Deep Moat Grange
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None thought of going farther. Though I knew very well that behind the hanging of dull purple at the lectern was the door by which Mr. Ablethorpe had saved his strange parishioners, and so cheated the hasty angers of Breckonside.
Nor did I tell them of it. Somehow I was no longer a leader. And deep in my heart I felt sure that if Elsie were indeed there, Mr. Ablethorpe would give his life rather than that any harm should come to her. Besides Elsie and I had been so many times in danger of our lives, in that very place even, that I knew somehow she would come back to me unhurt. At any rate, the actual prison house where she was hidden was far beyond our ken. None of us thought of searching on the other side of the moat, where was the underground oven of the Cistercians, in which Elsie (as she has already told) was interned.
Perhaps I did wrong in not revealing the secret of the passage. But then if there had been bloodshed – and our folk were quite in the mood for it – the death or ill-usage of these poor innocents (I do not speak of Miss Orrin or Mad Jeremy) would have been on my head. On the whole, I am still convinced that I acted wisely. And I am sure also that Mr. Ablethorpe did so. For he had, there was no doubt, hurried the sisters Honorine, Camilla, and Sidonia, with their eldest sister Miss Orrin, from the chapel where he had known he would be sure to find them at that hour, by the passage along which I had chased him, and had finally hidden them safely in the range of underground buildings that had been the store and treasure-houses of the monks in the days of the border moss-troopers. For then each good wife of a peel tower sent her husband to "borrow" from the holy clerks of the Moated Abbey as often as the larder and money bag were empty. And her way was a woman's way. She served him at dinner time with only this – a clean spur upon an empty plate, which being interpreted meant, "If thou would'st eat, good man of mine, rise and ride."
They lived in dangerous territory, these good monks, and it is small wonder if after their departure the moated island kept its repute. The very wealth of "hidie-holes" conduced to deeds that feared the light.
Mad Jeremy in his outcast days had sheltered there. He had explored them, and that knowledge had been abundantly utilized since the purchase of the Grange by Mr. Stennis. The whole situation was most favourable for his traffic, and even now when its good repute was blown upon, the Cistercian abbots' "hidie-hole" still showed itself capable of keeping its secrets.
Our Breckonsiders were proverbially slow of belief, but they could not get over the facts. There before us was the house of Deep Moat, all open to the eye, silent like a church on week days, prepared as for visitors from floor to roof tree. And nothing to be found, neither there, nor in the numerous out-buildings of which Mr. Bailiff Ball, a man of approven probity, had the charge.
There was nothing for it therefore but to go home. Or rather the villagers had almost arrived at that decision when Miss Orrin, escorted by Mr. Ablethorpe, walked suddenly into the midst of the crowd of armed country folk.
Her appearance caused an angry roar, pikes and scythes were raised against her. But the presence of a clergyman, the dignity of even an alien cloth, made them turn away a little shamefacedly. Mr. Ablethorpe put up his hand to command silence.
"My friends," he said, "I have lived among you long enough to know that you will offer no indignity to a woman. Miss Orrin is here of her own wish to explain to you all that may be necessary. She does not, of course, make herself responsible for the words or actions of all other members of her family, but so far as she is concerned she is ready to explain."
"Where is Elsie Stennis? Murderess! Burn the witch! The she-devil!" These cries, among others, broke from the crowd, and Miss Orrin was well advised not to attempt any long parley.
"Come with me," she said, "and I will satisfy you! But go gently. For the master of this house is very ill and the doctor is with him even now."
Whereupon she opened with a key a door in the weaving chamber of Mr. Stennis, a door which I had taken for that of a large iron safe, and conveyed us into a smaller chamber, with a barred window looking across the moat. Here Mr. Stennis lay on a bed, very pale and haggard, and with him, his hand upon the sick man's wrist, was Dr. Hector of Longtown, a man whom every one knew and respected – all the more so because of a brusque manner and an authoritative speech that caused people to place great confidence in his judgments.
He looked up astonished and rose to his feet, evidently very angry.
"Hello," he said, "what's this? What right have you to come masquerading here with your pitchforks and hedging tools? Out of this, or I'll put my lancet into some of you! I'll wager that I will let more blood in five minutes than you with your entrenching tools in a week – ay, and take it from the right spot, too!"
