Crockett Samuel Rutherford
Deep Moat Grange

CHAPTER XXXVIII
A FIT OF THE SULKS

Jove, wasn't it just ripping to think that at last a chap could go where he liked, and do what he liked – all that horrid lot at the Grange being either dead or with the locksmith's fingers between them and the outside world! Ripping? Rather! It was like a new earth.

All the same, you have no idea what a show place the ruined Grange became. Old Bailiff Ball stayed on and made a pretty penny by showing the people over. Especially the weaving-room, and where old Hobby sat, and the keyhole through which Elsie peeped to see her grandfather as if praying over the loom, with Jeremy's knife hafted between his shoulder blades! I think they would have had a magic lantern next! But finally this was stopped by the police people. For Miss Orrin was still to be tried, and all the money that could be got out of the grounds of Deep Moat Grange was to be given back to the friends and relatives of the people who had been "arranged for." But the mischief was, nobody wanted to buy, and the whole place was in danger of going to rack and ruin.

As for me, I took to wandering about a good deal there. Maybe I was love-sick – though I hope not, for my good name's sake. At least, it was about this time father said that we were far too young for any thought of marriage, but that Elsie could stay on in our house. Then Elsie was not happy, and was all the time wanting to go back to Nance Edgar's and her teaching at Mr. Mustard's – because my mother had got accustomed to the Caw girls, Harriet and Constantia, by this time, and could not bear the thought of parting with them. So Elsie, of course, would not stay, and go she did, as you shall hear.

We could have had some pretty good times, she and I, but for this worry. Father was about as fond of Elsie as I was (owing to the time behind the Monks' Oven). But, of course, he would not go openly against mother – that is, not in the house. It was not to be expected. If it had been anything to do with the shop or business, he would simply have told mother to mind her own affairs. And mother would have done it, too. But with the house it was different.

Well, all this made me pretty melancholy – with no more stand-up in me than a piece of chewed string. I read poetry, too, on the sly – such rot, as I now see – never anything written plain out, but all the words twisted, the grammar all tail foremost, and no sense at all mostly. I don't wonder nowadays people only use it in church to sing – and even then never think of bringing away their hymn books with them.

So what with the poetry, and the melancholy brought on by the thought of Elsie going back to have that old bristly weasel-faced Mustard breathe down her neck when she was doing sums, I brought myself to a pretty low ebb. Elsie was sorry for me, I think, but said nothing. She had aches of her own under the old blue serge blouse (left side front) when Harriet Caw went past her on our stairs rustling in silk underthings and an impudent little nose in the air as if she smelt a drain.

At any rate I spent a good deal of time in the woods that summer. Woods are most sympathetic places when you are young and just desperately sad, but can't for the life of you tell why. Doctors, I believe, know. But when mother asked old Doc McPhail, he only grinned and said she had better "let the kail-pot simmer a while longer. The broth would be none the worse!"

But my mother could make nothing out of that, nor I either for that matter. Yet through the glass of the office door I actually saw the doctor grin at my father, and my father – yes, he actually winked back! Old brutes, both of them – fifth commandment or no fifth commandment!

"No books – no office!" said old McPhail, "not for a while. Let the colt run till he tires!"

So the colt was, as it were, turned out to grass. The official explanation was that between nineteen and twenty there occurred a dangerous period – twenty-one was a yet more dangerous age. And I had overgrown my strength!

I liked that —I who could vault the counter twenty-five times back and forth, leaning only on the fingers of one hand!

Something during the long summer days drew me persistently to the Deep Moat Woods. Some magnet of danger past and gone for ever – something, too, of nearness to the little schoolhouse, to which, spite of my father and myself, Elsie had carried her point and returned. I was sulky and jealous about this – much to Elsie's indignation.

"Mr. Mustard – Mr. Mustard!" she said, with her eyes cold and contemptuous; "I can keep Mr. Mustard in his place – ay, or ten of him – you too, Joseph Yarrow, mopping about the woods like a sick cat! You are not half the man your father is!"

And, indeed, I never set myself up to be.

The day I am telling about was a Saturday. Elsie was to have gone for a walk with me; I expected it. But, instead, she informed me in the morning, when I met her setting out to go to the school-house for an extra lesson, that she had arranged to spend the afternoon with father in his office, going into her grandfather's affairs.

