It was pleasant in Nance's cottage by the Bridge End of Breckonside.

The house was, as perhaps I have already explained, overwhelmed in a perfect show of creeping flowers, not all of them yet in their full bloom of colour, but always spreading up to the chimneys and throwing abroad reckless tendrils that brushed the face as one entered the little wooden porch.

Nance was busy with the supper dishes, and Elsie had come down after "giving her hair a tidy," as she had been commanded by Nance to do.

"Who do you think has been here the day?" said Nance suddenly.

And I knew in a minute, but Elsie guessed her grandfather.

"The young English minister from Over Breckonton."

"Yes," Nance went on to give details, finding that n.o.body exclaimed at her news; "as fine an Englisher as ever was, with a bit cambric handkerchief that wad hae been little use to a man wi' a cauld in his heid, and a black cane wi' real silver bands. Extraordinary civil he was, and bode near an hour talkin' to puir auld Nance, and speirin'

where ye were, Elsie, and what time ye wad be hame!"

I looked at Elsie. She was busily engaged in tying up some sprays of early heath, which we had gathered on the steep sides of Brom Beacon.

She did not seem to be listening. But she heard well enough, as her words proved.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Ralph Ablethorpe! Joe and I met him by chance on the way to my grandfather's the other day."

Now the vixen knew very well that there would be no more question of the "coming of the Englishy minister" after an announcement like that.

Nance was all agog to hear of the wonders of Deep Moat Grange, which she had never seen except from the outside, and news of the mad people my la.s.sie's granddad had gathered about him. Small wonder, either!

For, indeed, no one had crossed the Moat for years except the High-Church curate, who (as they said) went periodically to "confess"

Miss Orrin.

Even such things as coals and provisions were brought by the bailiff to the end of the drawbridge in sacks, and from thence carried across on the back of the powerful Jeremy, the same Jeremy whom we had seen that day weeping like a child.

But it was then that I began first to understand what absence at college might cost me. I looked at Elsie. She was still tying up the little pink bundles of "bell heather," but her face was held down, and there was a little conscious flush upon her cheek. I had never thought it before, and it came on me like a judgment. Elsie was pretty.

I did not exactly wish she hadn't been, but oh, I did wish that n.o.body had been able to see it but myself!

That English curate, with his curly poll and clear blue eyes, rode me like a nightmare. I resolved to break his head, handsome as it looked--aye, if he were the best man that ever stepped in shoe leather, and had climbed all the mountains in Switzerland and given all that he got for doing it to the poor, as they said he had done. I did not care how good he was. I was desperate at the thought of losing Elsie. Not for love--oh no, thank you. I had more sense than that. But just to go about with, and be my little 'panion, as she had always said she would be, and as I expected her to remain.

But the curate did not let gra.s.s grow under his footsteps. It was only two days before he was back again at the little cottage at the Bridge End. Nance had work that day, and if I had not had the sense to play truant he would have found Elsie by herself, as no doubt he expected to do. But I was there seated on the table, swinging my legs.

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 n.o.body.

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 circ.u.mstances. 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.

But then, you see, he was a simple sort of young man, and never thought, or at least said, any evil of anybody.

Then he suggested that we would walk home together, and though I had meant to stay at the cottage all day, I actually went. But I soon got him into a hot argument with my father (who could argue the handle off the village pump) about doctrine and sacraments, and things that a boy has to learn about in school till he hates the very name of them. At least, if he has a master like old Mr. Mustard. Then I up and shinned out of the back door as quick as I could, lest father should ask me where I was going, and send me kiting all over the country with one of our delivery vans. I found Elsie looking out of the window and very pensive.

So I told her to her face that she was thinking of that curly-headed curate, and she answered me (as, of course, she would naturally do) that whether she was or wasn't, it was no business of mine.

Then I vowed I would make it my business.

"Then make it!" says she, and turned away very haughty and went and sulked in Nancy's little room, which was off the big kitchen. It was as much as I could do to keep from turning on my heel and walking away, never more to return. But I knew that it was wrong to yield to pa.s.sion. So I was n.o.ble and stopped where I was.

Instead I began to sweep up the cinders about the grate and get everything ready for tea, even to scouring the teapot and things. I used coa.r.s.e, common powder, and this I moistened by a coa.r.s.e and familiar method. The act brought Elsie out promptly. Just bounding she was. Mad was no name for it. She called me all the names she could think of, but she didn't sulk any more. I thought she wouldn't.

