Part 1 - Chapter 5. The Censor Of Morals

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_ PART I CHAPTER V. THE CENSOR OF MORALS

As my grandmother and I went down the little loaning from Heathknowes Farm she had an eye for everything. She "shooed" into duty's path a youngling hen with vague maternal aspirations which was wandering off to found a family by laying an egg in the underbrush about the saw-mill. She called back final directions to her daughter Jen and maidservant Meg, and saw that they were attended to before she would go on. She looked into the saw-mill itself in the by-going, and made sure that Rob McTurk was in due attendance on the whirling machinery which was turning off the spools, as it seemed to me, with the rapidity of light. She inquired as to the whereabouts of her husband.

"Oh, he was in a minute since!" said the politic Rob, who knew very well that my grandfather had climbed into the bark storage loft, and was at that moment sitting on a bundle, with a book in his hand and content in his heart at having escaped the last injunctions of his wife.

"Well, then," said Mistress Mary Lyon, "tell him from me----" And, as usual, a long list of recommendations followed.

"I'll see to it that he hears," said Rob McTurk imperturbably, knowing full well that his master could by no means help hearing, since my grandmother, in order to drown the noise of the whirling spindles and clattering cogs, had raised her voice till her every word must have penetrated to the pleasant, bark-scented place where, under his solitary skylight, Mr. William Lyon was so calmly reading his favourite Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Boston of Ettrick.

Besides my clothes, there were two things which interfered with the happiness of my jaunt. One was the presence of a third and most uncertain party to the affair--our rough, red house-collie Crazy, and the other was a doubt as to the way in which we would be received. For, be it remembered, I had seen Miss Irma Maitland shut the great door at the top of the Marnhoul steps on the raging crowd of assailants, and I wondered if we would not also find it slammed in our faces.

I had, however, confidence in my grandmother.

On the way to the padlocked gate at the entrance of the avenue which led to the Haunted House, my grandmother had abundant room for the exercise of her gifts. Never was there a woman who came across so many things that "she could not abide."

Such, for instance, were Widow Tolmie's ideas as to disposal of her nocturnal household rubbish on the King's highway. Into the Tolmie house went Mistress Mary Lyon, well aware that words would have no avail. In a minute she had requisitioned broom, bucket, and "claut," or byre-rake. In other three minutes all was over. Widow Tolmie had a clean frontage. The utensils had been washed and hung up, and my grandmother was delivering a lecture from one of the most frequently-quoted texts which are not to be found in Holy Writ, while she drew again upon her strong, energetic old hands the pair of lisle thread "mitts" she had taken off in order to effect her clean sweep.

After she had duly lectured the Widow Tolmie, she bade her in all amity "Good-day," and started to reform Crazy, who had been gyrating furiously across her path, trying apparently to bite his tail out by the roots. Crazy was, it appeared, a useless, good-for-nothing beast, a disgrace to a decent Elder's house, and I was ordered to stone him home.

Now I did not particularly wish Crazy to go with us to the Great House. I thought of the smiling carelessness of the girl's face I had seen there. Crazy might, and very likely would, misbehave himself. But still, Crazy was my friend, my companion, my joy. Stone Crazy! It was not to be thought of. He would certainly consider it some new kind of game and run barking after the missiles. I therefore shot so far beyond that the pebbles fell over the hedge, till my grandmother, whose sole method was an ungainly cross between a hurl and a jerk, took up the fusillade on her own account, with the result that Crazy was wrought up to the highest point of excitement, and, as I had foreseen, brought each stone back to my grandmother, barking joyously and pulling at her skirts for her to throw again.

"And just wait till I get you home," gasped Mrs. Mary Lyon, shaking her rough white head, "there shall a rope be put about your neck, my lad!"

But whether for the purpose of mere tying up, or to carry out the extreme sentence of the law, I did not gather. I resolved that, in the latter case, Crazy should come with me to the school-house. There was a place I knew of there, a crib at the end of the stick-cellar, which at a pinch would do admirably for Crazy. And I felt sure that Crazy, wholly incompetent at his own business of shepherding, would be a perfect "boys' dog" and a permanent acquisition to the Academy of Eden Valley. There was, of course, my father to consider. But I did not stop to think of that. The classics and Fred Esquillant were enough for him at the moment.

