was hardly a fitting "first-foot" to venture over the

threshold of a baronet of ancient name and of the sister who acted as

his sponsor, tutor and governor.

But then Miss Irma did not know my grandmother as Eden Valley did, still

less as we who were, as one might say, of Caesar's household.

"Let me come in--I will soon see for myself!" quoth my grandmother, and

marched straight into the front hall of the Maitlands, that immense

dusky cavern I had only once looked into over the pikes and pitchforks.

She carried Sir Louis, tenth baronet of that name, on one arm. With her

free right hand she went hither and thither, sweeping her hand along the

ledges of great oak cabinets, blowing at the dust on the stone

mantelpiece, and finally clearing the great curtained south-western

window to let in the sun in flakes and patches of scarlet and gold.

Then she turned to Miss Irma and said in the tone of an expert who has

inspected a grave piece of work and not found it wanting, "You have done

very well, my dear!"

And at this Miss Irma changed the fashion of her countenance. Pleasure

shone scarce concealed. It was certain that up to that moment she had

regarded my grandmother somewhat in the light of an intruder, but she

could not bear up against such an appeal from housewife to housewife.

"Will you come up-stairs?" she said, "I have hardly got begun here yet."

CHAPTER VI

THE APOTHEOSIS OF AGNES ANNE

No word or look included me in the invitation which Miss Irma tendered

to my grandmother. Nevertheless I followed, not knowing what else to do.

I felt huge, awkward, clumsy of build and knotty of elbow and knee. I

was conscious that my knuckles were red. I felt in the way and unhappy.

In short, I hulked. Indeed, but that I was able to watch two eyes of

darkest grey beneath a wisp of untamed curls on a small and shapely

head, and the look of the thing, I would far rather have stopped out on

the doorstep with Crazy.

And perhaps that would have been the best place for me, all things

considered.

After we had passed two or three rooms in review, all of which were, as

it appeared to me, garnished with the ordinary sheets and coverlets of a

bedroom, my grandmother abruptly turned upon Miss Irma.

"Let me see your hands!" she said, in her ordinary brusque manner. I was

in terror lest we should be shown to the door. But the freemasonry of

work, the knowledge of things feminine, the fine little nod of

appreciation at a detail which is perfectly lost on a man, the flush of

answering approbation had done their perfect work between the old woman

and the girl.

Such things were not within my ken, and my grandmother promptly banished

me. She set down the little baronet at the same time with a "Run and

play, my doo!" She issued directions for me to charge myself with the

responsibility. I would much rather have stayed to hear what grandmother

and Miss Irma had to say one to the other, because I was more interested

in that. But the choice was not given to me. Go I must.

And with her first personal word of acknowledgment that I was a human

being, Miss Irma, calling me by name, indicated the "drawing-room" as

the place where we might await the end of this first congress of the

Holy Alliance.

I was some little alarmed at the place, the name of which so far I had

only seen in books, but little Sir Louis whispered in my ear as he took

my hand, "We can play there. That's only what sister Irma calls it!"

When my grandmother and Miss Irma appeared after an absence of

half-an-hour they found the two of us deep in a game of bat-ball. I made

an attempt to hide the ball, fearing lest Miss Irma might think I

usually carried such things about with me (I had confiscated it in class

that day). But I need not have troubled, she paid no attention whatever

to me, continuing to hold my grandmother's hand and look into the wise,

stormy, tender, emphatic, much-enduring old face. And I wondered at my

relative, and saw in this marvel one more proof of her own

infallibility.

"You must not stay any longer in this great house alone," she was

saying, "I will send you--somebody."

Then she looked again at Miss Irma's hands, and though I did not see

why, nor understand at the time, she added, "No--no--it will never

do--never do!" I wish I could say that on this first occasion of our

meeting, Miss Irma devoted a little of her attention to me. But the

truth is, she had eyes for nobody but Mistress Mary Lyon of

Heathknowes. True, a glance occasionally came my way, which caused me

instinctively to straighten myself up and square my shoulders, as I did

in the playground when acting as drill sergeant to the juniors. But the

very same glance with quite as much personality in it, passed on to

Crazy, who, to the exuberant delight of little Louis, had by this time

intruded himself. It was impossible for the most self-conceited to bring

away much comfort or encouragement from favours so slight as these.

Even Louis, after the advent of Crazy, considered me only as his

drill-sergeant, and valued me according as Crazy consented to show off

his tricks at the word of command from me.

"Behave, sir! You are in the kirk!" cried I. And lo! to the boy's wonder

Crazy, who had been gambolling about on the bare floor, sank down with

his head between his paws and his eyes hypocritically closed, till I

gave the signal, "Now fight the French!" Upon which uprose Crazy like a

dancing bear on his hind legs, and jumped about with flaming eyes,

barking with all his might. This, being the performance which pleased

Crazy most, was also the favourite with the young Sir Louis.

Indeed leavetaking was difficult, though by no means on my account. For

Miss Irma was all taken up with grandmother and little Louis with Crazy.

Nobody minded me, and Miss Irma did not so much as reach me a finger,

though at the last she just nodded, and Sir Louis had to be removed

wailing, because he wished to keep his arms tight about the shaggy neck

of Master Crazy, that singularly indifferent sheep-dog, but excellent

variety entertainer.

It was, however, promised that Crazy should return, and as I knew that

Crazy would by no means perform without me, considering himself bound to

me by hours of patient labour and persistent fellow truantry, I saw some

light on the horizon of an otherwise dark future. I must go back too.

But in the meantime Louis wept uncomforted, and "batted" his sister with

baby palms in the impotence of his anger as she carried him within.

My grandmother said nothing of any importance on the way home. She was

evidently thinking deeply, and confined herself to "Hush, you there!"

and "Do ye hear what I was saying to ye?" Under a fire of suchlike

remarks, delivered more or less at random, and without the least

discrimination between the barking of Crazy (the effect) and me (the

cause)--I kept a little in the rear so that I might have a sober face on

me when she turned round, while the less subtle Crazy galloped in

furious circles yapping and leaping up even in my grandmother's face. He

was, however, useful in drawing her fire, and though I had to keep a

sharp look-out for the stones she caught up to throw at Crazy (who ran

no personal danger) our home-coming was effected in good order and with

considerable amusement to myself.

But on her arrival at Heathknowes, Mrs. Mary Lyon found that there were

forces in the universe which even she was powerless to conquer.

Meg, the "indoor" lass at Heathknowes, refused point-blank to go one

foot in the direction of the "Ghaist's Hoose." She persisted in her

refusal even when addressed by the awe-inspiring baptismal name of

Margaret Simprin Hetherington, and reminded of the terms of her

engagement.

No, Margaret Simprin Hetherington would not--could not--dared not--stay

a night in the great house of Marnhoul. Whatever my grandmother might

say it was not so nominated in the bond. She had been hired to serve

about the farmhouse of Heathknowes, and she did not mind carrying their

dinners to the workmen in the saw-mill----

"No," interpolated my grandmother, "nor taking an hour-and-a-half to do

it in!"

Upon which, as if stirred by some association of ideas, Meg added that

she would go none to Marnhoul Big Hoose, "because not a soul would come

near the place." It did not matter whether _she_ believed in Grey Ladies

with rain-drops pattering through them or not--other people did, and she

would not be banished "among the clocks and rattons"--no, not for double

wages!

My grandmother, indeed, explained that there was no question of ladies

grey or rain-drops pattering, but of obedience to her legal mistress.

But she knew that the cause was lost, and I am quite sure anticipated

the reply of Margaret Simprin Hetherington, which was to the effect that

no lass, indoor or outdoor, was more willing to obey her mistress than

she, but it would be in the place in which she had been hired to

serve--there and not elsewhere.

For once my grandmother was nonplussed. Being a good Galloway woman she

knew that of all things it is most impossible to run counter to the

superstitions of her people. Perhaps she retained a touch of these

herself. But, as she said, "The grace of the Lord can overcome all the

wiles of the Evil One! And Mary Lyon would like to see witch or warlock,

ghost or ghostling, that would come in her road when she went forth

under His banner." On the darkest night she marched unafraid, conquering

and to conquer, having the superstitions born in her, but knowing all

the same (and all the better for that knowledge) on which side were the

bigger battalions.

It was no use to send my Aunt Jen, who had once been "in a place"

before. Aunt Jen would go, but--she would take her tongue with her. She

had her mother's command of language, but was utterly destitute of her

tact, lacking also, as was natural, the maternal instinct. As, in a

moment of exasperation my grandmother once said of her, "Our Jinnet is

dried up like a crab-tree in the east wind!"

She would certainly undo all that Mistress Mary Lyon had done, and "that

puir young lassie" (as she called Miss Irma) carried a warlike flash in

her eye which warned the rugged grandmotherly heart that she and our

Aunt Jen could not long bide at peace in the same house.

My mother might have done, as far as temper was concerned, but she

wanted what grandmother called the "needcessary birr." Besides which she

had more than enough to do in caring for her own house, mending my

father's clothes and misinforming the public as to Post Office

regulations. On the whole, though she loved her married daughter, I

think Mary Lyon was not a little sorry for my father, John MacAlpine, in

his choice of a housekeeper. I could see this by the occasional descents

she made upon our house, and the way she had of going about the rooms,

setting things to rights, silent save for a running comment of soft

sniffs upon the nose of contempt--the while my mother, after a

sympathetic glance at me, devoted herself to silent prayer that

grandmother would not light upon anything very bad.

With my grandmother, to fail in the due ordering of a house was a

cardinal sin. And my poor mother sinned, not indeed by intention,

hardly even in labour, but in that appearance of easy perfection, which

in a household is the result of excellent plans thoroughly and timeously

carried out. She was apt to be found late of an afternoon in a chair

with a book--and the dinner dishes still unwashed. Then Agnes Anne, my

sister, would come in without a word. Her school frock would be quickly

shrouded under a great coarse apron. If I happened to be within doors I

was beckoned to assist. If not, not--and Agnes Anne did them herself

while my mother slept on.

But I do not think that grandmother knew this, for she very generally

ignored Agnes Anne altogether, having a decided preference for boys in a

family. It fell out, therefore, that when she came a little shamefacedly

to consult my father, as she sometimes did in days of difficulty--for

under a show of contempt she often really submitted to his judgment--it

was given to Agnes Anne to say suddenly, "Let me go to Marnhoul,

grandmother!" If Balaam's ass (or say, Crazy), had spoken these words,

grandmother could not have been more astonished.

More so still when John MacAlpine nodded approval.

"Yes, let the lassie go--let her put her hand to the work. The burden

cannot be too soon laid on young shoulders--that is, if they are strong

enough."

Mary Lyon stared, as if both he and his daughter had suddenly taken

leave of their senses.

"Why, what can the lassie _do_?" she cried; "I thought you were making

her nothing but a don in the dead languages!"

"I can bake, and brew, and wash, and keep a house clean," said Agnes

Anne, putting in her testimonials, since there was no one so well

acquainted with them. My father nodded. He was not so blind as many

might suppose. My mother said, "Aye, 'deed, she can that. Agnes Anne is

a good lass. I know not what I should do without her!"

My grandmother looked about at the new air of tidiness, and for the

first time a suspicion crossed her mind that, out of a pit from which

she was expecting no such treasure, some one in her own image might

possibly have been digged among her descendants of the second

generation. She looked at Agnes Anne with a ray of hope. Agnes Anne

stood the awful searching power of that eye. Agnes Anne did not flinch.

Mary Lyon nodded her head with its man's close-cropped locks of rough

white hair in lyart locks about her ears.

"You'll do, Agnes Anne, you'll do," she said, adding cautiously, "that

is, after a time"--so as not to exalt the girl above measure. It was,

however, recognized by all as a definite triumph for my sister. My

grandmother, a rigid Calvinist, who believed in Election with all her

intellect, and acted Free Will with all her heart, elected Agnes Anne

upon the spot. Had the girl not willed to rise out of the pit of sloth

and mere human learning? And lo! she had arisen. Thenceforth Agnes Anne

stood on a pedestal, and for a while one sturdy disciple of Calvin's

thought heretically of the pure doctrine. Here was a human being who had

willed, and, according to my grandmother, had made of herself a miracle

of grace.

But she recalled herself to more orthodox sentiments. The steel was out

of the sheath, indeed, but it had to be tried. Even yet Agnes Anne might

be found wanting.

"When will you be ready to start?" she said, turning her black twinkling

eyes upon her granddaughter.

"In five minutes," said Agnes Anne boldly.

"And you are not frightened?"

"Of what?"

"Of these vain tales--ghosts, hauntings, and so forth. Our Meg Simprin

(silly maid!) would not move a foot, and you are far younger."

"I am no younger than those who are in the house already," said Agnes

Anne, with great sense, which even I would hardly have expected from

her, "and if ghosts are spirits, as the Bible says, I do not see that

they can interfere with housework!"

My grandmother rose solemnly from her seat, patted Agnes Anne on the

top-knot of her hair, shook hands with John MacAlpine, nodded meaningly

at my mother, and said, "Come along, young lass," in a tone which showed

that the aged shepherdess had unexpectedly found a lamb whom she long

counted lost absolutely butting against the door of the sheep-fold.

This was the apotheosis of Agnes Anne. Her life dates from that evening

in our kitchen, even as mine did from the afternoon when one half the

fools of Eden Valley were letting off shot-guns at the back windows of

Marnhoul Great House, while Miss Irma withstood the others on the

threshold of the front door.

CHAPTER VII

THE DOCTOR'S ADVENT

The firm of lawyers in Dumfries, the agents for the Maitland properties,

did not seem to be taking any measures to dispossess Miss Irma and young

Sir Louis. Perhaps they, too, had private information. Perhaps those who

had brought the children to Marnhoul may have been in the confidence of

that notable firm of Smart, Poole & Smart in the High Street. At any

rate they made no move towards ejection. They may also have argued that

any one who could dispossess the ghosts and make Marnhoul once more a

habitable mansion, was welcome to the tenancy.

It was the Reverend Doctor Gillespie who, first of all the distinguished

men of the parish, received in some slight degree the confidence of Miss

Irma. Grandmother knew more, of course, and perhaps, also, Agnes Anne.

But, with the feeling of women towards those whom they approve, they

became Irma's accomplices. Women are like that. When you tell them a

secret, if they don't like you, they become traitors. If they do, they

are at once confederates. But the Doctor visited Marnhoul as a

deputation, officially, and also for the purpose of setting the minds of

the genteel at rest.

The Doctor's lady gave him no peace till he did his duty. The General's

womenfolk at the Bungalow were clamorous. It was not seemly. Something

must be done, and since the action of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe on the

occasion of the assault on the house had put _him_ out of the question,

and as the General flatly refused to have anything to do with the

affair, it was obvious that the duty must fall to the Doctor.

Nor could a better choice have been made. Eden Valley has known many

preachers, but never another such pastor--never a shepherd of the sheep

like the Doctor. I can see him yet walking down the manse avenue--it had

been just "the Loaning" in the days before the advent of the second Mrs.

Doctor Gillespie--a silver-headed cane in his hand, everything about him

carefully groomed, and his very port breathing a peculiarly grave and

sober dignity. Grey locks, still plentiful, clustered about his head.

His cocked hat (of the antique pattern which, early in his ministry, he

had imported by the dozen from Versailles) never altered in pattern.

Buckles of unpolished silver shone dully at his knee and bent across his

square-toed shoes.

Above all spread his neckcloth, spotless, enveloping, cumbrous,

reverence-compelling, a cravat worthy of a Moderator. And indeed the

Doctor--our Doctor, parish minister of Eden Valley, had "passed the

Chair" of the General Assembly. We were all proud of the fact, even

top-lofty Cameronians like my grandmother secretly delighting in the

thought of the Doctor in his robes of office.

"There would be few like him away there in Edinburgh," she would say.

"The Doctor's a braw man, and does us credit afore the great of the

land--for a' that he's a Moderate!"

And had he been the chief of all the Moderates, the most volcanic and

aggressive of Moderates, my grandmother would have found some good thing

to say of a fellow-countryman of so noble a presence--"so personable,"

and "such a credit to the neighbourhood."

Wisdom, grave and patient, was in every line of his kindly face.

Something boyish and innocent told that the shades of the prison-house

had never wholly closed about him. It was good to lift the hat to Dr.

Gillespie as he went along--hat a little tip-tilted off the

broadly-furrowed brow. In the city he is very likely to stop and regard

the most various wares--children's dolls or ladies' underpinnings. But

think not that the divine is interested in such things. His mind is

absent--in communion with things very far away. Lift your hat and salute

him. He will not see you, but--it will do _you_ good!

William Gillespie was the son of a good ministerial house. His father

had occupied the same pulpit. He himself had been born in his own

manse--which is to say, in all the purple of which our grey Puritan land

can boast. We were proud of the Doctor, and had good reason therefor. I

have said that even my field-preaching grandmother looked upon the

Erastian with a moisture quasi-maternal in her eyes, and as for us who

"sat under him and listened to his speech," we came well-nigh to worship

him.

