The Red Scaur: a novel of manners

Front matter

A NOVEL OF MANNERS BY P. AXDERSON GEAHAM " The loves, the ways of simple swains." — BDBNS. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY 1897 All rights reserved Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson & Co At the Ballan tync Prcss BY THE SAME AUTHOR COUNTRY PASTIMES FOR BOYS With 252 Illustrations from Drawings and Photographs. Crown Svo, 6s. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY CONTENTS chap. page i. the old adam ...... 1 ii the shepherd . . . . . „ 1 6 iit. farmer simon. . . . . . -33 iv. the grange ....... 49 v. jane and martha . . . . . -65 vi. the yeoman ....... 82 vii. brantham ....... 96 viii. "a merrynight" . . . . . .114 is. the story of a bondages . . . . i30 x. the story of a bondager — continued . 1 37 XI. GRACE NESBIT 146 XII. THE STUDENT . . . . . . 163 XIII. MARK HARBOTTLE . . . . . 1 82 XIV.

PASTIMES . . . . . . . 199 XV. THE SHADOWS OF ARCADY . . . . 2 1 6 XVI. LIFE AND DEATH . . . . . 233 XVII. FAMILY QUARRELS . . . . . . 250 XVIII. A DAY'S FISHING ,267 CONTENTS VIII CHAP. PAGE XIX. BILLY'S WOOING . . . . . ■ 284 XX. A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS 302 XXI. AN EXPLANATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES . • 321 XXII. AN OLD MAN'S SECRET . . . . 339

Chapter I The Old Adam

I am afraid you will search the map of Northumber land in vain for the river Skelter ; but to me it will always remain the pleasantest of the many streams which rise in the Cheviots and rush headlong into a rich valley whose land, say all true natives, is the finest and most fertde in England. As a child, I knew every pool and eddy of its ten-mile course. I could begin at Harbottle's Mill and describe from memory each green haugh and drooping willow on Simon's farm, and trace all its windings up to the lonely cottage where lived Simon's brother, the hill shepherd. There, it is but a slender silvery rivulet glancing past high red scaurs, where the sand-martins nest, and anon tumbling over the rocks, or singing above yellow gravel and protruding stones. On summer nights there often comes a reminiscence of that delicious feeling of rest and peace that, how ever long and bright the day had been, began to steal over the valley at " lowsin' time," when toiling human figures vanished from the landscape, and the blue hills grew white with ascending flocks of sheep, and a distant bleating, an endless murmur of water, the last note of A the cuckoo, and the plaintive cry of the whaup, seemed to emphasise rather than disturb the stillness.

The passage of time effects many changes, but the greatest, in my opinion, is this. When I roamed about these hills, and fished the stream, and waylaid the ploughmen to get a ride home on their big horses, I looked neither before nor after, and the world seemed all fixed and changeless. It never occurred to me that the old basket-maker who shambled down the valley behind his donkey would ever cease to peel his willows, and weave the long wheat-stalks into beehives ; or that the Red Scaur farm and mill could exist without Simon Harbottle ; or that Simon's brother would not always be able to climb the hills, and with his great strong voice shout to his dogs. But now, if I, on a summer afternoon, from some outlying hill, look down on the green valley, with the smoke curling up from its thinly-scattered hamlets and pan-tiled farmhouses, its meadows and corn fields, with the glittering stream winding through them, what I wonder at most is the changelessness of nature and the mutation of life.

Long ago a relation of mine lived a solitary life here. He was a scholar and a poet, and in certain old faded manuscripts has described it all — field, hill, and stream — just as I might describe it now. And to how many successive eyes has the landscape been the same ! But those who ploughed and harvested, whose scythes mowed down the grass, whose hands bound and carried the sheaves, how often have they changed ! Of all those whom my relative knew, not one is left — squire and rector, tenant and labourer are passed away, and scarcely are their names remembered. Even old Sir Hugh, who sleeps in a marble tomb, and has a tablet in the church, is as much forgotten as those who have no memorial but a green mound and the harebells and violets suffered to grow in the neglected graveyard. Often I sit among the fern and, in a dream that is neither pain nor pleasure, gladness nor melancholy, fancy that I see the endless procession of men that has streamed past the hill.