He followed the defeated Breckonsiders to the door, made a gesture as if to hasten a few laggards with the toe of his boot, and remarked aloud to Miss Orrin: "I thought you had more sense than to encourage this sort of thing!"
"Me encourage it!" cried Miss Orrin, indignantly facing him – "you are under a great mistake, sir!"
"Well, out of this, anyway, all of you," said Dr. Hector. "I will not have it. If my patient's repose is broken into again, tell them I am armed – I will take my horsewhip to the pack of them!"
And curiously enough the crowd of justicers melted more quickly merely with the shame of looking a good man in the face, and before his horsewhip of righteous indignation, than it would have done before Mad Jeremy, armed to the teeth.
"I went this morning to the school where Miss Elsie Stennis teaches," said Miss Orrin, "and I gave her a message that her grandfather was ill and wishful to see her. Dr. Hector is a witness that such was Mr. Stennis's urgent desire. I merely executed it, and all that I know further is that Miss Stennis has not yet complied with that request."
"Our Frankie saw teacher with you on the meadow pasture at nine this morning," interrupted a gaunt woman with the bent shoulders of the outdoor worker and a look of poverty on her face.
"Then your Frankie lied!" retorted Miss Orrin sharply.
And after this direct challenge it needed both Mr. Ablethorpe and Mr. De la Poer to restore order. But the fury of Frankie's mother contrasted so ill with Miss Orrin's glacial calm, that it seemed possible enough that "Frankie" had indeed invented the little circumstance to add to his importance, after hearing of the loss and disappearance of "teacher."
"Moreover," said Miss Orrin, "since Mr. Stennis is too ill to have his bedchamber and house invaded in this way, in future Dr. Hector will arrange for special protection from the police at Longtown. And after this warning let any one cross the moat at their peril."
There was no more to be done. Aphra Orrin had beaten us completely. The baffled tide ebbed back the way it came, and Deep Moat Grange was left alone once more with the secrets it had been successful in guarding in the teeth of a whole countryside in arms and aroused to a high pitch of curiosity.
The two clergymen waited behind, but the sick man would have nothing to do with them, declaring his intention, if he must, of dying as a good Presbyterian. He was the most intractable of invalids, even threatening to break a bottle over Dr. Hector's head if, as he proposed, he should venture to bring with him from Longtown a minister of his own denomination.
"Hobby Stennis is none so ill as that," he said stoutly, "if only I had my will in a safe place, and had seen the little lass, who is all my kith and kin, I would ask no more from doctor or minister in this world."
"I will take charge of the will myself if no better may be," said Dr. Hector. And so, none saying him nay, he rode back to Longtown with the holograph in his breast pocket, jesting with two farmers riding that way as he went. Had he only known, a few sheets of a folio account book covered with close writing in the hand of Mr. Stennis was considerably more dangerous to carry about with him than the latest discovered high explosive!
It was with considerable astonishment that on the evening of his next visit to Deep Moat Grange, about midway between the edge of the woods and the lonely alehouse where my father had alighted, Dr. Hector was suddenly aware of a noose of rope which circled about his neck with a whiz. The next moment he was dragged from his horse. He lay unconscious for an hour on the road, and then coming to himself turned and walked back to Longtown, very stiff and very angry, but conscious of no other loss than that of several copies of prescriptions which he kept in his breast pocket.
"What they can want with these, I don't know," said the vindictive doctor. "I only hope they will take them all together. There was a triple dose of strychnine in one which I wrote for Garmory's dog!"
Now Miss Orrin was a clever woman, and she grasped at once the immense moral value of having the support of Mr. Ablethorpe and his friend and spiritual director Mr. De la Poer. It was quite evident that for the sisters the situation at Deep Moat Grange would no longer be tenable. Mr. Stennis might die any day. The Longtown doctor gave little hope of ultimate recovery. The will had been removed out of Aphra's reach. True, she might possibly induce the old man to make another, disinheriting his granddaughter. If Elsie died in her prison, doubtless sooner or later all would be found out. There were other things also.
