But the rest was wanting. I stood and wondered as the tide ebbed away to other rooms--first to whom Elsie Stennis was to be married, and whether the inscription on that half-woven wedding present had anything to do with her disappearance in company with the granite-faced woman as reported by Frankie Leslie on his way through the meadows.

I even went so far as to suspect Mr. Ablethorpe. He had always been fond of Elsie. He had always protected her enemies, those whose interest it was to deprive her of her heritage. Perhaps his very pretence of celibacy was only a cover for a deeper design of getting hold of the riches of the Golden Farmer!

But all the turmoil, and the thundering blows of the fore-hammer wielded by Ebie McClintoch discovered nothing--not one of the mad sisters, not their leader and protectress, Miss Orrin, not Mad Jeremy himself. And, of course, no one expected to see anything of Mr.

Stennis. He would be far away, as usual, with an alibi obviously provided on purpose.

Most of all, the silence of the place was disquieting. The door of the barn was open. Within, all trace of the ridiculous gauds of a former time had disappeared. It had been restored carefully, with knowledge and discretion, to its first use as a chapel. A crucifix hung above the communion table. The twin sets of commandments, written in gold on blue, were against the wall on either side. The Bible, on the little lectern, behind a gilt eagle no bigger than a sparrow, was open at the lesson for the day. The Breckonside people, though in their Presbyterian hearts condemning such signs and symbols, paused open-mouthed, taken with a kind of awe, and as Mr. De la Poer dropped on one knee to make his altar reverence, all filed out bareheaded and a little ashamed of themselves.

None thought of going farther. Though I knew very well that behind the hanging of dull purple at the lectern was the door by which Mr.

Ablethorpe had saved his strange parishioners, and so cheated the hasty angers of Breckonside.

Nor did I tell them of it. Somehow I was no longer a leader. And deep in my heart I felt sure that if Elsie were indeed there, Mr. Ablethorpe would give his life rather than that any harm should come to her.

Besides Elsie and I had been so many times in danger of our lives, in that very place even, that I knew somehow she would come back to me unhurt. At any rate, the actual prison house where she was hidden was far beyond our ken. None of us thought of searching on the other side of the moat, where was the underground oven of the Cistercians, in which Elsie (as she has already told) was interned.

Perhaps I did wrong in not revealing the secret of the pa.s.sage. But then if there had been bloodshed--and our folk were quite in the mood for it--the death or ill-usage of these poor innocents (I do not speak of Miss Orrin or Mad Jeremy) would have been on my head. On the whole, I am still convinced that I acted wisely. And I am sure also that Mr.

Ablethorpe did so. For he had, there was no doubt, hurried the sisters Honorine, Camilla, and Sidonia, with their eldest sister Miss Orrin, from the chapel where he had known he would be sure to find them at that hour, by the pa.s.sage along which I had chased him, and had finally hidden them safely in the range of underground buildings that had been the store and treasure-houses of the monks in the days of the border moss-troopers. For then each good wife of a peel tower sent her husband to "borrow" from the holy clerks of the Moated Abbey as often as the larder and money bag were empty. And her way was a woman's way.

She served him at dinner time with only this--a clean spur upon an empty plate, which being interpreted meant, "If thou would'st eat, good man of mine, rise and ride."

They lived in dangerous territory, these good monks, and it is small wonder if after their departure the moated island kept its repute. The very wealth of "hidie-holes" conduced to deeds that feared the light.

Mad Jeremy in his outcast days had sheltered there. He had explored them, and that knowledge had been abundantly utilized since the purchase of the Grange by Mr. Stennis. The whole situation was most favourable for his traffic, and even now when its good repute was blown upon, the Cistercian abbots' "hidie-hole" still showed itself capable of keeping its secrets.

Our Breckonsiders were proverbially slow of belief, but they could not get over the facts. There before us was the house of Deep Moat, all open to the eye, silent like a church on week days, prepared as for visitors from floor to roof tree. And nothing to be found, neither there, nor in the numerous out-buildings of which Mr. Bailiff Ball, a man of approven probity, had the charge.

There was nothing for it therefore but to go home. Or rather the villagers had almost arrived at that decision when Miss Orrin, escorted by Mr. Ablethorpe, walked suddenly into the midst of the crowd of armed country folk.

