S. R. Crockett

“ But to the fabrication of this beverage, Jen added mysterious rites, during which the door of the still-room was locked, barred, and the keyhole blinded, while Eben and Rob, my uncles, stood without vainly asking for a taste, or simulating by their moans and cries the most utter lassitude and fatigue.
William Lyon sat sipping his drink while Jen eyed him furtively as she went about the house, doing her duties with the silence and exactitude of a well-oiled machine. She was a difficult subject, my aunt Jen, to live with, but she could be got at, as her father well knew, by a humanizing vanity. ”

“ Yet the people who owned the great house of Marnhoul were far away—few had ever seen any of them. Their affairs were in the hands of a notable firm of solicitors in Dumfries. How any mortal could have entered that great abode, or inhabited it after the manner of men, was beyond all things inexplicable. But there before us the blue reek continued to mount, straight as a pillar, till it reached the level of the trees on the bank behind, when a gentle current of air turned it sharply at right angles to the south. ”

“ She had an art, which my aunt counted uncanny, indeed savouring of the sin of witchcraft. It mattered not at all what Irma was given to wear—an old tartan of my grandmother’s Highland Mary days when she was a shepherdess by the banks of Cluden, a severe gown designed on strictly architectural principles by the unabashed shears of Aunt Jen herself, a bodice and skirt of my mother’s, dovelike in hue and carrying with them some of her own retiring quality in every line. ”

“ People went their ways as I was doing mine, dejected and sad. But always, as I crossed toward the opening of a wide new street, where against the sky were tall scaffoldings and men busy with hod and mortar, I saw Irma coming towards me. She was neat and youthful, but dressed poorly in plain things—homespun, and in my dream, I judged, also home-made.
I saw her afar off, and the heart within me gave a great leap. She came towards me smiling, and lo! I seemed to stand still and worship the lithe carriage and elastic step. The world grew all sweet and gay. The lift above became blue and high. ”

“ It was thus that the most notable news of a decade came to Eden Valley. The Haunted House—we did not need to be told—was Marnhoul, a big, gaunt mansion, long deserted, sunk in woods, yet near enough to the Cairn Edward road to be visible in stray round towers and rows of chimneys, long unblacked by fire of kitchen or parlour. It had a great forest behind it, on the verges of which a camp of woodcutters and a rude saw-mill had long been established, eating 4deeper and deeper in, without, however, seeming to make any more difference than a solitary mouse might to a granary. ”

“ Yet, though I have done with you, Mistress Irma Sobieski, I may say that I wish you no ill. Make a better use of your youth than maybe I have done. If ye need a helping hand, there’s my sister Frances out at the Sciennes. She’s fair crammed like a Strasburg goose wi’ the belles-lettres. She will maybe never let ye within the door, but a shilling a week of outdoor relief ye are sure of—for she sets up for being full of the milk of human kindness. ”

“ However, Miss Irma and I sat together in the jutting window, where, as the night darkened and the curtains of the clouds drew down to meet the sombre tree-tops, a kind of black despair came over me. Would “King George” really do any good? Would I prove myself stout and brave when the moment came? Would the beacon we had prepared really burn, and, supposing it did, would any one see it, drowned in woods as we were, and far from all folk, except the peaceable villagers of Eden Valley? ”

“ I do not think that even Rob took much supper. I know that but for my grandfather the horses would have had to go without theirs—and this, the most sacred duty of mankind about a farm, would for once have been neglected. We sat, mainly in the dark, with only the red glow of the fire in our faces, listening to the voice of a man that came in stormy gusts. The lamp had been left on the parlour table to give them light, and somehow we were so preoccupied that none of us thought of lighting a candle. ”

“ Had it been Galligaskins or any seaman of the Golden Hind, Boyd would have had him out of the house in spite of his wife and all the wholesome domestic terror she had so long been establishing.
But a Donegal man is from the north after all, and does not easily take to the informer’s trade. Besides, this was a gentleman born.
Yet he had better have given hospitality to Galligaskins and the whole crew of pirates who manned the Golden Hind than to this slender, clear-skinned creature who lay raving and smiling in the bedroom of Boyd Connoway’s cabin. ”

“ Agnes Anne is a good lass. I know not what I should do without her!”
My grandmother looked about at the new air of tidiness, and for the first time a suspicion crossed her mind that, out of a pit from which she was expecting no such treasure, some one in her own image might possibly have been digged among her descendants of the second generation. She looked at Agnes Anne with a ray of hope. Agnes Anne stood the awful searching power of that eye. Agnes Anne did not flinch. Mary Lyon nodded her head with its man’s close-cropped locks of rough white hair in lyart locks about her ears. ”