It came as the happiest of solutions, therefore, to the strenuous head of the Orrin family, when, a few days after, Mr. Ablethorpe proposed to charge himself with the care of the three "innocents" – Honorine, Camilla, and Sidonia. He knew of a convent, the good sisters of which gave up their lives to the care of women mentally afflicted. Aphra refused point blank any such assistance for herself, even temporarily. But for her sisters she rejoiced openly, and was indeed, after her fashion, really grateful to the two young clergymen who had taken up the cause of the witless and the friendless.
"I know why you do this," she said, "it is that you may clear the board of those who have neither art nor part in the evil. Then you will strike the more surely. I do not blame you, Mr. Ablethorpe, But for me, I will not go with my sisters, who have done nothing – known nothing. If the guilty are to suffer – and if the guilty are indeed my brother and my master – then I will stand in the dock by their side. No one shall ever say that Aphra Orrin went back on a friend, or refused her full share of responsibility. All the same, Mr. Ablethorpe – and you, Mr. De la Poer – I am grateful from my heart for what you are doing for my poor sisters. For me, I am neither mad nor irresponsible – only as the more notable sinner, in the greater need of your ghostly counsels!"
CHAPTER XXV
A LETTER FROM JOSEPH YARROW, SENIOR,
TO HIS SON JOSEPH YARROW, JUNIOR
Dear Joe – Yours of the 10th received and contents noted. You ask me to tell you in writing what happened when, like a fool, I allowed myself to be caught and imprisoned by the other fools at Deep Moat Grange, at that time the property of the late Mr. H. Stennis.
Nothing can be more generally useless than the practice of going back on old transactions, the gain of which has long gone to your banker, or the loss been written off. But as, on this occasion, you represent to me that a few notanda from me might aid your book to sell, I comply with your desire. Your proposition, kindly but speculative, that I should receive ten per cent. (10 %) of the proceeds, is one to which I cannot accede. The venture is your own, and though I reply as a father, I desire to rest absolutely disinterested in the business. I have made my success in life, such as it is, by never touching anything of a doubtful or gambling nature. And I am creditably informed the publication of books of thrilling adventure such as you propose undoubtedly falls under the latter category.
But the facts, nevertheless, are at your service. All that I ask of you is that you should allow them to remain facts. I once lifted a page of your MS., which had been blown from your desk, and I grieve to say that it contained such twaddle about love, together with other intangible and inappreciable articles, that I came very near to discharging you on the spot. But I remembered the solid qualities and aptitudes you had shown (I give you so much credit, but I trust you do not strike me for a rise on the strength of it) on the occasion of my late disappearance.
Well, on Monday, the sixth of December, at 8.59 I received a letter bearing the Edinburgh postmark, stating that a certain Mr. Stephen Cairney, who has owed me over three hundred pounds for a number of years (£329, to be exact) would be selling a large parcel of cattle at Longtown Tryst. The writer of the note was Mr. H. Stennis, of Deep Moat Grange, and he informed me that he had successfully adopted a similar course at Falkirk some years ago. He had been able to give his lawyer due notice, and had "riested" the money in the hands of the auctioneer.
Now there is no reason why Hobby Stennis should go out of his way to put money into my pocket. On the contrary! If it had been the other way about I should have seen him farther first before I meddled. Still, the sum was a considerable one, and Mr. Dealer Stephen Cairney certainly a slippery customer, whom I might never be able to make anything off of again. It was just possible that old Hobby, as spiteful an old ruffian as lived, whether as poor weaver or as Golden Farmer, had his knife into Cairney for some old quarrel which most likely Cairney had himself forgotten.
At any rate, there was nothing against my riding to Longtown to see. Nothing against my trying, at least, to come by my own. Still it was with an angry and unsettled mind, but a firm determination not to be cheated if I could help it, that I rode off to Longtown on Dapple, the good and trusty mare I had bought as a bargain from the heirs and assigns of Mr. Henry Foster, sometime deceased.
My wife was most difficult as to my riding alone, but if a man is to take account of the whim-whams of his women-folk, he will have time for little else. So I gave Joseph and Kingsman sufficient directions and elaborate instructions to pass them over till my return, and so parted.