Her appearance caused an angry roar, pikes and scythes were raised against her. But the presence of a clergyman, the dignity of even an alien cloth, made them turn away a little shamefacedly. Mr. Ablethorpe put up his hand to command silence.

"My friends," he said, "I have lived among you long enough to know that you will offer no indignity to a woman. Miss Orrin is here of her own wish to explain to you all that may be necessary. She does not, of course, make herself responsible for the words or actions of all other members of her family, but so far as she is concerned she is ready to explain."

"Where is Elsie Stennis? Murderess! Burn the witch! The she-devil!"

These cries, among others, broke from the crowd, and Miss Orrin was well advised not to attempt any long parley.

"Come with me," she said, "and I will satisfy you! But go gently. For the master of this house is very ill and the doctor is with him even now."

Whereupon she opened with a key a door in the weaving chamber of Mr.

Stennis, a door which I had taken for that of a large iron safe, and conveyed us into a smaller chamber, with a barred window looking across the moat. Here Mr. Stennis lay on a bed, very pale and haggard, and with him, his hand upon the sick man's wrist, was Dr. Hector of Longtown, a man whom every one knew and respected--all the more so because of a brusque manner and an authoritative speech that caused people to place great confidence in his judgments.

He looked up astonished and rose to his feet, evidently very angry.

"h.e.l.lo," he said, "what's this? What right have you to come masquerading here with your pitchforks and hedging tools? Out of this, or I'll put my lancet into some of you! I'll wager that I will let more blood in five minutes than you with your entrenching tools in a week--ay, and take it from the right spot, too!"

He followed the defeated Breckonsiders to the door, made a gesture as if to hasten a few laggards with the toe of his boot, and remarked aloud to Miss Orrin: "I thought you had more sense than to encourage this sort of thing!"

"Me encourage it!" cried Miss Orrin, indignantly facing him--"you are under a great mistake, sir!"

"Well, out of this, anyway, all of you," said Dr. Hector. "I will not have it. If my patient's repose is broken into again, tell them I am armed--I will take my horsewhip to the pack of them!"

And curiously enough the crowd of justicers melted more quickly merely with the shame of looking a good man in the face, and before his horsewhip of righteous indignation, than it would have done before Mad Jeremy, armed to the teeth.

"I went this morning to the school where Miss Elsie Stennis teaches,"

said Miss Orrin, "and I gave her a message that her grandfather was ill and wishful to see her. Dr. Hector is a witness that such was Mr.

Stennis's urgent desire. I merely executed it, and all that I know further is that Miss Stennis has not yet complied with that request."

"Our Frankie saw teacher with you on the meadow pasture at nine this morning," interrupted a gaunt woman with the bent shoulders of the outdoor worker and a look of poverty on her face.

"Then your Frankie lied!" retorted Miss Orrin sharply.

And after this direct challenge it needed both Mr. Ablethorpe and Mr.

De la Poer to restore order. But the fury of Frankie's mother contrasted so ill with Miss Orrin's glacial calm, that it seemed possible enough that "Frankie" had indeed invented the little circ.u.mstance to add to his importance, after hearing of the loss and disappearance of "teacher."

"Moreover," said Miss Orrin, "since Mr. Stennis is too ill to have his bedchamber and house invaded in this way, in future Dr. Hector will arrange for special protection from the police at Longtown. And after this warning let any one cross the moat at their peril."

There was no more to be done. Aphra Orrin had beaten us completely.

The baffled tide ebbed back the way it came, and Deep Moat Grange was left alone once more with the secrets it had been successful in guarding in the teeth of a whole countryside in arms and aroused to a high pitch of curiosity.

The two clergymen waited behind, but the sick man would have nothing to do with them, declaring his intention, if he must, of dying as a good Presbyterian. He was the most intractable of invalids, even threatening to break a bottle over Dr. Hector's head if, as he proposed, he should venture to bring with him from Longtown a minister of his own denomination.

"Hobby Stennis is none so ill as that," he said stoutly, "if only I had my will in a safe place, and had seen the little la.s.s, who is all my kith and kin, I would ask no more from doctor or minister in this world."

