THE WITNESSING OF MISER HOBBY
"_The Witnessing and last statement of Me, Howard Stennis, sometime
weaver to my trade, afterwards laird of the lands of 'Deep Moat
Grange,' near Breckonside--to which is added my last Will in my own
handwriting_.
"I, HOWARD STENNIS, being of sound mind, and desiring that after my
death nothing should be left uncertain, have decided to put on record
all that has occurred. This I do, not in the least to exculpate
myself, because what I have done, I have done calmly and with intention
aforethought.
"This paper is for the sole use of the heir whom I shall choose.
"If it be his will not to accept a fortune accumulated under these
conditions or in the way I made mine, I have joined to this a paper
with the names of those to whose heirs reparation can be made. But it
is my present intention to seek rather some strong man, at war with
other men--a hater of his kind, as I have good reason to be--who will
continue my work after I am gone. So that in time, if the life of our
instrument, Jeremy Orrin, be spared, one of the greatest fortunes of
the age may be built up.
"From my youth I was called Miser Hobby. And that most unjustly.
Because I wrought day and night that I might leave my one daughter Bell
in a position of a lady. But she chose to throw my lifetime's work in
my face. She left me without a word for a penniless boy in a uniform.
My heart had been black and bitter before, but there had always been a
bright spot upon it. That was Bell. Afterward it became black
altogether, for I cast Bell out of my heart and sight like an untimely
birth. I worked harder, yet for all that I wearied of the work. To be
rich suddenly, to have all in my power, and to deny to Bell and her
tramping rascal of a redcoat a sup of broth, a bite of bread--that
alone I counted sweet. It would come to me some day, I knew.
"I looked about for a weapon--for the hand to strike. This I found in
Jeremy Orrin. It was at the Tryst of Longtown, whither I had gone to
deliver a web. There I saw a limber youth, very dark, turning
somersaults on a scrap of carpet. He spread out his hands and walked
on them. There was hair on the palms. The thumb was as long as the
fingers, and he raised himself upon them as on steel springs. I saw
him take a byre 'grape'--or fork of three thick prongs--and bend the
three into one by the mere strength of one hand.
"Then that set me thinking of other things that these fingers might be
taught to do. So, in a little inn, I made the tumbler's acquaintance,
and I could see that at first he eyed me curiously. I could read such
looks. I knew the wickedness that was in his heart. He meant to
murder me on my way home!
"But first I gave him to drink as much as he would. Suddenly I turned
my pockets inside out and let him feel the linings of my coat--there in
that lighted room, to prove that he would not be twopence halfpenny the
richer by the transaction. Then, leaning forward as if jesting, I made
a proposition. By himself, I said, such a man could do but little. He
was but a tracked beast without a den. See what it had brought him to,
tumbling on a carpet for a living, and hungry withal! I would give him
safety, a position, the high road between two market towns, neither of
them yet reached by the railway, running before our very door.
"Finally, on the doorstep of the Red Lion, holding unstably by either
lintel, a warning to all sober men like myself, I pointed out Riddick
of Langbarns, who, as I knew, had that day sold his two-year-old horses
to the tune of eight hundred pounds!
"Jeremy Orrin and I left the lighted town behind us. I am well aware
even then that I put my life in his hands--how terrible was my danger I
did not know. For the young man's wayward madness was as yet hidden
from me, as from all the world except his elder sister. At the Windy
Slap, a narrow wind-swept gully, and a wild enough scene at the best of
times, I came out suddenly, and speaking to Riddick, who was on
horseback, asked him civilly if he would need any sheets or tablecloths
that year. For that I was making out my winter's orders. He knew me
at once, and bade me get out of his sight for an arrant self-seeking
miser that would keep a shivering man from a good glass of toddy at his
own fireside!
"Then I lowered my prices till he checked his horse beside a bank (for
I had been walking by his side), and while he strove to calculate cost
and rebate in his drink-dozened brain, Jeremy quietly leaped up from
behind, and clasped about his neck the broad-palmed, long-fingered,
hairy hands that had crushed the byre trident. Riddick of Langbarns
never spake word. We buried him decently in the kirkyard--in a grave
that had that day been filled, laying him on the coffin of a better man
than himself--even that of Ephraim Rae, elder in the Hardgate
Cameronian Kirk. Face down we laid him--his nose to the name
plate--and so filled in and replaced the sods. It was very secure--an
idea of my own. No disturbance of the earth, or none that mattered.