Yet "the Doctor" was self-effacing beyond many, and only our proper

respect for the "Lady of the Manse" kept the parishioners in their

places. Discourses which he had preached in the callow days of his youth

on the "Book of the Revelation" had brought hearers from many distant

parishes, and at that time the Doctor had had several "calls" and

"offers" to proceed to other spheres on account of their fame. But he

had always refused to repeat any of them.

"I have changed my mind about many things since then," he would say;

"young men are apt to be hasty! The greatest of all heresies is

dogmatism."

But among the older saints of the parish that "series of expositions"

was not forgotten. "It was" (they averred) "like the licht o' anither

world to look on his face--just heeven itsel' to listen to him. Sirce

me, there are no such discourses to be heard now-a-days--not even from

_himsel'_!"

And be it remembered that our dear Doctor could unbend--that is, in

fitting time and place. From the seats of the mighty, from Holyrood and

the Moderator's chair our Cincinnatus returned to shepherd his quiet

flock among the bosky silences of Eden Valley. He wore his learning, all

his weight of honour lightly--with a smile, even with a slight shrug of

the shoulder. The smile, even the jest, rose continually to his lips,

especially when his wife was not present. But at all times he remembered

his office, and often halted with the ancient maxim at the sight of some

intruder, "Let us be sober--yonder comes a fool!" And many of his

visitors noticed this sudden sobriety without once suspecting its cause.

Even the Cameronians agreed that there was "unction" in the Doctor. For

his brave word's sake they forgave the heresies of his church about the

Civil Magistrate, and said freely among themselves that if in every

parish there was such a minister as Dr. Gillespie, the civil magistrate

would be compelled to take a very back seat indeed. But it was on

Communion Sabbath days that the Doctor became, as it were, transfigured,

the face of him shining, though he wist not of it.

Something of the spirit of the Crucified was poured forth that day upon

men and women humbly bowing their heads over the consecrated memorials

of His love.

A silence of a rare and peculiar sanctity filled the little bare,

deep-windowed kirk. The odour of the flowering lilacs came in like

Nature's own incense, and the plain folk of Eden Valley got a foretaste,

faint and dim, but sufficient, of the Land where the tables shall never

be withdrawn.

Better preachers than the Doctor?--We grant it you, though there are

many in the Valley who will not agree, but not one more fitted to break

the bread of communion before the white-spread tables.

It was Agnes Anne who opened the door of Marnhoul, and stood a moment

astonished at the sight of the Doctor all in black and silver--hat,

coat, knee-breeches, silken hose and leathern shoes of the first, locks,

studs, knee-buckles, shoe-buckles all of the second.

But our Agnes Anne was truly of the race of Mary Lyon, so in a moment

she said, "Pray come in, sir!" with the self-respect of the daughter of

a good house, as well as the dutifulness which she owed to one so

reverend and so revered.

The Doctor was not surprised. He smiled as he recognized the

school-master's daughter. But he betrayed nothing. He laid his hand as

usual on her smooth locks by way of a blessing, and inquired if Miss

Maitland and Sir Louis were at home.

"They are in the school-room," said Agnes Anne, in the most

business-like tone in the world; "come this way, sir."

It was a very different house--that which Agnes Anne showed the

Doctor--from the cobweb-draped, dust-strewn, deserted mansion of a few

weeks ago. Simply considering them as caretakers, the Dumfries lawyers

ought to have welcomed their new tenants. So far as cleanliness went,

Miss Irma had done a great deal--so much, indeed, as to earn the praise

of that severest of critics, my grandmother.

But there was much that no girl could do alone. Chair-seats and

sofa-cushions had been beaten till no speck of dust was left. This had

had to be carefully gone about. For though, apparently, no thieves had

broken through to steal, it was evident that the house had last been

occupied by people of excessively careless habits, who had put muddy

boots on chairs and trampled regardlessly everywhere. But the other half

of the text held good. Moth and rust had certainly corrupted.

However, Agnes Anne was handy with her needle, in spite of her father

and his class on Ovid. There was always a good deal to do in our house,

and since mother made no great effort, and was generally tired, it fell

to Agnes Anne to do it.

She it was who had re-covered the worn old drawing-room chairs with

brocade found in the deep, cedar-wood lined cupboards, along with wealth

of ancient court dresses, provision of household linen, and all that had

belonged to the Maitlands on the day when, after the falling of the head

of their house upon Tower Hill, the great old mansion had been shut up.

The Doctor had been strictly enjoined to take good heed to write

everything down on his mental tablets, and to give careful account to

his lady. He found the two young Maitlands seated at a table from which

the cloth had been lifted at one corner to make room for copybooks, ink,

pens and reading-books. Evidently Miss Irma was instructing her brother.

"Now, Louis," they heard her say as they came in, "remember the destiny

to which you are called, and that now is the time----"

"The Doctor to call upon you!" Agnes Anne announced in a tone of awe

befitting the occasion.

Then the stately apparition in black and silver which followed her into

the room came slowly forward, smiling with outstretched hand. Miss Irma

was not in the least put out. She rose and swept a curtsey with bowed

head. Little Sir Louis, evidently awed by the sedate grandeur which sat

so well upon the visitor, paused a moment as if uncertain how he ought

to behave.

He was a little behind his sister, and completely out of the range of

her vision, so he felt himself safe in sucking the ink from the side of

his second finger, and rubbing the wet place hard on his black velvet

breeches. Then, as Miss Irma glanced round, he fell also to his manners

and bowed gravely--unconsciously imitating the grand manner of the

Doctor himself.

The room used for lessons was a wide, pleasant place, rather low in the

roof, plainly panelled and wainscotted in dark oak, with a single line

of dull gold beading running about it high up. There was a large

fireplace, with a seat all the way round, and a stout iron basket to

hold the fire of sea-coal, when such was used. Brass and irons stood at

the side, convenient for faggots. A huge crane and many S-shaped

pot-hooks discovered the fact that at some time this place had been

occupied as a kitchen, perhaps in the straitened days of the last

"attainted" Maitlands.

But now the chamber was pleasant and warm, the windows open to the air

and the song of the birds. Dimity curtains hung on the great poles by

the windows and stirred in the breeze, as if they had been lying for

half a century in dusky cupboards. Agnes Anne looked carefully to see if

the darning showed, and decided that not even her grandmother could spy

it out--how much less, then, the Doctor.

She was, however, annoyed that the tall, brass-faced clock in the

corner, dated "Kilmaurs, 1695," could not be made to go. But she had a

promise from Boyd Connoway that he would "take a look at her" as soon as

he had attended to three gardens and docked the tails of a litter of

promising puppies.

The Doctor bowed graciously over the hand of Miss Irma, and shook hands

gravely with Sir Louis, who a second time had rubbed his finger on his

black velvet suit, just to make assurance doubly sure.

The conversation followed a high plane of social commonplace.

"Yes," said Miss Irma, "it is true that our family has been a long time

absent from the neighbourhood, but you are right in supposing that we

mean to settle down here for some time."

Then she deigned to enter into particulars. She had her brother to bring

up according to his rank, for, since there was no one else to undertake

the charge, it fell to her lot. Luckily she had received a good

education up to the time when she had the misfortune----

"Ah," said the Doctor quickly, "I understand."

He said nothing further in words, but his sympathetic silence conveyed a

great deal, and was more eloquent and consolatory than most people's

speech.

"And where were you educated?" asked the Doctor gently.

"My father sent me to the Ursuline Sisters in Paris," said Miss Irma

calmly.

The Doctor was secretly astonished and much disappointed, but his face

expressed nothing beyond his habitual good nature. He replied, "Then

your father has had you brought up a Catholic, Miss Maitland?"

"Indeed, no," answered Miss Irma, "only he had often occasion to be away

on his affairs, and to keep me out of mischief he left me with the

Ursulines and my aunt the Abbess. At my father's death I might have

stayed on with the good sisters, but I left because I was not allowed to

see my brother."

"Then am I right in thinking that--that--in fact--you are a

Presbyterian?" said the Doctor, playing with the inlaid snuffbox which

he carried in his hand. The amount of time he occupied in tapping the

lid and the invisibility of the pinches he had ever been seen to take

were alike marvels in the district.

"I have no religious prejudices," said Miss Irma to the Doctor, in a

calm, well-bred manner which must have secretly amused that

distinguished theologian, fresh from editing the works of Manton.

"I did not speak of prejudices, dear young lady" (he spoke gently, yet

with the thrill in his voice which showed how deeply he was moved), "but

of belief, of religion, of principles of thought and action."

Miss Irma opened her eyes very wide. The sound of the Doctor's words

came to her ears like the accents of an unknown tongue.

"The sisters were very good people," she said at last; "they give

themselves a great deal of trouble----"

"What kind of trouble?" said the Doctor.

"Kneeling and scrubbing floors for one thing," said Miss Irma; "getting

up at all hours, doing good works, praying, and burning candles to the

Virgin."

"I should advise you," said the Doctor, with his most gentle accent, "to

say as little as possible about that part of your experience here in

Eden Valley."

Miss Irma looked exceedingly surprised.

"I thought I told you they were exceedingly good people. They were very

kind to me, though they looked on me as a lost heretic. I am sure they

said prayers for me many times a day!"

The Doctor looked more hopeful. He was thinking that after all he might

make something of his strange parishioner, when the young lady recalled

him by a repetition of her former declaration, "As I said, I have no

religious prejudices!"

"No," said the Doctor a little sharply--for him, "but still each one of

us ought to be fully persuaded in his own mind."

"And that means," Miss Irma answered, quick as a flash, "that most of us

are fully persuaded according to our father and mother's mind, and the

way they have brought us up. But then, you see, I never _was_ brought

up. I know very well that my family were Presbyterians. Once I read

about their sufferings in two great volumes by a Mr. Wodrow, or some

such name. But then my grandfather lost most of his estates fighting for

the King----"

"For the Popish Pretender," said the Doctor, who could speak no smooth

things when it was a matter of the Revolution Settlement and the

government of King George.

"For the man he believed to be king, while others stayed snugly at

home," persisted Miss Irma. "Then my mother was a Catholic, and my

father too busy to care----"

"My poor young maid," said the Doctor, "it is wonderful to see you as

you are!"

And secretly the excellent man was planning out a campaign to lead this

lamb into the fold of that Kirk of Scotland, for the purity of whose

doctrine and intact spiritual independence her forefathers had shed

their blood.

"At any rate," said he, rising and bending again over the girl's hand

with old-fashioned politeness, "you will remember that your family pew

is in the front of our laft--I mean in the gallery of the parish kirk

of Eden Valley."

And the Doctor took his leave without ever remembering that he had

failed in the principal part of his mission, having quite forgotten to

find out by what means these two young things came to find themselves

alone in the Great House of Marnhoul.

CHAPTER VIII

KATE OF THE SHORE

It was, I think, ten days after Agnes Anne had left us for the old house

of the Maitlands when she came to me at the school-house. My father had

Fred Esquillant in with him, and the two were busy with Sophocles. I was

sitting dreaming with a book of old plays in my hand when Agnes Anne

came in.

"Duncan," she said, "I am feared to bide this night at Marnhoul. And I

think so is Miss Irma. Now I would rather not tell grandmother--so you

must come!"

"Feared?" said I; "surely you never mean ghosts--and such nonsense,

Agnes Anne--and you the daughter of a school-master!"

"It's the solid ghosts I am feared of," said Agnes Anne; "haste you, and

ask leave of father. He is so busy, he will never notice. He has Freddy

in with him, I hear."

So Agnes Anne and I went in together. We could see the man's head and

the boy's bent close together, and turned from us so that the westering

light could fall upon their books. Fred Esquillant was to be a great

scholar and to do my father infinite credit when he went to the

university. For me I was only a reader of English, a scribbler of verses

in that language, a paltry essayist, with no sense of the mathematics

and no more than an average classic. Therefore in the school I was a

mere hewer of wood and drawer of water to my father.

"Duncan is coming with me to bide the night at Marnhoul," said Agnes

Anne, "and he is going to take 'King George' with him to--scare the

foxes!"

"From the hen-coops?" said my father, looking carelessly up. "Let him

take care not to shoot himself then. He has no nicety of handling!"

I am sure that really he meant in the classics, for his thoughts were

running that way and I could see that he was itching to be at it again

with Freddy.

"Tell your mother," he said, adjusting his spectacles on his nose, "and

please shut the door after you!"

Having thus obtained leave from the power-that-was, the matter was

broken to my mother. She only asked if we had told John, and being

assured of that, felt that her entire responsibility was cleared, and so

subsided into the fifth volume of Sir Charles Grandison, where thrilling

things were going on in the cedar parlour. It was my mother's favourite

book, but was carefully laid aside when my grandmother came--nay, even

concealed as conscientiously as I under my coat conveyed away the

bell-mouthed, silver-mounted blunderbuss which hung over the hat-rack in

the lobby. Buckshot, wads, and a powderhorn I also secreted about my

person.

On our way I catechized Agnes Anne tightly as to the nature of the

danger which had put her so suddenly in fear. But she eluded me. Indeed,

I am not sure she knew herself. All I could gather was that a letter

which had reached Miss Irma that morning, had given warning of trouble

of some particular deadly sort impending upon the dwellers in the house

of Marnhoul. When Agnes Anne opened the door of the hall to let the

sunshine and air into the gloomy recesses where the shadows still lurked

in spite of the light from the high windows, she had found a folded

letter nailed to the door of Marnhoul. The blade of a foreign-looking

knife had been thrust through it deep into the wood, and the stag's-horn

handle turned down in the shape of a reversed capital V--the spring

holding the paper firm. It was addressed to Miss Irma Maitland, and

evidently had reference to something disastrous, for all day Miss Irma

had gone about with a pale face, and a pitiful wringing action of her

fingers. No words, however, had escaped her except only "What shall I

do? Oh, what shall I do? My Louis--my poor little Louis!"

The danger, then, whatever it might be, was one which particularly

touched the boy baronet. I could not help hoping that it might not be

any plot of the lawyers in Dumfries to get him away. For if I were

obliged to fire off "King George," and perhaps kill somebody, I

preferred that it should not be against those who had the law on their

side. For in that case my father might lose his places, both as chief

teacher and as postmaster.

I got Agnes Anne to look after "King George," my blunderbuss, while I

went round to the village to see if anything was stirring about the

dwelling of Constable Jacky. She would only permit me to do this on

condition that I proved the gun unloaded, and permitted her to lock it

carefully in one cupboard, while the powder and shot reposed each on a

separate shelf outside in the kitchen, lest being left to themselves the

elements of destruction might run together and blow up the house.

I scudded through the village, passing from one end of the long street

to the other. Constable Jacky in his shirt sleeves, was peaceably

peeling potatoes on his doorstep, while with a pipe in his mouth Boyd

Connoway was looking on and telling him how. The village of Eden Valley

was never quieter. Several young men of the highest consideration were

waiting within call of the millinery establishment of the elder Miss

Huntingdon, on the chance of being able to lend her "young ladies" stray

volumes of Rollin's _Ancient History_, Defoe's _Religious Courtship_, or

such other volumes as were likely to fan the flame of love's young dream

in their hearts. I saw Miss Huntingdon herself taking stock of them

through the window, and as it were, separating the sheep from the goats.

For she was a particular woman, Miss Huntingdon, and never allowed the

lightest attentions to "her young ladies" without keeping the parents of

her charges fully posted on the subject.

All, therefore, was peace in the village of Eden Valley. Yet I nearly

chanced upon war. My grandmother called aloud to some one as I passed

along the street. For a moment I thought she had caught me, in spite of

the cap which I had pulled down over my eyes and the coat collar I had

pulled up above my ears.

If she got me, I made sure that she would instantly come to the great

house of Marnhoul with all the King's horses and all the King's men--and

so, as it were, spoil the night from which I expected so much.

But it was the slouching figure of Boyd Connoway which had attracted her

attention. As I sped on I heard her asking details as to the amount of

work he had done that day, how he expected to keep his wife and family

through the winter, whether he had split enough kindling wood and

brought in the morning's supply of water--also (most unkindly of all)

who had paid for the tobacco he was smoking.

To these inquiries, all put within the space of half-a-minute, I could

not catch Connoway's replies. Nor did I wait to hear. It was enough for

me to find myself once more safe between the hedges and going as hard as

my feet could carry me in the direction of the gate of Marnhoul.

No sooner was I in the kitchen with the stone floor and the freshly

scoured tin and pewter vessels glinting down from the dresser, than I

heard the voice of Miss Irma asking to be informed if I had come. To

Agnes Anne she called me "your big brother," and I hardly ever remember

being so proud of anything as of that adjective.

Then after my sister had answered, Miss Irma came down the stairs with

her quick light step, not like any I had ever heard. With a trip and a

rustle she came bursting in upon us, so that all suddenly the quaint old

kitchen, with its shining utensils catching the red sunshine through the

low western window and the swaying ivy leaves dappling the floor of

bluish-grey, was glorified by her presence.

