‘It was a crool thing to do, but it wasn’t exactly what ye could call a Jew’s swindle—but, damn Smithson aal the same, I says; for here’s me, Geordie Crozier, left a po’r orphin i’ the warld wi’ none o’ his fam’ly property to belang to him, ’cept two gifts—the yen for drinkin’ an’ t’other for gamblin’, an’ it’s damn Smithson, says I.’
THE SQUIRE’S LAST RIDE
‘Ay, that’s the priest, the Catholic Priest,’ said Eph Milburn, after a white-haired, cassock-clad old gentleman, who had nodded slightly in reply to my companion’s greeting, had passed over the bridge and departed out of hearing.
‘He looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth now,’ continued Milburn, a long-legged, ruddy-bearded, hawk-eyed son of the moorlands, ‘and aal his time nowadays he spends in his garden over his bees or his flowers, or thumbing his Mass-book in his library; but it wasn’t so once-a-day, not he, not when the old Squire was above ground, and he came up by to stop wiv him.
‘Ye’ll have heard tell o’ the old Squire an’ aal his goin’s on, I’ll be bound? Ay, o’ course, but there’s one thing nobody kens o’, not even Father Blenkinsop, and that’s where the Squire’s bones are lyin’, for they never found his body, ye ken.
‘Squire Dally was the last o’ the fam’ly that had lived in the old Pele Tower o’ Dally from generation to generation, and he was the wildest o’ a wild lot—riders an’ reivers in the old times, canny hard fox-hunters, drinkers, an’ gam’lers this century. They were bound to get through their property soon or late, an’ the last Squire, Tom Dally o’ Dally, he says, “I leave my property tiv a South-countryman? Not I, by Gad!” says he; “why, damme, but I’ll cheat him yet,” an’ sae he spends hissel’ right an’ left on any mortal thing he took a fancy for.
‘The Hall—which was an old Pele wi’ two wings added, ye ken—an’ a good bit o’ the property, had gone before that. The last Squire’s grandfeythor had got shot o’ that, the mortgages on it bein’ far ower heavy to keep up; but there was still a fair property left, an’ a nice canny house that had once been a dower-house, an’ was now a farm, an’ that was where Squire Tom lived with his fighting-cocks, an’ his hounds, an’ his hawks an’ aal.
‘His missus had died early, ye ken, an’ that had been the ruin ov him, for she was a clivvor woman, wiv a turn o’ management—just what ye would call good hands i’ the matter ov a horse; that was her faculty, an’ she was a bonny-featured woman for-bye.
‘Ay, she could manage him fine.