Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

I would gladly have gone with her, but, of course, that would have been too marked. Besides, I dared not face my mother without my father. There was a little fountain made of the mouths of lions on the terrace, which spouted out thin streams of water into a large oyster shell—the kind they call pecten, I think, only the round part as big as a horseshoe. And once Elsie was away with Mr. Bailiff Ball, I got father to wash his face and hands there, which were black and terrible with matted hair and hardened blood. So that my mother, for all her outcries, did not really see him at his worst, or anything like it.

The fire mounted always, but somehow in the light of day it did not seem real. The faces of all the folk as we returned from the water, were directed to the tower which was called Hobby's Folly. The gabled, crow-stepped mansion of the Moat had nothing very ancient about it—that is, to the common view. You had to know the older secrets of the monks for that. But at the angle overlooking the pond, Mr. Stennis had caused to be built a square tower in the old Robert the Bruce donjon fashion, each chamber opening out of the other. These communicated by ladders, which could be drawn up and all access prevented. At least that was the tale which the masons who were at the building brought back to Breckonside. The tower was square on the top and had low battlements, save at one corner where there was a kind of pepper-pot cupola in which—so they said—Hobby Stennis used to sit and count his gold.

At first I could not make out what it was that the folk were craning their necks upward to look at. Evidently it was on the far side, that nearest the small lake, and, of course, invisible from the court out of which my father and I were coming.

But we followed the movement of the people, and there on the utmost pinnacle of the battlements, that outer corner which was higher than the rest and shaped like a miniature dome, his long legs twined about the broken stalk of the weathercock, and his melodeon in his hands, sat Mad Jeremy! Of the gilt weathercock itself nothing remained save the butt. With a single clutch of his great hairy hand, Jeremy had rooted the uneasy fowl out of its socket and hurled it far before him into the pond.

Up till now the flames had hardly reached the tower, and it seemed at least a possible thing that the maniac might be saved. But none of the Breckonsiders were keen about it. Only Mr. Ablethorpe and my father were willing to make any attempt to save him. Indeed, I was absolutely with the majority on this occasion, and could not, for my part, imagine a better solution than that which seemed to be imminent.

Nevertheless, the two tried to get into the tower from behind, but found all a seething mass of flames, which had swept across the whole main body of the building as if to swallow up Hobby's Folly for a last bonne bouche. There was no arguing with such a spate of fire. There remained, however, a little low door, reported to be of iron, but which, being near to the water and exposed to the fury of damp westerly winds and the moist fogs off the pond, had probably rusted half away.

"The two tried to get into the Tower from behind, but found all a seething mass of flames."

"Come, let us do our duty," said Mr. Ablethorpe; "here is a human life! Let us save it!"