There is nothing to note on the journey to Longtown. I fell into converse with several farmers and made arrangements with one to take his young pigs at valuation – which I judged a good affair to me, his valuator being largely indebted to me in the line of bone manures and feeding stuffs.
But beyond that nothing, and even that affair was quite in the course of business, though it has not yet matured.
For, perhaps owing to the unsettled state of the country, the pigs have been anxious-minded and run to legs, utterly refusing to put on flesh, which, as I understand it, is the first duty of pig. I came somewhere across a book by Thomas Carlyle in which he stated this somewhat strongly. I was much struck by the strength and precision of the argumentation, and wished that at all times he had thought fit to write with similar clearness. There is no doubt that the man had the ability. I have read worse newspaper articles.
I found my man without great difficulty, and duly "riested" or arrested the moneys due to me, in the hands of Mr. Lightbody the auctioneer, taking the said Mr. Lightbody's cheque on a Thorsby bank – both as more portable, and also to give that sound and well-considered man time to settle with the buyers of the Cairney cattle – lots A, B, and C, on which I had first charge.
Now, I am not a man ever to halt at markets, or to drink in public places – more, that is, than to clinch a bargain, as an honest man ought, neither with stinting nor with offensive liberality. I even made it up with Cairney, though at first, of course, he was neither to hold nor to bind. He threatened to bring me up "before the fifteen" for damage to his credit. But I pointed out that nothing hurts a man's credit so much as the habit of not paying his debts. Whereupon he calmed a little, and said he, "I'll wager that it was old Hobby who put you on to this!" To which, naturally, I made no reply, letting him think just what he would.
At three o'clock I had Dapple saddled. For it being the winter season, I judged that late enough to be travelling over so wild a country. But having done harm to no one, and carrying no sums of money, I saw no reason for fear.
At the half-way little hedge inn, for once in my life I lighted down and called for a bowl of soup, but could only get coffee, and that without milk – which proves the improvidence of these people. For Crewe Moss would easily have pastured a hundred cows, though it would most likely happen that an odd one might get laired in the soft places now and then. But not to have so much as a drop of milk and on Crewe Moss! Lamentable! So I told the people what I thought of them, mounted Dapple, and came my ways.
I had gone, perhaps, three miles, and was skirting the woods adjoining the property of Mr. Stennis, when, as I passed under some high trees a noose dropped about my neck. The mare passed on, and I was left dangling as neatly as if the hangman had done it. Happily for me the cord had descended lower than my neck on one side, and I was caught under the left armpit. But there I swung and turned all the same, shouting manfully for help. I could observe as I wheeled about, for all the world like a scarecrow in a bean field, some one in the act of catching Dapple and tying her to a tree.
Then the man – a long-limbed, ugly-mugged fellow, with corkscrew curls exactly like the old maids when I was young – came back, and, letting me down, wrapped me carefully in a coil of rope till I could move neither hand nor foot. I know him now to be Mad Jeremy, for long chief agent in the doubtful affairs of Mr. Hobby Stennis.
Now I am a fair weight, for my inches, though not to call a heavy man. But this gipsy-looking fellow took me on his back as easily as if I had been a bag of shavings for kindling. If he had taken to honest courses, that same Jeremy Orrin – for so I am informed he is called – I would gladly have given him a thirty-shilling-a-week job in the warehouse. Nothing would have come unhandily to him.
Well, he carried me by various passages, the rough stone and lime of which scratched my face, knees, and knocking elbows, to a commodious rounded chamber. It was floored, walled, and roofed with wood. But I could make out, by sounding, the stone arching, and behind that again the solid earth. It was, as I now know, the cellar or ice house of the monks which they had built for themselves on the verge of the Moat to cool their wine in torrid summers.
Hither the woman, Aphra Orrin, accompanied her brother, my captor. They searched me thoroughly, as though I were a postman with registered letters and other valuables, but, as was my habit, they found upon my person no store of valuables – fairs and trysts being no fit places to make parade of one's gear.
Among some almanacs, jottings of bargains, and other things, these two came on the cheque for three hundred pounds on the bank of Thorsby, at which Mr. Lightbody, the auctioneer, did his business – as they said, for the purpose of giving him a day extra – which, indeed, an honest man might very well do, paying out on many occasions before he had received the price from the buyer.
