Deep Moat Grange. Crockett Samuel Rutherford

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      He bent toward us as if whispering, though he had no need, all being clear behind and around us for a long way on every side.

      "There are folk that are not canny on yon side of the moat!" he said, with the same curious shrinking look over his shoulder. "I can hardly manage them myself!"

      "Nonsense," said Elsie, "take us across, and be done with it. Is it not your own land, your own flowers, and I your nearest of kin?"

      "Aye," said the old man, shaking his head, "it will be true enough. Ye mind me of Bell's mother – my wife that was. God rest her soul – and her tongue! Ye are never a Stennis. And High Heaven pity the man that is going to run away with you, as I did with your grandam!"

      Elsie indicated me with her thumb.

      "Joe is," she said coolly.

      The Golden Farmer turned and looked me over from head to foot, and I own that with the thought of all we had seen and all that we might yet see, I shook like a leaf. I never had Elsie's assurance, or, more properly, cheek, but followed obediently, and I must own that generally it came out all right when I did as Elsie told me.

      "Then I pity him," quoth her grandfather, grimly; "but since you will, follow me."

      And he led the way, first to the tree where he had tethered his beast, and afterwards to the narrow wooden bridge, like a drawbridge in chivalry books, which spans the oily black water of the moat.

      I came behind with Elsie. All the time I kept putting my hand on her arm to stop her. For I believed that we should never, never cross that bridge again. If Elsie had no fear of her grandfather, I had! And besides, there was Jeremy Orrin with his big knife. Such at least was the idea that kept recurring to my disturbed brain. I could see him swimming the moat with it yet, wild to get at us. There were also the mad sisters, and all the linked terrors of Deep Moat Grange.

      But not the least bit of notice did Elsie take. She shook my hand off her arm, and told me that if I was afraid I could go back to the school green and play marbles with the little boys.

      So of course I said no more, but came meekly behind Elsie, and she followed her grandfather. He was leading his horse, that lifted its feet gingerly at the crossing of the wooden bridge, not liking the noise, as horses are wont to do on gangways of ships and when they lead them into trucks at railway stations.

      In another minute Elsie and I stood within the Moat. And turning round, what was my horror to see the bridge rising slowly into the air behind me, and in a little house at the side, bent double over a wheel, I caught sight of the "mounster," Jeremy Orrin, with a grin on his face and all his dark ringlets shaking and dancing.

      As we went past he set his head out and called these words after us:

      "Rats in a trap!" he cried, "rats in a trap!"

      And I can tell you that I for one felt just as he said.

      But Elsie followed her grandfather step for step and took no notice. You would have thought she was the crowned queen of the place.

      CHAPTER VII

      FAMILY DISCIPLINE

      As nobody had seen Deep Moat Grange since it had been taken over by Mr. Hobby Stennis and the crew he had gathered about him, it may be as well to describe it as I saw it – now that it is swept from off the face of the earth.

      The old, many-gabled, brick-built house was ivy-covered – in poor repair, but clean. Curious-looking, stocking-shaped contrivances cowled the chimneys, or such of them as were used. The Grange was set so deep in the woods that when the wind blew with any violence, and apparently from any quarter, it raced and gusted and whirled down the chimneys so as to blow the faggots out on the hearths.

      But without and within the house, it was anything but dirty. That is, so far as I – no great judge, mayhap – could make out. At times Jeremy Orrin, who now followed us, laughing and jeering, could work like a demon, clearing up some debris. And Mr. Stennis kept poking his nose here and there into the outhouses and cart sheds with a curious, dithering thrill of apprehension, not at all like a master coming back to his own house, or looking if his servants' work were well performed. Still, if he looked for dirt, he found none. No, nor anything else – except in the great barn, empty of everything (for the horse's oats and bedding were kept in the stable). Here Mr. Stennis, tripping along with his tread of a frightened hen, lifted a huge curtain of corn sacks, thick and heavy, made after the pattern of those at church doors abroad, and we went in.

      As soon as we stood on the beaten floor of hard earth, we could not take our eyes from what we beheld at the upper end. There was a kind of altar, rudely shaped, with a table and a cross, all as if hewn with an axe out of live wood, and painted black. On the table were the little black coffins, each small as baby's toys, which we had seen the mad women carry through the garden. Each of these had now a candle burning upon it. But the central light, a little larger than the rest, was protected about the flame by a curious contrivance made of red paper glued upon bits of stick which gave it (from where we stood) the appearance of a crimson lantern.

      For the first time, I think Elsie was now a little frightened. And no wonder, for suddenly we saw something appear in the dark of the big empty barn, amid a curious pervading smell that I took to be incense, but which might have been cockroaches. I liked bravely for Elsie to feel like that. For she had been just all too secure and cock-a-hoop up till now.

      What we saw was a row of kneeling figures singing a strange wordless chant, something between the wind in a score of keyholes and distant dog kennels on a moon-light night. At any rate, it tried the little girl's stomach. Because, quite suddenly she pitched forward on my shoulder and cried: "O Joe, get me out of this!"

      Then the next moment, just like thrusting a stick into a wasp's byke, each of the black kneeling figures had snatched her candle and made after us.

      I don't know what might have happened. To me it was like a nightmare till we found ourselves in the open courtyard again. This had seemed creepy enough to me before. But now it was just like our own back green, as homelike and as pleasant, with the open air and the waving woods and all.

      Within the barn we heard elricht squeaks and cries, like those of bats. But outside the door, holding the heavy curtain back, so that we could get out easily, stood a tall, masculine woman with gray, smoothly brushed hair, dressed in a black blouse and skirt that had something under them which looked like the haircloth covering of the chairs in our second best parlour at home – the kind my father sits in and smokes over his books and cash-box. She was the woman with the short skirt we had seen watering the lilies when we looked across the black and oily moat.

      "This is Miss Orrin, my housekeeper," said Elsie's grandfather automatically.

      "Aphra Orrin!" said the lady, with a prim intonation, tossing her head like one hurt in her pride, "one who hath been raised up to be a mother to the orphan and the shelterless, to avenge the witless and those at whom fools make a mock! Be quiet, you there!"

      She sent the door of the barn clashing into its place with her foot, and with the click of the well-oiled wards the screeching behind it redoubled.

      The tall woman sighed and folded her arms across her breast. There was a certain weary dignity about her, and at first I could not believe that she was really out of her mind, as all in Breckonside averred. "They are worse than usual to-day," she said, with a careless nod of the head in the direction of the barn, "but that will teach them. They shall stay there till I come and fetch them out! No food for such as they!"

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