"Mr. Yarrow," she said, "thinks that everything which my grandfather possessed before he began to kill people is quite rightly mine. He had weaved hard for that. It would have been my mother's, and it ought to be mine, too. Even a bad man, your father says, ought to be allowed to do a little good after he is dead, if it can be arranged honestly. That is what your father says."

"My father!" I repeated after her bitterly, "it is always my father now."

"And good reason!" cried Elsie, firing up, "he gives the best and wisest advice, and it would tell on you, Master Joe, if you took it a little oftener."

"No wonder mother prefers Harriet Caw!" I muttered. And the next moment I would have given all that I had in possession to have recalled the words, but it is always that way with a tongue which runs too easily.

Turning, Elsie gave me one long look, hurt, indignant, almost anguished. Then she went slowly up the stairs, and in ten minutes her little chest and bundle of wraps were out on the yard pavement. I saw her bargaining with Rob Kingsman to take them across to Nance Edgar's for her. And I think she took a shilling out of her lean purse to give him. I tell you I felt like a hog. I was a hog. I knew it and, shamefaced, betook me to the woods as to a sty.

I had wounded Elsie to the quick, and wronged my father also… I did not believe that either of them would ever forgive me. For, of course, she would go straight and tell father. I did not feel that I could ever go back. At the wood edge I turned and looked once at the smoke curling up from the chimney of "the Mount" kitchen. It was so hot there was no fire in any of the other rooms. Ah, 'home, sweet, sweet home'!

Then I peeped at the schoolhouse, and saw Mr. Mustard and Elsie walking slowly up to the front door together. She had had that extra lesson, the nature of which she had not thought fit to tell me. Then she would go – well, no matter where. It was all over between us at any rate.

Did you ever know such a fool? Why, yes – there was yourself, dear reader – that is, if you have been wise. If not, it may not even yet be too late to be foolish.

I wasted the day in the woods. That is, I took out my pocket-book, jerked my fountain pen into some activity, and scribbled verses. I was too proud to go back home. And I knew well that my father had accepted in its fullest sense the doctor's advice, "Let him run!" He would neither send after me himself nor allow anyone else to meddle with my comings and goings.

It was curious and fascinating to linger about the Deep Moat Woods, once so terrible, now become a haunt of the sightseer and the day tripper. But I who had seen so much there, and heard more, who with beating heart had adventured so often into these darkling recesses, could not lose all at once the impression of brooding danger they had given me, ever since that first morning when Elsie and I crossed the road and plunged into them on the day of poor Harry Foster's death.

I suppose it was the moody state of my mind (Elsie unkindly calls it "sulks") which led me to stay on and on till the afternoon became the evening, and the shadows of the trees over the pond became more and more gloomy – mere dark purple with blobs and blotches of fire where the sunset clouds showed between the leaves.

I stood leaning against the trunk of a tree, the branches bending down umbrella fashion all about me. In those days I was a limber young fellow enough, and could have acted model for an illustrated-paper hero quite fairly – Childe Harold, the Master of Ravenswood, or one of those young Douglases to whom they brought in the Black Bull's Head in the Castle of Edinburgh, as a sign that they must die.

Of course, I had no business to be there at that time of night, but my own loneliness and Elsie's desertion made me stay on and on – miserable and cherishing my misery, petting my "sulks," and swearing to myself that I would never, never give in —never forgive Elsie, never return to those who had so ill used and misunderstood me.

Yes, what a fool, if you like! But I wasn't the first and I won't be the last to feel and say just the same things.

Then, quick and chillish, like the breaking of cold sweat on a man, though he doesn't know quite why, there passed over me the thrill which tells a fellow that he is not alone. Yet anything more lonely than the Moat Pond ruins, with what remained of the square hulk of the tower cutting the sky – the same from which Jeremy had hurled himself – could not be imagined.

Nevertheless I did not breathe that night air alone. I was sure of that. The bats swooped and recovered, seeing doubtless the white blur of my face in the dusk of the tree shadows.