For who would ever seek for a lost man in the grave, where, that same
day, another had been laid with all due funeral observances? It would
be sacrilege. Afterwards, when we used this method, I always tried to
be present at both interments. In fact, I got a name for my reverence
and exactitude at burials. Also it gave me some useful thoughts upon
the transitory nature of all things. Besides, I liked to watch the
mourners' daylit faces and then think of Jeremy's twelve hours later,
seen perhaps by the light of a late-rising, cloudy, out-worn moon!
"Good fortune such as this (the timely burial of Elder Rae, that is) we
could not always depend upon. But as far as possible, of course, we
arranged our business transactions so that they fell due on the day of
a funeral, either at Over Breckonton or Breckonside. Bewick was of no
use to us--the graveyard there having the fatal fault of being placed
under the windows of the manse, and the minister being a bachelor, who
never cared whether he went to bed at all or not, keeping his light
burning till three of the morning. Such men have no right to be
ministers. Still, for the time being, the other two parishes served us
very well.
"I saw, however, that a change was becoming necessary, indeed
imperative. Also, thanks to a certain drover of the name of Lang
Hutchins, I had the money. It was most providential (I shall always so
regard it) that at this very time the place and policies of Deep Moat
Grange came into the market.
"Lang Hutchins was a pure windfall--a catch of Jeremy's. I had nothing
to do with that. One night Jeremy walked into the weaving-room with a
great leathern pocket-book.
"'Where did you get that?' I asked. I was, I remember, at the loom,
and the pattern being an interesting one, the time had passed without
my regarding its flight. It was, as a matter of fact, past one of the
morning.
"'Lang Hutchins, the Bewick drover, gied it to me,' said Jeremy Orrin,
'and as there were nae funerals in Breckonside, and that minister man
at Bewick willna put his candle oot, I had e'en to make Lang Hutchins
up a bonnie bed in the gairden at the Grange o' the Moat!'
"I rose instantly to my feet. This was indeed terrible. I had a
vision (which I have often seen in reality since) of Jeremy scratching
the earth with his fingers, and creeping about on the black soil like
some unclean beast, leaving marks easy to be read by the first
passer-by. We should be discovered. Jeremy would be tracked, and I
saw in appalling perspective two gibbets, and on one the murderer, and
on the other his master--the same Miser Hobby who had thought to make a
lady of his daughter; now Howard Stennis, Esquire--both raised to the
dignity of the hempen cravat.
"For a moment I did not know what to do--yes, even I, to whom plans
occur like oaths to a bad, foul-mouthed, swearing man such as Lang
Hutchins, one who had defied his Maker the very day his soul, was
required of him.
"'Buried in the garden at Deep Moat Grange!' I repeated to myself.
'The place out of habitation, a prey to every poacher, the gardens and
orchards overrun by vagrant boys!' Ah--even in that word it had come
to me!
"Deep Moat Grange was for sale! But then I had not enough money to buy
it, and I could not face the raising of a mortgage--the possible
scrutinies! At that moment Jeremy Orrin tossed carelessly at me a
long, many-caped overcoat, such as long-distance coachmen used to wear
in the days when twice a day the 'Dash' and the 'Flying Express' passed
Breckonside, and I was a boy in knee breeches and a blue bonnet. I
could feel that the coat was well padded though not heavy. And there
in the weaving-room of the little cottage, I drew out of the lining
hundreds and hundreds of packets of five-pound notes, all English, and
mostly long in use, like those which pass from hand to hand among
drovers. I could see that no one of them had recently been in a bank.
There would, therefore, be no awkward record of the numbers. Moreover,
Lang Hutchins had come north suddenly (so Jeremy told me) after quite a
year of running the southern markets.
"It was as safe as could be--all but the garden plot at Deep Moat
Grange, where in one particular oblong the earth had been raked with
the split and blackened nails of Jeremy's fingers.
"After that, there was no letting that spot out of our sight till I had
got the lawyer work finished--I mean that of the vendor's
representatives of Deep Moat Grange. I was my own lawyer and factor,
that is, so far as the district was concerned. I had a kinsman in
Edinburgh who went over all the agreements and so on, for me, just to
see that everything was in order.
"All the time I was away Jeremy watched, resolved that if any one
manifested overmuch interest in the scratched soil at the bottom of the
lawn where the rhododendrons begin, he or she should find a quiet
resting-place beside them. But, barring one slight accident, into the
details of which I deem it useless to enter (being but a poor man and
not worth in the gross three solvent halfpence) no one looked near the
lawn or the old orchard.
