SATURDAY, THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY
This was on the evening of Saturday, the tenth of February, a day never
to be forgotten by me and by many more. I will try to place here in
order the events which happened both at Deep Moat Grange and at
Breckonside during the succeeding forty-eight hours. Of course, there
is some part that can only be guessed at, and part is known solely by
the maunderings of a criminal maniac. But still, I think, I have now
got the whole pretty straight--as straight as it will ever be known on
this side time. At any rate, it is my account or none. For no one
else can know what I know.
As Mr. Ablethorpe had informed me, he was at a standstill in his
researches. And the reason was that Mr. Hobby Stennis, the "Golden
Farmer," as he was called, had departed on one of his frequent journeys.
So much was true. The master of Deep Moat Grange had indeed been
absent for three days. But he had returned that same Saturday morning
about ten o'clock. He had been disgusted to find the house empty.
Probably, also, he was in a very bad temper owing to the failure of
some combination or other he had counted upon. He found nothing
prepared for his reception. Miss Orrin and her sisters were gone, and
Mad Jeremy in one of his maddest and most freakish humours.
Now, of all times for arriving from a journey the noon is the worst.
In the evening one dines. Later, one may have supper. Later still,
one sleeps. In the morning everybody is astonished, and says: "How
brisk and early you are to-day!" This pleases you, and you step about
the place and come in sharp-set for breakfast. But in the forenoon it
is a long time till lunch or dinner. Every one is busy. The clothes
in which you have attempted to sleep feel as if filled with fine sand.
You want to kick somebody, and if there is nobody whom you can
reasonably kick, you feel worse.
Well, this is how Hobby felt. He wanted breakfast, and Mad Jeremy
informed him that there was no bread. If he wanted any he could act as
baker and bake a batch for himself.
"Go and get me something to eat, you rascal!" cried Mr. Stennis
threateningly. And as he raised his riding-whip, Jeremy cowered. But
it was with his body only. His eyes kept on those of his master, and
they were those of a beast that has not been conquered--or, if
vanquished, not subdued.
With impish spitefulness he set about gathering together all the orts
and scraps of his own various disorganized meals, and brought them in,
piled on a plate, to his master. Hobby Stennis was in no mood for
amusement. He had his riding-whip still in his hand. He raised it,
and, as one would strike a hound, he lashed Jeremy across the face.
The madman did not flinch--he only stood, with a certain semblance of
meekness, shutting his eyes as the blows descended, as a dog might.
Once, twice, thrice, the whip cut across cheek and brow and jaw.
Jeremy put up his fingers to feel the weals which rose red and angry.
But he said nothing. Only his eyes followed his master as he went out.
[Illustration: "He raised his riding whip, and, as one would strike a
hound he lashed Jeremy across the face."]
Mr. Stennis, still furiously angry, threw plate and contents out of the
window. They fell in the muddy, ill-cared-for yard. The plate
shivered, and Jeremy, after whimpering a little like a punished child,
went outside also, got on his knees, and patiently gathered them
together again, swinging his head with the pitiable and impotent
vengeance of a child. Only Mad Jeremy was very far indeed from being a
child.
Muttering to himself, Mr. Stennis strode away across the drawbridge,
which still bore the footmarks of the mob which, in the time of his
illness, had crossed and recrossed it. Part of the balustrade had been
kicked away, and hung by a tough twisted oak splinter, yawning over the
Moat to the swirl of the wet February wind.
He walked forward, never hesitating a moment, his switch still in his
hand, cutting at the brownish last year's brackens which, having
doubled over halfway up the stem, now trailed their broad leaves in the
bleak, black February sop.
Straight for Mr. Ball's the master of the Grange took his way. He
followed the narrow path which, skirting the Backwater, crosses a
field, and then drops over the high March dike into the road quite
close to the cottage of Mr. Bailiff Ball. It was almost dinner-time,
and with a word Mr. Stennis explained the situation. Mrs. Ball swept
all the too genial horde of children into the kitchen, and set herself
to serve a meal to the owner of the Grange and his bailiff.
The first plateful of Scots broth, with its stieve sustenance of peas,
broad beans, and carrots, together with curly greens and vegetables
almost without number, put some heart into Mr. Stennis--though his
anger against Jeremy for the insult offered to him in his own house did
not in the least cool.
"I always like broth that a man can eat conveniently with knife and
fork," said Mr. Ball, striving to be agreeable. "Let me give you
another plateful, sir."
But Mr. Stennis declined. The thought of Jeremy and his plate of orts
returned to his mind and he choked anew with anger.
"I will teach him!" he said aloud, frowning and pursing his mouth.