Before me I could see the green lawn all trampled that had been Miss Orrin's pride. The lilies were mostly uprooted to allow of the perquisitions of the law. But whether it was something supernatural (in which at the time I was quite in a mood to believe), or merely owing to the moving of a soil so pregnant with the exhalations of the marsh – certain it is that I saw the distinct outline of a man's body, with limbs extended, lie in the same place where each of Miser Hobby's "cases" had been interred. They were marked out with a kind of misty fire, like the phosphorus when a damp match won't strike – not bright like the boiling swirl in a vessel's wake. Each of them kept quite still. There was no movement save, perhaps, that of a star, when you see it through the misty air low on the horizon of the west, and kind of swaying, which after all may only have been in my head.

I don't think I was particularly frightened at first. I had had some chemistry lessons with Mr. Ablethorpe, and we had gone pretty far on – boiling a penny in one kind of acid, and making limestone fizz with another – nitrochloric, or hydrochloric, I think. So I knew enough not to be frightened – at least not very badly. But what I saw next scared me stiff. I don't hide the fact. And so it would have scared you!

There was something on the lawn, dabbling among the shiny glimmer of the uprooted lily plots, crouching and scratching!

CHAPTER XXXIX
THE THING THAT SCRATCHED

Something living it was, and pretty active, too – no mistake about that. A dog? Possibly! But the next moment it stood erect on two feet like a man, and, turning slowly, peered all about. Then as suddenly it dropped down on all fours again and fell to the scraping. I could hear the sound distinctly in that lonesome place, where the water in the pond was too thick and heavy even to ripple, and where only the owl cried regularly once in five minutes.

I could not have spoken if I had tried, and I did not try. My tongue dried up like a piece of old bark, and I knew what the Bible meant when it said that sometimes a fellow's tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. Mine would, if the roof had not been as dry as a chip also.

You ask if I watched the Thing. You may take it for gospel that I could not have turned my head or averted my eyes for all the wealth of the Indies, though that, I understand, is a poor country enough.

Well, I saw the Thing scramble from grave to empty grave, scratch at each furiously, obscuring the dim phosphorescent glimmer. Then, standing erect, it flung up great clawlike hands with a ghoulish gesture of disappointment, moaning lamentably to the stars!

I tell you I dripped. My body trembled so that it shook the tree. So would yours have done, if you had been there – perhaps even a bigger tree.

Then some noise from the opposite side of the Moat, or, perhaps, from beyond the Pond, struck the ear of the Thing. I don't know how a spectre disappears. I never saw but that one, and since then I have lost all interest. But at any rate the Shape passed me at a long wolf's lope, making no noise and going fast. Right under my nose it slipped silently into the black deeps of the Pond. I think it sank underneath, for the next moment I could see no more than a wet head, a round, vague sphere that glistened faintly, turning this way and that, and very ghastly. The Thing was swimming, and making no noise.

Then I came to myself with a sudden revulsion. If there were, indeed, anything living on that Island of Deep Moat Grange – yet another of that hideous crew left free and alive – the sooner the world knew about it the better. I had always thought, and my father had said that the official researches in the catacombs, called after the old Cistercian Monks, had been much too summary.

The moisture came slowly back to my mouth. I was still scared, of course, but I had got over the paralysis that comes with a first surprise. If the Thing could swim, I could run, though not quite so noiselessly, as there was an abundance of brushwood which I had to traverse, while the wave undulated like oil off the creature's back, as from an otter crossing a stream. You never saw anything swim so lightly and yet so fast.

It crossed the Pond obliquely, evidently making for the entrance of the Backwater. I could not follow directly. You see, I was constrained to cross at the drawbridge. But, between ourselves, I burned the path under my feet. I have many times run fast, but never so quickly as then. Talk about second wind – second courage is worth ten of it any day; quite as real, too, though less talked about.

It seemed a dreadful long way round about, and my heart was as much in my mouth now lest I should lose It, as it had been before, lest It should find me.

But I got there just ahead.

As I expected it had turned down the long, straight cut of the Backwater, and was swimming straight toward me. Now, thought I, I will surely see what the Thing is. But I could only make out – vague, round, and shining, a head that turned this way and that in swimming.

