The Dew of Their Youth - Samuel Rutherford Crockett (chromebook ebook reader TXT) 📗

got to the top of the stairs, I heard cries from without, which had been smothered by the deepness of the dungeon in which I had been labouring to put out the fire. For a moment I thought that by the failure of Agnes Anne to fire off "King George" at the proper moment, the door had been forced and we utterly lost. Which seemed the harder to be borne, that I had just saved all our lives in a way so original and happy.
But I was wrong. The shouting came not from the wicked crew of the privateersman, but from the shouting of a vast number of people, most of them mounted on farm and country horses, with some of finer limb and better blood, managed by young fellows having the air of laird's sons or others of some position. None of these had his face bare. But in place of the black highwayman masks of the followers of Galligaskins, these wore only a strip of white kerchief across the face, though, as I could see, more for the form of the thing than from any real apprehension of danger.
Indeed, in the very forefront of the cavalcade I saw our own two cart horses, Dapple and Dimple, and the lighter mare Bess, which my grandfather used for riding to and fro upon his milling business. I had not the least doubt that my three uncles were bestriding them, though I never knew that there were any arms about the house except the old fowling-piece belonging to grandfather, with which on moonlight nights he killed the hares that came to nibble the plants in his cabbage garden.
Soon the sailors and their abettors were fleeing in every direction. But, what took me very much by surprise, there was no firing or cutting down, though there was a good deal of smiting with the flat of the sword. And at the entrance of the ice-mound I saw a great many very scurvy fellows come trickling out, all burned and scorched, to run the gauntlet of a row of men on foot, who drubbed them soundly with cudgels before letting them go.
Seeing this, I opened the window and shouted with all my might.
"Apprehend them! They are villains and thieves. They have broken into this house and tried to kill us all, besides setting fire to the cellar and everything in it!"
The men without, both those on foot and those on horseback, had been calm till they heard this, and then, lo! each cavalier dismounted and all came running to the door, calling on us to open instantly.
"Not to you any more than to the others!" I cried. For, indeed, I saw not any good reason. It appeared to me, since there was no real fighting, that the two parties must be in alliance, or, at least, have an understanding between them.
But Agnes Anne called out, "Nonsense, I see Uncle Aleck and Uncle Ebenezer. I am going to open the door to them, whatever you say!"
So all in a minute the house of Marnhoul, long so desolate and silent, wherein such deeds of valour and strategy had recently been wrought, grew populous with a multitude all eager to win down to the cellar. But Agnes Anne brought up my three uncles (and another who was with them) and bade them watch carefully over the safety of Louis and Miss Irma. (For so I must again call her now that she had, as it were, come to her own again.)
As for me they carried me down with them, to tell all about the attempt to burn the goods in the cellar. And angry men they were when they saw so many webs of fine cloth, so many bolts of Flanders lace, so many kegs of rare brandy damaged and as good as lost. But when they understood that, but for my address and quickness, all would have been lost to them, they made me many compliments. Also an old man with a silver-hilted sword, who carried himself like some great gentleman, bade me tell him my _name_, and wrote it down in his note-book, saying that I was of too good a head and quick a hand to waste on a dominie.
And, indeed, I was of that mind (or something very much like it) myself. An old haunted house like Marnhoul to defend, a young maid of high family to rescue (and adopt you as her brother for a reward) did somehow take the edge off teaching the Rule of Three and explaining the _De Bello Gallico_ to imps who cannot understand, and would not if they could.


PART II
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.
"And when the great arrive to call," said Aunt Jen, with sour insight, "you, mother, will stop the churning just when the butter is coming to put on your black lace cap and apron. You will receive the lady of the manse, and Mrs. General Johnstone, and----"
"And if I do, Jen," cried her mother, "what is that to you?"
"Because I have enough to do as it is," snapped Jen, "without your butter-making when you are playing the lady down the house!"
Grandmother's black eyes crackled fire. She turned threateningly to her daughter.
"By my saul, Lady Lyon," she cried, "there is a stick in yon corner that ye ken, and if you are insolent to your mother I will thrash you yet--woman-grown as ye are. Ye take upon yourself to say that which none of your brothers dare set their tongue to!"
And indeed there is little doubt but that Mary Lyon would have kept her word. So far as speech was concerned, my Aunt Jen was silenced. But she was a creature faithful to her prejudices, and could express by her silence and air of injured rectitude more than one less gifted could have put into a parliamentary oration.
Her very heels on the stone floor of the wide kitchen at Heathknowes, where all the business of the house was transacted, fell with little raps of defiance, curt and dry. Her nose in the air told of contempt louder than any words. She laid down the porridge spurtle like a queen abdicating her sceptre. She tabled the plates like so many protests, signed and witnessed. She swept about the house with the glacial chill which an iceberg spreads about it in temperate seas. Her displeasure made winter of our content--of all, that is, except Mary Lyon's. She at least went about her tasks with her usual humming alacrity, turning work over her shoulder as easy as apple-peeling.
Being naturally lazy myself (except as to the reading of books), I took a great pleasure in watching grandmother. Aunt Jen would order you to get some work if she saw you doing nothing--malingering, she called it--yes, and find it for you too, that is, if Mary Lyon were not in the house to tell her to mind her own business.
But you might lie round among grandmother's feet for days, and, except for a stray cuff in passing if she actually walked into you--a cuff given in the purest spirit of love and good-will, and merely as a warning of the worse thing that might happen to you if you made her spill the dinner "sowens"--you might spend your days in reading anything from the _Arabian Nights_ in Uncle Eben's old tattered edition to the mighty _Josephus_, all complete with plans and plates--over which on Sundays my grandfather was wont to compose himself augustly to sleep.
Well, Miss Irma and Sir Louis came to my grandmother's house at Heathknowes. Yes, this is the correct version. The house of Heathknowes was Mary Lyon's. The mill in the wood, the farm, the hill pastures--these might be my grandfather's, also the horses and wagons generally, but his power--his "say" over anything, stopped at the threshold of the house, of the byre of cows, at the step of the rumbling little light cart in which he was privileged to drive my grandmother to church and market. In these places and relations he became, instead of the unquestioned master, only as one of ourselves, except that he was neither cuffed nor threatened with "the stick in the corner." All the same, this immunity did not do him much good, for many a sound tongue-lashing did he receive for his sins and shortcomings--indeed, far more so than all the rest of us. For with us, my grandmother had a short and easy way.
"I have not time to be arguing with the likes of you!" she would cry. And upon the word a sound cuff removed us out of her path, and before we had stopped tingling Mary Lyon had plunged into the next object in hand, satisfied that she had successfully wrestled with at least one problem. But with grandfather it was different. He had to be convinced--if possible, convicted--in any case overborne.
To accomplish this Mary Lyon would put forth all her powers, in spite of her husband's smiles--or perhaps a good deal because of them. Upon her excellent authority, he was stated to be the most irritating man betwixt the Brigend of Dumfries and the Braes of Glenap.
"Oh, man, say what you have to say," she would cry, when reduced to extremities by the obvious unfairness of his silent mode of controversy, "but don't sit there girning like a self-satisfied monkey!"
"Mother!" exclaimed Aunt Jen, horrified. For she cherished a secret tenderness for my grandfather, perhaps because their natures were so different, "How can you speak so to our father?"
"Wait till