CHAPTER XV
MY GRANDMOTHER SPEAKS HER MIND
“There is no use talking” (said my grandmother, as she always did when she was going to do a great deal of it), “no, listen to me, there is no use talking! These two young things need a home, and if we don’t give it to them, who will? Stay longer in that great gaol of a house, worse than any barn, they shall not—exposed day and night to a traffic of sea rascals, thieves and murderers, they shall not——”
“What I want to know is who is to keep them, and what the safer they will be here?”
It was the voice of my Aunt Jen which interrupted. None else would have dared—save mayhap my grandfather, who, however, only smiled and was silent.
“Ne’er you mind that, Janet,” cried her mother, “what goes out of our basket and store will never be missed. And father says the same, be sure of that!”
My grandfather did say the same, if to smile quietly and approvingly is to speak. At any rate, in a matter which did not concern him deeply, he knew a wiser way than to contradict Mistress Mary Lyon. She was quite capable of keeping him awake two-thirds of the night arguing it out, without the faintest hope of altering the final result.
“The poor things,” mourned my grandmother, “they shall come here and welcome—that is, till better be. Of course, they might be more grandly lodged by the rich and the great—gentlefolk in their own station. But, first of all, they do not offer, and if they did, they are mostly without experience. To bring up children, trust an old hen who has clucked over a brood of her own!”
“Safer, too, here,” approved my grandfather, nodding his head; “the tarry breeches will think twice before paying Heathknowes a visit—with the lads about and the gate shut, and maybe the old dog not quite toothless yet!”
This, indeed, was the very heart of the matter. Irma and Sir Louis would be far safer at the house of one William Lyon, guarded by his stout sons, by his influence over the wildest spirits of the community, in a house garrisoned by a horde of sleepless sheep-dogs, set in a defensible square of office-houses, barns, byres, stables, granaries, cart-sheds, peat-sheds and the rest.