"At last Deep Moat Grange was mine. Deep Moat Grange was paid for in
untraceable money--I had examined every note. Jeremy and I moved in,
and having heard all that he had to say about his sister Aphra, I sent
a hundred pounds to her--and our address. Jeremy said that would bring
her. We felt--or at least I, who knew the ways and thoughts, the
chatterings and clatterings of Breckonside, felt that there was need
for a good, careful, managing woman there. From what Jeremy told me, I
was certain that Euphrasia Orrin was that woman.
"She was. I could not have chosen better. Yet, for all that, the
madman had deceived me in the way that all such have, with a cunning
far above that of sane and grave persons, such as myself.
"Euphrasia or Aphra Orrin (as she was called) arrived in a few days.
But she brought with her three hare-brained sisters, concerning whom,
if their brother had breathed so much as one word, neither Aphra nor
any of them should ever have set foot within my door. I should have
claimed my granddaughter, at that time cared for by a decent working
woman named Edgar--and for whose upkeep I subscribed according to my
means. I should have taken her, I say, and trained her up to fulfil my
needs. Between us, Jeremy and I could have done it.*
* "I say nothing of the return and death of my daughter Bell. Save
that she left the parish and returned burdened with a brat, her coming
had no interest for me, though the neighbours made a foolish work about
it, going so far as to give me an ill name on account of my treatment
of her!"
"But Aphra was a clever woman, and as soon as I saw her, and as soon as
she had spoken with Jeremy, I knew for certain that there would be no
turning her out. She meant to stay at Deep Moat Grange, and stay she
would and did, she and her yelping litter of she-whelps. Of her I only
asked one thing, that she should confine their vagaries to the space
contained between the pond and the moat. The house had now been put
into some repair, the drawbridge restored, and we were safe within our
own guards and barriers. As for the country clatter, we took no heed
to that. Besides, whenever there was a fair or promising market, it
was agreed that (for my character's sake) I should be found with my
lawyer in Edinburgh, or in the company of some other decent, producible
people.
"The advantages of the Grange for our business are manifold. Firstly,
should this fall into the hands of a successor actuated by a like
hatred of humanity and lack of moral prejudice, and supposing him to be
served by the same able though irresponsible tools which I have used, I
would point out that from either road, that to Bewick to the right or
that through the woods to Longwood on the left, there is direct water
carriage to the secluded lawn beneath Deep Moat Grange. In case of
necessity, supposing that the 'accident' has befallen on the Bewick
road, you can load your boat by the bridge near to the darkest part of
the wood behind the Bailiff's houses, and then, sculling lightly, you
are carried all the way by the current of the Backwater without leaving
a trace. If the game has been played on the highway to the right, then
there is equally good going across the pond. It is recommended that
the boat, being probably heavily burdened, should return by the north
side, where I have planted certain rows of weeping willows, which not
only afford a grateful shade, but are seemly in the circumstances.
"It was, however, Miss Orrin (a clever woman in her way) who had the
best idea as to the final disposition of the frail but compromising
relicts of mortality, thus appropriately transported under my weeping
willows to their final resting beds. She made perennial flower pots of
them, and nowhere could be seen such display of varied beauty as she
obtained from cold, useless clay!
"Personally, I have always been opposed to the general uselessness of
graveyards and cemeteries. Nothing is better suited to enrich the soil
than the material which Jeremy supplied. It is far before phosphates,
about which there has been so much talk these last years. So I was
greatly content when Miss Orrin--to whom of necessity I had to confide
the secret of Jeremy's unfortunate tendencies, in order that she might
use her influence to direct it for our mutual advantage--discovered a
means at once of security and of utility by planting masses of lilies
in heart-shaped plots all about, wherever Jeremy had found it necessary
to disturb the soil. I believe that Miss Orrin attached some subtle
meaning to the lilies. Indeed had I not prevented her, she would even
have made the plots of the shape and size of coffins--which certainly
shows a trace of the family failing.
"But this was, of course, impossible. I had, how ever, good reason to
be content with our new arrangement. The old, difficult (though
perfectly safe) interment in a doubly tenanted grave, with all its
annoyances of being on the spot myself, of scaling walls and keeping
Jeremy to his labour, was all done away with. Deep Moat certainly
became, as it were, a self-contained factory for spinning the money
which is the god of this world. Ah, it was a peaceful and a happy
time. Within and without, everything went like clockwork. I began to
be respected, too--at a certain distance from home, that is. For I had
taken care to engage the simplest and honestest soul in the world for
my grieve or bailiff, and when Jeremy and I were not out on our more
immediate business, Simon Ball and I frequented markets and bought all
that was necessary for the home farm. To be exact, he bought and I
paid.
