So I sent down Agnes Anne (she not being good for much else) to the cellar to see how things were looking there, bidding her to be careful of the lantern, and to bring back as many of the five muskets as she could carry, so that I might keep the fellows in check above.

Agnes Anne came flying back with the worst kind of news. A great flame of fire was springing up out of the well of the staircase into which we had tumbled the barrels and boxes. It threatened, she said, to blow us sky-high, if there were any barrels of powder among the goods left by the smugglers.

At any rate, the flame was rapidly spreading to the other packages which had formed our breastwork of defence, and was now like to become our ruin.

For, once fairly caught, the spirit would flame high as the rigging of Marnhoul, and we should all be burnt alive, which was most likely what Lolar Maitland meant by his parting threatening.

"And it is more than likely," Agnes Anne added, "that some of the barrels burst as we threw them down the stairs, and so, with the liquor flowing among their feet, the assailants got the idea of thus burning us out."

At all events something had to be done, and that instantly. So I had perforce to leave Agnes Anne in charge of "King George" again, cautioning her not to pull the trigger till she should see the rascals actually bending to set fire to the pile underneath the porch of the front door. I also told her not to be frightened, and she promised not to.

Then I went down to the cellar. The heat there was terrible, and I do not wonder that Agnes Anne came running back to me. A pillar of blue flame was rising straight up against the arched roof of the cellar. I could hear the cries of the men working below in the passage.

"Hook it away—give her air—she will burn ever the brisker and smoke the land-lubbers out!"

Some few of the boxes in the front tier were already on fire, and still more were smouldering, but the straightness of the vent up which the flame was coming, together with the closeness and stillness of the vault, made the flame mount straight up as in a chimney. I therefore divined rather than saw what remained for me to do. I leaped over and began, at the risk of a severe scorching, to throw back all the boxes and packages which were in danger. It was lucky for me that the smugglers had piled them pretty high, and so by drawing one or two from near the foundation, I was fortunate enough to overset the most part of it in the outward direction.

But the fierceness of the flame was beginning to tell upon the building-stone of Marnhoul, which was of a friable nature—at least that with which the vault was arched.

Luckily some old tools had been left in the corner, and it struck me that if I could dig up enough of the earthen floor or topple over the mound of earth which had been piled up at the making of the underground passage, the fire must go out for lack of air; or, better still, would be turned in the faces of those who were digging away the barrels and boxes from the bottom of the stair-well.

This, after many attempts and some very painful burns, I succeeded in doing. The first shovelfuls did not seem to produce much effect. So I set to work on the large heap of hardened earth in the corner, and was lucky enough to be able to tumble it bodily upon the top of the column of fire. Then suddenly the terrible column of blue flame went out, just as does a Christmas pudding when it is blown upon. And for the same reason. Both were made of the flames of the French spirit called cognac, or brandy.

Then I did not mind about my burns, I can assure you. But almost gleefully I went on heaping mould and dirt upon the boxes in the well of the staircase, stamping down the earth at the top till it was almost like the hard-beaten floor of the cellar itself. I left not a crevice for the least small flame to come up through.

Then I bethought me of what might be going on above, and the flush of my triumph cooled quickly. For I thought that there was only Agnes Anne, and who knows what weakness she may not have committed. She would never have thought, for instance, of such a thing as covering in the flame with earth to put it out. To tell the truth, I did think very masterfully of myself at that moment, and perhaps with some cause, for not one in a thousand would have had the "engine" to do as I had done.

When I 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 you get a man of your ain, Janet," my grandmother would retort, "then you will have new light as to how it is permitted for a woman to speak."

With this retort Aunt Jen was well acquainted, and had to be thankful that it was carried no further, as it often was in the case of any criticisms as to the management of children. In this case Aunt Jen was usually invited not to meddle, on the forcible plea that what a score of old maids knew about rearing a family could be put into a nutshell without risk of overcrowding.

The room at Heathknowes that was got ready for the children was the one off the parlour—"down-the-house," as it was called. Here was a little bed for Miss Irma, her washstand, a chest of drawers, a brush and comb which Aunt Jen had "found," producing them from under her apron with an exceedingly guilty air, while continuing to brush the floor with an air of protest against the whole proceeding.

From the school-house my father sent a hanging bookcase—at least the thing was done upon my suggestion. Agnes Anne carried it and Uncle Ebie nailed it up. At any rate, it was got into place among us. The cot of the child Louis had been arranged in the parlour itself, but at the first glance Miss Irma turned pale, and I saw it would not do.

"I have always been accustomed to have him with me," she said; "it is very kind of you to give us such nice rooms—but—would you mind letting him sleep where I can see him?"

It was Aunt Jen who did the moving without a word, and that, too, with the severe lines of disapproval very nearly completely ruled off her face. It was, in fact, better that they should be together. For while the parlour looked by two small-paned windows across the wide courtyard, the single casement of the little bedroom opened on the orchard corner which my grandfather had planted in the first years of his taking possession.

The house of Heathknowes was of the usual type of large Galloway farm—a place with some history, the house ancient and roomy, the office houses built massively in a square, as much for defence as for convenience. You entered by a heavy gate and you closed it carefully after you. From without the walls of the quadrangle frowned upon you unbroken from their eminence, massy and threatening as a fortress. The walls were loopholed for musketry, and, in places, still bore marks of the long slots through which the archers had shot their bolts and clothyard shafts in the days before powder and ball.

Except the single gate, you could go round and round without finding any place by which an enemy might enter. The outside appearance was certainly grim, unpromising, inhospitable, and so it seemed to Miss Irma and Sir Louis as they drove up the loaning from the ford.

But within, everything was different. What a smiling welcome they received, my grandfather standing with his hat off, my grandmother with the tears in her motherly vehement eyes, gathering the two wanderers defiantly to her breast as if daring all the world to come on. Behind a little (but not much) was Aunt Jen, asserting her position and rights in the house. She did not seem to see Miss Irma, but to make up, she never took her eyes off the little boy for a moment.

Then my uncles were ranged awkwardly, their hands lonesome for the grip of the plough, the driving reins, or the water-lever at the mill in the woods.

Uncle Rob, our dandy, had changed his coat and put on a new neckcloth, an act which, as all who know a Scots farm town will understand, cost him a multitude of flouts, jeers and upcasting from his peers.

I was also there, not indeed to welcome them, but because I had accompanied the party from the house of Marnhoul. The White Free Traders had established a post there to watch over one of their best "hidie-holes," even though they had removed all their goods in expectation of the visit of a troop of horse under Captain Sinclair, known to have been ordered up from Dumfries to aid the excise supervisor, as soon as that zealous officer was sure that, the steed being stolen, it was time to lock the stable door.

But when the dragoons came, there was little for them to do. Ned Henderson, the General Surveyor of the Customs and head of the district in all matters of excise, was far too careful a man to allow more to appear than was "good for the country." He knew that there was hardly a laird, and not a single farmer or man of substance who had not his finger in the pie. Indeed, after the crushing national disaster of Darien, this was the direction which speculation naturally took in Scotland for more than a hundred years.

In due time, then, the dragoons arrived, greatly to the interest of all the serving lasses—and some others. There was, of course, a vast deal of riding about, cantering along by-ways, calling upon this or that innocent to account for his presence at the back of a dyke or behind a whin-bush—which he usually did in the most natural and convincing manner possible.

The woods were searched—the covers drawn. Many birds were disturbed, but of the crew of the Golden Hind, or the land smugglers by whose arrival the capture and burning of Marnhoul had been prevented, no trace was found. Even Kate of the Shore's present address was known to but few, and to these quite privately. There was no doubt of her faithfulness. That had been proven, but she knew too much. There were questions which, even unanswered, might raise others.

