Elsie and I were standing at the turn of the road looking at the tracks of the wheels which Harry Foster's cart had made in the grass, when who should come up but the very man, Mr. Ball, the bailiff at Deep Moat Grange.
He knew me, which was nothing extraordinary. They say I am the image of what my father was at my age, and, of course, everybody knows him. If they don't, he tells them, and sees if he can do business with them.
Well, Mr. Ball came up and asked us what we were looking at, and when we had told him, he blurted out all in a gabble that he had seen the blue and red cart with the piebald mare come tearing over the moor road yesterday morning. He had been in the little "lantern" above the drying-room at the corn mill, which is so high that you can see over the tree tops and look right out on the moor. He thought it was a runaway, but when he had time to run down to the end of the avenue, he could only see it like a little square dab rocking and lurching from one side of the road to the other, and scraping trees and bushes like all possessed.
"And has nobody come to tell you that poor Harry Foster is murdered?" I said.
"I heard the men in the yard talking about some such suspicion," he said quite calmly, "but nobody has been here. You see, Master Yarrow, our old gov'nor, Mr. Stennis, has been up in London for three days seeing his lawyer, and he don't like folk coming about the Grange when he is from home!"
"So I have heard," said I, "and he keeps some fine dogs there, too, to see that they don't."
For my father had refused to deliver Mr. Stennis' goods, except at Mr. Ball's house, which was on the main road, and no tearing dogs kept.
"Very like – very like," said Mr. Ball hastily; "and who may this fine young lady be – your sister? She seems to favour you, sir."
"Elsie Stennis," says I, "and if she had her rights you know very well what she would be! Your young mistress!"
"Elsie Stennis?" he gasped, "not poor Bell's daughter – and Robin's?"
"The same!"
"Bell and Robin Stennis – I mind them well. But where, how – "
The bailiff stopped, all thrown out of gear, much more affected, indeed, than when it was a question of Harry Foster's death.
"Well," he went on at last, "it's perhaps as well not asking. I might blurt things out. But I hope – I may say that I pray – that the day may come when you shall have your rights, young lady, and I shall see yon crew sent about their business to a madhouse. That's the fit place for such as they! There they go. I must be off. They will be at their processioning again, and Mr. Stennis will never forgive me if they come to a mischief or go off the premises!"
We did not know then what he was talking about, but we could hear over the green tree tops the sound of a cornet playing a marching tune, and marvellously well, too.
CHAPTER IV
THE GOLDEN FARMER
But that same night we got the full story, so far as she knew it, from Nance Edgar. It did not help us any in finding out what had become of poor Harry the carrier and his mail bags, but because it involved Elsie's father and mother I will admit that it interested me nearly as much.
Nance Edgar was a weather-beaten woman of about fifty. She had lived nearly all her life in the fields, and was tanned like a leather schoolbag for carrying books. She was kindly, but you never could have told it on her. Only I knew because she had been kind to Elsie.
Afterwards I found out that often she would go supperless to bed that Elsie might have something to eat when she came home from school.
But when Nance Edgar talked it was with the curious kind of quiet I have noticed about the speech of gentlefolks. The other field workers said that she kept herself to herself. But in the furrow, or on the rig, she was kind to young ones or feeble folk who were not up to their work. So Nance, in spite of her aloofness, was not at all unpopular. She always had work, too, because she could be trusted with anything.
So that very night I said to Elsie: "Let's have it out with Nance about your people. Your grandfather is as rich as can be. There may be money in it, and my father says you should never let that go a-begging. Besides you ought to know about your father and mother. It is only respectable if you are asked."
"Oh, I know all that," said Elsie, mightily unmoved, "my mother married her cousin and her father was angry. She ran away. My grandfather can keep his old money. Who wants it? Not I! I am happier with Nance."
This was very well, but if Elsie was not curious, I was. So I cooed and besought round Nance Edgar that night, till at last she told us everything in her little kitchen, after the tea dishes had been washed up and the coal fire was beginning to catch – the flame paying bo-peep with the bars, and every now and then coming brightly out in a triumphant jet of light, unexpected like a cuckoo clock, shining on Elsie's yellow hair and Nance's calm, tired face as she told us the story —
"Breckonside was not a big place twenty years ago (she said), even less than it is now, but there is one house that is a-wanting. That was your grandfather's house, Elsie, him they call the Golden Farmer, that lives now at the Grange in Deep Moat Hollow.
"It was up yonder beyond the church, and in the summer mornings the tombstones were blithe to see, glinting rosy-coloured with the dew on them, and the long, well-nourished grass hiding the inscriptions. Now you may go up the burnside to the turn of the road where the kirkburn runs bonnie and clear down the hill. The heather and the breckon grow there together, and that they say gave its name to the village – Breckonside. At any rate, there where stood your grandfather's cottage – he was a poor man then – ye will see a kind of knowe or hillock, greener than the rest. But of the house not one stone is left upon another. The kindly mould is over all. The hemlock and the foxglove, what we used to call 'bloody fingers,' grow tall and red where lovers whispered cannily by the ingle nook, and of all that well-set garden plot where Hobby the Miser – that is now Mr. Howard Stennis – grew his weaving lint and dibbled his cabbages, only a single lilac bush looks over the corner of the broken-down dyke as you pass by!
"But at that time it was a heartsome spot. I mind it well; I was young mysel'." (Here Nance Edgar sighed and was silent awhile, looking at the pouting bo-peep of the little blue flames between the hearth bars.) "A-well, youth comes and youth goes, but at the last the greensward covers it like Miser Hobby's cottage.
"Long they dwelt there, Miser Stennis and his daughter Bell. She had the name of being bonnie to look on in her young days, and many a lover would fain have hung up his hat behind the kitchen door and taken his seat at Hobby Stennis's table as his son-in-law.
"But Hobby was a far-seeing carle and a plain-spoken. He had but one word for all such.
"'When I hae a felt want for ony sons-in-law I will put a notice in Editor Drake's weekly screed, or hae it intimated in the parish kirk!'
"There were ill reports even then about the miser. Lights were seen wandering up the hillsides above the cottage when the nights were mirk and unkindly. Hobby would be found far from home with a basket gathering simples and medical plants – that is, by his way of it. So he grew to be counted a wizard, and had the name of money which is so useful to a man in some ways, but more than all else makes the folk jealous, too.
"It was less than natural that Hobby should always have the best lint wherewith to weave the flowered tablecovers by which he made his fame.