Deep Moat Grange. Crockett Samuel Rutherford
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.
CHAPTER X
THE BROM-WATER MYSTERY
It is wonderful how soon a thing is forgotten, or at least put on a shelf in people's memories. Poor Harry Foster, for example! There was a man now – a man murdered in the discharge of his duty, if ever a man was. And after a month or two another man was travelling the same road with a new mail cart and new sacks of letters, as quiet as water going down a mill-lade. The only difference was that he started a while later in the morning than poor Harry, after it was daylight, in fact, so that the Bewick people had to wait, often till midday, before they got their letters.
And when they made complaint to the Postmaster-General, or some other big-wig, he up and said to them, "You Bewickers, it is open to you to choose one of yourselves to bring up the mails from Breckonside, running the risk of Harry Foster's fate and providing a sufficient guarantee for any loss the post office run by Her Royal High Majesty may sustain."
Something like that he said. But no Bewicker offered. Of course not – why, they had skin creeps at the very thought.
"So," says the post official big-wig, "you Bewick cowards, be good enough to shut up and take your letters when they are sent out to you."
Still there were people who kept thinking about poor Harry for all that. And I was one of them. Elsie did not seem to care so much, or at least so long. Did you never observe that you can't keep a girl long interested in the same thing, unless you keep on telling her all the time how much prettier she is getting to look? But I did not know even that much, not then. I was just mortal green – green as father's spare pasture field after three days' steady rain and one of May sunshine. And, indeed, to tell the truth outright, I thought altogether too much at that time about people, and too little about my Latin and Greek prose, as Mr. Mustard, who was a good classic himself, often told me. He said I should rue it. But I can't say I have ever gone as far as that. Not to date, anyway. Perhaps I may some day, when I start reading Latin to pass the time.
The adventure grew more interesting to me after the policeman and detectives had one by one all cleared off. The affair was "classed," as the French say in their crime books – I learned my French out of these, and a jolly easy way, too – that is, the police were not going to do anything more in the matter, unless something fresh turned up. And it would have to be something mighty fresh, too, to move them. They had all got so sick of the whole business.
There was just one thing that kept me back. That was, I was nearly sure that Elsie's grandfather had something to do with the whole series of crimes of which the death of poor Harry was only the last and the most senseless. Perhaps not Mr. Stennis directly, but somebody about Deep Moat Grange. So, of course, I did not want to bring Elsie into it if I could help it. Because if her grandfather was a murderer, and if all the missing drovers and absconding cattle dealers were laid to his account, and he hanged for it, it would be clearly impossible for Elsie to go on living with Nance Edgar at the Bridge End. And as I was not yet ready to make other arrangements for her (besides being mortally afraid of the curate), I said nothing to any one – least of all to Elsie herself.
I think I had suspected everybody for miles round in turn – from Mr. Codling the policeman to the vicar himself. As for poor Mr. Ball, I had him so completely under observation, and was so sure of his guilt, that when the unfortunate bailiff went out only to fodder the cattle, I followed stealthily in his footsteps, sure that the secret of the mystery lay in the range of cattle sheds or