Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

He began at once saying how sorry he was that Nance was out, and that he had so much enjoyed the talk with her the other day. But under my breath I kept saying, "Liar! Liar!" Because I knew quite well that he was coming of purpose to see Elsie, and the thought gave me catchings of the breath when I thought of going to college. I wasn't jealous a bit, of course, only I couldn't bear to think of any other fellow being friends with Elsie.

But after awhile I began to like the parson better. He had heard that I could bowl more than a bit, and he asked me to make one of the team he was getting up to play the second eleven of East Dene. I took to him more after that, and really he did not talk to Elsie oftener than he did to me. More than that, he did not make me feel in the way.

But it was all no go. From deep down in my heart there kept bobbing up the feeling that somehow I was to lose Elsie, and that this young parson with the curly head would be the cause of it. Of course, I was going on to eighteen, and a big fellow for my age, with a moustache you could see by looking for it. But this was a full-grown man of twenty-four at the least—for all that his shaven face and sort of painted-window hair made him look any age from that of a choir boy to that of a holy angel.

He asked about Elsie's grandfather, saying that he had struggled long and vainly to get him to come to church, or at least to communion, but without success. More than that, he seemed to be keeping Miss Orrin from attending the parish church of Over Breckonton. Miss Orrin, so it seemed, had good instincts—she was well affected toward religion, but something always seemed to hold her back. At a certain point she became silent, and he, Ralph Ablethorpe, could do nothing more with her. This resistance he hoped, however, to overcome one day. It was his duty to study the welfare of every soul in his parish, and also of those wandering and foldless sheep who were cared for by nobody.

I had it on my tongue tip to say that there were many who cared for souls when they were connected with comely bodies, for that was the kind of thing that my father was always saying. He took himself for an advanced thinker whenever he quarrelled with our vicar, but between times he was as good a conservative as anybody, and stood up for law and order like the chucker-out of a bar-room.

Elsie had not much to say about her people. She never had. But I told him, as I always did any one who asked, that her father had been an army officer, and her mother the only daughter of the Golden Farmer, only that neither the one nor the other of them could stand the old man's ways.

Then the young parson, as I found to be his custom, started in to defend the absent, which is all right when the "absent" is anyway decent.

"Yes," he said, "Mr. Stennis's habits are certainly eccentric. I cannot deny that. But after all he does a lot of good in rather creditable circumstances. He gives shelter to four poor lunatics whom a sisterly love has preserved from the living death of a common asylum."

I told him plainly that I thought it would be much better for themselves, and infinitely so for the countryside, if they were all shut up in the nearest asylum under proper care.

"What do you mean?" says he, rather startled. For I could see by the changing of his countenance that he, too, had seen strange things. As, indeed, he was bound to do, if he kept his eyes open at all, going to Deep Moat Grange as often as he did.