She was younger in years than myself, but something of race, of

refinement, of experience, some flavour of an adventurous past and of

strange things seen and known, made her appear half-a-dozen years the

senior of a country boy like me.

"Has he come?" she asked, before ever she came into the kitchen; "is he

afraid?"

"Only of being in a house alone with two girls," said Agnes Anne, "but I

am most afraid of father's blunderbuss which he has brought with him."

"Nonsense," said Miss Irma, determination marked in every line of her

face. "We have a well-armed man on the premises. It is a house fit to

stand a siege. Why, I turned away three score of them with a darning

needle."

"Not but what it is far more serious this time!" she said, a little

sadly. By this time I was reassembling the scattered pieces of "King

George's" armament, while Agnes Anne, in terror of her life, was

searching on the floor and along the passages for things she had not

lost.

As soon as I had got over my first awe of Miss Irma, I asked her

point-blank what was the danger, so that I might know what dispositions

to take.

I had seen the phrase in an old book, thin and tall, which my father

possessed, called _Monro's Expedition_. But Irma bade me help to make

the ground floor of the mansion as strong as possible, and then come

up-stairs to the parlour, where she would tell me "all that it was

necessary for me to know."

I wished she had said "everything"--for, though not curious by nature, I

should have been happy to be confided in by Miss Irma. To my delight, on

going round I found that all the lower windows had been fitted with iron

shutters, and these, though rusty, were in perfectly good condition. In

this task of examination Miss Irma assisted me, and though I would not

let her put a finger to the sharp-edged flaky iron, it was a pleasure to

feel the touch of her skirt, while once she laid a hand on my arm to

guide me to a little dark closet the window of which was protected by a

hingeless plate of iron, held in position by a horizontal bar fitting

into the stonework on either side.

There was not so much to be done above stairs, where the shutters were

of fine solid oak and easily fitted. But I sought out an oriel window of

a tower which commanded the pillared doorway. For I did not forget what

I had seen when the Great House of Marnhoul was besieged by the rabble

of Eden Valley. It was there that the danger was if the house should be

attempted.

But I so arranged it, that whoever attacked the house, I should at least

get one fair chance at them with "King George," our very wide-scattering

blunderbuss.

In the little room in which this window was, we gathered. It made a kind

of watch-tower, for from it one could see both ways--down the avenue to

the main road, and across the policies towards the path that led up from

the Killantringan shore.

I felt that it was high time for me to know against what I was to fight.

Not that I was any way scared. I do not think I thought about that at

all, so pleased was I at being where I was, and specially anxious that

no one should come to help, so as to share with me any of the credit

that was my due from Miss Irma.

Agnes Anne, indeed, was afraid of what she was going to hear. For as yet

she had been told nothing definite. But then she was tenfold more afraid

of "King George"--mostly, I believe, because it had been made a kind of

fetish in our house, and the terrible things that would happen if we

meddled with it continually represented to us by our mother. Finally, we

arranged that "King George" should be set in the angle of the oriel

window, the muzzle pointing to the sky, and that in the pauses of the

tale, I should keep a look-out from the watch-tower.

"It is my brother Louis--Sir Louis Maitland--whom they are seeking!"

Miss Irma made this statement as if she had long faced it, and now found

nothing strange about the matter. But I think both Agnes Anne and I were

greatly astonished, though for different reasons. For my sister had

never imagined that there was any danger worse than the presence of

"King George" in the window corner, and as for me, the hope of helping

to protect Miss Irma herself from unknown peril was enough. I asked for

no better a chance than that.

"We have a cousin," she continued, "Lalor Maitland is his name, who was

in the rebellion, and was outlawed just like my father. He took up the

trade of spying on the poor folk abroad and all who had dealings with

them. He was made governor of the strong castle of Dinant on the Meuse,

deep in the Low Countries. With him my father, who wrongly trusted him

as he trusted everybody, left little Louis. I was with my aunt, the

Abbess of the Ursulines, at the time, or the thing had not befallen. For

from the first I hated Lalor Maitland, knowing that though he appeared

to be kind to us, it was only a pretence.

"He entertained us hospitably enough in a suite of rooms very high up in

the Castle of Dinant above the Meuse river, and came to see us every

day. He was waiting till he should make his peace with the English. Then

he would do away with my brother and----"

She paused, and a kind of shuddering whiteness came across the girl's

face. It was like the flashing of lightning from the east to the west

that my grandmother reads about in her Bible--a sort of shining of

hatred and determination like a footstep set on wet sand. "But no," she

added, "he would not have married me, even if he had kept me shut up for

ever in his Castle of Dinant on the Meuse!"

Then all at once I began very mightily to hate this Lalor Maitland,

Governor of the Castle of Dinant. I resolved to charge "King George" to

the very muzzle, wait till he was within half-a-dozen paces, and--let

him have it. For I made no doubt that it was he who was coming in

person to carry off Miss Irma and Sir Louis back again to his dungeons.

For though Irma had not called them that, I felt sure that she had been

shamefully used. And though I did not proclaim the fact, I knew the name

and address of a willing deliverer. I grew so anxious about the matter

that Agnes Anne three times bade me put down "King George" or I should

be sure to shoot some of them, or, most likely of all, little Louis in

his cot-bed up-stairs.

"However, at last we escaped" (Miss Irma went on), "and I will tell you

how--what I have not told to any here--not even to your good grandmother

or the clergyman. It was through our nurse, a Kirkbean woman and her

name Kate Maxwell, called Mickle Kate o' the Shore. Her father and all

her folk were smugglers, as, I understand, are the most of the farmers

along the Solway side. Some of these she could doubtless have married,

but Kate herself had always looked higher. The son of a farmer over the

hill, from a place called the Boreland of Colvend, had wintered sheep on

her father's lands. Many a sore cold morning (so she said) had they gone

out together to clear the snow from the feeding troughs. I suppose that

was how it began, but in addition the lad had ambition. He learned well

and readily, and after a while he went into a lawyer's office in

Dumfries, while Kate o' the Shore went abroad with the family of a Leith

merchant, to serve at Rotterdam. She wanted to save money for the house

she was going to set up with the lawyer's clerk. So, rather than come

back at the year's end, she took the place which the Governor of Dinant

Castle offered her, and he was no other than our cousin Lalor.

"In a little while Kate of the Shore had grown to hate our cousin. Why,

I cannot tell, for he always bowed to her as to a lady, and indeed

showed her far more kindness than ever he used to us. When we wanted a

little play on the terrace or a sweetcake from the town, we tried at

first to get Kate to ask for us. But afterwards she would not. And she

grew determined to leave the Castle of Dinant as soon as might be,

making her escape and taking us with her. Her Boreland lad, Tam Hislop,

had told her all about the estates and the great house standing empty.

So nothing would do but that Kate o' the Shore would come to this house

with us, where we would take possession, and hold it against all comers.

"'It is very difficult,' said Kate's friend, the Dumfries clerk, 'to put

any one out of his own house.' Indeed he did not think that even the

very Court of Session could do it."

"So during the governor's absence we brought little Louis from Dinant to

Antwerp, where we hid him with some friends of Kate's who are Free

Traders, and ran cargoes to the Isle of Man and the Solway shore. Kind

they were, stout bold men and appeared to hold their lives cheap

enough--also, for that matter, the lives of those who withstood them.

"Many of them were Kirkbean men, near kinsfolk of Kate o' the Shore, and

others from Colvend--Hislops, Hendersons and McKerrows, long rooted in

the place. But when we were in mid-passage, we were chased and almost

taken by a schooner that fired cannon and bade us heave to, but the

Kirkbean men, who had Kate o' the Shore with them, bade our boat carry

on, and engaged the pursuer. We could see the flash of their guns a long

distance, and cries came to us mixed with the thunderclap of the

schooner's guns. The Colvend men would have turned back to help, but

they had received strict orders to put us on shore, whatever might

happen, the which they did at Killantringan.

"After that" (Miss Irma still went on) "I had so much ado to look after

my brother, being fearful to let him out of my hands lest he should be

taken from me, that I only heard the names of a place or two spoken

among them--particularly the Brandy Knowe, a dark hole in a narrow

ravine, under the roots of a great tree, with a burn across which we had

to be carried. I remember the rushing sound of the water in the

blackness of the night, and Louis's voice calling out, as the men

trampled the pebbles, 'Are you there, sister Irma?'

"But long before it was day they had finished stowing their cargo. We

were again on the march and the men took good care of us, leaving us

here according to their orders with plenty of provisions for a

week--also money, all good unclipped silver pieces and English gold.

They bade us not to leave the house on any account, and in case of any

sudden danger to light the fire on the tower head!

"'For the present our duty is done,' said one of them, a kind of chief

or leader who had carried me before him on his own horse, 'but there may

be more and worse yet to do, wherein we of the Free Trade may help you

more than all the power of King George--to whom, however, we are very

good friends, in all that does not concern our business of the private

Over-Seas Traffic'--for so they named their trade of smuggling."

"I would like much to see this beacon," I said; "perhaps we may have to

light it. At any rate it is well to be sure that we have all the

ingredients of the pudding at hand in case of need."

CHAPTER IX

THE EVE OF ST. JOHN

We went up the narrow stair--that is, Miss Irma and I--because, since I

carried my father's blunderbuss, Agnes Anne would not come, but stopped

half-way, where the little Louis lay asleep in his cot-bed. On the top

of the tower, and swinging on a kind of iron tripod bolted into the

battlements, we found an iron basket, like that in which sea-coal is

burned, but wider in the mesh. Then, in the "winnock cupboard" at the

turn of the stair-head, were all the necessaries for a noble blaze--dry

wood properly cut, tow, tar, and a firkin of spirit, with some rancid

butter in a brown jar. There was even a little kindling box of foreign

make, all complete with flint, steel and tinder lying on a shelf,

enclosed in a small bag of felt.

Whoever had placed these things there was a person of no small

experience, and left nothing to chance. It was obvious that such a

beacon lit on the tower of the ancient house of Marnhoul would be seen

far and near over the country.

Who should come to our rescue, supposing us to be beset, was not so

clear. I did not believe that we could depend on the people of the

village. They would, if I knew them, cuddle the closer between their

blankets, while as for Constable Jacky, by that time of night he would

certainly be in no condition to know his right hand from his left.

"And the message fixed to the front door with the knife--of which my

sister told me," I suggested to Miss Irma, "what did it threaten?"

For in spite of her obvious reluctance to tell me even necessary

things, I was resolved to make her speak out. She hesitated, but finally

yielded, when I pointed out that we must decide whether it came from a

friendly or an unfriendly hand.

She handed it to me out of the pocket of her dress, the two of us

standing all the while on the top of the tower, the rusty basket

wheezing in the wind, and her blown hair whipping my cheek in the sharp

breeze from the north.

I may say that just at that moment I was pretty content with myself. I

do not deny that I had fancied this maid and that before, or that some

few things that might almost be called tender had passed between me and

Gerty Greensleeves, chiefly cuffing and pinching of the amicable

Scottish sort. Only I knew for certain that now I was finally and

irrevocably in love--but it was with a star. Or rather, it might just as

well have been, for any hope I had with Miss Irma Maitland, with her

ancient family and her eyes fairly snapping with pride. What could she

ever have to say to the rather stupid son of a village school-master?

But I took the paper, and for an instant Irma's eyes rested on mine with

something different in them from anything I had ever seen there before.

The contemptuous chill was gone. There was even a kind of soft appeal,

which, however, she retracted and even seemed to excuse the next moment.

"Understand," she said, "it is not for myself that I care. It is

for--for my brother, Sir Louis."

"But, Miss Irma, do not forget that I----" The words came bravely, but

halted before the enormity of what I was going to say. So I had perforce

to alter my formation in face of my dear enemy, and only continued

lamely enough, "I had better see what the letter says."

"Yes," she answered shortly, "I suppose that is necessary."

The letter was written on a sheet of common paper, ruled vertically in

red at either side as for a bill of lading. It had simply been folded

once, not sealed in the ordinary way, but thrust through sharply with

the knife which had pinned it to the wood, traversing both folds. The

knife, which I saw afterwards down-stairs, was a small one, with a

broadish blade shaped and pointed like a willow leaf. I had it a good

while in my hand, and I can swear that it had been lately used in

cutting the commonest kind of sailor tobacco.

The message read in these words exactly, which I copied carefully on my

killivine-tablets--

"The first danger is for this night, being the eve of Saint John.

Admit no one excepting those who bring with them friends you can

trust. Fear not to use the signal agreed upon. Help will be near."

Now this seemed to me to be very straightforward. None but a friend to

the children would speak of the beacon so familiarly, yet so

discreetly--"the signal agreed upon." Nor would an enemy advise caution

as to any being admitted to the house.

But Miss Irma had not passed through so many troubles without acquiring

a certain lack of confidence in the fairest pretences. She shook her

head when I ventured to tell her what I thought. She was willing to take

my help, but not my judgment.

The words, "Admit no one, _excepting those who bring with them friends

you can trust_," did not ring true in her ear. And the phrase, "the

signal agreed upon," might possibly show that while the writer made

sure of there being a signal of some kind, he was ignorant of its

nature.

In face of all this there seemed nothing for it but to wait--doors shut,

windows barred, "King George" ready charged, and the stuff for the

beacon knowingly arranged.

And this last I immediately proceeded to set in order. I had had

considerable experience. For during the late French wars we of Eden

Valley, though the most peaceful people in the world, had often been

turned upside down by reports of famous victories. After each of these

every one had to illuminate, if it were only with a tallow dip, on the

penalty of having his windows broken by the mob of loyal, but

stay-at-home patriots. At the same time, all the boys of Eden Valley had

full permission to carry off old barrels and other combustibles from the

houses of the zealous, or even to commandeer them without permission

from the barns and fences of suspected "black-nebs" to raise nearer

heaven the flare of our victorious bonfires.

With all the ingredients laid ready to my hand, it was exceedingly

simple for me to put together such a brazier as could be seen over half

the county. Not the least useful of my improvements was the lengthening

of the chain, so that the whole fire-basket could be hoisted to the top

of the tripod, and so stand clear of the battlements of the tower,

showing over the tree-tops to the very cliffs of Killantringan, and

doubtless far out to sea.

Last of all, before descending, I covered everything over with a thick

mat of tarred cloth, which would keep the fuel dry as tinder even in

case of rain, or the dense dews that pearled down out of the clear

heavens on these short nights of a northern June.

It is a strange thing, watching together, and in the case of young

people it is apt to make curious things hop up in the heart all

unexpectedly. It was so, at least, with myself. As to Miss Irma I cannot

say, and, of course, Agnes Anne does not count, for she sat back in the

shelter of a great cupboard, well out of range of "King George," and

went on with her knitting till she fell asleep.

However, Miss Irma and I sat together in the jutting window, where, as

the night darkened and the curtains of the clouds drew down to meet the

sombre tree-tops, a kind of black despair came over me. Would "King

George" really do any good? Would I prove myself stout and brave when

the moment came? Would the beacon we had prepared really burn, and,

supposing it did, would any one see it, drowned in woods as we were, and

far from all folk, except the peaceable villagers of Eden Valley?

But I had the grace to keep such thoughts to myself, and if they visited

Miss Irma, she did the like. The crying of the owls made the place of a

strange eeriness, especially sometimes when a bat or other night

creature would come and cling a moment under the leaden pent of the

window.

Such things as these, together with the strain of the waiting on the

unknown, drew us insensibly together--I do not mean Agnes Anne--but just

the two of us who were shut off apart in the window-seat. No, whatever

her faults and shortcomings (too many of them recorded in this book),

Agnes Anne acted the part of a good sister to me that night, and her

peaceful breathing seemed to wall us off from the world.

"Duncan?" queried Miss Irma, repeating my name softly as to herself;

"you are called Duncan, are you not?"

I nodded. "And you?" I asked, though of course I knew well enough.

"Irma Sobieski," she answered. And then, perhaps because everything

inside and out was so still and lonely, she shivered a little, and,

without any reason at all, we moved nearer to each other on the

window-seat--ever so little, but still nearer.

"You may call me Irma, if you like!" she said, very low, after a long

pause.

Just then something brushed the window, going by with a soft _woof_ of

feathers.

"An owl! A big white one--I saw him!" I said. For indeed the bird had

seemed as large as a goose, and appeared alarming enough to people so

strung as we were, with ears and eyes grown almost intolerably acute in

the effort of watching.

"Are you not frightened?" she demanded.

"No, Irma--no, Miss Irma!" I faltered.

"Well, I am," she whispered; "I was not before when the mob came,

because I had to do everything. But now--I am glad that you are here"

(she paused the space of a breath), "you and your sister."

I was glad, too, though not particularly about Agnes Anne.

"How old are you, Duncan?" she asked next.

I gave my age with the usual one year's majoration. It was not a lie,

for my birthday had been the day before. Still, it made Irma thoughtful.

"I did not think you were so much older than your sister," she said

musingly; "why, you are older than I am!"

