ELSIE'S VISITOR
It was a night or two after our first and (for the time being) last
visit to Deep Moat Grange. Elsie and I had arrived back at Nance's,
our hands and even our arms laden with flowers. For Nance had been at
home all day, and so Elsie and I had been taking a holiday--I from
lessons, and Elsie from looking after the house. We had gone wandering
over the long whinny knowes which stretch away to the south, till, from
the top of Brom Beacon, one can see the ships crowding into the docks
of East Dene and Thorsby, collier and tug and tall sea-going brig,
every ship after her kind.
It was a day to be remembered, and as a matter of fact neither of us
has forgotten it. We crossed Brom Water where it was as broad as a
lake. Our conveyance was a penny flatboat, running on a chain, which
chain hauled itself up wet and dripping from the bed of the river. A
little farther on we stretched ourselves out on the greensward upon a
green knoll above a railway cutting. We talked. We were silent, and
listened to the the wind among the leaves and the hum of insects among
the lime trees and meadow plants. Mr. Mustard was not at all in our
thoughts. Nor yet my father in mine. Only one thing troubled me--the
knowledge that in the autumn I must leave Breckonside and go to
college. College itself I did not mind about. There was a certain
amount of fun in being a student--or so I had always been told. What I
really did mind about was leaving Elsie.
It would be--I knew it by instinct--like cutting off a part of my own
body to go walking lonely on Saturdays when we had so often loitered in
company, thinking that the good days would never cease, wanting nothing
better, nothing other than just what we had. Ah! I had a prevision
that day that Elsie and I had better make the most of our time during
this summer. For the winter would try our friendship.
What I did not foresee was how suddenly Elsie would grow up. Yet she
had always done things suddenly--from boxing my ears to deciding to
continue her studies at home. She did the latter that very day, and in
the evening she announced to Nance that she was not going back to
school.
"Very well," said Nance, not in the least surprised. Indeed, with her
own limited education, she had often wondered why Elsie had prolonged
hers so unnecessarily.
It was pleasant in Nance's cottage by the Bridge End of Breckonside.
The house was, as perhaps I have already explained, overwhelmed in a
perfect show of creeping flowers, not all of them yet in their full
bloom of colour, but always spreading up to the chimneys and throwing
abroad reckless tendrils that brushed the face as one entered the
little wooden porch.
Nance was busy with the supper dishes, and Elsie had come down after
"giving her hair a tidy," as she had been commanded by Nance to do.
"Who do you think has been here the day?" said Nance suddenly.
And I knew in a minute, but Elsie guessed her grandfather.
"The young English minister from Over Breckonton."
"Yes," Nance went on to give details, finding that nobody exclaimed at
her news; "as fine an Englisher as ever was, with a bit cambric
handkerchief that wad hae been little use to a man wi' a cauld in his
heid, and a black cane wi' real silver bands. Extraordinary civil he
was, and bode near an hour talkin' to puir auld Nance, and speirin'
where ye were, Elsie, and what time ye wad be hame!"
I looked at Elsie. She was busily engaged in tying up some sprays of
early heath, which we had gathered on the steep sides of Brom Beacon.
She did not seem to be listening. But she heard well enough, as her
words proved.
"Oh, yes, Mr. Ralph Ablethorpe! Joe and I met him by chance on the way
to my grandfather's the other day."
Now the vixen knew very well that there would be no more question of
the "coming of the Englishy minister" after an announcement like that.
Nance was all agog to hear of the wonders of Deep Moat Grange, which
she had never seen except from the outside, and news of the mad people
my lassie's granddad had gathered about him. Small wonder, either!
For, indeed, no one had crossed the Moat for years except the
High-Church curate, who (as they said) went periodically to "confess"
Miss Orrin.
Even such things as coals and provisions were brought by the bailiff to
the end of the drawbridge in sacks, and from thence carried across on
the back of the powerful Jeremy, the same Jeremy whom we had seen that
day weeping like a child.
But it was then that I began first to understand what absence at
college might cost me. I looked at Elsie. She was still tying up the
little pink bundles of "bell heather," but her face was held down, and
there was a little conscious flush upon her cheek. I had never thought
it before, and it came on me like a judgment. Elsie was pretty.
I did not exactly wish she hadn't been, but oh, I did wish that nobody
had been able to see it but myself!
That English curate, with his curly poll and clear blue eyes, rode me
like a nightmare. I resolved to break his head, handsome as it
looked--aye, if he were the best man that ever stepped in shoe leather,
and had climbed all the mountains in Switzerland and given all that he
got for doing it to the poor, as they said he had done. I did not care
how good he was. I was desperate at the thought of losing Elsie. Not
for love--oh no, thank you. I had more sense than that. But just to
go about with, and be my little 'panion, as she had always said she
would be, and as I expected her to remain.