Several young men, of good family and connections, thought it prudent to visit friends at a distance, and at least one was never seen in the country more.

One of his Majesty's frigates had been sent for to watch the Solway ports, much to the disgust of her officers. For not only had they been expected at the Portsmouth summer station by numerous pretty ladies, but the navigation between Barnhourie and the Back Shore of Leswalt was as full of danger as it was entirely without glory. If they were unlucky, they might be cashiered for losing the ship. If lucky, the revenue men would claim the captured cargo. If they secured the malefactors they would sow desolation in a score of respectable families, with the daughters of which they had danced at Kirkcudbright a week ago.

In Galloway, though a considerable amount of recklessness mingled with the traffic, and there were occasional roughnesses on the high seas and about the ports and anchorages of Holland and the Isle of Man, there was never any of the cruelty associated with smuggling along the south coast of England. The smugglers of Sussex killed the informer Chater with blows of their whips. A yet darker tragedy enacted farther west, brought half-a-dozen to a well-deserved scaffold. But, save for the losses in fair fight occasioned by the intemperate zeal of some new broom of a supervisor anxious for distinction, the history of Galloway smuggling had, up to that time, never been stained with serious crime.

Meantime the two Maitlands, Sir Louis and Miss Irma, were safely housed within the defenced place of Heathknowes, guarded by William Lyon and his three stout sons, and mothered by all the hidden tenderness of my grandmother's big, imperious, volcanic heart.

Only my Aunt Jen watched jealously with a half-satisfied air and took counsel with herself as to what the end of these things might be.



CHAPTER XVI

CASTLE CONNOWAY

Meanwhile Boyd Connoway was in straits. Torn between two emotions, he was pleased for once to have found a means of earning his living and that of his family—especially the latter. For his own living was like that of the crows, "got round the country somewhere!" But with the lightest and most kindly heart in the world, Boyd Connoway found himself in trouble owing to the very means of opulence which had brought content to his house.

On going home on the night after the great attack on Marnhoul, weary of directing affairs, misleading the dragoons, whispering specious theories into the ear of the commanding officer and his aides, he had been met at the outer gate of his cabin by a fact that overturned all his notions of domestic economy. Ephraim, precious Ephraim, the Connoway family pig, had been turned out of doors and was now grunting disconsolately, thrusting a ringed nose through the bars of Paradise. Now Boyd knew that his wife set great store by Ephraim. Indeed, he had frequently been compared, to his disadvantage, with Ephraim and his predecessors in the narrow way of pigs. Ephraim was of service. What would the "poor childer," what would Bridget herself do without Ephraim? Bridget was not quite sure whether she kept Ephraim or whether Ephraim kept her. At any rate it was not to Boyd Connoway that she and her offspring were anyways indebted for care and sustenance.

"The craitur," said Bridget affectionately, "he pays the very rint!"

But here, outside the family domain, was Ephraim, the beloved of his wife's heart, actually turned out upon a cold and unfeeling world, and with carefully spaced grunts of bewilderment expressing his discontent. If such were Ephraim's fate, how would the matter go with him? Boyd Connoway saw a prospect of finding a husband and the father of a family turned from his own door, and obliged to return and take up his quarters with this earlier exile.

The Connoway family residence was a small and almost valueless leasehold from the estate of General Johnstone. The house had always been tumbledown, and the tenancy of Bridget and her brood had not improved it externally. The lease was evidently a repairing one. For holes in the thatch roof were stopped with heather, or mended with broad slabs of turf held down with stones and laboriously strengthened with wattle—a marvel of a roof. It is certain that Boyd's efforts were never continuous. He tired of everything in an hour, or sooner—unless somebody, preferably a woman, was watching him and paying him compliments on his dexterity.

The cottage had originally consisted of the usual "but-and-ben"—that is to say, in well regulated houses (which this one was not) of a kitchen—and a room that was not the kitchen. The family beds occupied one corner of the kitchen, that of Bridget and her husband in the middle (including accommodation for the latest baby), while on either side and at the foot, shakedowns were laid out "for the childer," slightly raised from the earthen floor on rude trestles, with a board laid across to receive the bedding. There was nothing at either side to provide against the occupants rolling over, but, as the distance from the ground did not average more than four inches, the young Connoways did not run much danger of accident on that account.

Disputes were, however, naturally somewhat frequent. Jerry or Phil would describe himself as "lying on so many taturs"—Mary or Kitty declare that her bedfellow was "pullin' every scrap off of her, that she was!"

To quell these domestic brawls Bridget Connoway kept at the head of the middle bed a long peeled willow, which was known as the "Thin One." The Thin One settled all night disputes in the most evenhanded way. For Bridget did not get out of bed to discriminate. She simply laid on the spot from which the disturbance proceeded till that disturbance ceased. Then the Thin One returned to his corner while innocent and guilty mingled their tears and resolved to conduct hostilities more silently in future.

In the daytime, however, the "Thick One" held sway, which was the work-hardened palm of Mistress Bridget Connoway's hand. She was ambidextrous in correction—"one was as good as t'other," as Jerry remarked, after he had done rubbing himself and comparing damages with his brother Phil, who had got the left. "There's not a fardin' to pick between us!" was the verdict as the boys started out to find their father, stretched on his favourite sunny mound within sight of the Haunted House of Marnhoul—now more haunted than ever.

But on this occasion Boyd Connoway was on his return, when he met the exiled Ephraim. His meditations on his own probable fate have led the historian into a sketch of the Connoway establishment, which, indeed, had to come in somewhere.

For once Boyd wasted no time. With his wife waiting for him it was well to know the worst and get it over. He opened the door quickly, and intruding his hat on the end of his walking stick, awaited results. It was only for a moment, of course, but Boyd Connoway felt satisfied. His Bridget was not waiting for him behind the door with the potato-beetle as she did on days of great irritation. His heart rose—his courage returned. Was he not a free man, a house-holder? Had he not taken a distinguished part in a gallant action? Bridget must understand this. Bridget should understand this. Boyd Connoway would be respected in his own house!

Nevertheless he entered hastily, sidling like a dog which expects a kick. He avoided the dusky places instinctively—the door of the "ben" room was shut, so Bridget could not be lying in wait there. Was it in the little closet behind the kitchen that the danger lurked? The children were in bed, save the two youngest, all quiet, all watching with the large, dreamy blue (Connoway) eyes, or the small, very bright ones (Bridget's) what his fate would be.

He glanced quaintly, with an interrogative lift of his eyebrows, at the bed to the left. Jerry of the twinkling sloe-eyes answered with a quick upturn of the thumb in the direction of the spare chamber.

Boyd Connoway frowned portentously at his eldest son. The youth shook his head. The sign was well understood, especially when helped out with a grin, broad as all County Donegal 'twixt Killibegs and Innishowen Light.

The "Misthress" was in a good temper. Reassured, on his own account, but inwardly no little alarmed for his wife's health in these unusual circumstances, Boyd began to take off his boots with the idea of gliding safely into bed and pretending to be asleep before the wind had time to change.

But Jerry's mouth was very evidently forming some words, which were meant to inform his father as to particulars. These, though unintelligible individually, being taken together and punctuated with jerks in the direction of the shut door of "doon-the-hoose," constituted a warning which Boyd Connoway could not afford to neglect.

He went forward to the left hand bed, cocked his ear in the direction of the closed door, and then rapidly lowered it almost against his son's lips.