"Of course I am," I answered, gallantly facing the danger, and

determined to brave it out.

On the spot I resolved to have a private interview with Agnes Anne as

soon as might be, and, after reminding her of my birthday just past,

tell her that in future I was to be referred to as "going on for

twenty"--and that there was no real need to insert the words "going on

for."

Irma Sobieski considered the subject a while longer, and I could see her

eyes turned towards me as if studying me deeply. I wondered what she was

thinking about with a brow so knotted, and I knew instinctively that it

must be something of consequence, because it made her forget the letter

nailed to the door, and the warning which might veil a threat. She fixed

me so long that her eyes seemed to glow out of the pale face which made

an oval patch against the darkness of the trees. Irma's face was only

starlit, but her eyes shone by their own light.

"Yes, I will trust you," she said at last. "I saw you the day when the

mob came. You were ashamed, and would have helped me if you could. Even

then I liked your face. I did not forget you, and when Agnes Anne spoke

of her brother who was afraid of nothing, I was happy that you should

come. I wanted you to come."

The words made my heart leap, but the next moment I knew that I was a

fool, and might have known better. This was no Gerty Gower, to put her

hand on your arm unasked, and let her face say what her lips had not the

words to utter.

"I want a friend," she said; "I need a friend--a big brother--nothing

else, remember. If you think I want to be made love to, you are

mistaken. And, if you do, there will be an end. You cannot help me that

way. I have no use for what people call love. But I have a mission, and

that mission is my brother, Sir Louis. If you will consent to help me, I

shall love you as I love him, and you--can care about me--as you care

about Agnes Anne!"

Now I did not see what was the use of bringing Agnes Anne into the

business. At home she and I were quarrelling about half our time. But

since it was to be that or nothing, of course I was not such a fool as

to choose the nothing.

All the same, after the promising beginning, I was enormously

disappointed, and if only it had been lighter, doubtless my chagrin

would have showed on my face. It seemed to me (not knowing) the

death-blow to all my hopes. I did not then understand that in all the

unending and necessarily eternal game of chess, which men and women play

one against the other, there is no better opening than this.

But I was still crassly ignorant, intensely disappointed. I even swore

that I would not have given a brass farthing to be "cared about" by Irma

as I myself did about Agnes Anne.

Dimly, however, I did feel, even then, that there was a fallacy

somewhere. And that, however much human beings with youthful hearts and

answering eyes may pretend they are brother and sister, there is

something deep within them that moves the Previous Question--as we are

used to say in the Eden Valley Debating Parliament, which Mr. Oglethorpe

and my father have organized on the model of that in the _Gentleman's

Magazine_.

But Irma, at least, had no such fear. She had, she believed, solved for

ever a difficult and troublesome question, and, on easy terms, provided

herself with a new relative, useful, safe and insured against danger by

fire. Perhaps the underwriters of the city would not have taken the

latter risk, but at that moment it seemed a slight one to Irma Sobieski.

At any rate, to seal the new alliance, in all sisterly freedom she gave

me her hand, and did not appear to notice how long I kept it in the

darkness. This was certainly a considerable set-off against the feeling

of loneliness, and, if not quite content, I was at least more so. I

wondered, among other things, if Irma's heart kept knocking in a choking

kind of way against the bottom of her throat.

At least mine did, and I had never, to my knowledge, felt just so about

Agnes Anne. Indeed, I don't think I had ever held Agnes Anne's hand so

long in my life, except to pick a thorn out of it with a needle, or to

point out how disgracefully grubby it was.

CHAPTER X

THE CROWBAR IN THE WOOD

We sat so long that I grew hungry. And then forethought was rewarded.

For as I well knew, Agnes Anne had much ado to keep the house supplied

(and the larder too often bare with all her trying!), I had done some

trifle of providing on my own account. I had a flask of milk in my

pouch--the big one in the skirt of the coat that I always wore when

taking a walk in the General's plantations. Cakes, too, and well-risen

scones cut and with butter between them, most refreshing. I gave first

of all to Irma, and at the sound of the eating and drinking Agnes Anne

awakened and came forward. So I handed her some, but with my foot

cautioned her not to take too much, because it was certain that she

would by no means do her share of the fighting.

Both were my sisters. We had agreed upon that. But then some roses smell

sweeter than others, though all are called by the same name.

We had just finished partaking of the food (and great good it did us)

when Agnes Anne heard a sound that sent her suddenly back to her corner

with a face as white as a linen clout. She was always quicker of hearing

than I, but certain it is that after a while I did hear something like

the trampling of horses, and especially, repeated more than once, the

sharp jingle which the head of a caparisoned horse makes when, wearied

of waiting, it casts it up suddenly.

_They were coming._

We said the words, looking at each other, and I suppose each one of us

felt the same--that we were a lot of poor weak children, in our folly

fighting against men. At least this is how I took it, and a sick

disdain of self for being no stronger rose in my throat. A moment and it

had passed. For I took "King George" in hand, and bidding Irma see that

little Louis was sleeping, I ran up the stairs to the open tower-top.

Here I had thought to be alone, but there before me, crouched behind the

ramparts and looking out upon a dim glade which led down towards the

landing-place at Killantringan, was Agnes Anne. In answer to my question

as to what she was doing there, she answered at first that she could see

in the dark better than I, and when I denied this she said that surely I

did not think she was going to be left down there alone, nearest to the

assailants if they should force a passage!

One should never encourage one's real sister in the belief that she can

ever by any chance do right. So I said at once that whether she was

behind the door or sitting on the weathercock at Marnhoul Tower would

make no difference if the people were enemies and once got in.

"Hush!" she said. "What is that I hear now?"

And from away down the glade came slow and steady blows like those which

a man might make as he lifts his axe and smites into the butt. There was

a sort of reverberation, too, as if the tree were hollow. But that might

only be the effect of the night, the stillness, and the heavy covert of

great woods which lay like a big green blanket all about us, and tossed

every sound back to us like a wall at ball-play.

"Oh, if we could only see what they were doing--who they are?" I

groaned. "I could go out quite safely by the door in the tower, but then

who would fire off 'King George'?"

"Toc! Toc!" came the sounds. And then a pause as if the woodsman had

straightened himself up and was wiping his brow. The timing of the

strokes was very slow. Probably, therefore, the labour itself was

fatiguing. Sometimes, too, the axe fell with a different swing, as if

other hands grasped it, but always with the same dull thudding and

irritating slowness.

Then Agnes Anne made an astonishing proposition.

"See here, Duncan," she whispered, "let _me_ out by the little postern

door at the foot of the tower. Miss Irma can watch behind it to let me

in if I come running back, and you stay on the top ready with 'King

George.' I will find out for you everything you want to know." And I got

ready to say, brother-like, "Agnes Anne, you are a fool--your legs would

give way under you in the first hundred yards."

But somehow she saw (or felt) the speech that was coming, and cut me

short.

"No, I wouldn't either," she said hurriedly and quite boldly. "You think

that because I hate that great thing there filled with powder and slugs

(which even you can't tell when it will go off, or what harm it will do

when it does) that I am a coward. I am no more frightened than you are

yourself--perhaps less. Who was the best tracker when we played at

Indians and colonists, I should like to know? Who could go most quietly

through the wood? Or run the quickest? Just me, Agnes Anne MacAlpine!"

Well, I had to admit it. These things were true. But then they had

little to do with courage. This was serious. It was taking one's life in

one's hand.

"And pray what are we doing here and now?" snapped Agnes Anne. "If they

are strong enough to break in one of the doors, or get through one of

the windows, what can we do? Till we know what is coming against us, we

are only going from one blunder to another!"

Now this was most astonishing of our Agnes Anne. So I told her that I

had known that Irma was plucky, but not her. And she only said, very

shortly, "Better come and see!"

So we went down and told Irma. At first she was all against opening any

door, even for a moment, on any account. The strength of these defences

was our only protection. She would rather do anything than endanger

that. But we made her listen to the slow thud of the axe out in the

wood, and even as we looked the figure of a man passed across the glade,

black against the greyish-green of the grass, on which a thick rise of

dew was catching the starlight.

This figure wrapped in a sea-cloak, with head bent forward, passing

across the pale glimmer of the glade, sufficed to alter the mind of

Irma. She agreed in a moment, and locking the door of little Louis's

room, she declared herself willing to keep watch behind the little

postern door of the tower, ready to let Agnes Anne in again, on the

understanding that I should be prepared from the open window above to

deal with any pursuer.

I admit that in this I was persuaded against my judgment. For I felt

certain that though Agnes Anne could move with perfect stillness through

woods, and was a fleet runner, her nerve would certainly fail her when

it came to a real danger. And so great was the sympathy of my

imagination that I seemed already to feel the pursuer gaining at every

stride, the muscles of my limbs failing beneath me and refusing to carry

me farther, just as they do in a dream.

But Agnes Anne was serious and determined, and in the end had to have

her way. I can see the reason now. She knew exactly what she meant to

do, which neither Irma nor I did--though of course both of us far

braver.

We got the door open quite silently--for it was the one Irma had used

in her few and brief outgates. Then, shrouded in her school cloak of

grey, and clad, I mean, in but little else, Agnes flitted out as silent

as a shadow along a wall.

But oh, the agony I suffered to think what my father, and still more my

grandmother, would say to me because I had let my sister expose herself

on such an errand. Twenty times I was on the point of sallying forth

after her. Twenty times the sight of the pale face of Irma waiting there

stopped me, and the thought that I was the only protector of the two

poor things in that great house. Also after all Agnes Anne had gone of

her own accord.

All the same I shivered as I kneeled by the window above with the wide

muzzle of "King George" pointing down the path which led from the glade.

Every moment I expected to hear the air rent with a hideous scream, and

"King George" wobbled in my hands as I thought of Agnes Anne lying slain

in the glow-worm shining of that abominable glade, with that across her

white neck for which my conscience and my grandmother would reproach me

as long as I (and she) lived. One thing comforted me during that weary

waiting. The hollow thudding as of axe on wood never ceased for a

moment. So from that I gathered (and was blithe to believe) that the

alarm had not been given, and that wherever Agnes Anne was, she herself

was still undiscovered.

My eyes were so glued to that misty glade that presently I got a great

surprise. "There she is!" cried Irma, looking round the door, and I saw

a figure flit out of the dusk of the copse-covert within two yards of

the postern door. The next moment, without advertisement or the least

fuss, Agnes Anne was within. I heard the sliding of bolts, the hum of

talk, and then the patter of returning feet on the stair.

CHAPTER XI

AGNES ANNE'S EXPERIENCES AS A SPY

"Well, at first I did not think much about anything" (said Agnes Anne),

"except keeping quiet and doing what Duncan did not believe I could do.

But I knew the wood. It was not so dark as one would think, and once out

of the echo of the house walls I could hear far better. I leaned against

a larch, holding on to the trunk and counting the sticky rosettes on its

trailers to keep me from thinking while I listened. Twice I thought I

had made out exactly from which direction the sound came, and twice I

found I was mistaken. But the third time I followed the ditch under the

sunk fence till I came to the mound which is shaped like a green hat at

the end next the house. The thudding came from there--I was sure of it.

When I could hear men talking, I was (and I am not saying it to put

Duncan in the wrong) more glad than afraid.

"The bottom of the ditch was full of all sorts of underbrush--hazel and

birch roots mostly--growing pretty close as I found when once I got

there, but rustling horribly while I was getting settled. However, there

was nothing for it, if I wanted to find out anything, but to go on. So

on I went. I was close to the mound now, and could hear the voices.

"'Quiet there a moment!' said some one, 'I'll swear I heard a noise in

the ditch!'

"And as I crouched something like a blade of a sword or maybe a pike

came high above me stabbing this way and that. Twigs and leaves pattered

down, but I was safe behind the stump of a fallen tree. Presently the

steel thing I had seen glinting struck the dead and sodden wood of the

tree-trunk, and snapped with a sharp tang like a fiddle-string--a

hayfork it may have been, or one of the long thin swords such as are

hung up in the hall.

"But another and deeper voice--like that of a man somewhat out of

breath, said gruffly, 'Better get the job done! 'Tis only a fox or a

rabbit--what else would be out here at this hour?'

"And then, with the noise of spitting on the hands, the sound of the

heavy tool began again. It had a ring in it like steel on stone. I think

they had been chopping something with a pickaxe and had got through. For

now the clink was quite different, though that again might be because I

was nearer.

"'Have you found the passage? Surely it is long in showing?'

"That was the first voice again, the better educated one, I take it. He

spoke like a gentleman, like the General or even the Doctor himself,

though there was much rudeness in the voice of the other when he

answered him.

"'D'ye think I am breaking my back over this stone-door for fun?'

growled the man in panting gasps. 'If I imagined you were any hand at a

tool, you should have a chance at this one quick enough!'

"'Steady, Dick!' said the first, always in his pleasant tone, 'it can't

be far away at the farthest now!'

"'Hang it, it may not be there at all. Did you ever hear of a mouldy old

castle but had its tale about a secret passage? And did anybody ever see

one? Better make the woman speak, I tell you!'

"'Well,' argued the first suavely, 'it may come to that, of course. But

let us give this a good trial first. To it, Dick--to it!'

"'Aye, "To it, Dick--to it!" And your own arm up to the elbow in your

blessed pocket,' he grunted, and I could hear him set to work again with

an angry snarl. 'If this doesn't fetch it--well--there's always the

woman!'

"'Aye--but it _will_ do it this time,' said the man with the soft voice.

'I hear by the clink of the crow that you are nearly through. My uncle

used often to tell me about this. The big green mound is the ice-house

of Marnhoul. It was his father that made it, and the passage also to

connect with the cellar. See where it drains sideways into that ditch.

That is what makes the green stuff grow so rank about there!'

"Between the noise of the heavy crowbar and the dispute, I ventured to

edge a bit closer, so that at last I could make out the two men, and

beyond them something that looked like a figure of a woman lying under a

cloak. But all was under the dimness of the stars and the twinkling dew,

so that I could see nothing clearly.

"But what I had heard was enough, for in the middle of the worker's

gasping and cursing there came a sudden crash and a jingle.

"'She's through--I told you so. Uncle Edward was right!' cried the first

and taller man, while the other only stared at the sudden disappearance

of his tool, and stood looking blankly at his own empty hands.

"'What's to be done now?' said the tall man.

"'Lever it up with the nose of the pick!' growled the short thick man;

'here, you--hang on to that!'

"And then I knew that the sooner Duncan and 'King George' were down in

the cellar of Marnhoul House, the better it would be for our lives."

* * * * *

When Agnes Anne finished we sat a moment agape. But very evidently there

was no time to be lost. They would be among us before we knew it, if

once they got down into the passage. We tried to find out from Irma

where the cellar was, but she was sunk in terrible thoughts, and for a

long while she could say nothing but "Lalor Maitland--it is Lalor

Maitland, come to kill my poor Louis!"

And indeed it was difficult to get her aroused sufficiently to help us.

Left to herself I do not doubt that she would have gone up-stairs and

fled with the child in her arms in the hope of hiding him in the wood.

At last we got it out of her that the keys of the cellar were in the

great cupboard behind the door. She directed us to a double flight of

broad stairs. Irma had only looked into the cellar when she first came,

and had found it rifled, the barrels dry and gaping, full of dust,

dry-rot and the smell of decay.

But she too had heard her father tell of the passage to the ice-house,

and how he and his brothers had used it for their escapades when the

house was locked up and the keys taken to their father's room.

We went down--I leading with "King George" under my arm and the two

girls following. But on the stairway a sudden terror leaped upon Irma.

While we were all down in the cellar, might not Lalor and his companion

enter by the front door, or by some unguarded window. So she turned and

ran back to the little boy's room to defend him with an old pistol I had

found on the wall and loaded for her with powder and ball.

Then Agnes Anne and I made our way into the cellar. We had taken with

us the lantern, which we had hitherto kept covered, lest by the moving

of the light about the house we might be suspected of being on our

guard.

Hastily I made the tour of the great cellar. The back of the place was

full of the _debris_ of ancient barrels, some intact, some with gaping

sides, many held together with no more than a single hoop. But packed

together in one corner and occupying a place about one third of the

whole area of the floor was something very different. Tarpaulined,

fastened together by ropes, and guarded from damp by planks laid below

them, were some hundreds of kegs and packages--all, so far as I could

see, marked with curious signs, and in some cases the names of places.

One I remember, "Sallet Ooil--Apuglia," gave me a sense of such distance

and strangeness, that for a moment I seemed to be travelling in strange

countries and seeing curious sights, rather than going down to risk my

life in Miss Irma's quarrel with men I had never seen.

It was very evident that there could be but one place where the passage

Irma had spoken of (on her father's information) could debouch upon the

great cellar of Marnhoul. In the angle behind the mass of kegs was an

open space of some yards square, so clean that it looked as if it had

been recently swept.

Beyond this again and quite in the corner, there was a step or two

downwards, as if it were into the bowels of the earth. This was stopped

with a door of stone accurately arranged and fitted with uncommon skill.