It is not all fancy either. Mr. Selwyn, the relative already mentioned, when a bachelor of fourscore, used to talk to me by the hour of the inhabitants of the Glen, and of the scenes and incidents of his prime ; and though much was forgotten at the time, the memory of it was revived when I came to look over the bundles of papers left in his library. It was like reviewing the actual life of a man, for Mr. Selwyn, who was absurdly shy and diffident in company, had solaced himself by copious writing. And he evidently had a vanity all his own ; for his MS. book of poems and his history of local antiquities were carefully prepared for the press, though he never had summoned up courage enough to submit them to a publisher. His diaries and letters, too, were arranged as by one who knew them to be of consequence.

More than by anything else, however, his character was revealed by a long series of love poems. They belonged to a species of literature to which I was not addicted, and which I did not read carefully, but their salient features could be caught at a glance. In a great boyish hand there was an acrostic showing that the girl's name was Elizabeth, and then there were in tensely passionate sonnets to Eliza, and long madrigal like effusions full of references to the " blue Cheviots," " the meandering Skelter," " daisied fields like hills in drifted snow," and heaps of sentimental songs and ballads. Then the hand got smaller, as that of one who writes much, and a note of heart-broken despair began to be mingled with vigorous railing against clowns, rustics, and agriculturists generally. It would all have been imintelligible if the diary had not con tained a version in plain prose.

My esteemed relative had been in love with the young lady at the Red Scaur. He had not been rejected, because he never had courage enough to ask, and she had married some one who ultimately succeeded her father. This was frequently referred to in succeeding years as " the sorrow of my life," " my great disappointment," and so on ; but it was only within the walls of the library. Those who knew Mr. Selwyn say he went about in the same quiet abstracted way as before, poking about the castle ruins, or watching the shadows spread from lull to hill as night crept over the valley. Years passed, and, as other interests sprang up, the overwhelming sorrow was half forgotten. It was about now that the "Antiquities" was written, and my relative was lucky enough to make his famous find of Hotspur's gauntlet.

He was certainly getting over his grief; for among records of opening stone coffins, and going to see tombstones, and buying old coins, there comes in a cheery passage telling how " I met my old flame Betty." One would have thought this proof positive that a cure had been effected, but nearly twenty years after the disease broke out again. I was carelessly turning over the leaves and noting how youth and its en thusiasms were past, how stories of the loss and de parture of friends began to appear on the page, and how the comments of the writer began more and more to be tinged with melancholy, when my eye caught this sentence, " To-day Eliza is a widow," and turnino over many pages, as one will sometimes peep at the last chapter of a novel to see how the story ends, it was with a whimsical pleasure that I saw the closely written lines were once again broken up with bits of verse.

But for the time being Mr. Selwyn did not in his inmost privacy utter a word of personal hope. He minutely described the funeral. Indeed, he took a pleasure in the description, and did not leave out a detafl, so that one could well imagine the cloudy winter day with its occasional gusts of snow, the long procession headed by ploughmen in antiquated tall hats and threadbare black coats, handed down in some instances from father to son, and carefully laid by for such occasions — the decent loyal servants would have been sorely hurt if they had not been allowed to bear the coffin. Then there were forty freeholders, each on his own horse — alas, holdings and holders have all disappeared now ! — and Sir Hugh himseff from the castle, coughing and wriggling with the gout, faced the wintry blast to pay the last rites to his most considerable tenant.

If my relative had a secret hope that day, it was that the widow might be in need of his help, and frugal as he was, his all was at her disposal ; but he learned she was well provided for, and his generous intention was confided only to his diary. A few weeks later Sir Hugh's carriage stopped at the Red Scaur, and he went in, coughing and twisting his limbs as usual, to say that if the widow got a capable steward and cared to stay on at the rent paid by her husband he desired no other tenant. Naturally enough she, who was still in the prime of life, and had been brought up at the farm, and had never passed six con secutive nights in any other house, was reluctant to leave, and so in a few months — one had almost written weeks — things were going on just as though the farmer were still alive.

And it began to dawn on my relative that the widow was free again, and though more buxom than of yore, looked almost as beautiful as ever in her weeds, and did not inspire quite as much awe as the slim and elegant girl had done. But whether it was that his old shyness returned, or that he dreaded the worry of having to take over the farm, since he cared little for agriculture, except as it appeared in the pages of Virgil, Varro, or Antonius Musa, or that he simply put it off from one day to another till age overtook him, certain it is that his love-making took no more definite form than an attempt to recover the rhyming rapture of his youth, and possibly to pass certain ornate compliments when he met the widow. " If she would only give up the Red Scaur and come here : I have enough for both," he wrote once, but I fancy the very idea of changing his bachelor habits and arrangements to suit a wife set him ofT on such a sea of speculation that the qudl dropped from his fingers — there was a blot just as if this had happened — and he forgot what else he had been intending to write in the diary.