That always fetches her. She knows I do it a-purpose to make her angry, but she can't help it--not one time in a thousand. Elsie is built that way, and from what I have seen quite a lot of women are.

It works far better than taffying up to them, or doing the dreadful humble. Get them spitting mad, and they will love you ever after, or at least for quite a while.

CHAPTER X

THE BROM-WATER MYSTERY

It is wonderful how soon a thing is forgotten, or at least put on a shelf in people's memories. Poor Harry Foster, for example! There was a man now--a man murdered in the discharge of his duty, if ever a man was. And after a month or two another man was travelling the same road with a new mail cart and new sacks of letters, as quiet as water going down a mill-lade. The only difference was that he started a while later in the morning than poor Harry, after it was daylight, in fact, so that the Bewick people had to wait, often till midday, before they got their letters.

And when they made complaint to the Postmaster-General, or some other big-wig, he up and said to them, "You Bewickers, it is open to you to choose one of yourselves to bring up the mails from Breckonside, running the risk of Harry Foster's fate and providing a sufficient guarantee for any loss the post office run by Her Royal High Majesty may sustain."

Something like that he said. But no Bewicker offered. Of course not--why, they had skin creeps at the very thought.

"So," says the post official big-wig, "you Bewick cowards, be good enough to shut up and take your letters when they are sent out to you."

Still there were people who kept thinking about poor Harry for all that. And I was one of them. Elsie did not seem to care so much, or at least so long. Did you never observe that you can't keep a girl long interested in the same thing, unless you keep on telling her all the time how much prettier she is getting to look? But I did not know even that much, not then. I was just mortal green--green as father's spare pasture field after three days' steady rain and one of May sunshine. And, indeed, to tell the truth outright, I thought altogether too much at that time about people, and too little about my Latin and Greek prose, as Mr. Mustard, who was a good cla.s.sic himself, often told me. He said I should rue it. But I can't say I have ever gone as far as that. Not to date, anyway. Perhaps I may some day, when I start reading Latin to pa.s.s the time.

The adventure grew more interesting to me after the policeman and detectives had one by one all cleared off. The affair was "cla.s.sed,"

as the French say in their crime books--I learned my French out of these, and a jolly easy way, too--that is, the police were not going to do anything more in the matter, unless something fresh turned up. And it would have to be something mighty fresh, too, to move them. They had all got so sick of the whole business.

There was just one thing that kept me back. That was, I was nearly sure that Elsie's grandfather had something to do with the whole series of crimes of which the death of poor Harry was only the last and the most senseless. Perhaps not Mr. Stennis directly, but somebody about Deep Moat Grange. So, of course, I did not want to bring Elsie into it if I could help it. Because if her grandfather was a murderer, and if all the missing drovers and absconding cattle dealers were laid to his account, and he hanged for it, it would be clearly impossible for Elsie to go on living with Nance Edgar at the Bridge End. And as I was not yet ready to make other arrangements for her (besides being mortally afraid of the curate), I said nothing to any one--least of all to Elsie herself.

I think I had suspected everybody for miles round in turn--from Mr.

Codling the policeman to the vicar himself. As for poor Mr. Ball, I had him so completely under observation, and was so sure of his guilt, that when the unfortunate bailiff went out only to fodder the cattle, I followed stealthily in his footsteps, sure that the secret of the mystery lay in the range of cattle sheds or under the pigs' feeding troughs. In the end I only managed to get a welting from father for coming home all muddy from head to foot--and not pleasant mud at that.

But really I did not mind. I was always glad when I got home safe.

Now I know that I was taking my life in my hands every minute. Even then I had glimmerings of the fact. The folks of Breckonside might say, as they always did, that the killing of poor Harry was the work of some chance tramps, who would be far away by the next morning. But putting everything together, just as Sherlock Holmes used to do, I couldn't make it out at all. I had his spirit, but not his luck--no, not by any means his luck.

This, however, was what I made out. Harry had jogged on till he met with some one whom he knew, that is, almost immediately after he parted with Davie Elshiner, the poacher. He had talked, parleyed, and then accepted company. Then some one of these, sitting on the back seat of the dog cart, had covered up his mouth and butchered him most foully.

After that no more was to be learned. The light vehicle which had bounded from side to side of the narrow drove-road had certainly been empty. I am no Sherlock Holmes, but my father and I know about horses and local conveyances. And we could see by the rebounding, the one wheel climbing the bank, and the other sinking in the slough, that if any one had been inside--nay any _thing_, the contents of the cart, be they what they would, must have been emptied out.