"She's gotten a hurt man down there," said Jerry, "she has been runnin' wi' white clouts and bandages a' the forenight. And I'm thinkin' he's no very wise, either—for he keeps cryin' that the deils are comin' to tak' him!"

"What like of a man?" said Boyd Connoway.

But Jerry's quick ear caught a stirring in the room with the closed door. He shook his head and motioned his father to get away from the side of his low truckle bed.

When his wife entered, Boyd Connoway, with a sober and innocent face, was untying his boot by the side of the fire. Bridget entered with a saucepan in her hand, which, before she deigned to take any notice of her husband, she pushed upon the red ashes in the grate.

From the "ben" room, of which the door was now open, Boyd could hear the low moaning of a man in pain. He had tended too many sick people not to know the delirium of fever, the pitiful lapses of sense, then again the vague and troubled pour of words, and at the sound he started to his feet. He was not good for much in the way of providing for a family. He did a great many foolish, yet more useless things, but there was one thing which he understood better than Bridget—how to nurse the sick.

He disengaged his boot and stood in his stocking feet.

"What is it?" he said, in an undertone to Bridget.

"No business of yours!" she answered, with a sudden hissing vehemence.

"I can do that better than you!" he answered, for once sure of his ground.

His wife darted at him a look of concentrated scorn.

"Get to bed!" she commanded him, declining to argue with such as he—and but for the twinkling eyes of Jerry, which looked sympathy, Boyd would have preferred to have joined the exiled Ephraim under the dark pent among the coom of the peat-house.

He looked to Jerry, but Jerry was sound asleep. So was Phil. So were all the others.

"Very well, daeaerlin'!" said Boyd Connoway to himself as his wife left the room. "But, sorrow am I for the man down there that she will not let me nurse. She's a woman among a thousand, is Bridget Connoway. But the craitur will be after makin' the poor man eat his poultices, and use his beef tay for outward application only!"



CHAPTER XVII

THE MAN "DOON-THE-HOOSE"

But Bridget Connoway, instant and authoritative as she was, could not prevent her down-trodden husband from thinking. Who was the mysterious wounded man "down-the-house"? One of the White Smugglers? Hardly. Boyd had been in the thick of that business and knew that no one had been hurt except Barnboard Tam, whose horse had run away with him and brushed him off, a red-haired Absalom in homespuns, against the branches in Marnhoul Great Wood.

One of the crew of the Golden Hind, American-owned privateersman with French letters of marque? Possibly one of the desperate gang they had landed called the Black Smugglers, scum of the Low Dutch ports, come to draw an ill report upon the good and wholesome fame of Galloway Free Trade.

In either case, Boyd Connoway little liked the prospect, and instead of going to bed, he remained swinging his legs before the fire in a musing attitude, listening to the moaning noises that came from the chamber he was forbidden to enter. He was resolved to have it out with his wife.

He had not long to wait. Bridget appeared in the doorway, a bundle of dark-stained cloths between her palms. She halted in astonishment at the sight which met her eyes. At first it seemed to her that she was dreaming, or that her voice must have betrayed her. She gave her husband the benefit of the doubt.

"I thought I tould ye, Boyd Connoway," she said in a voice dangerously low and caressing, "to be getting off to your bed and not disturbin' the childer'!"

"Who is the man that had need of suchlike?" demanded Boyd Connoway, suddenly regaining his lost heritage as the head of a house, "speak woman, who are ye harbouring there?"

Bridget stood still. The mere unexpectedness of the demand rendered her silent. The autocrat of all the Russias treated as though he were one of his own ministers of state could not have been more dumbfounded.

With a sudden comprehension of the crisis Bridget broke for the poker, but Boyd had gone too far now to recoil. He caught at the little three-legged stool on which he was wont to take his humble frugal meals. It was exactly what he needed. He had no idea of assaulting Bridget. He recognized all her admirable qualities, which filled in the shortcomings of his shiftlessness with admirable exactitude. He meant to act strictly on the defensive, a system of warfare that was familiar to him. For though he had never before risen up in open revolt, he had never counted mere self-preservation as an insult to his wife.

"Whack!" down came the poker in the lusty hand of Bridget Connoway. "Crack!" the targe in the lifted arm of Boyd countered it. At arm's-length he held it. The next attack was cut number two of the manual for the broad-sword. Skilfully with his shield Boyd Connoway turned it to the side, so that, gliding from the polished oak of the well-worn seat, the head of the poker caught his wife on the knee, and she dropped her weapon with a cry of pain. Jerry and the other children, in the seventh heaven of delight at the parental duel, were sitting up in their little night-shirts (which for simplicity's sake were identical with their day-shirts); their eyes, black and blue, sparkled unanimous, and they made bets in low tones from one bed to another.

"Two to one on Daddy!"

"Jerry, ye ass, I'll bet ye them three white chuckies[1] he'll lose!"

"Hould your tongue, Connie—mother'll win, sure. The Thick 'Un will get him!"

Such combats were a regular interest for them, and one, in quiet times, quite sympathized in by their father, who would guide the combat so that they might have a better view.

"Troth, and why shouldn't they, poor darlints? Sure an' it's little enough amusement they have!"

He had even been known to protract an already lost battle to lengthen out the delectation of his offspring. The Caesars gave to their people "Bread and the circus!" But they did not usually enter the arena themselves—save in the case of the incomparable bowman of Rome, and then only when he knew that no one dared stand against him. But Boyd Connoway fought many a losing fight that his small citizens might wriggle with delight on their truckles. "The Christians to the lions!" Yes, that was noble. But then they had no choice, while Boyd Connoway, a willing martyr, fought his lioness with a three-legged stool.

This time, however, the just quarrel armed the three-legged, while cut number two of Forbes's Manual fell, not on Boyd Connoway's head, for which it was intended, but on Bridget's knee-cap. Boyd of the tender heart (though stubborn stool), was instantly upon his knees, his buckler flung to the ground and rubbing with all his might, with murmurings of, "Does it hurt now, darlint?—Not baeaed, sure?—Say it is better now thin, darlint!"

Boyd was as conscience-stricken as if he had personally wielded the poker. But the mind of Bridget was quite otherwise framed. With one hand she seized his abundant curly hair, now with a strand or two of early grey among the straw-colour of it, and while she pulled handfuls of it out by the roots (so Boyd declared afterwards), she boxed his ears heartily with the other. Which, indeed, is witnessed to by the whole goggle-eyed populace in the truckle bed.

"Didn't I tell ye, Jerry, ye cuckoo," whispered Connie, "she'd beat him? He's gettin' the Thick 'Un, just as I told ye!"

"But it's noways fair rules," retorted Jerry; "father he flung down his weepon for to rub her knee when she hurt it herself wid the poker!"

Jerry had lost his bet, as indeed he usually did, but for all that he remained a consistent supporter of the losing side. Daily he acknowledged in his body the power of the arm of flesh, but the vagrant butterfly humour of the male parent with the dreamy blue eyes touched him where he lived—perhaps because his, like his mother's, were sloe-black.

Nevertheless, in spite of mishandling and a scandalous disregard of the rules of the noble art of self-defence (not yet elaborated, but only roughly understood as "Fair play to all"), Boyd Connoway carried his point.

He saw the occupant of the bed "doon-the-hoose."

He was a slim man with clean-cut features, very pale about the gills and waxen as to the nose. He lay on the bed, his head ghastly in its white bandages rocking from side to side and a stream of curses, thin and small of voice as a hill-brook in drought, but continuous as a mill-lade, issuing from between his clenched teeth.