And I could see at a glance that it was probably one of the same kind

that the men whom Agnes Anne had seen were engaged in bursting by stroke

of crow. I understood more than that. For there was all the winter in

Eden Valley scarce any other subject of talk than the Free Trade (which

is to say, plainly, smuggling), and concerning the various "ventures" or

boats and crews attached to some famous leader engaged in it.

There was, in fact, no particular moral wrong attaching to the business

in Eden Valley or along the Solway shore high and low--rather a sort of

piety, since the common folk remembered that the excise had first been

instituted by that perjured persecutor of the Church, Charles II. Even

the Doctor, though he denounced the practice from the pulpit in

befitting words, did so chiefly on the ground that the attractions of

Free Trade, its dangers even, carried so many promising young men forth

of the parish, and a goodly proportion of them to return no more.

But for all that, I never heard that he refused to partake of the anker

of Guernsey which his lady found by chance in the milk-house among the

creaming-pans, or by the tombstones of his predecessors in the

"Ministers' Corner" of the kirkyard.

I looked at the means of defence, and hidden among the packages at the

back I found two good muskets and one or two very worn ones--yet all

bearing the marks of recent attention. So, since the smuggled casks

formed a kind of breastwork right round the steps--up from the passage

that was blocked by the stone door--it came into my head that I could

there set up a kind of battery and run from one to the other of them,

firing--that is, if the worst came to the worst and the passage were

forced. So, having plenty of powder and shot and the wrappings of the

lace packages making excellent wads, I set about loading all the

muskets. I knew that Agnes Anne would be afraid of what I was doing,

having had a horror of firearms ever since, as a child, she had seen

Florrie, our old dun cow, shot dead by Boyd Connoway to be our "mart" of

the year, and salted down for the winter's food in the big beef barrel.

Agnes Anne would never be induced to eat a bit of Florrie, though indeed

she was very good and sweet, because forsooth she had been used to milk

her and give her handfuls of fresh grass. Since then she had never

forgiven Boyd Connoway, and had never been able to look upon a gun with

any complaisance.

Yet when I told her to stand back and keep away from the powder horn and

the lantern (for it is none of the easiest to charge strange pieces in a

dark cellar) she said that she would stand by "King George" while I was

at hand--yes, and fire him off, too, if need were. Only I must show her

how to pull the trigger, and also adjust the muzzle so as to bear on the

steps by which the villains would come up!

This I relate to show how (for the time being) Agnes Anne was worked

upon. For, as all have seen, she was naturally of a very timorsome and

quavering disposition. At any rate I did get the muskets, all five of

them, loaded, and set in position with their noses cocked over the

squared bulwarks of Mechlin and Vallenceens, of Strasburg yarn, and

Italian silver-gilt wire.

And I can tell you they looked imposing in the light of the lantern,

though I was more than a little doubtful about some of them going off

without blowing themselves up. But it was no time to cavil about small

matters like that, and I said nothing about this to Agnes Anne, who, for

her part, continued to glance along the barrel of "King George" at the

stone door with the fixity of my father viewing a star through his large

brass spy-glass. Only Agnes Anne, being unable to keep one eye shut and

the other open, had to hold the lid of the unoccupied organ hard down

with her left hand, as if it too were about to bounce out on us like the

two men she had seen in the ice-house mound by the edge of the sunk

fence.

We waited a good while with the light of the lamp smothered--all, that

is, but barely sufficient to give air to the flame. And I tell you our

hearts were gigotting rarely. Even Agnes Anne had taken a sudden liking

to "King George," and would not let him go as I proposed to her, now

that all the other muskets were loaded and ready.

"You would do better service with the lantern," I told her, "you could

hold it up to let us see them better."

But she answered that the lantern could take care of itself. She was

going to do some of the real fighting, and so I should not scorn her any

more. But I knew very well that it was only a kind of hysteria and would

all go off at the dangerous moment. Down she would go on the floor like

a bundle of wet rags!

However, to encourage Agnes Anne (as one must do to a girl), I said that

she was not to fire till she saw the white of their eyes. I remembered

that my father, in speaking of some battle or other, told how the

general had given his men that order, so that they might not miss. I

thought it very fine.

But Agnes Anne said promptly that she would not wait for the white of

anybody's eyes. She would fire and run for it as soon as she saw their

ugly heads coming up out of the ground. This shows how little you can do

with a girl, even if she have occasional fits of bravery. And I do not

deny that Agnes Anne had, though not naturally brave like myself and

Miss Irma.

It was anywhere between five minutes and a century before we heard the

first stroke of the crow behind the barricade. It sounded dull and

painful, as if inside of one's head. At first we heard no talking such

as Agnes Anne had described at the entrance of the ice-house.

Also, as they had been a good while on the way; I believe that they had

found other difficulties which they had not counted upon in traversing

the passage. But they were very near now, for presently, after perhaps

twenty strokes we could hear the striker sending out his breath with a

"_Har_" of effort each time he drove his crow home.

It was very dark in the cellar, for we had covered the lamp more

carefully and almost ceased to breathe. But we saw through certain

chinks that our assailants had a light of some sort with them. We could

discern a faint glimmering all round the upper portion of the stone, and

stray rays also pierced at various places elsewhere.

The long line of light at the top suddenly split and seemed to break

open in the middle. There came a fierce "_Hech_" from the assailant, and

the point of his crowbar showed, slid, and was as sharply recovered.

Next moment it came again.

"Lever it!" cried the gruff voice, "if you have the backbone of a

windlestraw, lever!"

And after a short, hard-breathing struggle, the stone door fell inwards,

the aperture was filled with intense light, dazzling, as it appeared to

us--and in the midst we saw two fierce and set faces peering into the

dark of the cellar.

CHAPTER XII

THE FIGHT IN THE DARK

One of the peering faces was hot and angry, bearded too, which few then

used to do except such as followed the sea. The other was dark and

beaked like a hawk, so that the shadow of an aquiline nose fell on the

man's chin as he held the lantern high above his head.

At first we could only see them to about the middle of the breast, as

for a little space of time they stood thus, hearkening with their heads

thrust forward.

"Not a ratton--forward there, Dick!" said the man behind, and the man

with the bushy beard advanced, rising as he did so till I could see the

ties of tarry cord with which he looped up his corduroy small-clothes.

Now it was high time to act. The game had been played far enough.

"Hold there--stand!" I cried. "Not a step further or we fire!"

I suppose my voice was echoed and fortified by the hollow vault.

Certainly in my own ears it roared like the sound of many waters. At any

rate the men stood, dumb-stricken, the tarry sailorly man a little in

front with his mouth open and his yellow dog-teeth gleaming. The other,

he who had given the orders, held the lantern higher in the air almost

against the stones of the vault, so as to see over the barricade of

boxes and barrels.

"'Tis no more than the----" he was beginning. But he never got the

sentence completed. For I took good aim from a rest upon a package of

cloth, and let fly with the best of the muskets--but at the clear lowe

of the lantern, not at the man's face, as I had at first intended.

Somehow, a kind of pity came over me. I did not want to slay such men,

who, taken in their iniquity, must go right to their accounts. But the

lantern was hit clean, and the glass went jingling to the ground in a

hundred fragments.

I judge also that some of the slugs must have strayed a little, for out

of the darkness came curses and the voice of the commander crying on

Dick to get back--that they were too strong for only two men. But the

sailor man advanced till I could hear him actually pulling himself over

the breastwork, gasping (or, as we say, "pech-"ing) with the effort.

Then I ran along my battery, and directing the next two of the old

muskets to the arched roof, I fired them off, bringing down with a crash

handfuls of rough lime and small bits of stone, mingled no doubt with

the ricocheted bullets themselves. At any rate our tarry Galligaskins

soon had enough of it. He turned and made good his retreat towards the

stairs up which he had forced his way.

Then Agnes Anne, who had no chivalrous ideas of sparing anybody who came

assaulting the house of her friends, pulled the trigger of "King

George," and in a moment all lesser sounds were drowned in a roar loud

as of a piece of ordnance.

The blunderbuss had been trained on the opening with some care, and it

was lucky for the men that they happened to be in retreat, and so

presenting their backs at the time--lucky, also, that only buckshot had

been used instead of the bullets and slugs with which the other guns

were loaded. But even so it was enough. She was always careless and

scattery, our old "King George." And from the marks on the lintels

afterwards she had sprinkled her charge pretty freely. Also there were

tokens, besides the yells and imprecations of the assailants and the

threats of Galligaskins to come back and do for us, that both of them

(as Constable Jacky would have said) "carried off concealed about their

persons an indictable quantity of my father's good lead drops."

So far, good. Better than good, indeed--better than we had the least

reason to expect, all owing to my presence of mind, and the fortunate

nervousness of Agnes Anne--which, however, in the case under review,

Providence directed to a wise and good end. I was for running

immediately back up the stairs to put the mind of Miss Irma at rest, but

Agnes Anne, with that stubbornness which she will often manifest

throughout this history, withstood me.

"What is it now?" I asked her, somewhat impatiently, I am bound to

admit. For I was all in a sweat to tell Irma about my victory, and how I

fought--and also, of course, about Agnes Anne pulling the trigger of

"King George" at random in the dark.

"This is the matter," said she, "Irma can wait. But if we do not improve

our victory, they will be back again with a whole army of men before we

can wink."

"Well," I answered, "I will load the guns first and then go up!"

"Loading the guns is good," said Agnes Anne. "But before that we must

blind up this hole by which they climbed in. We will give them something

more difficult to break through in this narrow passage than a stone door

which they can make holes in with a crowbar!"

And I caught at the idea in a moment, wondering how I had not thought of

it myself. But of course, though I did not actually suggest it, Agnes

Anne could never have carried it through without me.

We set about the work immediately. I took the big stone they had

loosened with their tools and tumbled it down the well of the stairway,

where, after rebounding once, it stuck at the turn and made a good

foundation for the barrels, boxes and packages we threw down till the

whole space was choke full, and then I danced on the top and defied the

lantern-man and Dick to get through in a week.

"_Now_ go and tell your Irma!" said Agnes Anne, and I went, while she

stopped behind with the lantern and a gun to watch if anything should be

attempted against the cellar.

But I knew right well that no such thing was possible. Nothing short of

such a charge of gunpowder as would rive the whole house of Marnhoul

asunder would suffice to clear the staircase of the packing I had given

it. So Agnes Anne might just as well have come her ways up-stairs with

me. Still, I do not deny that it was thoughtful of her; Agnes Anne meant

well.

Irma had heard the firing, and I found her with her little brother in

her arms, sitting by the window of the parlour overlooking the pilasters

of the front door. She held little Louis wrapped in a blanket, and kept

both herself and him out of sight as much as possible behind the

curtain. But she had the horse pistol I had given her on the ledge of

the sill close at her hand.

She listened to my tale with a white intensity which was very pitiful.

Her eyes seemed so big that they almost overran her face, and there were

little sparks of light like fairy candles lit at the bottom of each.

"Lalor Maitland--it was no other man!" she said in an awed voice. "And

now he is wounded he will be furious. He has many men always in his

power. For he can make or mar a man in the Low Countries, and even bad

men will do much for his favour. He will gather to him all who are

waiting. They will be here immediately and burst in the doors. Oh, what

shall we do? My poor, poor Louis!"

"There is the woman whom Agnes Anne saw," I said. "Can you guess what

she has to do with it? They said they would try her if they did not

succeed."

"Why not light the beacon now?" said a voice from the door. It was Agnes

Anne, who, being left to herself, the thought had come to her in the

dark of the cellar, and had run up to propose it. For me, I was too much

occupied with Irma, and I am sure that Irma was far too troubled

concerning her brother to think about the beacon. Yet it was the obvious

thing to do, and if I had had a moment to spare I would have thought of

it myself. So Agnes Anne had no great credit, after all, when you come

to look at it rightly.

But the effect of the suggestion on Irma was very remarkable. It was as

if the voice of my sister actually raised her from the place where she

had been listlessly sitting with her brother in her arms. She snatched

the lantern from the hands of Agnes Anne and put little Louis back on

his pillow, bidding him stay there till the time should come for him to

get up.

"Are the bad men all killed, Irma?" he asked.

"We are going to bring the good people to help us!" she cried. And with

that she ran up-stairs, and I after her, in a great pother of haste. For

the candle in her hand was the only bit of fire we had, and I did not

want it blown out if I could help it.

CHAPTER XIII

A WORLD OF INK AND FIRE

The idea of Irma's danger on the open house-top and in the full glare of

the beacon acted on me like a charm--yet people will say that there is

nothing at all in such a relationship as ours. Why, I would not have

been half as much concerned for Agnes Anne! And as a matter of fact, I

had not been so anxious down there behind the barrels and packages in

the cellar, when Lalor Maitland and Galligaskins were coming at us.

Besides which, I knew that Irma, being unused to fire-building, would

only waste the excellent provision of kindling, and perhaps do us out of

our beacon altogether.

So having joined her, it was not long till we had the tarred cloth off,

and, through the interstices of the iron bucket, the little blue and

yellow flames began chirping and chattering. But as I pulled the basket

up to the height of its iron crane, the wind of the night sent the fire

off with a mighty roar. The tops of the nearer trees stood out, every

leaf hard and distinct, but the main body of the woods all about

Marnhoul remained dark and solid, as if you could have walked upon them

without once breaking through.

I stood there watching, with the chain still in my hand, though I had

run the ring into the hoop on the wall. We had been very clever so far,

and I was full of admiration for ourselves. But a bullet whizzing very

near my head, struck the basket with a vicious "scat," doing no harm,

of course, but extending to us an urgent invitation to get out of range,

that was not to be disregarded.

Irma was close beside me, following with her eyes the mounting crackle

of the beacon, the sudden jetting of the tall pale flames that ran

upward into the velvet sky of night. For from a pale and haunting grey

the firmament had all of a sudden turned black and solid. Middle shades

had been ruled out instantly. It was a world of ink and fire.

But that sharp dash of danger cooled admiration in my heart. I caught

Irma by the shoulders and, roughly enough, pulled her down beside me on

the platform behind the stone ramparts. For a moment I think she was

indignant, but the next thankful. For half-a-dozen balls clicked and

whizzed about, passing through the square gaps that went all round the

tower, as if the wall had had a couple of teeth knocked out at regular

distances every here and there.

Very cautiously we crawled to the stair-head, leaving our invisible

enemies cracking away at the fire basket, knocking little cascades of

sparks out of it, indeed, but doing no harm. For the beacon was

thoroughly well alight, and the chain good and strong.

As we descended the ladder I went first so as to help Irma. She was a

little upset, as indeed she might well be. For it was quite evident that

the number of our assailants had singularly increased, and we did not in

the least know whether our signal would do us any good or not.

"It may waken Boyd Connoway," I thought, "but that will be all. He will

come sneaking through the wood to see what is the matter so as to tell

about it, but he never used a weapon more deadly than a jack-knife with

a deer-horn handle."

As Irma's foot slipped on the bottom rung of the ladder, I caught her as

she swayed, and for a moment in that dark place I held her in my hands

like a posy, fresh and sweet smelling, but sacred as if in church. She

said, without drawing herself away, at least not for a moment longer

than she need, "Duncan, you saved my life!"

I had it on my tongue tip to reply, "And my own at the same time, for I

could not live without you!"

When one is young it is natural to talk like that, but my old awe of

Miss Irma preserved me from the mistake. It was too early days for that,

and I only said, "I am glad!" And when we got down there was Agnes Anne,

with her finger on her lip, watching little Sir Louis sleeping. She

whispered to me to know why we had made such a noise firing on the top

of the tower.

"It isn't like down in the cellar," she said, "you came as near as you

can think to wakening him!"

I was so astonished that I could not even tell Agnes Anne that she would

soon find it was not we who had done the firing. The most part of the

guns were in the cellar any way, as she might have remembered. Besides,

what was the use? She had caught that fell disease, which is

baby-worship.

Instead, I posted myself in the window, my body hidden in the red rep

curtain, and only my eyes showing through a slit I made with my knife as

I peered along the barrel of "King George." I had resolved that with an

arm of such short "carry," I would not fire till I had them right

beneath the porch, or at least coming up the steps of the mansion.

It was in my mind that there would be a brutal rush at the door,

perhaps with pickaxes, perhaps with one of the swinging battering-rams I

had read of in the Roman wars, that do such wondrous things when cradled

in the joined hands of many men.

But in this I was much mistaken. The assailants were indeed rascals of

the same tarry, broad-breeched, stringfasted breed as Galligaskins of

the cellar door. But Galligaskins himself I saw not. From which I judge

that Agnes Anne had sorted him to rights with the contents of "King

George," laid ready for her pointing at the top of the steps by which an

enemy must of necessity appear.

But they had a far more powerful weapon than any battering-ram. We saw

them moving about in the faint light of a moon in her last quarter just

risen above the hills--a true moon of the small hours, ruddy as a fox

and of an aspect exceedingly weariful.

