"A devil—a black devil," cried the wizened little man, shaking his stick, as it were, at the four winds of heaven; "bride-bed or bairn-cot, shroud or bier, I have no word to say to any connected with Bell Stennis or the man that she counted her husband——!"
"Except to give her a decent burial, as ye did," said Elsie. "I have seen her name on the stone in Breckonside churchyard, and the space for your own beneath——!"
"Any one with eyes might have seen as much. But surely I am not expected to own you for a granddaughter just because ye have looked over the cemetery wall!"
"Neither have you a right to be angry because Joe Yarrow and I look across the ditch at the flower beds of Deep Moat Grange——"
There appeared to be some hidden sting in this saying of Elsie's. For a moment the old man looked perfectly murderous. But he quickly recovered himself.
"Faith," he cried, "but it would have been telling your mother, if indeed she be my daughter Bell—if she had had the gift o' the gab like you! But that's no proof. I have ever been a silent man myself!"
"Maybe you had need, grandfather!" cried Elsie merrily, as if it were all a joke, even when I knew that our lives hung, of a certainty, in the balance between his goodwill and his anger at our intrusion. Certainly, however, Elsie had a curious power over the old man, and instead of getting angry, he actually laughed, a queer, crackling laugh, caught perhaps from living so long among mad folk. I have heard doctors out of lunatic asylums laugh like that. There is nothing so catching as crack-brainedness. A lot of people have it at Breckonside—maybe because the East Dene Asylum is so near. Perhaps not.
"I see," said old Mr. Stennis, "that you have upon your body day-linen of my weaving. That is a waste. I only weave now to amuse myself, and sometimes for the great of the land—because no one can weave like Hobby Stennis. Therefore the webs I have sent that old wretch Mrs. Comline in the town of Dumfries, and now yearly to Nance at the bridge-end, ought to have been put carefully away, and not cut up to make fal-lals for a daft hempie of your age! Nance ought to know better. She is old enough and ugly enough for that!"
"Then if I am your daughter's daughter, as I see you admit," said Elsie, taking his words as an admission, "let us go across and view the bonnie flowers over yonder, the bedded tulips, the Lent lilies, and all the flowers of the spring."
Then, for the first time the old man had a look of fear, almost of revolt.