These adjurations were in many tongues, and their low-toned variety indicated the swearing of an educated man.

Boyd understood at once that he had to do with no vulgar Tarry-Breeks, no sweepings of a couple of hemispheres, but with "a gentleman born." And in Donegal, though they may rebel against their servitude and meet them foot by foot on the field or at the polling-booths, they know a gentleman when they see one, and never in their wildest moods deny his birthright.

Boyd, therefore, took just one glance, and then turning to his wife uttered his sentiment in three words of approval. "I'm wid ye!" he said.

Had it been Galligaskins or any seaman of the Golden Hind, Boyd would have had him out of the house in spite of his wife and all the wholesome domestic terror she had so long been establishing.

But a Donegal man is from the north after all, and does not easily take to the informer's trade. Besides, this was a gentleman born.

Yet he had better have given hospitality to Galligaskins and the whole crew of pirates who manned the Golden Hind than to this slender, clear-skinned creature who lay raving and smiling in the bedroom of Boyd Connoway's cabin.

[Footnote 1: "Chuckies," white pebbles used, in these primitive times, instead of marbles.]



CHAPTER XVIII

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF AUNT JEN

Never was anything seen like it in our time. I mean the transformation of Aunt Jen, the hard crabapple of our family, after the entrance of the Maitland children into the household of Heathknowes. Not that my aunt had much faith in Irma. She had an art, which my aunt counted uncanny, indeed savouring of the sin of witchcraft. It mattered not at all what Irma was given to wear—an old tartan of my grandmother's Highland Mary days when she was a shepherdess by the banks of Cluden, a severe gown designed on strictly architectural principles by the unabashed shears of Aunt Jen herself, a bodice and skirt of my mother's, dovelike in hue and carrying with them some of her own retiring quality in every line. It was all the same, with a shred or two of silk, with a little undoing here, a little tightening there, a broad splash of colour cut from one of my Uncle Rob's neckcloths—not anywhere, but just in the right place—Irma could give to all mankind the impression of being the only person worth looking at in the parish. With these simple means she could and did make every other girl, though attired in robes that had come all the way from Edinburgh, look dowdy and countrified.

Also she had the simple manner of those who stand in no fear of any one taking a liberty with them. Her position was assured. Her beauty spoke for itself, and as for the old tartan, the slab-sided merino, the retiring pearl-grey wincey, their late owners did not know them again when they appeared in the great square Marnhoul pew in the parish church, which Irma insisted upon occupying.

I think that a certain scandal connected with this, actually caused more stir in the parish than all the marvel of the appearance of the children in the Haunted House. And for this reason. Heathknowes was a Cameronian household. The young men of Heathknowes were looked upon to furnish a successor to their father as an elder in the little meeting-house down by the Fords. But with the full permission of my grandmother, and the tacit sympathy of my grandfather, each Sabbath day Miss Irma and Sir Louis went in state to the family pew at the parish kirk (a square box large enough to seat a grand jury). The children were perched in the front, Irma keeping firm and watchful guard over her brother, while in the dimmer depths, seen from below as three sturdy pairs of shoulders against the dusk of a garniture of tapistry, sat the three Cameronian young men of Heathknowes.

Nothing could so completely and fully have certified the strength of my grandmother's purpose than that she, a pillar of the Covenant, thus complacently allowed her sons to frequent the public worship of an uncovenanted and Erastian Establishment.

But there was at least one in the house of Heathknowes not to be so misled by the outward graces of the body.

"Favour is vain and the eye of Him that sitteth in the heavens regardeth it not," she was wont to say, "and if Rob and Thomas and Ebenezer come to an ill end, mother, you will only have yourself to thank for it!"

"Nonsense, Jen," said her mother, "if you are prevented by your infirmities from talkin' sense, at least do hold your tongue. Doctor Gillespie is a Kirkman and a Moderate, but he is—well, he is the Doctor, and never a word has been said against him for forty year, walk and conversation both as becometh the Gospel——"

"Aye, but is it the Gospel?" cried Jen, snipping out her words as with scissors; "that's the question."

"When I require you, Janet Lyon, to decide for your mother what is Gospel and what is not, I'll let ye ken," said my grandmother, "and if I have accepted a responsibility from the Most High for these children, I will do my best to render an account of my stewardship at the Great White Throne. In the meantime, you have no more right to task me for it, than—than—Boyd Connoway!"

"There," cried Jen, slapping down the last dish which she had been drying while her mother washed, "I declare, mother, I might just as well not have a tongue at all. Whatever I say you are on my back. And as if snubbing me were not enough, down you must come on me with the Great White Throne!"

Her aggrieved voice made my grandmother laugh.

"Well-a-well!" she said, in her richly comfortable voice of a mother of consolation, "you are of the tribe of Marthas, Jen, and you certainly work hard enough for everybody to give your tongue a right to a little trot now and then. You will have all the blessings, daughter Janet—except that of the peacemaker. For it's in you to set folk by the ears and you really can't help it. Though who you took it from is more than I can imagine, with a mother as mild as milk and a father——"

"Well, what about the father—speak of the—um-um—father and he will appear, I suppose!"

It was my grandfather who had come in, his face bronzed with the sun and a friendly shaving tucked underneath his coat collar at the back, witnessing that some one of his sons, in the labours of the pirn-mill, had not remembered the first commandment with promise.

His wife removed it with a smile, and said, "I'll wager ye that was yon rascal Rob. He is always at his tricks!"

"Well, what were you saying about me, old wife?" said grandfather, looking at his wife with the quiet fondness that comes of half-a-century of companionship.

"Only that Jen there had a will-o'-the-wisp of a temper and that I knew not how she got it, for you only go about pouring oil upon the waters!"

"As to that, you know best, guidwife," he answered, smiling, "but I think I have heard of a wife up about the Heathknowes, who in some measure possesses the power of her unruly member. It is possible that Jen there may have picked up a thorn or two from that side!"

William Lyon caught his daughter's ear.

"Eh, lass, what sayest thou?" he crooned, looking down upon her with a tenderness rare to him with one of his children. "What sayest thou?"

"I say that you and mother and all about this house have run out of your wits about this slip of a girl? I say that you may rue it when you have not a son to succeed you at the Kirk of the Covenant down by the Ford."

The fleeting of a smile came over my grandfather's face, that quiet amusement which usually showed when my grandmother opposed her will to his, and when for once he did not mean to give in.

"It's a sorrowful thing—a whole respectable household gone daft about a couple of strange children;" he let the words drop very slowly. "Specially I was distressed to hear of one who rose betimes to milk a cow, so that the cream would have time to rise on the morning's milk by their porridge time!"

"Father," said Jen, "that was for the boy bairn. He has not been brought up like the rest of us, and he does not like warm milk with his porridge."

"Doubtless—ah, doubtless," said William Lyon; "but if he is to bide with us, is it not spoiling him thus to give way to suchlike whims? He will have to learn some day, and when so good a time as now?"

Aunt Jen, who knew she was being teased, kept silence, but the shoulder nearest my father had an indignant hump.

"Wheesht, William," interposed grandmother good-naturedly, "if Jen rose betimes to get milk for the bairn, ye ken yoursel' that ye think the better of her for it. And so do I. Jen's not the first whose acts are kindlier than her principles."

But Jen kept her thorns out and refused to be brought into the fold by flattery, till her father said, "Jen, have ye any of that fine homebrewed left, or did the lads drink it a' to their porridges? I'm a kennin' weary, and nothing refreshes me like that!"

