The Dew of Their Youth

by S. R. Crockett

I watched my grandmother take the antique knocker between her fingers, noting with housewifely approval that it had recently been polished. I have seldom passed a more uncomfortable time of waiting, than that between the resounding clatter of grandmother’s knocking reverberating through the empty house, and the patter of feet, the whispering, and at last the opening of the door.

Then I saw again the tall girl with the proudly angled chin, the crown of raven curls, and the pair of brave outlooking eyes that met all the world with something that was even a little bold.

I had been afraid that my grandmother, so indiscriminating in her admonitions, might open fire upon this forlorn couple, isolated in the great haunted house of Marnhoul. But I need not have troubled.

My grandmother had the instinct of caressing maternity for all the young, the forlorn, the helpless. So she only opened her arms and cried out, “Oh, you dears—you poor darlings!”

And the little boy, moved by the instinctive yearning of all that needed protection, of everything of tender years and little strength towards the breast that had suckled and the hands that had nursed, let go his sister’s hand and ran happily to my grandmother. She caught him in her arms and lifted him up with the easy habitual gesture of one long certified as a mother in Israel. He threw his little arms about my grandmother’s neck, nestling there just as the rest of us used to do when we were in any trouble.

“I like you! You are good!” he said.

Miss Irma and I were therefore left eye to eye while Louis Maitland, in spite of his title, was so rapidly making friends with the actual head of our family.

Irma eyed me, and I did the like to Miss Irma—that is, to the best of my ability, which in this matter was nothing to hers. She seemed to look me through and through. At which I quailed, and then she appeared a little more content.

With the child still in her arms, and her voice, lately so harsh in rebuke, now tuned to the cooing of a nesting dove, my grandmother introduced herself.

“Child,” she said to Miss Irma, “I am your nearest neighbour. Who should come to welcome you if not I? You will find me at the farm of Heathknowes. It is my goodman’s saw-mills that you hear clattering from where you stand, and I am come to see if there is anything I can do to help you.”