The Hayfork Minister went on knocking off big flakes of dried mud with the point of his stick. Then, whistling softly, he started to polish something with vigour. At first I could not in the least see what he was after, but soon a good big square of reddish metal was laid bare. It was not upright in the bank, but leaned a little back, was very deep set, and I could see that it had been intended to slide in grooves. At the time I had no idea as to why it had been put there. But now I know that it must have been constructed for purposes of irrigation.
There was, in fact, an old vegetable garden and orchard, still partly enclosed with crumbling walls, not two hundred yards off through the woods. And there is little doubt that it had been the intention of some former travelled master of the Grange to cultivate his table vegetables and fruits on the system of Southern Europe.
All, however, was now desolate.
Yet the iron plate in the bank, though mud-covered and rusty, had not stuck altogether. Indeed, looking at it closely, it was not difficult to see that it had recently been used. With the Hayfork Minister at one end of the oak branch, and myself at the other, we soon made it budge with a smothered heave-ho! and revealed a regularly bricked tunnel leading apparently into the bowels of the earth.
"That is where you are to go, my son!" said Mr. Ablethorpe.
"Me!"
Mr. Ablethorpe nodded, and scraping away some leaves behind the fallen tree on which we had been sitting together, he disinterred a coil of stout cord, not thick, but very strong, with a red thread running through it. "This has served," he said, "for heavier weights in more dangerous places!"
And without more ado he proceeded to knot it about my waist, as if he had been accustomed to nothing else all his life. But I objected. Indeed, I had reason. For suppose Mad Jeremy, or Aphra Orrin, or Mr. Stennis himself were to come while I was up there—what then?
"You leave that to me, Joe," said the Hayfork Minister; "there is not one of them that would dare to touch me—no, nor you—while you are in my company."
This was good enough to hear, and, in its way, comforting. But, somehow, at such a time the mind craves for proofs more absolute. Or to be somewhere else. Particularly the latter.