Mr. Ball was far too wise a man to ask a question. He kept his place,
worked the out-farms, deserved the confidence of his master, and
convinced all the world that he had nothing to do with the ill-doings
of the garrison at the "Big Hoose" by carefully guarding his speech.
As a matter of fact, he made it his business to know nothing except in
which field to sow turnips, and the probable price he would get for the
wintering sheep that ate them out of the furrows.
Never was a man better provided with deaf and blind sides than Mr.
Bailiff Ball. And, being a man with a family, he had need of them at
Deep Moat Grange.
So he did not inquire who it was that Mr. Hobby Stennis meant to teach,
nor yet what was the nature of the proposed lesson. If knowledge is
power, carefully cultivated ignorance sometimes does not lack a certain
power also.
Mr. Stennis ate of the boiled mutton which followed, and of the boiled
cabbage withal--of potatoes, mealy and white, such as became the
bailiff of several large unlet farms, and a man whose accounts had
never been called in question by so much as a farthing.
Mr. Stennis ate of pancakes with jam rolled inside, and of pancakes on
which the butter fairly danced upon the saffron and russet surfaces, so
hot were they from the pan. He drank pure water. He refused to smoke,
which Mr. Ball did every day and all day long. Mr. Stennis was an
example--a man without vices.
Then these two, master and man--though by no means "like master, like
man"--strolled about the fields discussing what was to be done with
this parcel of bullocks, or what line of crops would do best on the
Nether Laggan Hill, or the Broomy Knowe. Mr. Bailiff Ball wished
heartily that his master would be gone. But he was not in a position
to tell him so. At last, after two o'clock, Mr. Stennis suddenly, and
without any preliminaries, bade him "good-day" and so betook himself
through the misty willow copses along the Backwater, on which the haze
of spring was greening already, towards the house of Deep Moat Grange.
* * * * *
It was not the least of Elsie's troubles to keep herself "nice" in the
back half of the monks' oven, near the bakehouse. Soap she had--a
whole bar of it. And with the water which she dipped up from the
trap-door behind her bed, she washed her single turn-over collar again
and again--as well as her handkerchiefs and other "white
things"--drying them rapidly and well in front of the dividing wall of
the oven.
Starch, however, was beyond her, and ironing also. Still she was
clean, which to Elsie Stennis was very near indeed to being godly.
Jeremy had been idle for several days, but it chanced that that very
Saturday morning he had set the furnace a-going, and had begun to
prepare a batch of bread. Notwithstanding, he had been strangely
unsettled. He had looked in several times on Elsie, even bringing in a
little washing soda for her laundry work, but had departed always
without saying anything of his intentions. Never on any occasion had
he mentioned her fellow-prisoner, my father. And he, on his part, had
strictly forbidden Elsie to say anything of their converse one with
another. Not that Elsie would have done that in any case. She had too
much the instinct of playing the game.
Usually when Jeremy came in, he would bring with him a Jew's-harp, and,
curling himself up in one corner of the settle, he would extract tunes
from that limited instrument with a strange weird combination of voice
and twang of the metallic tongue.
Or with a mandolin, of which he had somehow become possessed, he would
lean against the table, stretch his long legs, shake back his snaky
curls, swinging his body to and fro, and improvise such music as never
has been heard on earth before.
But ever and anon, between bursts of strange melody--for there was a
certain attraction in every sound he produced--he would return to the
subject of the new cargo of melodeons which had just been received at
Yarrow's, down in the village. He would have one he declared, whatever
old Hobby might say, the skinflint--who would not let poor Jeremy have
a single goldpiece of all he had won for him by his own strong hands.
He would let him see, however, when he came back, who was master. And
if he would not, then he, Jeremy Orrin, knew somebody--perhaps not so
far away--who would give him not only one, but many melodeons, for one
smell of the fresh air.
Elsie had the presence of mind not to appear to understand that he
meant my father. It was, evidently, one of Jeremy's worst days. And
Elsie wished that she had been able to get her knife back from my
father, who had borrowed it the night before for a special piece of
filing. The work was approaching completion, but just at the last
moment he had come upon a bar of iron, buried, for what purpose he
could not imagine, in the thickness of the wall. It ran diagonally,
and would need to be cut in two places before there was any chance of
the passage being finished between their prison chambers.
But the bar once cut, and the passage clear, my father, who, as part of
his business, was learned in locks, did not anticipate from Elsie's
description any serious trouble. The iron door and patent safety lock
of his own prison house, recently arranged for by Mr. Stennis--he
remembered the transaction--was, of course, beyond him. But if all was
as he had been given to expect, the fastenings of Elsie's door--which
communicated with the oven corridor--were of quite another type, and
need not detain him long.
