Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

I thought all this out, putting myself in the other's place, and no one can imagine—who has not tried it—how excellent a lesson in affairs it proved. After that drill in the old ice house, where at times I was well-nigh frozen, I seemed to see inside every man's skull with whom I was making a bargain. It was not only a great advantage, but in a sort of way it was poetry also. I don't expect Joseph to understand this any more than I understand his maunderings about love and girls. Not but what I am fond of my wife. She brought me a good round sum, as every woman ought, which I have used with care and caused to breed handsomely. But if I were to tell Mary that I loved her, I think she would go at once and order my tombstone. At least, she would call in a doctor!

Still, with all my invention, the time hung heavy. Each day the Orrin woman came bringing Lightbody's cheque, with new arguments why I should sign it. I put her off, though sometimes not without difficulty. I think she must have been partly cracked, in spite of her apparently business-like habits, for it puzzled me how they would have got the money, even over my signature, taking into consideration my sudden disappearance and the to-do there would be about it. But I took care to say nothing about that. Mr. Lightbody's cheque and the hope that they had of my signing it, and so enabling them to get the money, was my best safeguard.

But one day Miss Orrin, apparently after long cogitation, made another proposal. If I would write to my bankers telling them that I had gone abroad on an affair of great moment, and asking them to pay to the bearer a thousand pounds on my behalf, Miss Orrin would pledge her word to leave me with ten days' provisions in the vault, and at the end of that time to send to the authorities a message stating where I was to be found.

This, she said, was their ultimatum. The alternative unexpressed, but evident, was Master Jeremy's knife. However, I did not agree. The business had too speculative an air, and there was a decided lack of guarantee. For there was nothing to prevent those kind friends from cutting my throat after they had pocketed the cash, supposing that my banker was fool enough to pay it without going to the police. I suppose, however, that Jeremy would have stayed here by me, and if the police had been called in, or his sister had not returned, there would have been no more of me.

I told them plainly, and as a business man, that they would only be running their heads into a trap if I wrote any such order, but that the cheque was negotiable anywhere. It could pass through any number of hands even from the Continent. This little bit of information, I believe, preserved my life. For the very next day I caught one of the jackdaws that came to seek shelter about my dungeon, entering through a crack high in the arched roof. I wrote the message—already reproduced—on paper stuffed in a rook's quill which I picked up off the floor, and fastening the long feather to the jackdaw's tail with whitey-brown thread unwound from a button, I let the bird flutter away.

Now I come to a circumstance that I have something of delicacy about. Bairns' plays are not suitable for men of ripe years, you say. I agree, but when sometimes one has children, and especially an only son upon whom the care and guidance of a large business will some day devolve, there are certain kinds of plays that cannot be hastily condemned even by the wisest.

It was the year when the fever, now called typhoid, but then simply the "Fivvor," made ravages in Breckonside. No one knew what brought it, and none knew why it went away. But during its stay, both myself and my son Joseph were attacked by it among the first. My wife, Mrs. Yarrow, had her hands full with the two of us. Neither was very ill, but the time of convalescence was long; and had it been any other doctor than Dr. Hector who attended me, I would have been out a dozen times a day.

But—and I like him for it, for I have the faculty myself—Dr. Hector has a way with him that makes people think twice before disobeying him. Joe was in his room, I in mine, and there was between us a thick partition, such as are to be found in old houses, of double oak, with an air space between.

Now my brain being by nature busy, and to amuse the boy most of all, I concocted a simple code of sound signals which Joe and I called our "Morse." We would often amuse ourselves the day by the length, by rapping our messages the one to the other. It went like this. I made a little tablet for Joe, and kept one by me till we had both learned the inscription by ear, as it were.

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