“ A red rag to a bull, a match to tinder, are weak metaphors—quite incapable of expressing a tenth of what my grandmother felt at the sight of the pet idler of Eden Valley.
She rushed instantly to the assault, much as she would have led a forlorn hope. The dragoons who plunged their swords into great mows of straw in Covenanting barns, the unfortunates who pursued a needle through a load of hay, were employed in hopeful work when compared with Mistress Mary Lyon, searching with her tongue in this mass of self-sufficiency for any trace of Boyd Connoway’s long-lost conscience. ”

“ We went up the narrow stair—that is, Miss Irma and I—because, since I carried my father’s blunderbuss, Agnes Anne would not come, but stopped half-way, where the little Louis lay asleep in his cot-bed. On the top of the tower, and swinging on a kind of iron tripod bolted into the battlements, we found an iron basket, like that in which sea-coal is burned, but wider in the mesh. Then, in the “winnock cupboard” at the turn of the stair-head, were all the necessaries for a noble blaze—dry wood properly cut, tow, tar, and a firkin of spirit, with some rancid butter in a brown jar. ”

“ She snatched the lantern from the hands of Agnes Anne and put little Louis back on his pillow, bidding him stay there till the time should come for him to get up.
“Are the bad men all killed, Irma?” he asked.
“We are going to bring the good people to help us!” she cried. And with that she ran up-stairs, and I after her, in a great pother of haste. For the candle in her hand was the only bit of fire we had, and I did not want it blown out if I could help it. ”

“ Boyd was as conscience-stricken as if he had personally wielded the poker. But the mind of Bridget was quite otherwise framed. With one hand she seized his abundant curly hair, now with a strand or two of early grey among the straw-colour of it, and while she pulled handfuls of it out by the roots (so Boyd declared afterwards) , she boxed his ears heartily with the other. Which, indeed, is witnessed to by the whole goggle-eyed populace in the truckle bed.
“Didn’t I tell ye, Jerry, ye cuckoo,” whispered Connie, “she’d beat him? He’s gettin’ the Thick ’Un, just as I told ye!” ”

“ Or mayhap (and this, married or single, Irma liked best of all) there came in some shy old farmer from the uplands, or perhaps a herd, to whose boy or girl “out at service” the mistress of Heathknowes had brought home a Bible. These had come to thank Mary Lyon, but could not get a word out. They sipped their currant wine as if it were medicine and moved uneasily on the edges of their chairs. They had excellent manners stowed away somewhere—the natural well-bredness of the hill and the heather, but in a place like that, with so many folk, it seemed as if they had somehow mislaid them. ”

“ All this time he was thumping me on my back, and I was standing before him with such a red face, and (I doubt not) such a compound of idiocy and black despair upon it, that I might have been listening to my doom being pronounced by the mouth of some full-blooded, jovial red judge, with a bunch of seals the size of your fist dangling from his fob and the loaded whip with which he had brought down the highwayman, under his arm.
“Come thou up to the King’s Arms!” he cried; “don’t stand there looking like a dummy. Let’s have the matter out! Thour’t noan shamed, surely! There’s no reason for why. ”

“ Young men on the outskirts of villages might have been seen stealing through gardens, stumbling among cabbage-stocks and gooseberry bushes as they made their way by the uncertain flicker of our far-away beacon to the place of rendezvous.
Herds rising early to “look the hill” gave one glance at the red dance of the flames over the tree-tops of Marnhoul great wood, and anon ran to waken their masters. ”

“ Irma thought a moment and then said, “Perhaps I shall not be quite just because I hated him so. But he was a man whom most call handsome, though to me there was always something dreadful about his face. His hair was dark brown mixed with grey. His features were cut like those of a statue, and his head small for his height. He was slender, light on his feet, and walked silently—ugh—yes, like a cat.”
The Fiscal looked an interrogation at Boyd Connoway.
“That is the man,” he answered unhesitatingly, “though most of the time while he stayed with Bridget and me he kept his bed. ”

“ My father had Fred Esquillant in with him, and the two were busy with Sophocles. I was sitting dreaming with a book of old plays in my hand when Agnes Anne came in.
“Duncan,” she said, “I am feared to bide this night at Marnhoul. And I think so is Miss Irma. Now I would rather not tell grandmother—so you must come!”
“Feared?” said I; “surely you never mean ghosts—and such nonsense, Agnes Anne—and you the daughter of a school-master!”
“It’s the solid ghosts I am feared of,” said Agnes Anne; “haste you, and ask leave of father. He is so busy, he will never notice. ”