Presently there came toward the door two men with a strange and shrouded

figure walking painfully between them, as if upon hobbled feet. I could

see that one of the men was the tall man of the cave, he in whose hand I

had smashed the lantern. I knew him by a wrist that was freshly

bandaged, and also by his voice when he spoke. The other who accompanied

him was a sailor of some superior grade, a boatswain or such, dressed in

good sea cloth, and with a kind of glazed cocked hat upon his head.

It was a very weird business--the veiled woman, the dim skarrow of the

beacon, the foxy old moon sifting an unearthly light between the

branches, everything fallen silent, and our assailants each keeping

carefully to the back of a tree to be out of reach of our muskets.

They came on, the two men leading the woman by the arms till they were

out of the flicker of the flames both outside and under the shadow of

the house.

Then the tall man, whom in my heart I made sure to be Lalor Maitland, as

Irma said, held up his bandaged hand as a man does when he is about to

make a speech and craves attention.

"I have been ill-received," he cried, "in this the house of my

fathers----"

"Because you have striven to enter it as a thief and a robber!" cried

Irma's voice, close beside me. She had passed behind me, slid the bolt

of the window, and was now leaning out, resting upon her elbows and

looking down at the men below. She was apparently quite fearless. The

appearance of her cousin so near seemed somehow to sting her.

"Your brother and yourself are both under my care--I suppose,

Mademoiselle Irma, you will not deny that?"

"We were," Irma answered, in a clear voice; "but then, Lalor Maitland, I

heard what the fate was you were so kindly destining for me after having

killed my brother----"

"And I know who put that foolishness into your head," said Lalor

Maitland; "she regrets it at this moment, and has now come of her own

will to tell you she lied!"

And with a jerk he loosened the apron which, as I now saw, had been

wrapped about the head of the swathed figure. I shall never forget the

face of the woman as I saw it then. The uncertain flicker of the flames

and sparks from our beacon (which, though itself invisible, darkened and

lightened like sheet lightning), the dismal umbery glimmer of the waning

moon, and the pale approach of day over the mountains to the east, made

the face appear almost ghastly. But I was quite unprepared for the

effect which the sight produced upon Irma.

"Kate," she cried, "Kate of the Shore!"

The woman did not reply, though there was an obvious effort to speak--a

straining of the neck muscles and a painful rolling of the eyes.

"Yes," said Lalor calmly, as if he were exhibiting a curiosity, "this is

your friend to whom you owe your escape. She was doubtless to have

received a reward, and in any case we shall give her a fine one. But if

you will return to your protector, and come with me immediately on board

the good ship _Golden Hind_, which in some considerable danger, is

beating off and on between the heads of Killantringen--then I promise

you, you will save the life of our friend Kate here. If not----" (He

waved his hand expressively.)

"You dare not kill her," cried Irma; "in an hour the country will be up,

and you will be hunted like dogs."

"Oh, it is not I," said Lalor calmly, "I do not love the shedding of

blood, and that is why I am here now. But consider those stout fellows

yonder. They are restive at having to wait for their pay, and the loss

of their captain, wounded in aiding me in obtaining my rights in a quiet

and peaceable manner, has by no means soothed them. I advise you,

Mistress Irma, to bring down the boy and let us get on board while there

is yet time. No one in the house shall be harmed. But listen to

Kate--Kate of the Shore. She will speak to you better than I! But first

we must perform a little surgical operation!"

And with that he whipped out a bandanna handkerchief, which had been

knotted and thrust into her mouth in the manner of a gag.

"Now then," he said, "put a pistol to her head, Evans! Now, Kate, you

have told many lies about your master, the late Governor of the fortress

of Dinant. Speak the truth for once in a way. For if you do not tell

these foolish children that they have nothing to fear--nay more, if you

cannot persuade them to quit their foolish conduct and return to their

rightful duty and obedience, it will be my painful duty to ask Evans

there, who does not love you as I do, to--well, you know what will

happen when that pistol goes off!"

But even in such straits Kate of the Shore was not to be frightened.

"You hear me, Miss Irma," she said, "I know this bad man. He is only

seeking to betray you as he betrayed me. Defend your castle. Open not a

window--keep the doors barred. They cannot take the place in the time,

for they have the tide to think of."

"I expected this," said Lalor, with a vaguely pensive air, "it has ever

been my lot to be calumniated, my motives suspected. But I have indeed

deserved other things--especially from you, Irma, whom (though your

senior in years, and during the minority of my ward Sir Louis, the head

of the house), I have always treated with affectionate and, perhaps, too

respectful deference!"

"Miss Irma," cried Kate of the Shore, "take care of that man. He has a

pistol ready. I can see the hilt of it in his pocket. You he will not

harm if he can help it, but if that be your brother whom I see at the

fold of the window-hanging, bid him stand back for his life."

"Drop your pistol, Evans," commanded Lalor Maitland, "this part of the

play is played out. She will not speak, or rather what she says will do

us no good. Women are thrawn contrary things at the best, Evans, as I

dare say you have noticed in your Principality of Wales. But take heed,

you and your precious defenders, I warn you that in an hour the house of

Marnhoul shall be flaming over your heads with a torch that shall bring

out, not your pitiful burghers from their rabbit-holes, but also the men

of half a county.

"Hear me," he raised his voice suddenly to a strident shout, "hear me

all you within the house. Give up the girl and the child to their legal

protectors, and no harm shall befall either life or property. We shall

be on shipboard in half-an-hour. I shall see to it that every man within

the castle is rewarded from the Maitland money that is safe beyond seas,

out of the reach of King George! Of that, at least I made sure, serving

twice seven years for it in the service of a hard master. I offer a

hundred pounds apiece to whoever will deliver the boy and the maid!"

This was a speech which pleased me much, for it showed that from the

stoutness of our defence, and the many guns which had been shot off,

Lalor was under the impression that the house was garrisoned by a proper

force of men--when in truth there was only Miss Irma and me--that is,

not counting Agnes Anne.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WHITE FREE TRADERS

But the country was by no means so craven as Lalor supposed. There were

bold hearts and ready saddles still in Galloway. The signal from the top

of the beacon tower of Marnhoul was seen and understood in half-a-dozen

parishes.

Not that the young fellows who saw the flame connected it with the two

children who had taken refuge in the old place of the Maitlands. In

fact, most knew nothing about their existence. But their alacrity was

connected with quite another matter--the great cargo of dutiable and

undutied goods stored away in the cellars of Marnhoul!

There was stirring, therefore, in remote farms, rattling on doors,

hurried scrambling up and down stable ladders. Young men on the

outskirts of villages might have been seen stealing through gardens,

stumbling among cabbage-stocks and gooseberry bushes as they made their

way by the uncertain flicker of our far-away beacon to the place of

rendezvous.

Herds rising early to "look the hill" gave one glance at the red dance

of the flames over the tree-tops of Marnhoul great wood, and anon ran to

waken their masters.

For in that country every farmer--aye, and most of the lairds, including

a majority of the Justices of the Peace--had a share in the "venture."

Sometimes the value of the cargo brought in by a single run would be

from fifty to seventy thousand pounds. All this great amount of goods

had to be scattered and concealed locally, before it was carried to

Glasgow and Edinburgh over the wildest and most unfrequented tracks.

The officers of the revenue, few and ill-supported, could do little.

Most of them, indeed, accepted the quiet greasing of the palm, and

called off their men to some distant place during the night of a big

run. But even when on the spot and under arms, a cavalcade of a couple

of hundred men could laugh at half-a-dozen preventives, and pass by

defiantly waving their hands and clinking the chains which held the kegs

upon their horses. The bolder cried out invitations to come and drink,

and the good-will of the leaders of the Land Free Traders was even

pushed so far that, if a Surveyor of Customs showed himself pleasantly

amenable, a dozen or more small kegs of second-rate Hollands would be

tipped before his eyes into a convenient bog, so that, if it pleased

him, he could pose before his superiors as having effected an important

capture.

The report which he was wont to edit on these occasions will often

compare with the higher fiction--as followeth:--

"Supervisor Henry Baskett, in charge of the Lower Solway district,

reports as follows under date June 30th: Found a strong body of

smugglers marching between the wild mountains called Ben Tuthor and

Blew Hills. They were of the number of three hundred, all well

mounted and armed, desperate men, evidently not of this district,

but, from their talk and accoutrement, from the Upper Ward of

Lanerickshire. Followed them carefully to note their dispositions

and discover a favourable place for attack. I had only four men with

me, whereof one a boy, being all the force under my command.

Nevertheless, at a place called the Corse of Slakes I advanced

boldly and summoned them, in the King's name and at the peril of

their lives, to surrender.

"Whereat they turned their guns upon us, each man standing behind

his horse and having his face hidden in a napkin lest he should be

known. But we four and the boy advanced firmly and with such

resolution that the band of three hundred law-breakers broke up

incontinent, and taking to flight this way and that through the

heather, left us under the necessity of pursuing. We pursued that

band which promised the best taking, and I am glad to intimate to

your Excellencies, His Majesty's Commissioners, that we were

successful in putting the said Free Traders to flight, and capturing

twenty-five casks best Hollands, six loads of Vallenceen, etc.,

etc., as per schedule appended to be accounted for by me as your

lordship's commissioners shall direct. In the hope that this will be

noted to our credit on the table of advancement (and in this connect

I may mention the names of the three men, Thomas Coke, Edward Loval,

Timothy Pierce, and the boy Joseph McDougal, whom I recommend as

having done their duty in the face of peril), I have the honour to

sign myself,

"My Lords and Hon. Commissioners of H. M. Excise,

"Your obedient, humble servant,

"Henry Baskett (Supervisor)."

The other view of this transaction I find more concisely expressed in a

memorandum written in an old note-book belonging to my Uncle Tom.

"Baskett held out for forty best French, but we fobbed him off with

twenty-five low-grade Rotterdam--the casks being leaky, and some packs

of goods too long left at Rathan Cave, which is at the back of the

isle, and counted scarce worth the carrying farther. The night fine and

business most successful--thanks to an ever-watchful Providence."

The reader of these family memoirs will perhaps agree with me that, if

any one could do without an ever-watchful Providence troubling itself

about him, that man was my Uncle Tom.

While, therefore, we in the House of Marnhoul were in the wildest

alarm--at least Agnes Anne was--forces which could not possibly be

withstood were mustering to hasten to our assistance. The tarry jackets

of the _Golden Hind_ would doubtless have rushed the front door with a

hurrah, as readily as they would have boarded a prize, but Lalor

Maitland ordered them to bring wood and other inflammable material. At

least, so I judge, for presently I could see them running to and fro

about the edges of the wood. They had now learned the knack of keeping

in shelter most of the way. But I did not feel really afraid till I saw

some of them with kegs of liquor making towards the porch. There they

stove them in, and proceeded to empty the contents on the dry branches

and fuel they had collected. The matter was now beginning to look really

serious. To make things worse, they were evidently digging out the

bottom of our cellar-stair barricade, and if they succeeded in that they

would turn our position and take us in the rear.

So I sent down Agnes Anne (she not being good for much else) to the

cellar to see how things were looking there, bidding her to be careful

of the lantern, and to bring back as many of the five muskets as she

could carry, so that I might keep the fellows in check above.

Agnes Anne came flying back with the worst kind of news. A great flame

of fire was springing up out of the well of the staircase into which we

had tumbled the barrels and boxes. It threatened, she said, to blow us

sky-high, if there were any barrels of powder among the goods left by

the smugglers.

At any rate, the flame was rapidly spreading to the other packages which

had formed our breastwork of defence, and was now like to become our

ruin.

For, once fairly caught, the spirit would flame high as the rigging of

Marnhoul, and we should all be burnt alive, which was most likely what

Lolar Maitland meant by his parting threatening.

"And it is more than likely," Agnes Anne added, "that some of the

barrels burst as we threw them down the stairs, and so, with the liquor

flowing among their feet, the assailants got the idea of thus burning us

out."

At all events something had to be done, and that instantly. So I had

perforce to leave Agnes Anne in charge of "King George" again,

cautioning her not to pull the trigger till she should see the rascals

actually bending to set fire to the pile underneath the porch of the

front door. I also told her not to be frightened, and she promised not

to.

Then I went down to the cellar. The heat there was terrible, and I do

not wonder that Agnes Anne came running back to me. A pillar of blue

flame was rising straight up against the arched roof of the cellar. I

could hear the cries of the men working below in the passage.

"Hook it away--give her air--she will burn ever the brisker and smoke

the land-lubbers out!"

Some few of the boxes in the front tier were already on fire, and still

more were smouldering, but the straightness of the vent up which the

flame was coming, together with the closeness and stillness of the

vault, made the flame mount straight up as in a chimney. I therefore

divined rather than saw what remained for me to do. I leaped over and

began, at the risk of a severe scorching, to throw back all the boxes

and packages which were in danger. It was lucky for me that the

smugglers had piled them pretty high, and so by drawing one or two from

near the foundation, I was fortunate enough to overset the most part of

it in the outward direction.

But the fierceness of the flame was beginning to tell upon the

building-stone of Marnhoul, which was of a friable nature--at least that

with which the vault was arched.

Luckily some old tools had been left in the corner, and it struck me

that if I could dig up enough of the earthen floor or topple over the

mound of earth which had been piled up at the making of the underground

passage, the fire must go out for lack of air; or, better still, would

be turned in the faces of those who were digging away the barrels and

boxes from the bottom of the stair-well.

This, after many attempts and some very painful burns, I succeeded in

doing. The first shovelfuls did not seem to produce much effect. So I

set to work on the large heap of hardened earth in the corner, and was

lucky enough to be able to tumble it bodily upon the top of the column

of fire. Then suddenly the terrible column of blue flame went out, just

as does a Christmas pudding when it is blown upon. And for the same

reason. Both were made of the flames of the French spirit called cognac,

or brandy.

Then I did not mind about my burns, I can assure you. But almost

gleefully I went on heaping mould and dirt upon the boxes in the well of

the staircase, stamping down the earth at the top till it was almost

like the hard-beaten floor of the cellar itself. I left not a crevice

for the least small flame to come up through.

Then I bethought me of what might be going on above, and the flush of my

triumph cooled quickly. For I thought that there was only Agnes Anne,

and who knows what weakness she may not have committed. She would never

have thought, for instance, of such a thing as covering in the flame

with earth to put it out. To tell the truth, I did think very

masterfully of myself at that moment, and perhaps with some cause, for

not one in a thousand would have had the "engine" to do as I had done.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I heard cries from without, which

had been smothered by the deepness of the dungeon in which I had been

labouring to put out the fire. For a moment I thought that by the

failure of Agnes Anne to fire off "King George" at the proper moment,

the door had been forced and we utterly lost. Which seemed the harder to

be borne, that I had just saved all our lives in a way so original and

happy.

But I was wrong. The shouting came not from the wicked crew of the

privateersman, but from the shouting of a vast number of people, most of

them mounted on farm and country horses, with some of finer limb and

better blood, managed by young fellows having the air of laird's sons or

others of some position. None of these had his face bare. But in place

of the black highwayman masks of the followers of Galligaskins, these

wore only a strip of white kerchief across the face, though, as I could

see, more for the form of the thing than from any real apprehension of

danger.

Indeed, in the very forefront of the cavalcade I saw our own two cart

horses, Dapple and Dimple, and the lighter mare Bess, which my

grandfather used for riding to and fro upon his milling business. I had

not the least doubt that my three uncles were bestriding them, though I

never knew that there were any arms about the house except the old

fowling-piece belonging to grandfather, with which on moonlight nights

he killed the hares that came to nibble the plants in his cabbage

garden.

Soon the sailors and their abettors were fleeing in every direction.

But, what took me very much by surprise, there was no firing or cutting

down, though there was a good deal of smiting with the flat of the

sword. And at the entrance of the ice-mound I saw a great many very

scurvy fellows come trickling out, all burned and scorched, to run the

gauntlet of a row of men on foot, who drubbed them soundly with cudgels

before letting them go.

Seeing this, I opened the window and shouted with all my might.

"Apprehend them! They are villains and thieves. They have broken into

this house and tried to kill us all, besides setting fire to the cellar

and everything in it!"

The men without, both those on foot and those on horseback, had been

calm till they heard this, and then, lo! each cavalier dismounted and

all came running to the door, calling on us to open instantly.

"Not to you any more than to the others!" I cried. For, indeed, I saw

not any good reason. It appeared to me, since there was no real

fighting, that the two parties must be in alliance, or, at least, have

an understanding between them.

But Agnes Anne called out, "Nonsense, I see Uncle Aleck and Uncle

Ebenezer. I am going to open the door to them, whatever you say!"

So all in a minute the house of Marnhoul, long so desolate and silent,

wherein such deeds of valour and strategy had recently been wrought,

grew populous with a multitude all eager to win down to the cellar. But

Agnes Anne brought up my three uncles (and another who was with them)

and bade them watch carefully over the safety of Louis and Miss Irma.