It was a little after eleven of the day, as Elsie judged by the light,
when Jeremy came back after a somewhat prolonged absence. He brought
her a piece of made bread--by which he meant bread bought from one of
the vans that passed along the highway, but none of which came up to
the Moat Grange.
"Hae," he said, smiling curiously, "there's for you! I hae nae time to
be baking to-day. The maister's hame. Guid luck, an' lang life to
him!"
He was speaking very curiously, laughing all the time--not offering
threats and complaints as he had been doing before.
"And see!" he cried out, suddenly. "He has brought Jeremy a present
wi' his ain hand--ay, wi' his ain hand he gied it him!"
And, lifting his finger, he drew it along three red weals on his brow
and cheek, one after the other, ending at the corner of the jaw beneath
the ear, from which a drop of blood trickled. And he laughed--all the
time he laughed.
"A bonnie present," he repeated, "think ye not so, bonnie birdie? Ye
never gat the like, and him your ain grandfather. Ah, but he's kind to
Jeremy! And Jeremy will never forget it. Na--Jeremy followed him,
like pussy cat after a plate of cream, to the March dyke, to the very
door o' Bailiff Ball's house. Jeremy wadna let ony ill befall his
maister this day. If a _wulf_, or a lion, or a bear had leaped upon
Hobby Stennis, Jeremy wad hae strangled them like this--_chirt_--wi'
his hands, as easy as ony thing. Ay, he wad that! For the kind kind
present he fetched his faithfu' servant, naebody shall lay a hand on
Hobby Stennis this day--except, maybe, Jeremy himsel'--ay, maybe, juist
Jeremy himsel'. Ow, ay, but a' in the way o' kindness! the same as
Hobby himsel'!"
And with that he picked up his Jew's-harp and breathed a fierce anger
and scorn into the familiar words that was positively shocking to
listen to--
Be it ever so humble,
There's no place like ho-o-o-me.
And he stopped to laugh between the lines. Elsie says that it fairly
turned her cold to hear him. Though at that time she had, as she
remembers, no fear for herself--which, when you come to think of it,
was a very curious circumstance indeed. But then her turn was yet to
come.
In Jeremy's absence, Elsie tried to tell my father all about it. But
the coming and going of the madman that day were so uncertain, and his
moods so dangerous, that she could not get matters half explained; nor
yet any advice from my father, except not to cross the maniac, save in
the last extremity. He offered to pass her back the knife, but Elsie,
hearing that one end of the bar was already severed, and the other well
through, refused, like the little brick she was, to take it.
Now, this part which follows can only be known imperfectly, because it
concerns what happened when Hobby Stennis went back to his own house of
the Moat Grange. There were two other sources of information--Jeremy's
wild talk afterwards to Elsie, and certain signs and marks not easy of
interpretation, which, however, tend to confirm in most points the
madman's version.
After Mad Jeremy had come back from watching his master carefully into
the house of the bailiff, he visited Elsie, and spoke the words, little
reassuring, which I have already written down.
Then going up to the great parlour, out of which opened Mr. Stennis's
weaving-room, he lit a lire of wood, which burned with much cheerful
blaze. In front of this he sat down, with his fiddle in his hand. He
had only drawn the bow across it, and began to tune up when his master
walked in.
Possibly the noise irritated Hobby Stennis's none too steady nerves.
Possibly, also, he was nettled at Jeremy's insistent request for the
loan of a couple of sovereigns in order to go down and "price" the new
cargo of melodeons received at Yarrow's, in the village. They had been
ordered by my father before his disappearance, to satisfy a temporary
local musical fever, and had only just arrived.
How exactly the thing happened is not known, but, at any rate, it is
certain that Mr. Stennis refused to give Jeremy a farthing for any such
purpose, and at the first sullen retort of the madman, turned fiercely
upon him, wrenched from his hands the violin on which he had been
fitfully playing and threw it on the fire. As the light dry wood
caught and the varnish crackled, Mr. Stennis strode off, fuming, to his
weaving-room to calm himself with a turn at the famous hand-loom. He
sat down before it, and as the shuttle began to pass back and forth,
his passion fell away in proportion as the fascination of the perfect
handicraft gained on him.
But Jeremy stood gazing fixedly at the burning fiddle till the last
clear flame died out, and in the great fireplace only a double couch of
red ashes preserved the shape of a violin.
But, meantime, in the weaving-room the shuttle said _click-clack_ in
the great silence which seemed to have fallen all of a sudden upon Deep
Moat Grange. In the red light, Jeremy stood erect, gazing entranced at
the shape of his beloved instrument outlined on the hearth, and
following one by one with his forefinger the ridged weals, from his
cheek to his forehead and back again. And all about the twilight fell
suddenly dim.