“ Southward all was green and whaup-haunted to the grey hip of Pentland, and we saw the spread of the countryside when we—that is, Freddie and I—went down the Dalkeith Road to the red-roofed hamlet of Echobank. Here, four times a week we bought a canful of milk that had to do us two days. For there was something about the taste of the town milk that scunnered us—Freddie especially being more delicately stomached than I.
Here, too, was a red-cheeked serving maid who provoked us—but more especially poor Fred, who asked nothing better than that the wench should let him alone. ”

“ Why Agnes Anne meddled I cannot so well make out, unless it were the mania which at a certain age attacks most nice girls—that of distributing their brothers among their dearest friends—as far, that is, as they will go round.
So Charlotte and I walked under the tall firs of the Academy wood in the hope that Irma might be passing that way. I escorted her home in full sight of all Eden Valley—that was always on the look-out for whatever might happen in the way of courtship about the shop of the famous mantua-maker. ”

“ Richard preferred to be his own hostler, nor did he offer to go near the house or speak a word of his business till he had seen his splendid black duly stalled.
Then my grandmother was summoned, the children brought down, and immediately stricken, Sir Louis with an intense admiration of the great strong man in riding boots, and Miss Irma with a dislike quite as intense. I could see her averting her eyes and trying to hide it. But over all the other women in the house he established at once a paramount empire. ”

“ Could it be that he came there to be near Irma—Irma, whom I had fought for and saved half-a-dozen times over all by myself—for it is not worth while going back to what Agnes Anne did, as it were, accidentally. I was so angry at the mere thought that there and then I charged him with his perfidy. He laughed a short, contemptuous laugh.
“And what for no,” he answered; “at least I have a trade at my finger-ends. I can drive a plough. I can thresh a mow. At a pinch I can even shoe a horse. ”

“ The high dresser, the kitchen pride of Galloway, was in a state of absolute perfection. Aunt Jen despised men, but she had a way of reproving their congenital untidiness by the shine of her plates and the mirror-like polish of her candlesticks. She had spent a couple of hours over the dresser that afternoon, answering all the taunts of her mother as to her occupation, “It’s true, 334mither, they will never ken the difference; but, then, I will!”
“Go up, Irma, and tell your brother that we are waiting,” said my grandmother. But as Irma was busy with Duncan the Second, I offered myself instead. ”

“ I had gone forth to conquer the world for the sake of a faithless girl—though, again, I had not even done quite that, seeing that Freddy Esquillant bade fair to beat me in all the classes—except, perhaps, in the Mathematic, for which he had no taste. But the principle was the same. I was deserted, and my whole aspect became so dejected that my mother spoke to my father about my killing myself in Edinburgh with study, which caused that good (and instructed) man to exclaim, “Fiddlesticks!” Then she went to my grandmother, who prescribed senna tea, which she brewed and stood by till I had drunk. ”

“ If I let myself drift, then farewell all hope of Irma Maitland.
I hesitated and was lost. But who in my place could have bettered it—save by not being such a portentous fool to begin with? But when that is in a man, it will out.
I entered the King’s Arms meekly, and before I knew what I was doing I had been presented to three or four solid-thighed, thick-headed, stout-legginged farmers as “Our Lottie’s intended.” ”

“ This I could hardly tell him without entering into my furious foolish jealousy of Uncle Rob, his waiting at the mill, and our exchange of words. So I only said, “It just came to me that I would like to get learning, father!”
“Ah, yes,” he meditated, “that is mostly the way. It is like heavenly grace. It comes to a man when he least expects it—the desire for learning. We seek it diligently with tears. It comes not. We wake in the morning and lo! it is there!” ”

“ Richard Poole of Dumfries, why did you say nothing?”
“Now, your honour,” exclaimed Bridget, holding up her hands, “wad I be telling aught like that to bring worse and worse on the head of any man in trouble? If it had been yourself, now, how wad you have liked that, your honour?”
“Leave me alone, Bridget. Answer what you are asked,” said the Fiscal; “when did you find out that this man was not what he pretended to be?” ”

“ It was the voice of my Aunt Jen which interrupted. None else would have dared—save mayhap my grandfather, who, however, only smiled and was silent.
“Ne’er you mind that, Janet,” cried her mother, “what goes out of our basket and store will never be missed. And father says the same, be sure of that!”
My grandfather did say the same, if to smile quietly and approvingly is to speak. At any rate, in a matter which did not concern him deeply, he knew a wiser way than to contradict Mistress Mary Lyon. ”

“ Now I like a fine up-standing wench myself, well filled out, none o’ your flails done up in a bean-sack, nor yet a tea-pot little body that makes the folk laugh as they see her trotting alongside a personable man like me. Lottie will do ye fine. She’s none great at the books—takes after her mother in that, but she’s a good girl, and I’ll warrant ye, she will keep up her end of an argument well enough after a year or two’s practice. But, mind you, lad, there’s to be nothing come of this till I see you safe through college as a doctor. ”