FRENDER'S FOLLY.
When Griff reached home and looked at himself in the glass, he was
struck by the disarrangement of his features. The left eye was swollen
and rapidly discolouring; his upper lip was pretty badly bruised; and
a deepish cut in one cheek was still bleeding fitfully. These, and a
few minor blemishes, helped to make up a picture that was far from
prepossessing; it occurred to him that Kate would think it a bad start,
if he appeared on the morrow in this guise. The more he thought of it,
the more clearly he saw that he must get away from Marshcotes before
the household was up, leaving a good-bye behind him. He stole out of
his room and across the landing. A light shone under Mrs. Lomax's door,
and he knocked gently.
"Come in!" called the old lady, who had long ago recognized his
footfall on the stairs. She was sitting up in bed, with a thick shawl
drawn close about her shoulders and a book on her knees.
"What! reading in the middle of the night? Fie, mother."
"I have been troubled lately, dear; it takes an old woman longer to
reconcile herself to a change--do you understand? Why, Griff, what
_have_ you been doing to your face?"
"I don't look exactly pretty, do I? I've had a lively discussion
touching the rights of property, and this is the outcome."
"Poaching again, boy?" sighed the mother. "I had hoped, since you came
back--but, there, I might as well try to keep a duck from the water.
Let me be doing something to your face, at any rate."
"No, don't bother. I'll get a slice of raw beef and paste it over the
eye. I want you to do something else for me, though, mother."
"Well?"
"You have seen me like this before, but Kate hasn't. I was going to
leave to-morrow in any case. If I pack my bag now and slip off by the
early coach from Heathley, will you make matters right with Kate?"
"But where are you going?"
"Up to North Yorkshire. I had a letter from Framlingham the other
day--you remember Framlingham?--he is playing the hermit up there in an
out-of-the-way shooting-box of his, and he gave me _carte blanche_ to
run up when, and for as long as, I liked. After I leave him, I must put
on my time as best I can until the divorce business is through. Mother,
you will look after _my wife_? I hate to leave her. Strangeways may be
up to mischief, you know. Don't let her go out alone, will you?"
The old lady smiled at him, very tenderly and a little ruefully.
"You are a muddle of a man, Griff; I sometimes wonder how you manage
to come through things as well as you do. First, you rush off on a
harum-skarum prank the night but one after taking big responsibilities
on your shoulders; then, you come to me with all kinds of suggestions
for taking care of Kate; finally, you will leave us in the lurch, us
two poor women, to fight out a trying time together."
"I'll stay, mother! It was your suggestion, to start with, that I
should----"
"You can't stay," said Mrs. Lomax, quietly.
"Well, but you seem----"
"Don't bother me with logic, when I am suffering from feelings. Off you
go, boy; you can trust me with your treasure-trove. Don't forget to put
the beef on your eye; you have no idea what a fright you look."
So Griff was well on his way north by the time that Kate had opened
her eyes and had wondered anew at the strangeness of her surroundings.
Mrs. Lomax contrived an explanation of her son's early departure, not
without sundry concessions to her principles of honesty, and the two
women began their dreary, uneventful waiting time. There were legal
delays, first of all; and when at last the case had come on for trial,
and Strangeways had obtained the verdict of the court, there was a
further wait until the decree could be made absolute. The interval,
indeed, was then only half what it is to-day, but to Kate, in her
present condition of nervous dread, three months seemed a veritable
eternity.
It was a wretched winter, too, for Gabriel Hirst. He was troubled, to
begin with, by the difficulty of reconciling Griff's innocence with
his action in carrying off Kate Strangeways to the Manor. Griff had
given his word that they were innocent, and innocent therefore they
must be--yet, "it looked queer to a plain man's way of thinking." Then,
Greta was becoming positively vixenish; the preacher's helplessness,
his dog-like devotion, his womanish beating about the bush, got on
the poor lassie's nerves at last, till she was driven, from sheer
inability to bear it any longer, to follow Griff's example and migrate
for a while to an atmosphere less strained. She met Gabriel as she was
lumbering across the square that fronted the Black Bull, in the one
rickety chaise which Marshcotes possessed.
"How do you do, Mr. Hirst?" she said, leaning out of the window and
beckoning him to approach.
The driver pulled up his nag--never a matter of serious difficulty--and
Gabriel came to the door.