As she passed various cottage doors my grandmother had several bouts with joiners who blocked the road with unfinished carts and diffusive pots of red paint, with small wayside cowherds in charge of animals which considered the hedge-rows as their appointed pasturage, with boys going fishing who had learned at school that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and who practised their Euclid to the detriment of their neighbours' fences.

But nothing of great moment occurred till, on the same knoll from which he had summoned us to view the smoke of the ghost's afternoon fire at Marnhoul, we encountered Boyd Connoway. He was stretched at length, as usual, one leg crossed negligently over the other. He had pivoted his head against a log for the purpose of seeing in three directions about him--towards the Great House, and both up and down the main road. A straw, believed to be always the same, was in his mouth.

A red rag to a bull, a match to tinder, are weak metaphors--quite incapable of expressing a tenth of what my grandmother felt at the sight of the pet idler of Eden Valley.

She rushed instantly to the assault, much as she would have led a forlorn hope. The dragoons who plunged their swords into great mows of straw in Covenanting barns, the unfortunates who pursued a needle through a load of hay, were employed in hopeful work when compared with Mistress Mary Lyon, searching with her tongue in this mass of self-sufficiency for any trace of Boyd Connoway's long-lost conscience.

"Why are you not at home?" she cried; "I heard Bridget complaining as I came by, that she could not feed the pig because she had nobody to bring her wood for her boiler fire--and she in the middle of her blanket washing!"

The husband whom fate and her own youthful folly had given to Bridget Connoway, took off his battered and weather-beaten hat with the native politeness of a born Irishman. He did not rise. That would have been too much to expect of him. But he uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way about.

"Mistress Lyon," he said indolently, but with the soft, well-anointed utterance of the blarneying islander, which does not die away till the third generation of the poorest exile from Erin, "now, misthress dear, consider!"

"I have considered you for seven years, and seven to the back of that, Boyd Connoway, and you are a lazy lout! Every year you get worse!"

My grandmother counted nothing so stimulating as truth spoken to the face. She acted, with all save her male grandchildren, on the ancient principle that "Praise to the face is an open disgrace!" And Boyd, in his time, had been singularly exempt from this kind of disgrace, so far as my grandmother was concerned.

"But consider, Mrs. Lyon," he went on tranquilly, while my relative stood in the road and eyed him with bitter scorn, "there's my wife, now she's up early and late. She's scrubbing and cleaning, and all for what?--just that yonder pack o' children o' hers should go out on the road and come trailing back in ten minutes dirtier than ever. She runs to Shepstone Oglethorpe's to give his maid a help in the mornings, all for a miserable three shillings a week. She takes no rest to the sole of her foot, nor gives nobody any either! Poor Bridget--I am sorry for Bridget. 'Take things easier, and you will feel better, Bridget,' I say. 'Trust in Providence, Bridget!' 'Think on what the Doctor said three Sundays but one ago from the very pulpit.' And would ye believe me, Mistress Lyon, that poor woman, being left to herself, threw all the weights at me one after the other--aye, and would have thrown the scales too if I had not come away!"

Here Connoway sighed and stretched himself luxuriously, rubbing the stiff fell of his hair meditatively as he did so.

"Ah, poor Bridget," he continued, with pathos in his voice, "Bridget is so dreadfully unresigned, Mistress Lyon. Often have I said to her, 'Be resigned, Bridget--trust in Providence, Bridget!' But as sure as I point out Bridget's duty, there is something broken in our house!"

"Pity but it was your head, Boyd Connoway! Come away, child!" cried my grandmother, "quick--lest I do that man an injury. He puts me in such a state that I declare to goodness I am thankful I have not a poker in my hand! Now there's your grandfather----"

But she went no further in the discussion of her own lesser household burden. For there right in front of us was the great gate, the battered notice to trespassers, the broken standard on which the padlock, now removed, had worn a rusty hollow, and in its place we read the little white notice concerning the hours at which the mistress of the mansion could receive visitors.

"Oh, the poor young things!" said my grandmother, her anger (as was its wont) instantly cooling, and even Boyd Connoway dropping back into his own place as perhaps a necessary factor in an ill-regulated but on the whole rather bearable world.

The gate creaked open slowly. My grandmother drew herself up. For did she not come of the best blood of the Westland Whigs, great-granddaughter of that Bell of Whiteside, kinsman of Kenmure's, who was shot by Lag on the moor of Kirkconnel, near to the Lynn through which the Tarff foams white?