"But the beginning of evil days was at hand. I have always noticed it.
Man cannot long be left in peace, even among the most favoured
surroundings. Now I was doing no harm to any soul or body in all the
surrounding parishes. Instead I did what good I could--spoke fairly
and civilly, contributed freely to charities, helped more than one of
my impoverished neighbours. But I will not conceal it from my
successor (who alone is to read this manuscript) that all my good will
was in vain, so far as gaining the affection and respect of the
countryside was concerned. Yet for this, personally, I can conceive no
reason. Those whom Jeremy took charge of were invariably
strangers--men of loud, brawling character, generally semi-drunkards,
trampling all laws of a quiet and respectable demeanour under their
feet.
"While I myself, giving shelter to these poor creatures, the sisters
Orrin--who without me would have been hunted from city to city--I,
Howard Stennis, whose only dissipation or distraction was to weave the
thronging fancies of flower and fruit into my napery--was no better
respected than an outlaw dog. They called me the Golden Farmer, but it
was with a sneer. None would willingly linger a moment to speak with
me, not so much as one of Bailiff Ball's tow-headed urchins. If one of
them met me in a lonesome path, as like as not he would set up a howl
and dodge between my legs, running, tumbling, and making the welkin
ring, as if I had been some black evil bogie!
"Yet, I am a man who all his life has loved children, and (with a few
exceptions) carefully observed the courtesies as between man and man.
When I consider how I have been served by friends and neighbours, many
of whom I have repeatedly obliged, I am filled with surprise that I
have kept the sphere of my operations so remote from my insulters. But
then I have always, save perhaps in the case of my daughter Bell, been
a forgiving man. Even now I cherish no enmity against those whose
machinations have caused me to be suspected.
"It was about this time, when the first-planted lilies were beginning
to sprout for the third season, that Jeremy, nosing, as usual, here and
there, discovered the ancient underground rooms across the drawbridge.
Immediately I saw the use they would be to us. Having been well
brought up myself, I had always regretted the necessity of sending so
many, mostly careless and godless men, to their account unwarned and
unprepared. Such of them as could be induced to disgorge further sums
of money besides those carried on their bodies might at least have some
space for reflection and repentance. What I did not foresee was that
the Orrins, with their low, mad-folks' cunning, would make use of these
nests of chambers and hiding-places for their own ends, and thereby
endanger everything which I had so wisely and so laboriously thought
out.
"But for all that it was, as I have said, the beginning of the evil
days.
"And as usual it was owing to my own carelessness. I have enough
common sense to know that, nine times out of ten, men have themselves
to thank for the misfortunes which befall them. It is only the born
fool who goes from house to house and from friend to friend maundering
about ill luck and an unkind Providence. Good luck, at least, is
generally only the art of looking a good way ahead.
"I was away in Edinburgh, for the almanac told us that we were
approaching the date of the Bewick Wakes. Jeremy was to make the
acquaintance of a certain Lammermuir farmer with a well lined
pocket-book. The lily bed, under which he was to lie, would just have
made out Miss Aphra's pattern neatly--a thing concerning which she was
most particular. I will not give his name; if this falls into the
hands of a worthy successor he may one day scent the 'shot' out for
himself. He speaks broad Lammermuir, wears glasses hooked round his
ears, like a college professor, and generally has cut himself while
shaving in more than one place. But at any rate he had a respite for
the time being.
"For, without my knowledge, and quite apart from all my well-ordered
designs, Jeremy in a mad, fierce fit fell suddenly upon the mail
carrier betwixt Breckonside and Bewick. Very early in the morning it
was done, and the place unsuitable and quite unsafe, being close by the
bailiff's cottage. But that was not the worst. The mare belonging to
the carrier postman (I knew him well, a decent quiet man, Henry Foster
by name) ran wide and wild, made a circuit of the Deep Moat property
and turned up in front of the school-house at Breckonside, the mail gig
all blood and leaves, just as the innocent bairns were going in to say
their morning's lessons.
"The rest of the business Jeremy had carried through well enough. He
had sculled the body of Foster, properly covered with bark and
brushwood, and laid it comfortably in the place intended for the
Lammermuir farmer. He had taken the mail bags, such as appeared to
have anything of value in them, turned them inside out, burned them in
his baker's furnace, and hidden away the rings (which he could not
melt) in some of his private _caches_.
"Yet when I asked him why he had done the deed at all, he would only
reply, 'I saw Harry passing by, just when I had done whetting my knife,
and I thought I would try it on him!'"