"Good morning; are you--are you leaving us?" he stammered, keeping
the little gloved hand in his, for very forgetfulness of all that lay
without the pretty, frost-kindled face, with its mocking lips.
"Yes, for a few weeks. It is so dull here, month in and month out,
isn't it? _Such_ a bother I had to get father to let me go--but aunt
has begged me to stay with her for such a long while past, that I
could hardly have got out of it this time. Do you never go away, Mr.
Hirst?"
"I? Not often. I like the old place well enough, when----"
"Yes, when?"
"When folks treat a man as if he was something better than the mud
under their high-heeled boots," said the preacher, with sudden
savagery. This pretty scrap of womanhood, with her warm white flesh
nestling cosily into her wraps--why did he let himself be driven by
her out of his wonted sober courses? For a half-moment, the man of God
could have strangled this mocking daughter of Eve.
"I never was treated in that way, so I can't tell; besides, my boots
aren't high-heeled," she added inconsequently.
The driver was beating his hands across his chest to keep the cold out,
and Greta bethought her of the coach.
"You'll make me late for the coach at Heathley, Mr. Hirst. Good-bye;
won't it be a relief to you to have me out of the village? I tease you
so, and I believe you don't half like it."
Gabriel Hirst stood there like a fool in the middle of the road,
and watched the chaise disappear over the crest of the ill-paved
street. Anger had gone from him; religion had gone from him; he was
only dazedly conscious of that furry vision which had left him with
a careless gibe. He never knew of the bitter tears shed by this same
furry vision, who was really no more than a healthy young maiden, with
all a life's desires before her; never guessed that she wept through
half her journey, and wanted to weep out the other half, had there been
tears enough to draw upon, and no one to see them fall.
Altogether, when Christmas Day came and the bells rang out their
message, in the hearty country way, there was little responsive joy
in the hearts of many of the dwellers by Marshcotes Moor. Mrs. Lomax,
though every day seemed to bring Kate nearer to her, was as yet far
from accepting the situation; she remembered other Christmases, when
she had had Griff all to herself--further back, too, when her husband
was alive, and they had framed great plans for the future of a certain
toddling hopeful. Who was this strange woman, that she should upset a
lifetime of hopes and fears, lightly as if they had been a card-house?
And Kate felt her position keenly; she was soon to be branded in the
eyes of all who knew her as a woman of bad repute, and it cut her
pride to the quick. Then she would cease, for a whole day together, to
care what any one thought of her, so long as she had Griff; but after
that would come a bitter sense that he was far away from her, and a
dread of what might happen in the interim. Like all superstitious
people, she thought of Providence as an agent whose unalterable aim
it was to defeat the plans of mortals when they were aiming for the
highest happiness; it seemed inconceivable that nothing should step
in to thwart them at the last. Griff was shooting--there was a whole
crop of terrors to be gleaned from that knowledge alone; accidents
were so easy, and the chance fall of a trigger was as simple an agent
as Providence could well find. It was in vain that Mrs. Lomax, with
her cheery common sense, strove to put such dreads away from her; and
Griff's frequent letters--they came, if the truth must out, three times
a week--did less to comfort Kate than one good, hearty hand-grip could
have effected.
But there was more than theoretic dread abroad; there was real tragedy
between Ling Crag Moor to the west and Cranshaw Moor to the east--as
Roddick knew to his cost.
Roddick was shaving when the sound of the Marshcotes bells came through
the frosty air on Christmas morn. He grinned savagely at his own
reflection in the glass, and cut himself badly on the chin, under the
delusion that he was uttering a biting sarcasm.
"Peace on earth," he muttered, as he sought for a cobweb on the
well-lined walls of his bedroom. "Good-will towards men; I know the old
tomfoolery by heart," he growled, applying the cobweb to his chin.
The old woman who came for a few hours each morning--his only
servant--was planting a smoking coffee-pot on the table when he came
downstairs.
"A merry Kirsmas, sir, to ye," she croaked.
"Thanks; the same to you," said Roddick, dryly. "Oh, by the way, isn't
there some superstition about the season--something about coin of
the realm, and other things that really touch people's hearts? Mrs.
Whitaker, would you like a Christmas-box?"
He amused himself for a while, as his way was, in watching the old
creature squirm from one embarrassment to another. First, she feared
he would see how anxious she was in the matter, and then she feared
he wouldn't; it was an unfair advantage, she felt, to take of a
woman "that had allus had her own living to addle, but what war noan
dependant on onybody's charity, for all that."