For me, I was chiefly conscious of the bushes and shrubs on either side the avenue, broken and trampled in the tumultuous rush of the populace on the day of the discovery. I felt guilty. By that way Gerty Greensleeves and I had passed, Gerty very close to my elbow. And now, like the rolling away of a panorama picture in a show, Gerty Greensleeves, and all other maids save one, had passed out of my life. Or so, in my ignorance, I thought at the time.

For no woman ever passes wholly out of any man's life--that is, if he lives long enough. She steals back again with the coming of life's gloaming, with the shadows of night creeping across the hills, or the morning mists swimming up out of the valley. Sometimes she is weeping, but more often smiling. For there is time enough, since the man last thought of her, for all tears to be wiped from her eyes. But come she will. Yet sometimes it is not so. She does not smile. She only stands on the threshold of a man's soul with reproachful eyes, and lips drawn and mute. Then it is not good to be that man.

But in those days, being a boy, carried along in the waft of my grandmother's skirt, I knew nothing about such things.

I watched my grandmother take the antique knocker between her fingers, noting with housewifely approval that it had recently been polished. I have seldom passed a more uncomfortable time of waiting, than that between the resounding clatter of grandmother's knocking reverberating through the empty house, and the patter of feet, the whispering, and at last the opening of the door.

Then I saw again the tall girl with the proudly angled chin, the crown of raven curls, and the pair of brave outlooking eyes that met all the world with something that was even a little bold.

I had been afraid that my grandmother, so indiscriminating in her admonitions, might open fire upon this forlorn couple, isolated in the great haunted house of Marnhoul. But I need not have troubled.

My grandmother had the instinct of caressing maternity for all the young, the forlorn, the helpless. So she only opened her arms and cried out, "Oh, you dears--you poor darlings!"

And the little boy, moved by the instinctive yearning of all that needed protection, of everything of tender years and little strength towards the breast that had suckled and the hands that had nursed, let go his sister's hand and ran happily to my grandmother. She caught him in her arms and lifted him up with the easy habitual gesture of one long certified as a mother in Israel. He threw his little arms about my grandmother's neck, nestling there just as the rest of us used to do when we were in any trouble.

"I like you! You are good!" he said.

Miss Irma and I were therefore left eye to eye while Louis Maitland, in spite of his title, was so rapidly making friends with the actual head of our family.

Irma eyed me, and I did the like to Miss Irma--that is, to the best of my ability, which in this matter was nothing to hers. She seemed to look me through and through. At which I quailed, and then she appeared a little more content.

With the child still in her arms, and her voice, lately so harsh in rebuke, now tuned to the cooing of a nesting dove, my grandmother introduced herself.

"Child," she said to Miss Irma, "I am your nearest neighbour. Who should come to welcome you if not I? You will find me at the farm of Heathknowes. It is my goodman's saw-mills that you hear clattering from where you stand, and I am come to see if there is anything I can do to help you."

"I thank you----" began the girl, and then hesitated. She had meant to declare that they wanted for nothing, perhaps to indicate that the wife of a tenant was hardly a fitting "first-foot" to venture over the threshold of a baronet of ancient name and of the sister who acted as his sponsor, tutor and governor.

But then Miss Irma did not know my grandmother as Eden Valley did, still less as we who were, as one might say, of Caesar's household.

"Let me come in--I will soon see for myself!" quoth my grandmother, and marched straight into the front hall of the Maitlands, that immense dusky cavern I had only once looked into over the pikes and pitchforks. She carried Sir Louis, tenth baronet of that name, on one arm. With her free right hand she went hither and thither, sweeping her hand along the ledges of great oak cabinets, blowing at the dust on the stone mantelpiece, and finally clearing the great curtained south-western window to let in the sun in flakes and patches of scarlet and gold.

Then she turned to Miss Irma and said in the tone of an expert who has inspected a grave piece of work and not found it wanting, "You have done very well, my dear!"

And at this Miss Irma changed the fashion of her countenance. Pleasure shone scarce concealed. It was certain that up to that moment she had regarded my grandmother somewhat in the light of an intruder, but she could not bear up against such an appeal from housewife to housewife.

"Will you come up-stairs?" she said, "I have hardly got begun here yet." _

Read next: Part 1: Chapter 6. The Apotheosis Of Agnes Anne

Read previous: Part 1: Chapter 4. First Foot In The Haunted House

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