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The Dew of Their Youth, a novel by S. R. Crockett |
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Part 2 - Chapter 15. My Grandmother Speaks Her Mind |
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_ 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. _ |
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