So he began to refer to her as Betty and " my old flame " again, and only now and then made a half quizzical, half tender reference to the one tiny vein of sentiment that ran through his life. He was so quiet and reserved that not one of his neighbours, not Betty herself, guessed, or at any rate more than guessed, at his unuttered love. If the widow did not suspect the extent of my kins man's admiration — though you may generally trust a woman for that ! — she at least recognised him for a very faithful friend ; and when Sir Hugh suggested that Adam Harbottle should be made farm steward, it was very natural for her to consult him. He had not the slightest qualification for judging of the man's fitness, but, away from his hobbies, had a fund of common-sense that generally brought him to a sound conclusion.

" If I were in your place," he said after a long discussion, " I would, as Sir Hugh must know that he can do the work, try Adam for a year, and at the end, if all just debts were paid and the income from the farm remained very nearly what it used to be, why, I would be satisfied. Let him see that his place wdl depend on the broad results, and give him his own way in details." Both of them looked upon the new steward as only a slightly superior hind ; his father and grandfather had been ploughmen in the Breamish valley, and he was a sober and industrious man, in the prime of life, and the lather of a large young family. " He will hold his head six inches higher to-night," laughed the widow, as she drove off in her pony-cart. But there was more in Adam Harbottle than any of them imagined, and his great head was not one to be flustered with any chance breath of fortune.

My relative and the gentle widow might have doubted their wisdom had they been able to witness his home going. He lived in one of the houses in the " hinds' row," and any one who saw his collection of boys and girls would have wondered how his poor, thin, prema turely-aged drudge of a wife managed to stow them all away in the two-roomed cottage. She was trying in vain to obtain quiet, for the babies were squalling, the older children laughing at one moment, fighting at another, and altogether making a new Babel, when some one looking out of window noticed a familiar fio-ure coming down by the stackyard. In a moment the tumult was allayed, the elders stole out at the door and rushed off to play in the cart-sheds, the little ones crept into corners, where they sat as stdl as mice, and the mother hushed the babies into silence.

But she herself was in an uncommonly good humour ; for one of the boys had brought home word of the pro motion, and she had made a " Neddy," or girdle cake, to celebrate the occasion, and had slipped into her clean print gown, and brought out her store of china, two little cups without handles that had belonged to her grandmother. And she pulled the white deal table close to the blazing wood fire, and thought of those early married days when his home-coming was so pleasant. But all this sentiment was lost on Adam. He had been walking slowly as one who meditates, and there was the flush of a bold deep thought on his strong face as he entered. The preparations for his comfort only made him angry. " That's a pattern o' waste and extravagance to set the bairns ! " he ex claimed. " It's always the way ; the mair a man gets, the mair a wummin spends.

But mind ee this — ee'll have to lay by now." She was beginning to explain that there had been no outlay, but he glanced so threaten ingly at a big cart-whip hanging from the ceiling, that she ran and got out the barley bread and munched it submissively, while he, despite his indignation, ate up the cake. That was the beginning of a regimen as strict as ever a poor family was placed imder. Incredible as it may appear, seeing that farm wages are paid largely in kind" in Northumberland, the chddren soon began to bear the marks of gaunt hunger, for the father turned the very meal and potatoes into cash, so that there was scarcely enough left to provide the brose that was their only food. He grudged them clothes, he grudged them school-fees, he turned them out to work as soon as they could toddle to the cornfields to shake a clapper and cry out shriUy to the rooks.

But they never owned a penny, for he was paymaster, and their earn ings were heaped up at the Brantham Bank. To do him justice, he did not shrink from equal privation. He gave up his occasional glass of beer, and even grudged the cost of tobacco so much that he stopped smoking. And unless rumour lied more than usual, there was never a flock of lambs, or a head of cattle, or a thrashing of wheat sold without the hoard receiving an in crement. But then, as steward, he was allowed to keep certain live-stock, and perhaps his own sheep multiplied as did those of Jacob when he served his uncle Laban. At all events, the widow found no cause to complain. The man put a spirit and energy into his management that outdid the efforts of the late farmer. Sir Hugh often rode over to see how things were going on, but whether he came late or early, Adam was at his post, the first out in the morning, the last to go home at night, and he developed an unerring judgment of times and seasons, and markets and prices.