(For so I must again call her now that she had, as it were, come to her

own again.)

As for me they carried me down with them, to tell all about the attempt

to burn the goods in the cellar. And angry men they were when they saw

so many webs of fine cloth, so many bolts of Flanders lace, so many kegs

of rare brandy damaged and as good as lost. But when they understood

that, but for my address and quickness, all would have been lost to

them, they made me many compliments. Also an old man with a

silver-hilted sword, who carried himself like some great gentleman, bade

me tell him my _name_, and wrote it down in his note-book, saying that I

was of too good a head and quick a hand to waste on a dominie.

And, indeed, I was of that mind (or something very much like it) myself.

An old haunted house like Marnhoul to defend, a young maid of high

family to rescue (and adopt you as her brother for a reward) did somehow

take the edge off teaching the Rule of Three and explaining the _De

Bello Gallico_ to imps who cannot understand, and would not if they

could.

PART II

CHAPTER XV

MY GRANDMOTHER SPEAKS HER MIND

"There is no use talking" (said my grandmother, as she always did when

she was going to do a great deal of it), "no, listen to me, there is no

use talking! These two young things need a home, and if _we_ don't give

it to them, who will? Stay longer in that great gaol of a house, worse

than any barn, they shall not--exposed day and night to a traffic of sea

rascals, thieves and murderers, _they shall not_----"

"What I want to know is who is to keep them, and what the safer they

will be here?"

It was the voice of my Aunt Jen which interrupted. None else would have

dared--save mayhap my grandfather, who, however, only smiled and was

silent.

"Ne'er you mind that, Janet," cried her mother, "what goes out of our

basket and store will never be missed. And father says the same, be sure

of that!"

My grandfather did say the same, if to smile quietly and approvingly is

to speak. At any rate, in a matter which did not concern him deeply, he

knew a wiser way than to contradict Mistress Mary Lyon. She was quite

capable of keeping him awake two-thirds of the night arguing it out,

without the faintest hope of altering the final result.

"The poor things," mourned my grandmother, "they shall come here and

welcome--that is, till better be. Of course, they might be more grandly

lodged by the rich and the great--gentlefolk in their own station. But,

first of all, they do not offer, and if they did, they are mostly

without experience. To bring up children, trust an old hen who has

clucked over a brood of her own!"

"Safer, too, here," approved my grandfather, nodding his head; "the

tarry breeches will think twice before paying Heathknowes a visit--with

the lads about and the gate shut, and maybe the old dog not quite

toothless yet!"

This, indeed, was the very heart of the matter. Irma and Sir Louis would

be far safer at the house of one William Lyon, guarded by his stout

sons, by his influence over the wildest spirits of the community, in a

house garrisoned by a horde of sleepless sheep-dogs, set in a defensible

square of office-houses, barns, byres, stables, granaries, cart-sheds,

peat-sheds and the rest.

"And when the great arrive to call," said Aunt Jen, with sour insight,

"you, mother, will stop the churning just when the butter is coming to

put on your black lace cap and apron. You will receive the lady of the

manse, and Mrs. General Johnstone, and----"

"And if I do, Jen," cried her mother, "what is that to you?"

"Because I have enough to do as it is," snapped Jen, "without your

butter-making when you are playing the lady down the house!"

Grandmother's black eyes crackled fire. She turned threateningly to her

daughter.

"By my saul, Lady Lyon," she cried, "there is a stick in yon corner that

ye ken, and if you are insolent to your mother I will thrash you

yet--woman-grown as ye are. Ye take upon yourself to say that which none

of your brothers dare set their tongue to!"

And indeed there is little doubt but that Mary Lyon would have kept her

word. So far as speech was concerned, my Aunt Jen was silenced. But she

was a creature faithful to her prejudices, and could express by her

silence and air of injured rectitude more than one less gifted could

have put into a parliamentary oration.

Her very heels on the stone floor of the wide kitchen at Heathknowes,

where all the business of the house was transacted, fell with little

raps of defiance, curt and dry. Her nose in the air told of contempt

louder than any words. She laid down the porridge spurtle like a queen

abdicating her sceptre. She tabled the plates like so many protests,

signed and witnessed. She swept about the house with the glacial chill

which an iceberg spreads about it in temperate seas. Her displeasure

made winter of our content--of all, that is, except Mary Lyon's. She at

least went about her tasks with her usual humming alacrity, turning work

over her shoulder as easy as apple-peeling.

Being naturally lazy myself (except as to the reading of books), I took

a great pleasure in watching grandmother. Aunt Jen would order you to

get some work if she saw you doing nothing--malingering, she called

it--yes, and find it for you too, that is, if Mary Lyon were not in the

house to tell her to mind her own business.

But you might lie round among grandmother's feet for days, and, except

for a stray cuff in passing if she actually walked into you--a cuff

given in the purest spirit of love and good-will, and merely as a

warning of the worse thing that might happen to you if you made her

spill the dinner "sowens"--you might spend your days in reading anything

from the _Arabian Nights_ in Uncle Eben's old tattered edition to the

mighty _Josephus_, all complete with plans and plates--over which on

Sundays my grandfather was wont to compose himself augustly to sleep.

Well, Miss Irma and Sir Louis came to my grandmother's house at

Heathknowes. Yes, this is the correct version. The house of Heathknowes

was Mary Lyon's. The mill in the wood, the farm, the hill

pastures--these might be my grandfather's, also the horses and wagons

generally, but his power--his "say" over anything, stopped at the

threshold of the house, of the byre of cows, at the step of the rumbling

little light cart in which he was privileged to drive my grandmother to

church and market. In these places and relations he became, instead of

the unquestioned master, only as one of ourselves, except that he was

neither cuffed nor threatened with "the stick in the corner." All the

same, this immunity did not do him much good, for many a sound

tongue-lashing did he receive for his sins and shortcomings--indeed, far

more so than all the rest of us. For with us, my grandmother had a short

and easy way.

"I have not time to be arguing with the likes of you!" she would cry.

And upon the word a sound cuff removed us out of her path, and before we

had stopped tingling Mary Lyon had plunged into the next object in hand,

satisfied that she had successfully wrestled with at least one problem.

But with grandfather it was different. He had to be convinced--if

possible, convicted--in any case overborne.

To accomplish this Mary Lyon would put forth all her powers, in spite of

her husband's smiles--or perhaps a good deal because of them. Upon her

excellent authority, he was stated to be the most irritating man betwixt

the Brigend of Dumfries and the Braes of Glenap.

"Oh, man, say what you have to say," she would cry, when reduced to

extremities by the obvious unfairness of his silent mode of controversy,

"but don't sit there girning like a self-satisfied monkey!"

"Mother!" exclaimed Aunt Jen, horrified. For she cherished a secret

tenderness for my grandfather, perhaps because their natures were so

different, "How can you speak so to our father?"

"Wait till you get a man of your ain, Janet," my grandmother would

retort, "then you will have new light as to how it is permitted for a

woman to speak."

With this retort Aunt Jen was well acquainted, and had to be thankful

that it was carried no further, as it often was in the case of any

criticisms as to the management of children. In this case Aunt Jen was

usually invited not to meddle, on the forcible plea that what a score of

old maids knew about rearing a family could be put into a nutshell

without risk of overcrowding.

The room at Heathknowes that was got ready for the children was the one

off the parlour--"down-the-house," as it was called. Here was a little

bed for Miss Irma, her washstand, a chest of drawers, a brush and comb

which Aunt Jen had "found," producing them from under her apron with an

exceedingly guilty air, while continuing to brush the floor with an air

of protest against the whole proceeding.

From the school-house my father sent a hanging bookcase--at least the

thing was done upon my suggestion. Agnes Anne carried it and Uncle Ebie

nailed it up. At any rate, it was got into place among us. The cot of

the child Louis had been arranged in the parlour itself, but at the

first glance Miss Irma turned pale, and I saw it would not do.

"I have always been accustomed to have him with me," she said; "it is

very kind of you to give us such nice rooms--but--would you mind letting

him sleep where I can see him?"

It was Aunt Jen who did the moving without a word, and that, too, with

the severe lines of disapproval very nearly completely ruled off her

face. It was, in fact, better that they should be together. For while

the parlour looked by two small-paned windows across the wide courtyard,

the single casement of the little bedroom opened on the orchard corner

which my grandfather had planted in the first years of his taking

possession.

The house of Heathknowes was of the usual type of large Galloway farm--a

place with some history, the house ancient and roomy, the office houses

built massively in a square, as much for defence as for convenience. You

entered by a heavy gate and you closed it carefully after you. From

without the walls of the quadrangle frowned upon you unbroken from their

eminence, massy and threatening as a fortress. The walls were loopholed

for musketry, and, in places, still bore marks of the long slots through

which the archers had shot their bolts and clothyard shafts in the days

before powder and ball.

Except the single gate, you could go round and round without finding any

place by which an enemy might enter. The outside appearance was

certainly grim, unpromising, inhospitable, and so it seemed to Miss Irma

and Sir Louis as they drove up the loaning from the ford.

But within, everything was different. What a smiling welcome they

received, my grandfather standing with his hat off, my grandmother with

the tears in her motherly vehement eyes, gathering the two wanderers

defiantly to her breast as if daring all the world to come on. Behind a

little (but not much) was Aunt Jen, asserting her position and rights in

the house. She did not seem to see Miss Irma, but to make up, she never

took her eyes off the little boy for a moment.

Then my uncles were ranged awkwardly, their hands lonesome for the grip

of the plough, the driving reins, or the water-lever at the mill in the

woods.

Uncle Rob, our dandy, had changed his coat and put on a new neckcloth,

an act which, as all who know a Scots farm town will understand, cost

him a multitude of flouts, jeers and upcasting from his peers.

I was also there, not indeed to welcome them, but because I had

accompanied the party from the house of Marnhoul. The White Free Traders

had established a post there to watch over one of their best

"hidie-holes," even though they had removed all their goods in

expectation of the visit of a troop of horse under Captain Sinclair,

known to have been ordered up from Dumfries to aid the excise

supervisor, as soon as that zealous officer was sure that, the steed

being stolen, it was time to lock the stable door.

But when the dragoons came, there was little for them to do. Ned

Henderson, the General Surveyor of the Customs and head of the district

in all matters of excise, was far too careful a man to allow more to

appear than was "good for the country." He knew that there was hardly a

laird, and not a single farmer or man of substance who had not his

finger in the pie. Indeed, after the crushing national disaster of

Darien, this was the direction which speculation naturally took in

Scotland for more than a hundred years.

In due time, then, the dragoons arrived, greatly to the interest of all

the serving lasses--and some others. There was, of course, a vast deal

of riding about, cantering along by-ways, calling upon this or that

innocent to account for his presence at the back of a dyke or behind a

whin-bush--which he usually did in the most natural and convincing

manner possible.

The woods were searched--the covers drawn. Many birds were disturbed,

but of the crew of the _Golden Hind_, or the land smugglers by whose

arrival the capture and burning of Marnhoul had been prevented, no trace

was found. Even Kate of the Shore's present address was known to but

few, and to these quite privately. There was no doubt of her

faithfulness. That had been proven, but she knew too much. There were

questions which, even unanswered, might raise others.

Several young men, of good family and connections, thought it prudent to

visit friends at a distance, and at least one was never seen in the

country more.

One of his Majesty's frigates had been sent for to watch the Solway

ports, much to the disgust of her officers. For not only had they been

expected at the Portsmouth summer station by numerous pretty ladies, but

the navigation between Barnhourie and the Back Shore of Leswalt was as

full of danger as it was entirely without glory. If they were unlucky,

they might be cashiered for losing the ship. If lucky, the revenue men

would claim the captured cargo. If they secured the malefactors they

would sow desolation in a score of respectable families, with the

daughters of which they had danced at Kirkcudbright a week ago.

In Galloway, though a considerable amount of recklessness mingled with

the traffic, and there were occasional roughnesses on the high seas and

about the ports and anchorages of Holland and the Isle of Man, there was

never any of the cruelty associated with smuggling along the south coast

of England. The smugglers of Sussex killed the informer Chater with

blows of their whips. A yet darker tragedy enacted farther west,

brought half-a-dozen to a well-deserved scaffold. But, save for the

losses in fair fight occasioned by the intemperate zeal of some new

broom of a supervisor anxious for distinction, the history of Galloway

smuggling had, up to that time, never been stained with serious crime.

Meantime the two Maitlands, Sir Louis and Miss Irma, were safely housed

within the defenced place of Heathknowes, guarded by William Lyon and

his three stout sons, and mothered by all the hidden tenderness of my

grandmother's big, imperious, volcanic heart.

Only my Aunt Jen watched jealously with a half-satisfied air and took

counsel with herself as to what the end of these things might be.

CHAPTER XVI

CASTLE CONNOWAY

Meanwhile Boyd Connoway was in straits. Torn between two emotions, he

was pleased for once to have found a means of earning his living and

that of his family--especially the latter. For his own living was like

that of the crows, "got round the country somewhere!" But with the

lightest and most kindly heart in the world, Boyd Connoway found himself

in trouble owing to the very means of opulence which had brought content

to his house.

On going home on the night after the great attack on Marnhoul, weary of

directing affairs, misleading the dragoons, whispering specious theories

into the ear of the commanding officer and his aides, he had been met at

the outer gate of his cabin by a fact that overturned all his notions of

domestic economy. Ephraim, precious Ephraim, the Connoway family pig,

had been turned out of doors and was now grunting disconsolately,

thrusting a ringed nose through the bars of Paradise. Now Boyd knew that

his wife set great store by Ephraim. Indeed, he had frequently been

compared, to his disadvantage, with Ephraim and his predecessors in the

narrow way of pigs. Ephraim was of service. What would the "poor

childer," what would Bridget herself do without Ephraim? Bridget was not

quite sure whether she kept Ephraim or whether Ephraim kept her. At any

rate it was not to Boyd Connoway that she and her offspring were anyways

indebted for care and sustenance.

"The craitur," said Bridget affectionately, "he pays the very rint!"

But here, outside the family domain, was Ephraim, the beloved of his

wife's heart, actually turned out upon a cold and unfeeling world, and

with carefully spaced grunts of bewilderment expressing his discontent.

If such were Ephraim's fate, how would the matter go with him? Boyd

Connoway saw a prospect of finding a husband and the father of a family

turned from his own door, and obliged to return and take up his quarters

with this earlier exile.

The Connoway family residence was a small and almost valueless leasehold

from the estate of General Johnstone. The house had always been

tumbledown, and the tenancy of Bridget and her brood had not improved it

externally. The lease was evidently a repairing one. For holes in the

thatch roof were stopped with heather, or mended with broad slabs of

turf held down with stones and laboriously strengthened with wattle--a

marvel of a roof. It is certain that Boyd's efforts were never

continuous. He tired of everything in an hour, or sooner--unless

somebody, preferably a woman, was watching him and paying him

compliments on his dexterity.

The cottage had originally consisted of the usual "but-and-ben"--that is

to say, in well regulated houses (which this one was not) of a

kitchen--and a room that was not the kitchen. The family beds occupied

one corner of the kitchen, that of Bridget and her husband in the middle

(including accommodation for the latest baby), while on either side and

at the foot, shakedowns were laid out "for the childer," slightly raised

from the earthen floor on rude trestles, with a board laid across to

receive the bedding. There was nothing at either side to provide against

the occupants rolling over, but, as the distance from the ground did

not average more than four inches, the young Connoways did not run much

danger of accident on that account.

Disputes were, however, naturally somewhat frequent. Jerry or Phil would

describe himself as "lying on so many taturs"--Mary or Kitty declare

that her bedfellow was "pullin' every scrap off of her, that she was!"

To quell these domestic brawls Bridget Connoway kept at the head of the

middle bed a long peeled willow, which was known as the "Thin One." The

Thin One settled all night disputes in the most evenhanded way. For

Bridget did not get out of bed to discriminate. She simply laid on the

spot from which the disturbance proceeded till that disturbance ceased.

Then the Thin One returned to his corner while innocent and guilty

mingled their tears and resolved to conduct hostilities more silently in

future.

In the daytime, however, the "Thick One" held sway, which was the

work-hardened palm of Mistress Bridget Connoway's hand. She was

ambidextrous in correction--"one was as good as t'other," as Jerry

remarked, after he had done rubbing himself and comparing damages with

his brother Phil, who had got the left. "There's not a fardin' to pick

between us!" was the verdict as the boys started out to find their

father, stretched on his favourite sunny mound within sight of the

Haunted House of Marnhoul--now more haunted than ever.

But on this occasion Boyd Connoway was on his return, when he met the

exiled Ephraim. His meditations on his own probable fate have led the

historian into a sketch of the Connoway establishment, which, indeed,

had to come in somewhere.