Roddick grew swiftly weary of her--weary, with one of his hot, insane
frenzies. He tossed her a sovereign, as he would have thrown a bone to
his dog, and turned to his eggs and bacon.
"That will do for to-day," he snapped. "You can leave as soon as your
legs will carry you."
"But there's th' kitchen not fettled up yet, an' th' bedroom----" began
the woman.
"Well, they must wait till to-morrow. I can't stand your clatter,
clatter, clatter, upstairs and down. Heaven knows why it allowed man to
hit on the notion of clogs!"
Mrs. Whitaker was not insensible to fear of her master's black moods;
but it shocked her sense of decency that the domestic rites should go
unperformed.
"Axing your pardon, sir, what'll you do for th' Kirsmas dinner? There's
th' turkey to be roasted, an' th' sauce to be made, an' th' plum
pudding----"
"Confound the lot of them! I shall dine off cheese and bread. Good day,
Mrs. Whitaker."
The woman made off with what speed she could muster, realizing that
Roddick was not all a God-fearing man should be, yet inclined--in the
light of the golden sovereign clutched in her withered palm--to make
allowance for the most sinful of masters on the blessed Christmas Day.
Roddick finished his breakfast, and pulled round his chair to the fire.
"Humph!" growled he, lighting his pipe. "Now we'll salute the happy
morn, and be as jolly as we're bound to be. What a rum sort of place
the world is!"
He read till twelve o'clock, and had just thrown down his book in
disgust, when there came a knock at the outer door. His face brightened
as he saw the wiry little man in velveteen who stood on the threshold.
"Oh, it's you, Riggs, is it? Come in. Have you got a message for me?"
"Yes, sir; from Miss Laverack. I'm to wait for an answer, sir."
Roddick jerked open the envelope, and ran his eye over the note. He
tried to keep back any hint of the passion that warmed his blood at
sight of the well-known handwriting; but the man in velveteen had not
been a keeper for fifteen years without acquiring a quick eye.
"All right. I'll scribble an answer at once. What will you take, Riggs?
Beer--whisky?"
He was not long in returning with his reply to the letter, and Riggs
also left Wynyates with a well-defined feeling that Mr. Roddick came
very seasonably.
"Only, what I fear is, that I'll be blabbing about the business to
the wife one day," muttered the keeper; "and then it would be as
good as all up with the young miss. What them two would do without
a well-meaning, close-mouthed chap like me to help 'em, beats me. I
wonder what's wrong with this Mr. Roddick, and why they can't make a
clean breast of it to the Captain? It's plain to be seen they're over
ears in love one with t'other; he's just got to that time of life,
has Mr. Roddick, when it does take a man mortal hard if he once let's
himself be collared. Well, well, there'll be a pretty reckoning between
me and the Captain if ever my share in the game comes out."
As for Roddick, the brief message contained in Janet Laverack's note
had altered his mood completely. "I begin to believe in the good-will
nonsense," he said to his pipe. Even so short a spell of solitude as
he had already tried had sufficed to induce the bad habit of talking
aloud. He went and looked out of doors. "A fine day, too--just the
sort of day one always reads about, but which doesn't usually turn
up in practice. Every meeting means so much more sheer madness, but
what of that? We'll make a good day of it, and leave the rest to the
Providence I was kicking at a moment ago."
The ground was too slippery to encourage riding. He swallowed some
food standing, and set off on foot at a brisk pace across Ling Crag
Moor. Thence he gained Marshcotes Moor, struck into an ill-defined
track that brought him out at Sorrowstones Spring, went a little way
down the highroad at this point, and turned into the fields behind the
Quarryman's Arms. Soon he was on the moor again, with frozen peat for a
road, and sharp, dry air for stimulus.
On he strode till Lawfoot Water lay below him, with the reddening sun
shimmering across the ice. Another turn, sharp to the right, past the
further edge of the water, led him at the end of half an hour more to
the crest of the ridge overlooking Frender's Folly.