"I will take charge of the will myself if no better may be," said Dr.

Hector. And so, none saying him nay, he rode back to Longtown with the holograph in his breast pocket, jesting with two farmers riding that way as he went. Had he only known, a few sheets of a folio account book covered with close writing in the hand of Mr. Stennis was considerably more dangerous to carry about with him than the latest discovered high explosive!

It was with considerable astonishment that on the evening of his next visit to Deep Moat Grange, about midway between the edge of the woods and the lonely alehouse where my father had alighted, Dr. Hector was suddenly aware of a noose of rope which circled about his neck with a whiz. The next moment he was dragged from his horse. He lay unconscious for an hour on the road, and then coming to himself turned and walked back to Longtown, very stiff and very angry, but conscious of no other loss than that of several copies of prescriptions which he kept in his breast pocket.

"What they can want with these, I don't know," said the vindictive doctor. "I only hope they will take them all together. There was a triple dose of strychnine in one which I wrote for Garmory's dog!"

Now Miss Orrin was a clever woman, and she grasped at once the immense moral value of having the support of Mr. Ablethorpe and his friend and spiritual director Mr. De la Poer. It was quite evident that for the sisters the situation at Deep Moat Grange would no longer be tenable.

Mr. Stennis might die any day. The Longtown doctor gave little hope of ultimate recovery. The will had been removed out of Aphra's reach.

True, she might possibly induce the old man to make another, disinheriting his granddaughter. If Elsie died in her prison, doubtless sooner or later all would be found out. There were other things also.

It came as the happiest of solutions, therefore, to the strenuous head of the Orrin family, when, a few days after, Mr. Ablethorpe proposed to charge himself with the care of the three "innocents"--Honorine, Camilla, and Sidonia. He knew of a convent, the good sisters of which gave up their lives to the care of women mentally afflicted. Aphra refused point blank any such a.s.sistance for herself, even temporarily.

But for her sisters she rejoiced openly, and was indeed, after her fashion, really grateful to the two young clergymen who had taken up the cause of the witless and the friendless.

"I know why you do this," she said, "it is that you may clear the board of those who have neither art nor part in the evil. Then you will strike the more surely. I do not blame you, Mr. Ablethorpe, But for me, I will not go with my sisters, who have done nothing--known nothing. If the guilty are to suffer--and if the guilty are indeed my brother and my master--then I will stand in the dock by their side. No one shall ever say that Aphra Orrin went back on a friend, or refused her full share of responsibility. All the same, Mr. Ablethorpe--and you, Mr. De la Poer--I am grateful from my heart for what you are doing for my poor sisters. For me, I am neither mad nor irresponsible--only as the more notable sinner, in the greater need of your ghostly counsels!"

CHAPTER XXV

A LETTER FROM JOSEPH YARROW, SENIOR, TO HIS SON JOSEPH YARROW, JUNIOR

Dear Joe--Yours of the 10th received and contents noted. You ask me to tell you in writing what happened when, like a fool, I allowed myself to be caught and imprisoned by the other fools at Deep Moat Grange, at that time the property of the late Mr. H. Stennis.

Nothing can be more generally useless than the practice of going back on old transactions, the gain of which has long gone to your banker, or the loss been written off. But as, on this occasion, you represent to me that a few notanda from me might aid your book to sell, I comply with your desire. Your proposition, kindly but speculative, that I should receive ten per cent. (10%) of the proceeds, is one to which I cannot accede. The venture is your own, and though I reply as a father, I desire to rest absolutely disinterested in the business. I have made my success in life, such as it is, by never touching anything of a doubtful or gambling nature. And I am creditably informed the publication of books of thrilling adventure such as you propose undoubtedly falls under the latter category.

But the facts, nevertheless, are at your service. All that I ask of you is that you should allow them to remain facts. I once lifted a page of your MS., which had been blown from your desk, and I grieve to say that it contained such twaddle about love, together with other intangible and inappreciable articles, that I came very near to discharging you on the spot. But I remembered the solid qualities and apt.i.tudes you had shown (I give you so much credit, but I trust you do not strike me for a rise on the strength of it) on the occasion of my late disappearance.