For once Boyd wasted no time. With his wife waiting for him it was well

to know the worst and get it over. He opened the door quickly, and

intruding his hat on the end of his walking stick, awaited results. It

was only for a moment, of course, but Boyd Connoway felt satisfied. His

Bridget was not waiting for him behind the door with the potato-beetle

as she did on days of great irritation. His heart rose--his courage

returned. Was he not a free man, a house-holder? Had he not taken a

distinguished part in a gallant action? Bridget must understand this.

Bridget should understand this. Boyd Connoway would be respected in his

own house!

Nevertheless he entered hastily, sidling like a dog which expects a

kick. He avoided the dusky places instinctively--the door of the "ben"

room was shut, so Bridget could not be lying in wait there. Was it in

the little closet behind the kitchen that the danger lurked? The

children were in bed, save the two youngest, all quiet, all watching

with the large, dreamy blue (Connoway) eyes, or the small, very bright

ones (Bridget's) what his fate would be.

He glanced quaintly, with an interrogative lift of his eyebrows, at the

bed to the left. Jerry of the twinkling sloe-eyes answered with a quick

upturn of the thumb in the direction of the spare chamber.

Boyd Connoway frowned portentously at his eldest son. The youth shook

his head. The sign was well understood, especially when helped out with

a grin, broad as all County Donegal 'twixt Killibegs and Innishowen

Light.

The "Misthress" was in a good temper. Reassured, on his own account, but

inwardly no little alarmed for his wife's health in these unusual

circumstances, Boyd began to take off his boots with the idea of

gliding safely into bed and pretending to be asleep before the wind had

time to change.

But Jerry's mouth was very evidently forming some words, which were

meant to inform his father as to particulars. These, though

unintelligible individually, being taken together and punctuated with

jerks in the direction of the shut door of "doon-the-hoose," constituted

a warning which Boyd Connoway could not afford to neglect.

He went forward to the left hand bed, cocked his ear in the direction of

the closed door, and then rapidly lowered it almost against his son's

lips.

"She's gotten a hurt man down there," said Jerry, "she has been runnin'

wi' white clouts and bandages a' the forenight. And I'm thinkin' he's no

very wise, either--for he keeps cryin' that the deils are comin' to tak'

him!"

"What like of a man?" said Boyd Connoway.

But Jerry's quick ear caught a stirring in the room with the closed

door. He shook his head and motioned his father to get away from the

side of his low truckle bed.

When his wife entered, Boyd Connoway, with a sober and innocent face,

was untying his boot by the side of the fire. Bridget entered with a

saucepan in her hand, which, before she deigned to take any notice of

her husband, she pushed upon the red ashes in the grate.

From the "ben" room, of which the door was now open, Boyd could hear the

low moaning of a man in pain. He had tended too many sick people not to

know the delirium of fever, the pitiful lapses of sense, then again the

vague and troubled pour of words, and at the sound he started to his

feet. He was not good for much in the way of providing for a family. He

did a great many foolish, yet more useless things, but there was one

thing which he understood better than Bridget--how to nurse the sick.

He disengaged his boot and stood in his stocking feet.

"What is it?" he said, in an undertone to Bridget.

"No business of yours!" she answered, with a sudden hissing vehemence.

"I can do _that_ better than you!" he answered, for once sure of his

ground.

His wife darted at him a look of concentrated scorn.

"Get to bed!" she commanded him, declining to argue with such as he--and

but for the twinkling eyes of Jerry, which looked sympathy, Boyd would

have preferred to have joined the exiled Ephraim under the dark pent

among the coom of the peat-house.

He looked to Jerry, but Jerry was sound asleep. So was Phil. So were all

the others.

"Very well, daeaerlin'!" said Boyd Connoway to himself as his wife left

the room. "But, sorrow am I for the man down there that she will not let

me nurse. She's a woman among a thousand, is Bridget Connoway. But the

craitur will be after makin' the poor man eat his poultices, and use his

beef tay for outward application only!"

CHAPTER XVII

THE MAN "DOON-THE-HOOSE"

But Bridget Connoway, instant and authoritative as she was, could not

prevent her down-trodden husband from thinking. Who was the mysterious

wounded man "down-the-house"? One of the White Smugglers? Hardly. Boyd

had been in the thick of that business and knew that no one had been

hurt except Barnboard Tam, whose horse had run away with him and brushed

him off, a red-haired Absalom in homespuns, against the branches in

Marnhoul Great Wood.

One of the crew of the _Golden Hind_, American-owned privateersman with

French letters of marque? Possibly one of the desperate gang they had

landed called the Black Smugglers, scum of the Low Dutch ports, come to

draw an ill report upon the good and wholesome fame of Galloway Free

Trade.

In either case, Boyd Connoway little liked the prospect, and instead of

going to bed, he remained swinging his legs before the fire in a musing

attitude, listening to the moaning noises that came from the chamber he

was forbidden to enter. He was resolved to have it out with his wife.

He had not long to wait. Bridget appeared in the doorway, a bundle of

dark-stained cloths between her palms. She halted in astonishment at the

sight which met her eyes. At first it seemed to her that she was

dreaming, or that her voice must have betrayed her. She gave her husband

the benefit of the doubt.

"I thought I tould ye, Boyd Connoway," she said in a voice dangerously

low and caressing, "to be getting off to your bed and not disturbin' the

childer'!"

"Who is the man that had need of suchlike?" demanded Boyd Connoway,

suddenly regaining his lost heritage as the head of a house, "speak

woman, who are ye harbouring there?"

Bridget stood still. The mere unexpectedness of the demand rendered her

silent. The autocrat of all the Russias treated as though he were one of

his own ministers of state could not have been more dumbfounded.

With a sudden comprehension of the crisis Bridget broke for the poker,

but Boyd had gone too far now to recoil. He caught at the little

three-legged stool on which he was wont to take his humble frugal meals.

It was exactly what he needed. He had no idea of assaulting Bridget. He

recognized all her admirable qualities, which filled in the shortcomings

of his shiftlessness with admirable exactitude. He meant to act strictly

on the defensive, a system of warfare that was familiar to him. For

though he had never before risen up in open revolt, he had never counted

mere self-preservation as an insult to his wife.

"_Whack!_" down came the poker in the lusty hand of Bridget Connoway.

"_Crack!_" the targe in the lifted arm of Boyd countered it. At

arm's-length he held it. The next attack was cut number two of the

manual for the broad-sword. Skilfully with his shield Boyd Connoway

turned it to the side, so that, gliding from the polished oak of the

well-worn seat, the head of the poker caught his wife on the knee, and

she dropped her weapon with a cry of pain. Jerry and the other children,

in the seventh heaven of delight at the parental duel, were sitting up

in their little night-shirts (which for simplicity's sake were

identical with their day-shirts); their eyes, black and blue, sparkled

unanimous, and they made bets in low tones from one bed to another.

"Two to one on Daddy!"

"Jerry, ye ass, I'll bet ye them three white chuckies[1] he'll lose!"

"Hould your tongue, Connie--mother'll win, sure. The Thick 'Un will get

him!"

Such combats were a regular interest for them, and one, in quiet times,

quite sympathized in by their father, who would guide the combat so that

they might have a better view.

"Troth, and why shouldn't they, poor darlints? Sure an' it's little

enough amusement they have!"

He had even been known to protract an already lost battle to lengthen

out the delectation of his offspring. The Caesars gave to their people

"Bread and the circus!" But they did not usually enter the arena

themselves--save in the case of the incomparable bowman of Rome, and

then only when he knew that no one dared stand against him. But Boyd

Connoway fought many a losing fight that his small citizens might

wriggle with delight on their truckles. "The Christians to the lions!"

Yes, that was noble. But then they had no choice, while Boyd Connoway, a

willing martyr, fought his lioness with a three-legged stool.

This time, however, the just quarrel armed the three-legged, while cut

number two of Forbes's Manual fell, not on Boyd Connoway's head, for

which it was intended, but on Bridget's knee-cap. Boyd of the tender

heart (though stubborn stool), was instantly upon his knees, his

buckler flung to the ground and rubbing with all his might, with

murmurings of, "Does it hurt now, darlint?--Not baeaed, sure?--Say it is

better now thin, darlint!"

Boyd was as conscience-stricken as if he had personally wielded the

poker. But the mind of Bridget was quite otherwise framed. With one hand

she seized his abundant curly hair, now with a strand or two of early

grey among the straw-colour of it, and while she pulled handfuls of it

out by the roots (so Boyd declared afterwards), she boxed his ears

heartily with the other. Which, indeed, is witnessed to by the whole

goggle-eyed populace in the truckle bed.

"Didn't I tell ye, Jerry, ye cuckoo," whispered Connie, "she'd beat him?

He's gettin' the Thick 'Un, just as I told ye!"

"But it's noways fair rules," retorted Jerry; "father he flung down his

weepon for to rub her knee when she hurt it herself wid the poker!"

Jerry had lost his bet, as indeed he usually did, but for all that he

remained a consistent supporter of the losing side. Daily he

acknowledged in his body the power of the arm of flesh, but the vagrant

butterfly humour of the male parent with the dreamy blue eyes touched

him where he lived--perhaps because his, like his mother's, were

sloe-black.

Nevertheless, in spite of mishandling and a scandalous disregard of the

rules of the noble art of self-defence (not yet elaborated, but only

roughly understood as "Fair play to all"), Boyd Connoway carried his

point.

He saw the occupant of the bed "doon-the-hoose."

He was a slim man with clean-cut features, very pale about the gills and

waxen as to the nose. He lay on the bed, his head ghastly in its white

bandages rocking from side to side and a stream of curses, thin and

small of voice as a hill-brook in drought, but continuous as a

mill-lade, issuing from between his clenched teeth.

These adjurations were in many tongues, and their low-toned variety

indicated the swearing of an educated man.

Boyd understood at once that he had to do with no vulgar Tarry-Breeks,

no sweepings of a couple of hemispheres, but with "a gentleman born."

And in Donegal, though they may rebel against their servitude and meet

them foot by foot on the field or at the polling-booths, they know a

gentleman when they see one, and never in their wildest moods deny his

birthright.

Boyd, therefore, took just one glance, and then turning to his wife

uttered his sentiment in three words of approval. "I'm wid ye!" he said.

Had it been Galligaskins or any seaman of the _Golden Hind_, Boyd would

have had him out of the house in spite of his wife and all the wholesome

domestic terror she had so long been establishing.

But a Donegal man is from the north after all, and does not easily take

to the informer's trade. Besides, this was a gentleman born.

Yet he had better have given hospitality to Galligaskins and the whole

crew of pirates who manned the _Golden Hind_ than to this slender,

clear-skinned creature who lay raving and smiling in the bedroom of

Boyd Connoway's cabin.

[Footnote 1: "Chuckies," white pebbles used, in these primitive times,

instead of marbles.]

CHAPTER XVIII

THE 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 did not 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 are prevented 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, but _is_ it 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, _you_ have 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 a quantity 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 that _he_ knew 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's coming 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 to _be_ a 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 my grandmother 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 XIX

LOADED-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 mischief

For 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 my grandmother, 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 coat worn 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 we have 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 the _Courier_ every

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 always careful 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 be another 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, and was 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 XX

THE 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 black stripes, 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 come all 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 came in. 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 of the room

with his person, while he of the flannel dressing-gown wandered about

_tee-heeing_ with 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

decently quiet 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 I

have 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. _Our_ Mr. 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 XXI

WHILE 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-looking maid 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 like this 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 theatre and 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--

"As Miss Irma Maitland urgently desires that her brother and she

should remain under the care of Mr. William Lyon and his wife at

Heathknowes, and as the aforesaid William and Mary Lyon are able and

willing to provide for their maintenance, we see no reason why the

arrangement should not be an excellent and suitable one, at least

until such time as Sir Louis must be sent to school, when the whole

question will again come up. And this to hold good whatever may be

the outcome of this interview with the person calling himself

Wringham Pollixfen Poole,

"For Smart, Poole and Smart,

"R. Poole."

He handed the paper across to my grandmother, in whom he easily

recognized the ruling spirit of the household.

"There, madam," he said, "that will put matters on a right basis with my

firm whatever may happen to me. And now, if you please, I should like to

see my double at once. I suspect a kinsman, but do not be afraid of a

vendetta. If Master Robin, of whose prowess I have already heard, has

crushed in a rib or two, so much the better. Even if he had broken my

worthy relative's back, I fear me few would have worn mourning!"

They found the three young men still in the room, and my grandmother did

no more than assure herself of the presence of the still white-wrapped

figure on the shakedown in the corner, before leading Mr. Richard into

the parlour.

He went out from us with a jovial nod to my father, a low bow to Miss

Irma, and mock salutation to little Sir Louis, his head high in the air,

his riding whip swinging by its loop from his arm, and as it seemed, a

vigour of blood sufficient for a dozen ordinary people circulating in

his veins.

"Thank you, gentlemen," he said to my uncles, as soon as he had looked

at the bed and lifted the kerchief which Mary Lyon had laid wet upon the

brow. "I recognize, as I had reason to expect, a scion of my house,

however unworthy, with whom it will be necessary for me to communicate

privately. But if you will retire to the kitchen, I shall easily signal

you should your services become again necessary."

He stood with the edge of the door in his hand, and with a slight bow

ushered each of my uncles out. I was there, too, of course, seeing what

was to be seen. His eye lighted on me, and a slinking figure I must have

presented in spite of my usual courage, for he only turned one thumb

back over his shoulder with a comical smile, and bade me get to bed,

because when he was young he, too, knew what keyholes were good for.

The word "too" hurt me, for it meant that he thought I was going to

eavesdrop, whereas I was merely, for the sake of Irma and the family,

endeavouring to satisfy a perfectly legitimate curiosity.

I did, however, hear him say as he shut and locked the parlour door,

"Now, sir, the play is played. Sit up and take off that clout. Let us

talk out this affair like men!"

It was now night, and we were gathered in the kitchen. I do not think

that even Rob took much supper. I know that but for my grandfather the

horses would have had to go without theirs--and this, the most sacred

duty of mankind about a farm, would for once have been neglected. We

sat, mainly in the dark, with only the red glow of the fire in our

faces, listening to the voice of a man that came in stormy gusts. The

lamp had been left on the parlour table to give them light, and somehow

we were so preoccupied that none of us thought of lighting a candle.

The great voice of Mr. Richard dominated us--so full of contempt and

anger it was. We could not in the least distinguish what the impostor

said in reply. Indeed, Rob and I could just hear a kind of roopy

clattering like that of a hungry hen complaining to the vague Powers

which rule the times and seasons of distribution from the "daich" bowl.

There was something very strange in all this--so strange that when my

grandfather came back, for the first time in the history of Heathknowes,

no chapter was read, no psalm sung or prayer read. Somehow it seemed

like an impiety in the face of what was going on down there. Mr. Richard

talked far the most. At first his mood was all of stormy anger, and the

replies of the other, as I have said, almost inaudible.

But after a while these bursts of bellowing became less frequent. The

low replying voice grew, if not louder, more persistent. Mr. Richard

seemed to be denying or refusing something in short gruff gasps of

breath.

"No, no--no! By heaven, sir, NO!" we heard him cry plainly. And somehow

hearing that, Irma crept closer to me, and slid her hand in mine, a

thing which she had not done since the night of watching in the Old

House of Marnhoul.

Somehow both of us knew that it was a question of herself.

Then suddenly upon this long period of to-and-fro, there fell (as it

were) the very calmness of reconciliation. Peace seemed to be made, and

I think that all of us were glad of it, for the suspense and an

increasing tension of the nerves were telling on us all.

"They are shaking hands," whispered my grandmother; "Mr. Richard has

brought him to his senses. Fine I knew he would."

"I wonder if they will put him in prison or let him off because of the

family?" said Rob, adjusting the bandage about his wounded leg. "Anyway,

I am glad of the bit tramp he got from my yard clogs!"

"Wheesht!" whispered my grandfather, inclining his ear in the direction

of the parlour door. We all listened, but it was nothing. Not a murmur.

"They will be writing something--some bond or deed, most likely."

"They are long about it," said William Lyon uneasily.

The silence endured and still endured till an hour was passed. My

grandfather fidgeted in his chair. At last he said in a low tone, "Lads,

we have endured long enough. We must see what they are at. If we are

wrong, I will bear the weight!"

As one man the four moved towards the door, through the keyhole of which

a ray of light was stealing from the lamp that had been left on the

table.

"Open!" cried my grandfather suddenly and loudly. But the door remained

fast.

"Is all right there, Master Richard?" he shouted. Still there was

silence within.

"Put your shoulders to it, lads!" Eben and Tom were at it in a moment,

while strong Rob, springing from the far side of the passage, burst the

lock and sent the door back against the inner wall, the hinges snapped

clean through.

Mr. Richard was sitting in a quiet room, his head leaning forward on his

hands. His loaded riding whip was flung in a corner. The window was wide

open, and the night black and quiet without. Sweet odours of flowers

came in from the little garden. The lamp burned peacefully and nothing

in the room was disturbed. But Mr. Wringham Pollixfen was not there, and

when we touched him, Mr. Richard Poole was dead, his head dropped upon

his arms.

PART III