Suddenly the speed was checked. The swimmer, whatever it might be, turned sharply, searched a little, and appeared to hesitate. I took a step and bent forward to listen. A rotten branch cracked sharply under my careless foot. There was a sort of "wallop" like a seal or sea lion turning off a spring-board into a pond. Then came the sharp click of sliding iron. A square of darkness yawned in the canal bank. Something entered, and the door shut with several jerks like machinery in infrequent usage. The Thing had vanished. I was alone with the new terror of the woods of Deep Moat Grange.

Nevertheless I had had a certain lesson some time before. I could not again be altogether deceived. It was something human, though in all probability just so much the more dangerous and cruel for that. He, or she, knew the secret of the iron door which Mr. Ablethorpe had made me enter.

There was, therefore, at least one still left of the devil's brood in their ancient haunts, and the sooner that the world was warned, the better. Or, at least, I would tell my father, and he would get together a few determined men, who would not be afraid to act according to their consciences and the necessities of the case.

As for fear, it had clean gone from me. A kind of singing came into my head instead, but not in my ears, which seemed to act with extraordinary acuteness. After all it was splendid to know what no one else on earth knew. Besides, I would show them all, especially Elsie, what I could do, acting alone. They despised me, laughed at me, yet here was I I had been away all day, without food, without a soul thinking about me or caring for me. Nevertheless I, Joe Yarrow, whom everybody thought an idler, a mere waster of precious time, would spring this news upon the world!

And so I might, but for one thing.

To get away I had to pass the wall of the old orchard and the flagstone on which Mr. Ablethorpe and I had seen Mad Jeremy stamping down with such force. Now, if I had not been such a conceited young man (my father's words), or so taken up with getting the better of Elsie (that young person's own opinion), I would have known that any of the crew who knew the secret of the iron door and the bricked passage would also be sure to know that of the flagstone and the way out by the orchard.

But at any rate it did not occur to me at the time. I thought solely about getting home, arming a band, and coming to watch for the scratcher of the lily beds, the swimmer of the Backwater, the creature which had opened and shut the iron door – no easy task, as we knew, Mr. Ablethorpe and I.

So I skirted the water edge of the old orchard hastily. Some stones had rolled down from the coping, and the walking was difficult. But there was still a good deal of light, as soon as I had turned the corner. For the west was bright with a late golden afterglow. Quite useful it was.

I was just about the middle, just where the gates with their broken blazons had stood, for it had been a swell place once. Also there was a short cut across to the Bewick road. I passed between the damaged stone posts, which, however, still stood upright. As I did so, something sprang at me with the growl of a hungry tiger. I had hardly time to glance up, and even then I could see no more than a vaguely shining head, and an arm uplifted to strike, with something glittering in it like a crescent moon.

There was no time for defence. There was no time for escape. The Thing, beast, or man – more beast-like now than human – was upon me and bore me down. But even while the danger was in the air, I heard a sound which appeared to me not at all like a shot – more like a spit of fire when a log sparks on the hearth. And in a moment I was prone on my face, bruised and beaten down by the weight. I heard a jangle of steel. I supposed that I was wounded – that this was the end. And with the Thing heavy on the top of me, I fainted away.

CHAPTER XL
WANTED – A PENNY IN THE SLOT

When I came to myself the moon had risen – risen good and high, too – for it showed well above the orchard wall where it was broken, and over the palisades with which Hobby Stennis had mended it with his own hand.

Elsie was seated by me. She had opened up my coat, and undone my waistcoat and shirt at the neck. There was a pleasant coolness, and she was slopping about with a wet handkerchief – not very big, indeed, being one of her own, and better adapted for dabbing dry girls' eyes, than for recovering a man out of a faint.

I sat up.

"How did you come here?" I said.

"How did you?" she answered, very shortly; "lie still!"

"Shan't!"

"Still in the sulks?"

"I say, Elsie, what was that?"

"What?"

I was looking all about, you may be sure, and a little way off under the shadow of the great broken-down gates of the orchard, I saw a heap lie darkly, curiously loose and stretched out, a kind of wisp in the form of a man, something like a Guy Fawkes dragged through water instead of fire.

I pointed to it. The head, to my eyes at least, still glowed faintly phosphorescent.

"That!" I said briefly.

