Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

Mr. Ball was far too wise a man to ask a question. He kept his place, worked the out-farms, deserved the confidence of his master, and convinced all the world that he had nothing to do with the ill-doings of the garrison at the "Big Hoose" by carefully guarding his speech. As a matter of fact, he made it his business to know nothing except in which field to sow turnips, and the probable price he would get for the wintering sheep that ate them out of the furrows.

Never was a man better provided with deaf and blind sides than Mr. Bailiff Ball. And, being a man with a family, he had need of them at Deep Moat Grange.

So he did not inquire who it was that Mr. Hobby Stennis meant to teach, nor yet what was the nature of the proposed lesson. If knowledge is power, carefully cultivated ignorance sometimes does not lack a certain power also.

Mr. Stennis ate of the boiled mutton which followed, and of the boiled cabbage withal—of potatoes, mealy and white, such as became the bailiff of several large unlet farms, and a man whose accounts had never been called in question by so much as a farthing.

Mr. Stennis ate of pancakes with jam rolled inside, and of pancakes on which the butter fairly danced upon the saffron and russet surfaces, so hot were they from the pan. He drank pure water. He refused to smoke, which Mr. Ball did every day and all day long. Mr. Stennis was an example—a man without vices.

Then these two, master and man—though by no means "like master, like man"—strolled about the fields discussing what was to be done with this parcel of bullocks, or what line of crops would do best on the Nether Laggan Hill, or the Broomy Knowe. Mr. Bailiff Ball wished heartily that his master would be gone. But he was not in a position to tell him so. At last, after two o'clock, Mr. Stennis suddenly, and without any preliminaries, bade him "good-day" and so betook himself through the misty willow copses along the Backwater, on which the haze of spring was greening already, towards the house of Deep Moat Grange.

*****

It was not the least of Elsie's troubles to keep herself "nice" in the back half of the monks' oven, near the bakehouse. Soap she had—a whole bar of it. And with the water which she dipped up from the trap-door behind her bed, she washed her single turn-over collar again and again—as well as her handkerchiefs and other "white things"—drying them rapidly and well in front of the dividing wall of the oven.

Starch, however, was beyond her, and ironing also. Still she was clean, which to Elsie Stennis was very near indeed to being godly. Jeremy had been idle for several days, but it chanced that that very Saturday morning he had set the furnace a-going, and had begun to prepare a batch of bread. Notwithstanding, he had been strangely unsettled. He had looked in several times on Elsie, even bringing in a little washing soda for her laundry work, but had departed always without saying anything of his intentions. Never on any occasion had he mentioned her fellow-prisoner, my father. And he, on his part, had strictly forbidden Elsie to say anything of their converse one with another. Not that Elsie would have done that in any case. She had too much the instinct of playing the game.

Usually when Jeremy came in, he would bring with him a Jew's-harp, and, curling himself up in one corner of the settle, he would extract tunes from that limited instrument with a strange weird combination of voice and twang of the metallic tongue.