Jen felt the artfulness of this, nevertheless she could not help being touched. The care of the still-room was hers, because, though my grandmother could go through twice the work in the day that her daughter could, the brewing of the family small beer and other labours of the still-room were of too exact and methodical a nature for a headlong driver like Mary Lyon.

My grandfather got his ale, of the sort just then beginning to be made—called "Jamaica," because a quantity of the cheap sugar refuse from the hogsheads was used in its production. In fact, it was the ancestor of the "treacle ale" of later years. But to the fabrication of this beverage, Jen added mysterious rites, during which the door of the still-room was locked, barred, and the keyhole blinded, while Eben and Rob, my uncles, stood without vainly asking for a taste, or simulating by their moans and cries the most utter lassitude and fatigue.

William Lyon sat sipping his drink while Jen eyed him furtively as she went about the house, doing her duties with the silence and exactitude of a well-oiled machine. She was a difficult subject, my aunt Jen, to live with, but she could be got at, as her father well knew, by a humanizing vanity.

He sat back with an air of content in his great wide chair, the chair that had been handed down as the seat of the head of the house from many generations of Lyonses. He sipped and nodded his head, looking towards his daughter, and lifting the tankard with a courtly gesture as if pledging her health.

Jen was pleased, though for a while she did not allow it to be seen, and her only repentance was taking up the big empty goblet without being asked and going to the still-room to refill it.

During her absence my grandfather shamelessly winked at my grandmother, while my grandmother shook her fist covertly at her husband. Which pantomime meant to say on the part of William Lyon that he knew how to manage women, while on his wife's side it inferred that she would not demean herself to use means so simple and abject as plain flattery even with a "camsteary" daughter.

But they smiled at each other, not ill-content, and as my grandmother passed to the dresser she paused by the great oak chair long enough to murmur, "She's coming round!" But my grandfather only smiled and looked towards the door that led to the still-room, pantries and so forth, as if he found the time long without his second pot of sugar ale.

He was something of a diplomat, my grandfather.

It was while sitting thus, with the second drink of harmless "Jamaica" before him, my aunt and grandmother crossing each other ceaselessly on silent feet, that a knock came to the front door.

Now in Galloway farm houses there is a front door, but no known use for it has been discovered, except to be a door. Later, it was the custom to open it to let in the minister on his stated visitations, and later still to let out the dead. But at the period of which I write it was a door and nothing more.

Both of these other uses are mere recent inventions. The shut front door of my early time stood blistering and flaking in the hot sun, or soaking—crumbling, and weather-beaten—during months of bad weather. For, with a wide and noble entrance behind upon the yard, so well-trodden and convenient, so charged with the pleasant press of entrants and exodants, so populous with affairs, from which the chickens had to be "shooed" and the moist noses of questing calves pushed aside twenty times a day—why should any mortal think of entering by the front door of the house. First of all it was the front door. Next, no one knew whether it would open or not, though the odds were altogether against it. Lastly, it was a hundred miles from anywhere and opened only upon a stuffy lobby round which my grandmother usually had her whole Sunday wardrobe hung up in bags smelling of lavender to guard against the moths.

Nevertheless, the knock sounded distinctly enough from the front door.

"Some of the bairns playing a trick," said my grandmother tolerantly, "let them alone, Janet, and they will soon tire o't!"

But Jen had showed so much of the unwonted milk of human kindness that she felt she must in some degree retrieve her character. She waited, therefore, for the second rap, louder than the first, then lifted a wand from the corner and went "down-the-house," quietly as she did all things.

Aunt Jen concealed the rod behind her. Her private intention was to wait for the third knock, and then open suddenly, with the deadly resolve to teach us what we were about—a mental reservation being made in the case of Baby Louis, who (if the knocker turned out to be he) must obviously have been put up to it.

The third knock fell. Aunt Jen leaped upon the door-handle. Bolts creaked and shot back, but swollen by many rainy seasons, the door held stoutly as is the wont of farm front doors. Then suddenly it gave way and Aunt Jen staggered back against the wall, swept away by the energy of her own effort. The wand fell from her hand, and she stood with the inner door handle still clutched in nervous fingers before a slight dapper man in a shiny brown coat, double-breasted and closely buttoned, even on this broiling day—while the strident "weesp-weesp" of brother Tom down in the meadow, sharpening his scythe with a newly fill "strake," made a keen top-note to the mood of summer.

"Mr. Poole," said the slim man, uncovering and saluting obsequiously, and then seeing that my aunt rested dumb-stricken, the rod which had been in pickle fallen to the floor behind her, he added with a little mincing smile and a kind of affected heel-and-toe dandling of his body, "I am Mr. Wrighton Poole, of the firm of Smart, Poole, and Smart of Dumfries."



CHAPTER XIX

LOADED-PISTOL POLLIXFEN

Now Aunt Jen's opinion of lawyers was derived from two sources, observation and a belief in the direct inspiration of two lines of Dr. Watts, his hymns.

In other words, she had noticed that lawyers sat much in their offices, twiddling with papers, and that they never went haymaking nor stood erect in carts dumping manure on the autumnal fields. So two lines of Dr. Watts, applicable for such as they, and indeed every one not so aggressively active as herself, were calculated to settle the case of Mr. Wrighton Poole.

"Satan finds some mischief For idle hands to do."

Indeed, I had heard of them more than once myself, when she caught me lying long and lazy in the depths of a haymow with a book under my nose.

At any rate Aunt Jen suspected this Mr. Poole at once. But so she would the Lord Chancellor of England himself, for the good reason that by choice and custom he sat on a woolsack!

"I'd woolsack him!" Aunt Jen had cried when this fact was first brought to her notice; "I'd make him get up pretty quick and earn his living if he was my man!"

My grandfather had pointed out that the actual Lord Chancellor of the moment was a bachelor, whereupon Aunt Jen retorted, "Aye, and doubtless that's the reason. The poor body has nobody to do her duty by him!"

For these excellent reasons my Aunt Jen took a dislike to Mr. Wrighton Poole (of the firm of Smart, Poole, and Smart, solicitors, Dumfries) at the very first glance.

And yet, when he was introduced into the state parlour with the six mahogany-backed, haircloth-seated chairs, the two narrow arm-chairs, the four ugly mirrors, and the little wire basket full of odds and ends of crockery and foreign coins—covered by the skin of a white blackbird, found on the farm and prepared for stuffing—he looked a very dapper, respectable, personable man. But my Aunt Jen would have none of his compliments on the neatness of the house or the air of bien comfort that everything about the farm had worn on his way thither.

She drew out a chair for him and indicated it with her hand.

"Bide there," she commanded, "till I fetch them that can speak wi' you!" An office which, had she chosen, Jen was very highly qualified to undertake, save for an early and deep-rooted conviction that business matters had better be left to the dealing of man and man.

This belief, however, was not in the least that of my grandmother. She would come in and sit down in the very middle of one of my grandfather's most private bargainings with the people to whom he sold his spools and "pirns." She had her say in everything, and she said it so easily and so much as a matter of course that no one was ever offended.

Grandfather was at the mill and in consequence it was my grandmother who entered from the dairy, still wiping her hands from the good, warm buttermilk which had just rendered up its tale of butter. There was a kind of capable and joyous fecundity about my grandmother, in spite of her sharp tongue, her masterful ways, the strictness of her theology and her old-fashioned theories, which seemed to produce an effect even on inanimate things. So light and loving was her hand—the hand that had loved (and smacked) many children, brooded over innumerable hatchings of things domestic, tended whole byrefuls of cows, handled suckling lambs with dead mothers lying up on the hill—aye, played the surgeon even to robins with broken legs, for one of which she constructed a leg capable of being strapped on, made it out of the whalebone of an old corset of her own for which she had grown too abundant!