But the curate did not let grass grow under his footsteps. It was only
two days before he was back again at the little cottage at the Bridge
End. Nance had work that day, and if I had not had the sense to play
truant he would have found Elsie by herself, as no doubt he expected to
do. But I was there seated on the table, swinging my legs.
He began at once saying how sorry he was that Nance was out, and that
he had so much enjoyed the talk with her the other day. But under my
breath I kept saying, "Liar! Liar!" Because I knew quite well that he
was coming of purpose to see Elsie, and the thought gave me catchings
of the breath when I thought of going to college. I wasn't jealous a
bit, of course, only I couldn't bear to think of any other fellow being
friends with Elsie.
But after awhile I began to like the parson better. He had heard that
I could bowl more than a bit, and he asked me to make one of the team
he was getting up to play the second eleven of East Dene. I took to
him more after that, and really he did not talk to Elsie oftener than
he did to me. More than that, he did not make me feel in the way.
But it was all no go. From deep down in my heart there kept bobbing up
the feeling that somehow I was to lose Elsie, and that this young
parson with the curly head would be the cause of it. Of course, I was
going on to eighteen, and a big fellow for my age, with a moustache you
could see by looking for it. But this was a full-grown man of
twenty-four at the least--for all that his shaven face and sort of
painted-window hair made him look any age from that of a choir boy to
that of a holy angel.
He asked about Elsie's grandfather, saying that he had struggled long
and vainly to get him to come to church, or at least to communion, but
without success. More than that, he seemed to be keeping Miss Orrin
from attending the parish church of Over Breckonton. Miss Orrin, so it
seemed, had good instincts--she was well affected toward religion, but
something always seemed to hold her back. At a certain point she
became silent, and he, Ralph Ablethorpe, could do nothing more with
her. This resistance he hoped, however, to overcome one day. It was
his duty to study the welfare of every soul in his parish, and also of
those wandering and foldless sheep who were cared for by nobody.
I had it on my tongue tip to say that there were many who cared for
souls when they were connected with comely bodies, for that was the
kind of thing that my father was always saying. He took himself for an
advanced thinker whenever he quarrelled with our vicar, but between
times he was as good a conservative as anybody, and stood up for law
and order like the chucker-out of a bar-room.
Elsie had not much to say about her people. She never had. But I told
him, as I always did any one who asked, that her father had been an
army officer, and her mother the only daughter of the Golden Farmer,
only that neither the one nor the other of them could stand the old
man's ways.
Then the young parson, as I found to be his custom, started in to
defend the absent, which is all right when the "absent" is anyway
decent.
"Yes," he said, "Mr. Stennis's habits are certainly eccentric. I
cannot deny that. But after all he does a lot of good in rather
creditable circumstances. He gives shelter to four poor lunatics whom
a sisterly love has preserved from the living death of a common asylum."
I told him plainly that I thought it would be much better for
themselves, and infinitely so for the countryside, if they were all
shut up in the nearest asylum under proper care.
"What do you mean?" says he, rather startled. For I could see by the
changing of his countenance that he, too, had seen strange things. As,
indeed, he was bound to do, if he kept his eyes open at all, going to
Deep Moat Grange as often as he did.
But then, you see, he was a simple sort of young man, and never
thought, or at least said, any evil of anybody.
Then he suggested that we would walk home together, and though I had
meant to stay at the cottage all day, I actually went. But I soon got
him into a hot argument with my father (who could argue the handle off
the village pump) about doctrine and sacraments, and things that a boy
has to learn about in school till he hates the very name of them. At
least, if he has a master like old Mr. Mustard. Then I up and shinned
out of the back door as quick as I could, lest father should ask me
where I was going, and send me kiting all over the country with one of
our delivery vans. I found Elsie looking out of the window and very
pensive.
So I told her to her face that she was thinking of that curly-headed
curate, and she answered me (as, of course, she would naturally do)
that whether she was or wasn't, it was no business of mine.
Then I vowed I would make it my business.
"Then make it!" says she, and turned away very haughty and went and
sulked in Nancy's little room, which was off the big kitchen. It was
as much as I could do to keep from turning on my heel and walking away,
never more to return. But I knew that it was wrong to yield to
passion. So I was noble and stopped where I was.
Instead I began to sweep up the cinders about the grate and get
everything ready for tea, even to scouring the teapot and things. I
used coarse, common powder, and this I moistened by a coarse and
familiar method. The act brought Elsie out promptly. Just bounding
she was. Mad was no name for it. She called me all the names she
could think of, but she didn't sulk any more. I thought she wouldn't.
That always fetches her. She knows I do it a-purpose to make her
angry, but she can't help it--not one time in a thousand. Elsie is
built that way, and from what I have seen quite a lot of women are.
It works far better than taffying up to them, or doing the dreadful
humble. Get them spitting mad, and they will love you ever after, or
at least for quite a while.