Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

Did you ever know such a fool? Why, yes—there was yourself, dear reader—that is, if you have been wise. If not, it may not even yet be too late to be foolish.

I wasted the day in the woods. That is, I took out my pocket-book, jerked my fountain pen into some activity, and scribbled verses. I was too proud to go back home. And I knew well that my father had accepted in its fullest sense the doctor's advice, "Let him run!" He would neither send after me himself nor allow anyone else to meddle with my comings and goings.

It was curious and fascinating to linger about the Deep Moat Woods, once so terrible, now become a haunt of the sightseer and the day tripper. But I who had seen so much there, and heard more, who with beating heart had adventured so often into these darkling recesses, could not lose all at once the impression of brooding danger they had given me, ever since that first morning when Elsie and I crossed the road and plunged into them on the day of poor Harry Foster's death.

I suppose it was the moody state of my mind (Elsie unkindly calls it "sulks") which led me to stay on and on till the afternoon became the evening, and the shadows of the trees over the pond became more and more gloomy—mere dark purple with blobs and blotches of fire where the sunset clouds showed between the leaves.

I stood leaning against the trunk of a tree, the branches bending down umbrella fashion all about me. In those days I was a limber young fellow enough, and could have acted model for an illustrated-paper hero quite fairly—Childe Harold, the Master of Ravenswood, or one of those young Douglases to whom they brought in the Black Bull's Head in the Castle of Edinburgh, as a sign that they must die.

Of course, I had no business to be there at that time of night, but my own loneliness and Elsie's desertion made me stay on and on—miserable and cherishing my misery, petting my "sulks," and swearing to myself that I would never, never give in—never forgive Elsie, never return to those who had so ill used and misunderstood me.

Yes, what a fool, if you like! But I wasn't the first and I won't be the last to feel and say just the same things.

Then, quick and chillish, like the breaking of cold sweat on a man, though he doesn't know quite why, there passed over me the thrill which tells a fellow that he is not alone. Yet anything more lonely than the Moat Pond ruins, with what remained of the square hulk of the tower cutting the sky—the same from which Jeremy had hurled himself—could not be imagined.

Nevertheless I did not breathe that night air alone. I was sure of that. The bats swooped and recovered, seeing doubtless the white blur of my face in the dusk of the tree shadows.

Before me I could see the green lawn all trampled that had been Miss Orrin's pride. The lilies were mostly uprooted to allow of the perquisitions of the law. But whether it was something supernatural (in which at the time I was quite in a mood to believe), or merely owing to the moving of a soil so pregnant with the exhalations of the marsh—certain it is that I saw the distinct outline of a man's body, with limbs extended, lie in the same place where each of Miser Hobby's "cases" had been interred. They were marked out with a kind of misty fire, like the phosphorus when a damp match won't strike—not bright like the boiling swirl in a vessel's wake. Each of them kept quite still. There was no movement save, perhaps, that of a star, when you see it through the misty air low on the horizon of the west, and kind of swaying, which after all may only have been in my head.