At the sight of that they were much bewildered, and did not, as I judge, know what to do. Finally, after having taken away the cheque and considered upon it, or perhaps taken the advice of a third person, they brought it back to me, and offered me my life in exchange for my signature upon the back of that piece of paper.
But to this I would not agree. I regarded the position all round, and saw clearly that as soon as I had signed, it would be as good as signing my death warrant. So I judged it best to put them off with half promises, and partial encouragements. As, "that I could not bring myself to rob my family of so great a sum," or "that the bank would expect me to present the cheque in person." Both of which were mere vanities – for, of course, the cheque was made out to me personally and would be paid over my signature, which was as well known to the cashiers of the Thorsby bank as that of the manager himself.
So, being countered in this, the man with the curls was for putting his knife into me instanter, but the tall woman took him apart, and I could hear her pounding the table with her fist, persuading him. With three hundred pounds, so she argued, they could all get out of the country, supposing that Mr. Stennis's money was not available. I was, I learned from her words, their anchor to windward. They had expected I should bring back the money in gold or notes. Therefore, as I had not done so, I should be kept in the ice house and coaxed till I signed the cheque. Then they could close all the doors – no need of stronger measures – and leave me tied on the floor of the ice house. Who, at least for long, would be any the wiser?
I had time for many things, there, in that chilly abode. They chained my ankles to rings let into the wall, the bolts of which appeared through the lining of planks. I was given a mattress to lie upon, and occasionally Mad Jeremy threw me a loaf of bread, as one does to a dog.
Most of all, I was afraid that my faculties should rust, or even that I should go mad, so by steady application I learned the multiplication table up to twenty-four-times, making each as familiar to me as ten times ten. This would prove of great use to me afterwards in my business, and those who do have transactions with me wonder at my quickness while I laugh at their simplicity.
Then I took up one by one all the concerns of every man I knew, and set myself problems as against myself. As thus: Yarrow, of Breckonside, will be coming to me shortly for two hundred loads of fodder for the company's horses. He has the contract down at Clifton – the tramway company – and get the fodder he must. And how shall I mix the stuff so that it will be passed when it comes to be taken off his hands?
I thought all this out, putting myself in the other's place, and no one can imagine – who has not tried it – how excellent a lesson in affairs it proved. After that drill in the old ice house, where at times I was well-nigh frozen, I seemed to see inside every man's skull with whom I was making a bargain. It was not only a great advantage, but in a sort of way it was poetry also. I don't expect Joseph to understand this any more than I understand his maunderings about love and girls. Not but what I am fond of my wife. She brought me a good round sum, as every woman ought, which I have used with care and caused to breed handsomely. But if I were to tell Mary that I loved her, I think she would go at once and order my tombstone. At least, she would call in a doctor!
Still, with all my invention, the time hung heavy. Each day the Orrin woman came bringing Lightbody's cheque, with new arguments why I should sign it. I put her off, though sometimes not without difficulty. I think she must have been partly cracked, in spite of her apparently business-like habits, for it puzzled me how they would have got the money, even over my signature, taking into consideration my sudden disappearance and the to-do there would be about it. But I took care to say nothing about that. Mr. Lightbody's cheque and the hope that they had of my signing it, and so enabling them to get the money, was my best safeguard.
But one day Miss Orrin, apparently after long cogitation, made another proposal. If I would write to my bankers telling them that I had gone abroad on an affair of great moment, and asking them to pay to the bearer a thousand pounds on my behalf, Miss Orrin would pledge her word to leave me with ten days' provisions in the vault, and at the end of that time to send to the authorities a message stating where I was to be found.
This, she said, was their ultimatum. The alternative unexpressed, but evident, was Master Jeremy's knife. However, I did not agree. The business had too speculative an air, and there was a decided lack of guarantee. For there was nothing to prevent those kind friends from cutting my throat after they had pocketed the cash, supposing that my banker was fool enough to pay it without going to the police. I suppose, however, that Jeremy would have stayed here by me, and if the police had been called in, or his sister had not returned, there would have been no more of me.