Fifty years before, Luke Frender had ridden safely and well on the top
of the rising trade-tide. When he sold his cotton-mill at Lutherton,
and the business appertaining thereto, he was still a young man, with a
taste for high living, and half a million sterling in the bank. Being
a man of some imagination, and anxious to use his money in ways that
had not occurred to his neighbours, he built himself a huge place in
the very heart of the moors--not an ordinary square-built mansion with
stuccoed walls, but a faithful imitation of the mediæval. There is a
spacious courtyard on the north side, with a fountain in the middle,
guarded by four great stone dogs. Loop-holes grin from the castle
walls, and at one corner the steps of an unbuilt tower climb up to the
second-floor windows. The windows are long, narrow, deep-browed; and
here and there crumbling warts of masonry are tacked on to the walls.
As it stands to-day, blackened by fifty years of the wind and rain and
frost that is no child's play in the heart of Cranshaw Moor, Castle
Frender--better known to the neighbourhood as Frender's Folly--has a
certain dignity of its own. If it be palpably an imitation, it is at
least not jerry-built. Its walls are thick and well knit; its situation
is harsh to the verge of terror; and the smooth lawns, the sweeping
circle of carriage drive, the banked masses of rhododendron that climb
the valley sides, serve only to accentuate the unshorn roughness that
hems them in.
Nor is the Folly wanting in tradition of a sombre sort; short as its
life has been, it has lived fast, just as its stones have greyed before
their time. Luke Frender gambled away his money, his credit--his wife,
too, some say--within its walls; and he shot himself in the big room
overlooking the courtyard, which, half in mockery, he had built to
serve as a private chapel. Then the friend who had robbed him of money
and wife alike, lived on at the castle, and took to hard drinking, and
died in raving delirium; his son, succeeding to the property, married
one of his own housemaids, realized in a very brief time that he, too,
had sold his honour to the devil, and avenged Luke Frender's end, in
a fashion, by hanging himself to a beam in the same private chapel
overlooking the great gateway and the courtyard. This was five years
before Captain Laverack bought the place. Its history had become common
talk throughout the countryside; prospective buyers shunned alike the
grimness of its surroundings and the uncanny trend of its history, and
Laverack had been able to buy it for a tithe of the amount which had
originally been spent on the building. The shooting was excellent, and
the situation exactly such a one as the Captain, in the present state
of his domestic affairs, would have chosen before all others.
Roddick knew nothing of the story attaching to Frender's Folly, except
that the building was almost of yesterday; yet now, as he looked down
on that level circle of lawn and shrubbery, with the gloomy pile at
its centre, he felt no whit disposed to gibe at the pretentiousness of
what he had once termed the Cotton Castle. The sun, a crimson ball, was
touching the moor-edge with its lower rim; a grey gloaming crept across
the everlasting waste of heath; the wind sobbed piteously. A strip of
green, a fringe of naked branches, a broad band of moor, were mirrored
dimly in the big lake that stretched to the northern end of the valley.
It was all inexpressibly lonesome, terrible beyond words.
The sun died wholly, while Roddick crept down the hill-side towards the
trysting-place. He awoke from his sense of awe to find that his eyes
were wet and his throat troubled. He cursed himself for a fool, but the
pity had gripped his heart, for all that; the pathos that underlies
all this bluster and wildness of the moors had struck to some inner
sense, and made him womanish. He shivered as he stood beneath the grim
old fir-tree that had found it hard work enough to stick to its post
halfway up the hill-side. A sheep, away above him on the moor, bleated
its half-witted protest against the fate that had set it there. If only
a good, honest dog would give one good, honest bark, thought Roddick,
he would not mind it half as much.
But the ungainly brute--half mastiff, half collie--that came creeping
up towards the trysting-oak uttered no bark. He crouched close to
Roddick's side, and wagged his rope of a tail, and smuggled his head
into the man's hand for approbation; but he had been trained to hold
his tongue, and he feared rebuke from the girl who followed him a few
paces behind.
"Janet!"
No other word came to Roddick's lips. The tragedy, the desolation, the
pathos,--they were all absorbed in that slim, girlish figure whose
every line betokened eagerness. Wreck and ruin were chiselled deep into
the stones below them; yearning that had no limits, aloofness that
dared not seek for sympathy, were above them; but they two were close
in each other's arms, and looked neither above nor below.
"Leo," she said at last, "was I foolish to drag you so far across the
moor?"
"Be quiet, child!"
"I would have met you nearer Wynyates, but I could not get away for
long enough. There is a crowd of people down there, dear, all expecting
me to entertain them."
"Let them expect," muttered Roddick, gruffly.
As of old, he understood the folly of these meetings; the strain was
greater than any sane man would subject himself to willingly.