So kindly was the eye that could flash fire on an argumentative Episcopalian parson—and send him over two pounds of butter and a dozen fresh-laid eggs for his sick wife—that (as I say) even inanimate objects seemed to respond to her look and conform themselves to the wish of her finger tips. She had been known to "set" a dyke which had twice resolved itself into rubbish under the hands of professionals. The useless rocky patch she had taken as a herb garden blossomed like the rose, bringing forth all manner of spicy things. For in these days in Galloway most of the garnishments of the table were grown in the garden itself, or brought in from the cranberry bogs and the blaeberry banks, where these fruits grew among a short, crumbly stubble of heather, dry and elastic as a cushion, and most admirable for resting upon while eating.

Well, grandmother came in wiping her hands. It seems to me now that I see her—and, indeed, whenever she does make an entry into the story, I always feel that I must write yet another page about the dear, warm-hearted, tumultuous old lady.

She saw the slender lawyer with the brown coat worn shiny, the scratch wig tied with its black wisp of silk, and the black bag in his hand. He had been taking a survey of the room, and started round quickly at the entrance of my grandmother. Then he made a deep bow, and grandmother, who could be very grand indeed when she liked, bestowed upon him a curtsey the like of which he had not seen for a long while.

"My name is Poole," he said apologetically. "I presume I have the honour of speaking to Mistress Mary Lyon, spouse and consort of William Lyon, tacksman of the Mill of Marnhoul with all its lades, weirs, and pendicles——"

"If you mean that William Lyon is my man, ye are on the bit so far," said my grandmother; "pass on. What else hae ye to say? I dinna suppose that ye cam' here to ask a sicht o' my marriage lines."

"It is, indeed, a different matter which has brought me thus far," said the lawyer man, with a certain diffidence, "but I think that perhaps I ought to wait till—till your husband, in fact——"

"If you are waiting for Weelyum," said Mary Lyon, "ye needna fash. He is o' the same mind as me—or will be after I have spoken wi' him. Say on!"

"Well, then," the lawyer continued, "it is difficult—but the matter resolves itself into this. I understand—my firm understands, that you are harbouring in or about this house a young woman calling herself Irma Sobieski Maitland, and a child of the male sex whom the aforesaid Irma Sobieski affirms to be the rightful owner of this estate—in fact, Sir Louis Maitland. Now, my firm have been long without direct news of the family whom they represent. Our intelligence of late years has come from their titular and legal guardian, Mr. Lalor Maitland, Governor of the district of the Upper Meuse in the Brabants. Now we have recently heard from this gentleman that his wards—two children bearing a certain resemblance to those whom, we are informed, you have been harbouring——"

My grandmother's temper, always uncertain with adults with whom she had no sympathy, had been gradually rising at each repetition of an offending word.

"Harbouring," she cried, "harbouring—let me hear that word come out o' your impident mouth again, ye upsettin' body wi' the black bag, and I'll gie ye the weight o' my hand against the side o' your face. Let me tell you that in the house of Heathknowes we harbour neither burrowing rats nor creepin' foumarts, nor any manner of unclean beasts—and as for a lawvier, if lawvier ye be, ye are the first o' your breed to enter here, and if my sons hear ye talkin' o' harbourin'—certes, ye stand a chance to gang oot the door wi' your feet foremost!"

"My good woman," said the lawyer, "I was but using an ordinary word, in perfect ignorance of any——"

"Come na, nane o' that crooked talk! Mary Lyon is nae bit silly Jenny Wren to be whistled off the waa' wi' ony siccan talk. Dinna tell me that a lawvier body doesna ken what 'harbouring rogues and vagabonds' means—the innocent lamb that he is—and him reading the Courier every Wednesday!"

"But," said the solicitor, with more persistent firmness than his emaciated body and timorous manner would have led one to expect, "the children are here, and it is my duty to warn you that in withholding them from their natural guardian you are defying the law. I come to require that the children be given up to me at once, that I may put them under their proper tutelage."

"Here, William," my grandmother called out, recognizing the footsteps of her husband approaching, "gae cry the lads and lock the doors! There's a body here that will need some guid broad Scots weared on him."

But the lawyer was not yet frightened. As it appeared, he had only known the safe plainstones of Dumfries—so at least Mary Lyon thought. For he continued his discourse as if nothing were the matter.

"I came here in a friendly spirit, madam," he said, "but I have good reason to believe that every male of your household is deeply involved in the smuggling traffic, and that several of them, in spite of their professions of religion, assaulted and took possession of the House of Marnhoul for the purpose of unlawfully concealing therein undutied goods from the proper officers of the crown!"

"Aye, and ken ye wha it was that tried to burn doon your Great House," cried my grandmother—"it was your grand tutor—your wonderfu' guardian, even Lalor Maitland, the greatest rogue and gipsy that ever ran on two legs. There was a grandson o' mine put a charge o' powder-and-shot into him, though. But here come the lads. They will tell ye news o' your tutor and guardian, him that ye daur speak to me aboot committing the puir innocent bairns to—what neither you nor a' the law in your black bag will ever tak' frae under the roof-tree o' Mary Lyon. Here, this way, lads—dinna be blate! Step ben!"

And so, without a shadow of blateness, there stepped "ben" Tom and Eben and Rob. Tom had his scythe in his hand, for he had come straight from the meadow at his father's call, the sweat of mowing still beading his brow, and the broad leathern strap shining wet about his waist. Eben folded a pair of brawny arms across a chest like an oriel window, but Rob always careful for appearances, had his great-grandfather's sword, known in the family as "Drumclog," cocked over his shoulder, and carried his head to the side with so knowing an air that the blade was cold against his right ear.

Last of all my grandfather stepped in, while I kept carefully out of sight behind him. He glanced once at his sons.

"Lads, be ashamed," he said; "you, Thomas, and especially you, Rob. Put away these gauds. We are not 'boding in fear of weir.' These ill days are done with. Be douce, and we will hear what this decent man has to say."

There is no doubt that the lawyer was by this display of force somewhat intimidated. At least, he looked about him for some means of escape, and fumbled with the catch of his black hand-bag.

"Deil's in the man," cried Mary Lyon, snatching the bag from him, "but it's a blessing I'm no so easy to tak' in as the guidman there. Let that bag alane, will ye, na! Wha kens what may be in it? There—what did I tell you?"

Unintentionally she shook the catch open, and within were two pistols cocked and primed, of which Eben and Tom took instant possession. Meanwhile, as may be imagined, my grandmother improved the occasion.

"A lawvier, are you, Master Wringham Poole o' Dumfries," she cried? "A bonny lawvier, that does his business wi' a pair o' loaded pistols. Like master, like man, I say! There's but ae kind o' lawvier that does his business like that—he's caa'ed a cut-purse, a common highwayman, and ends by dancing a bonny saraband at the end o' a tow-rope! Lalor Maitland assaulted Marnhoul wi' just such a band o' thieves and robbers—to steal away the bairns. This will be another o' the gang. Lads, take hold, and see what he has on him."