"That," said Elsie calmly, "is Mad Jeremy!"

I started up on my elbow in great astonishment.

"Then he wasn't dead after all, when he jumped into the water from the top of the tower the morning of the burning?"

"It seems not – it was only a little habit of his," said Elsie calmly, "but he is now! I killed him."

"Why?"

"Because he would have killed you, if I had not! He was waiting for you to pass. Only, as it happened, I had been waiting longest. I knew you were in the sulks, and came to find you. Besides – he killed my grandfather."

"But your grandfather – "

"No matter – he was my grandfather!"

"And what did you kill him with?" I was sitting up now, quite myself, and intensely curious. Elsie always says that merely wanting to know will restore me quicker than a whole apothecaries' hall.

She affected not to hear.

"You can't do without me after all!" she taunted. "I know."

"Don't you mind having killed him?" I asked. As for me I should have been fairly cut out of my mind if I had done as much.

"Of course I care," she answered; "didn't I tell you he killed my grandfather?"

Then it was that I began to believe that after all there was something in blood. And I resolved, there and then, that when Elsie and I were married I should behave, and give her no cause to take an odd shot at me.

"But what did you do it with?" It was the second time of asking.

"Dum-dum!" said she.

"What!" I cried; "then my father gave you that beautiful long-barrelled Webley he took from me?"

"Well, don't sulk about it – there's no time!" she cried. "Of course he gave it to me – as soon as you had gone out – said I might need it, with all the excitement among the Bewick pit folk. So I had a special pocket made for it, and I have carried it about ever since. This is the first chance I've had, though!"

I looked at her in astonishment. This was the girl who was afraid of mice.

"But don't you mind —that?" I pointed over my shoulder at the heap under the archway. The moon was creeping upward towards the zenith, and the light had now illuminated the dark face and wet, snaky curls of that which had been Mad Jeremy. I went nearer to look at him. I wanted to make sure that he was indeed dead.

The bullet had entered a trifle behind one ear, traversed the base of the skull, and come out by the opposite temple. This time there was no mistake – the creature was dead.

Two little crosses of white caught my eye, one over each bullet hole. She saw me bend down to examine them.

"That's the Geneva pattern," she said calmly. "It's plaster from my 'First Aid to the Wounded' case. I always carry it – so convenient. Now let us go back and tell Mr. Yarrow!"

"Before we start," I said, "I think you had better give me that pistol, and after this you stick to your First Aids!"

"If I had stuck to my First Aids," she retorted, "you wouldn't have needed any aids – first, second, or third!"

However, she handed over the revolver, "not (as she said) because she was afraid of it, but because it weighed down her pocket so much it was making her walk lopsided!"

*****

There is ever so much to tell – about how Elsie and I quarrelled and made up – that of course. How Mr. Yarrow, senior, would and Mrs. Yarrow wouldn't. How my mother pestered me about Harriet Caw, and Mr. Mustard pestered Elsie on his own account. Then, there is all about how we were at last rid of the Caw girls, Harriet and Constantia both, and who rid us of them. That is a ripping part. There isn't so much battle, murder, and sudden death in all this, but it's even more interesting, especially the part where Elsie and I decided to take our fate into our own hands. It all came right enough in the end, of course, or I shouldn't be writing like this, looking out on the sheep pasturing on the Cheviot slopes, and listening to the whaups crying.

But for certain private reasons Elsie and I want a little more money this year. She is sewing away like a house on fire, with her feet on the fender by the hearth. So if you want to know about it, just pester some editor man to get us to write it all out for him. And we will do it gladly.

As for me, I am working up quite a good business connection on this side of the border for my father. You see, Elsie couldn't stand the neighbourhood of Breckonside and Deep Moat Grange after what had happened. And, indeed, I don't blame her. Her opinion on mice, black beetles, and the two Caw girls, particularly Harriet, is still unchanged – even though Harriet – but there, I really can't go on with the story without another penny in the slot.

It is quite enough to say that Aphra Orrin got imprisonment for life in an asylum for criminal lunatics, that I got Elsie, and that Elsie seems in a fair way to get what will take her thoughts, once and for all, off the gloomy woods and terrible waters which surround the house of Deep Moat Grange.

THE END