"But I shall be missed if I stay here long, and I dread father finding
us out; it would put an end to--to all the world, I think, Leo."
"Janet!" he said sharply.
"Yes?" She looked up, shocked by his tone.
"You shall not say those things. Do you know what it makes me ready to
do--when you show your naked heart to me like that? It makes me tell
myself that I have only to carry you away from all this to put an end
to the struggle. You are such a flimsy weight, too; I could carry you
with ease, whether you liked it or not, and then----"
He stopped. A supple strength came into the girl's figure--a strength
one would not have expected from its slenderness.
"Leo," she said slowly, "I ask nothing better. I am not afraid to face
it."
He hesitated--just for one half-moment. Then he shook her as if she had
been a naughty child.
"You little fool! Who _is_ afraid to face a danger that he does not
understand? If ever you dare to try me as far as that again, I'll----
Good God, Janet!" he broke off, with irritable tenderness, "you mustn't
cry. Can't you see that a man who wants to be--unselfish, you know, and
nonsense of that kind--has to behave like a fiend incarnate. It's easy
to be soft when you have not to keep the fight hot in you."
"Leo," said she, "if you don't kiss me at once, I shall hate you for
ever.--Have you stopped to think," she went on, as if in apology for
obtaining her demand, "to think what the life here means to me? I
loathe the moors; they frighten me; it is all so dreary. And the people
father brings to make things livelier for me, they only aggravate the
loneliness. Leo, if I were one little bit _more_ of a fool, I should
either cry myself blind or--well, the lake is deep enough, and the cold
would only be for the first minute or two."
Roddick's voice was in rags when he spoke.
"I'm a brute, child; why didn't you learn it in time?"
He took her to him, and petted her with a helpless mixture of the
father and the lover that was infinitely pitiable.
"Leo," she whispered, looking up and smiling through her sobs, "is this
our happy Christmas?"
Before Roddick could reply, the dog began to whine in a way that called
for attention. He had his nose to the ground, and evidently scented
something not to his liking. Then he was off like a rocket, and a
dismal shriek came from a clump of heather just above them. The night
was clear, with stars enough to show things in a sort of gloaming
light. In the middle of the clump was a writhing mass of rags and
dishevelled hair.
"My wife, by----! Janet, call off the dog and run back home. It is no
place for you!" cried Roddick.
But Tramp was too excited to hear the girl's call. He was running round
and round the figure, a stifled bark cutting into his growls now and
then. Janet ran forward and gripped him by the collar--none too soon,
for every moment he was on the point of making a spring. The figure got
up out of the heather. Roddick cursed the light, because it was enough
to show Janet the hideous contortions of the creature's face.
The silence grew unbearable.
"Well, what are you doing here?" demanded Roddick.
"Nay, Leo, you mustn't speak to me like that, when I've followed you,
mile on mile, across the desolate places. Will you never learn what a
true woman's love means?"
Janet winced cruelly. Roddick's eyes blazed as he watched the delicate
girl shrink from this evil hag who was yet his wife.
"How often must I tell you to stay where you are bidden?" The effort to
keep his hands off was trying him sorely.
"I can't obey when I'm drunk, Leo--I can't. I go wild for you, I----
Who's the white girl standing there?"
"Janet, go, I tell you! Go!"
She shook off the numbness that held her.
"I can't, I won't, leave you! Leo, are not your battles mine? How can I
leave you to face--that?"
"Why didn't we let the dog do its work?" muttered Roddick.
Janet caught the words and gripped him by the arm.
"No, no--not that, Leo. That is what I meant--you will kill her if I
leave you, and we should lose our chance of happiness, you and I, for
ever. Oh, can't you see it? You who shook the breath out of my body
because I asked you to take me away."
The creature glared from one to another and tried to speak, but Roddick
checked her roughly.
"It is better to run away than commit murder," went on the girl, with
eager persistence. "Will nothing make you understand, Leo?"
He pulled himself together.
"It is well to do neither, child. You can trust me."
"Will you swear to do--that thing--no harm?"
"Yes, I swear it. Now go."
She hesitated, glanced at the bundle of rags, then held up her face. He
kissed it gravely.
"That is our protest, dear," she said.
He watched her out of sight. He turned to the wife of his bosom.
"Come along, you devil!" he said dispassionately.
Together they set off across the moor. Roddick laughed harshly from
time to time.