But with one bound the seemingly weak and slender man flung himself in the direction of the door. Before they could move he was out into the lobby among the lavender bags containing Mary Lyon's Sunday wardrobe, and but for the fact that he mistook the door of a preserve closet for the front door, he might easily have escaped them all. But Rob, who was young and active, closed in upon him. The slim man squirmed like an eel, and even when on the ground drew a knife and stuck it into the calf of Rob's leg. A yell, and a stamp followed, and then a great silence in which we looked at one another awe-stricken. Mr. Wringham Poole lay like a crushed caterpillar, inert and twitching. It seemed as if Rob had killed him; but my grandfather, with proper care and precautions drew away the knife, and after having passed a hand over the body in search of further concealed weapons, laid him out on the four haircloth chairs, with a footstool under his head for a pillow.

Then, having listened to the beating of the wounded man's heart, he reassured us with a nod. All would be right. Next, from an inner pocket he drew a pocket-book, out of the first division of which dropped a black mask, like those worn at the assault upon Marnhoul, with pierced eyeholes and strings for fastening behind the ears. There were also a few papers and a card on which was printed a name—

"Wringham Pollixfen Poole"; and then underneath, written in pencil in a neat lawyer-like hand, were the words, "Consultation at the Old Port at midnight to-morrow."

At this we all looked at one another with a renewal of our perturbation. The firm of Smart, Poole and Smart had existed in Dumfries for a long time, and was highly considered. But in these troubled times one never knew how far his neighbour might have been led. A man could only answer for himself, and even as to that, he had sometimes a difficulty in explaining himself. One of the firm of lawyers in the High Street might have been tempted out of his depth. But, at any rate, here was one of them damaged, and that by the hasty act of one of the sons of the house of Heathknowes—which in itself was a serious matter.

My grandfather, therefore, judged it well that the lawyers in Dumfries should be informed of what had befallen as soon as possible. But Mr. Wringham Pollixfen Poole, if such were his name, was certainly in need of being watched till my grandfather's return, specially as of necessity he would be in the same house as Miss Irma and Sir Louis.

None of the young men, therefore, could be spared to carry a message to Dumfries. My father could not leave his school, and so it came to pass that I was dispatched to saddle my grandfather's horse. He would ride to Dumfries with me on a pillion behind him, one hand tucked into the pocket of his blue coat, while with the other I held the belt about his waist to make sure. I had to walk up the hills, but that took little of the pleasure away. Indeed, best of all to me seemed that running hither and thither like a questing spaniel, in search of all manner of wild flowers, or the sight of strange, unknown houses lying in wooded glens—one I mind was Goldielea—which, as all the mead before the door was one mass of rag-weed (which only grows on the best land), appeared to me the prettiest and most appropriate name for a house that ever was.

And so think I still.



CHAPTER XX

THE REAL MR. POOLE

So in time we ran to Dumfries. And my grandfather put up at a hostelry in English Street, where were many other conveyances with their shafts canted high in the air, the day being Wednesday. He did not wait a moment even to speak to those who saluted him by name, but betook himself at once (and I with him) to the lawyers' offices in the High Street—where it runs downhill just below the Mid Steeple.

Here we found a little knot of people. For, as it turned out (though at the time we did not know it), Messrs. Smart, Poole and Smart were agents for half the estates in Dumfriesshire, and our Galloway Marnhoul was both a far cry and a very small matter to them.

So when we had watched a while the tremors of the ingoers, all eager to ask favours, and compared them with the chastened demeanour of those coming out, my grandfather said to me with his hand on my shoulder, "I fear, Duncan lad, we shall sleep in Dumfries Tolbooth this night for making so bauld with one of a house like this!"

And from this moment I began to regard our captive Mr. Poole with a far greater respect, in spite of his pistols—which, after all, he might deem necessary when travelling into such a wild smuggling region as, at that day and date, most townsbodies pictured our Galloway to be.

We had a long time to wait in a kind of antechamber, where a man in a livery of canary and black stripes, with black satin knee-breeches and paste buckles to his shoes took our names, or at least my grandfather's and the name of the estate about which we wanted to speak to the firm.

For, you see, there being so many to attend to on market day, they had parted them among themselves, so many to each. And when it came to our turn it was old Mr. Smart we saw. The grand man in canary and black ushered us ben, told our name, adding, "of Marnhoul estate," as if we had been the owners thereof.

We had looked to see a fine, noble-appearing man sitting on a kind of throne, receiving homage, but there was nobody in the room but an old man in a dressing-gown and soft felt slippers, stirring the fire—though, indeed, it was hot enough outside.

He turned towards us, the poker still in his hand, and with an eye like a gimlet seemed to take us in at a single glance.

"What's wrong? What's wrong the day?" he cried in an odd sing-song; "what news of the Holy Smugglers? More battle, murder, and sudden death along the Solway shore?"

I had never seen my grandfather so visibly perturbed before. He actually stammered in trying to open out his business—which, now I come to think of it, was indeed of the delicatest.

"I have," he began, "the honour of speaking to Mr. Smart the elder?"

"It is an honour you share with every Moffat Tam that wants a new roof to his pigstye," grumbled the old man in the dressing-gown, "but such as it is, say on. My time is short! If ye want mainners ye must go next door!"

"Mr. Smart," said my grandfather, "I have come all the way from the house of Heathknowes on the estate of Marnhoul to announce to you a misfortune."

"What?" cried the old fellow in the blanket dressing-gown briskly, "has the dead come to life again, or is Lalor Maitland turned honest?"

But my grandfather shook his head, and with a lamentable voice opened out to the head of the firm what had befallen their Mr. Poole, how he had come with pistols in his bag, and gotten trodden on by Rob, my reckless uncle, so that he was now lying, safe but disabled, in the small wall cabinet of Heathknowes.

I was expecting nothing less than a cry for the peace officers, and to be marched off between a file of soldiers—or, at any rate, the constables of the town guard.

But instead the little man put on a pair of great glasses with rims of black horn, and looked at my grandfather quizzically and a trifle sternly to see if he were daring to jest. But presently, seeing the transparent honesty of the man (as who would not?), he broke out into a snort of laughter, snatched open a door at his elbow, and cried out at the top of his voice (which, to tell the truth, was no better than a screech), "Dick Poole—ho there, big Dick Poole!—I want you, Dickie!"

I could see nothing from the next room but a haze of tobacco smoke, which presently entering, set the old man in the dressing-gown a-coughing.

"Send away thy rascals, Dick," he wheezed, "and shut that door, Dickie. That cursed reek of yours would kill a hog of the stye. Hither with you, good Dick!"

And after a clinking of glasses and the trampling of great boots on the stairs, an immense man came in. His face was a riot of health. His eyes shone blue and kindly under a huge fleece of curly black hair. There was red in his cheeks, and his lips were full and scarlet. His hand and arm were those of a prizefighter. He came in smiling, bringing with him such an odour of strong waters and pipe tobacco that, between laughing and coughing, I thought the old fellow would have choked. Indeed, I made a step forward to pat the back of his dressing-gown of flannel, and if Mary Lyon had been there, I am sure nothing would have stopped her from doing it.

Even when he had a little recovered, he still stood hiccoughing with the tears in his eyes, and calling out with curious squirms of inward laughter, "Dick, lad, this will never do. Thou art under watch and ward down at the pirn-mill of Marnhoul! And it was a wench that did it. Often have I warned thee, Dick! Two pistols thou hadst in a black bag. Dick—for shame, Dick—for shame, thus to fright a decent woman! And her son, Rob (I think you said was the name of him), did trample the very life out of you—which served you well and right, Dickie! Oh, Dickie, for shame!"

The big man stood looking from one to the other of us, with a kind of comical despair, when, hearing through the open door between the old gentleman's room and his own, the sounds of a noisy irruption and the clinking of glasses beginning again, he went back, and with a torrent of rough words drove the roysterers forth, shutting and locking the door after them.

Then he came strolling back, leaned his arm on the mantelpiece, and bade my grandfather tell him all about it. I can see him yet, this huge ruddy man, spreading himself by the fireplace, taking up most of the room with his person, while he of the flannel dressing-gown wandered about tee-heeing with laughter—and, round one side or the other, or between the legs of the Colossus, making an occasional feeble poke at the fire.

It was curious also to see how my grandfather's serene simplicity of manner and speech compelled belief. I am sure that at first the big man Dick had nothing in his mind but turning us out into the street as he had done the roysterers. But as William Lyon went on, his bright eye grew more thoughtful, and when my grandfather handed him the slip with the name of Mr. Wringham Pollixfen Poole upon it, he absolutely broke into a hurricane of laughter, which, however, sounded to me not a little forced and hollow—though he slapped his leg so loud and hard that the little man in the dressing-gown stopped open-mouthed and dropped his poker on the floor.

"It seems to me," he cried shrilly, "that if you hit yourself like that, Dick Poole, you will split your buckskin breeches, which appear to be new."

But the big man took not the least notice. He only stared at the scrap of paper, and then started to laugh again.

"Oh, don't do that!" cried his partner. "You will blow my windows out, and you know how I hate a draught!"

And indeed they were rattling in their frames. Then the huge Dick went forward and took my grandfather by the hand.

"You are sure you have got him?" he inquired; "remember, he is slippery as an eel."

"My wife is looking after him—my three sons also," said William Lyon, "and I think it likely that the stamp he got from Rob will keep him decently quiet for a day at least. You see," he added apologetically, "he drave the knife into the thick of the poor lad's leg!"

"Wringham?" cried the big man, "why, I did not think he had so muckle spunk!"

"Is he close freend of yours?" my grandfather inquired a little anxiously. For he did not wish to land himself in a blood-feud with the kin of a lawyer.

"Friend of mine!" cried the big man, "no, by no means a friend—but, as it may chance, some sort of kin. However that may be, if you have indeed got Pollixfen safe, you have done the best day's work that ever you did for yourself and for King George, God bless him!"

"Say you so?" said my grandfather. "Indeed, I rejoice me to hear it. I have ever been a loyal subject. And as to the Maitland bairns—you see no harm in their making their home with my goodwife, where the lads can take care of them—in the unsettled state of the country!"

The senior partner at last got in a poke at the fire, for which he had been long waiting his chance.

"And you, Master Lyon, that are such a good kingsman," he kekkled, "do you never hear the blythe Free Traders go clinking by, or find an anker of cognac nested in your yard among the winter-kail?"

"Mr. Smart," said the big man, "this is a market day, but I shall need to ride and see if this is well founded. You will put on your coat decently and take my work. Abraham has already as much as he can do. Be short with them—they will not come wanting to drink with you as they do with me! If what this good Cameronian says be true at this moment, as I have no doubt it was when he left Marnhoul, the sooner I, Richard Poole, am on the spot the better."

So he bade us haste and get our beast out of the yard. As for him he was booted and spurred and buckskinned already. He had nothing to do but mount and ride.

All this had passed so quickly that I had hardly time to think on the strangeness of it. Our Mr. Poole, he to whom my uncle Rob had given such a stamp, was not the partner in the ancient firm of Smart, Poole and Smart of the Plainstones. Of these I had seen two, and heard the busy important voice of the third in another room as we descended the stairs. They were all men very different from the viper whom my grandmother had caught as in a bag. Even Mr. Smart was a gentleman. For if he had a flannel dressing-gown on, one could see the sparkle of his paste buckles at knee and instep, and his hose were of the best black silk, as good as Doctor Gillespie's on Sacrament Sabbath when he was going up to preach his action sermon. But our Mr. Wringham Pollixfen Poole—I would not have wiped my foot on him—though, indeed, Uncle Rob had made no bones about that matter.



CHAPTER XXI

WHILE WE SAT BY THE FIRE

Through the deep solitude of Tereggles Long Wood, past lonely lochs on which little clattering ripples were blowing, into a west that was all barred gold and red islands of fire, we rode. Or rather grandfather and I went steadily but slowly on our pony, while beside us, sometimes galloping a bit, anon trotting, came big Mr. Richard Poole on his black horse. Sometimes he would ride off up a loaning to some farm-town where he had a job to be seen to, or rap with the butt of his loaded whip at the door of some roadside inn—the Four Mile house or Crocketford, where he would call for a tankard and drain it off, as it were, with one toss of the head.

It was easy to be seen that, for some reason of his own, he did not wish to get to Heathknowes before us. Yet, after he had asked my grandfather as to the children, and some details of the attack on the house of Marnhoul (which he treated as merely an affair between two rival bands of smugglers) he was pretty silent. And as we got nearer home, he grew altogether absorbed in his thoughts.

But I could not help watching him. He looked so fine on his prancing black, with the sunset glow mellowing his ruddy health, and his curious habit of constantly making the thong of his horsewhip whistle through the air or smack against his leg.

I had met as big men and clever men, but one so active, so healthy, so beautiful I had never before seen. And every time that a buxom wife or a well-looking maid brought him his ale to the door of the change-house, he would set a forefinger underneath her chin and pat her cheek, asking banteringly after the children or when the wedding was coming off. And though they did not know him or he them, no one took his words or acts amiss. Such was the way he had with him.

And about this time I began to solace myself greatly with the thought of the meeting there would be between these two—the false Poole and the true.

At last we came in the twilight to the Haunted House of Marnhoul, and Mr. Richard made his horse rear almost as high as the unicorn does in the sign above the King's Arms door, so suddenly did he swing him round to the gate. He halted the beast with his head against the very bar and looked up the avenue. The grass in the glade was again covered with dew, for the sky was clear and it was growing colder every minute. It shone almost like silver, and beyond was the house standing like a dim dark-grey patch between us and the forest.

"This gate has been mended," he remarked, tapping the new wooden post that had come down from the mill a day or two before.

"I saw to that myself, sir," said my grandfather. "I also painted it."

"Ha, well done—improving the property for your young guests!" said Mr. Richard, and then quite suddenly he turned moodily away. All at once he looked at my grandfather again. "You had better know," he said, "that the girl will have no money. So she ought to be taught dairymaking. I am partial to dairymaids myself! If she favours the Maitlands, she ought to make a pretty one."

My grandfather said nothing, for he did not like this sort of talk, and was utterly careless whether Miss Irma were penniless or the greatest heiress in the country.

Then the long whitewashed rectangle of the Heathknowes office-houses loomed above us on their hill. In a minute more we were at the gate. My grandfather called, and through the door of the kitchen came a long vertical slab of light that fell in a broad beam across the yard. Then one of the herd-lads hurried across to open the barred "yett" and let us in.

"Is all safe?" said my grandfather.

"As ye left him," was the answer. "The mistress and the lads have never taken their eyes off him for a moment!"

"Take this gentleman's horse, Ben," said my grandfather. But Mr. Richard preferred to be his own hostler, nor did he offer to go near the house or speak a word of his business till he had seen his splendid black duly stalled.

Then my grandmother was summoned, the children brought down, and immediately stricken, Sir Louis with an intense admiration of the great strong man in riding boots, and Miss Irma with a dislike quite as intense. I could see her averting her eyes and trying to hide it. But over all the other women in the house he established at once a paramount empire. Even my Aunt Jen followed him with her eyes, so much of the room did he take up, so large and easy were his gestures, and with such a matter-of-course simplicity did he take the homage they paid him.