Whatever operation was in hand he seemed to give his whole mind to, and the simple test proposed by my kinsman proved highly satisfactory, for the widow's income actually increased — not so rapidly, perhaps, as the improved management might have been thought to warrant, and yet to an extent that disarmed suspicion. Nor must it be thought that the widow knowingly employed a miser and domestic tyrant merely because it paid her — the facts narrated above only came out later. Whatever Adam was at home, he always had a humble smile, a touch of his cap, and a piece of wellchosen flattery for his mistress, the squire, the rector, Mr. Selwyn, or any one in a superior position. My kinsman's diary has a laughing entry about his change of religion, but nobody else seems to have been struck with its ridiculous aspect.

As a ploughman he was elder in the Presbyterian meeting-house, but after his promotion he and his famdy walked four miles every Sunday to attend the parish church, and they always got into their places before the arrival of Sir Hugh, who considered it his duty to be in the family pew five minutes before the service began, and he never failed, because the bell-ringer took his time from him, and did not begin his second peal tdl the party from the castle walked up to their seats. Thus if the squire did happen to linger over the newspaper which he read every Sunday morning, he was still able to set the exceUent example of being in church before the rector, and as he marched up the aisle, never again did he miss seeing Adam Har bottle and his horde of ill-fed boys and girls. Perhaps if the widow had taken a more active in terest in the farm she might have found cause to quarrel with her steward ; but a few years after the death of her husband she began to suffer in health, and having once been persuaded by the squire to try the Cheltenham waters, she grew so enamoured of that town, then in the height of its fashion and prosperity, that she returned again and again.

My kinsman on these occasions used to take a general oversight of the farm, and was her chief correspondent. Her letters are in little bundles tied with blue ribbon. Often there occurs in them the expression, " Well done ! thou good and faithful servant," but that was when Adam, who was always anxious for her to stay away as long as possible, had written about some good stroke of business by which she would have another twenty or thirty or fifty pounds to spend. And she learned to spend freely ; but who can blame her, since she had no child or near relative to leave the money to ? The steward did not find Mr. Selwyn a strict scru tineer of his work ; for you had only to put an obsolete custom, a curious rhyme or proverb, before my relative, and he forgot there was anything else in the world.

Thus in his diary at this period there are long entries suggested by the seasonal occurrences at the farm. He finds that the kim dolly, which the harvesters made from the last ears of wheat to nail up on the wall of the barn when they dance, at one time must have represented the goddess Ceres. The dialogue of the mummers or guizards suggests to him an essay on the miracle play, and he was never tired of collecting the rhymes which children say when they seek their Pace eggs or their Hogmanay. But had one asked him the selling price of wheat, or the value of a steer, he would have been nonplussed. No wonder people said the widow was lucky to have such an excellent steward ! For a long time the years passed very uneventfully on the banks of the Skelter. Every now and then my kinsman notes that he and his contemporaries are " wearin' awa " and a new generation coming up.

Sir Hugh is no longer able to come to church ; it is given out that the widow's days are numbered. Adam Harbottle has lost none of his vigour, but even he is becoming stiff and elderly. Perhaps his troubles weigh upon him, for his large family has dwindled into two. First one and then another died, and the gossip long current among the poor finds its way into the rectory and the Grange, that their constitutions had been ruined by privation and overwork in youth. Both the rector and Mr. Selwyn tried to ascertain the truth ; but the Harbottles were a sullen, stand-off family, inured to a life of saving and grasping, and jealous of interference. "They must have inherited a weakness from their mother," was the conclusion. They called upon her in the afternoon, when her husband and children were in the fields, and the room was swept and dusted and scrubbed till there was not a speck of dust or a pin out of place, and the lean, pinched, worn-out woman with tight lips, which she would not open to say more than " No, sir," or " Yes, sir," sat at the fireside a picture of ill-health.

If they ever knew, they had forgotten what a ruddy, buxom girl she was once. " In her heart she is still a Presbyterian," thought the clergy man, and so explained her reserve. And though Adam, when seen among his workers in the stack yard or the granary, or on the plough-land, was always smiling and pleasant and humble, he never spoke about his private affairs. Even gaunt, hungry John, who turned out quite different from the rest — though that is a long story — made no complaint of his home life. Thus pity rather than blame was accorded the steward ; and that large majority who judge by hard fact, and do not concern themselves about motive, looked up to the civil, obliging, hard-working, strong-minded man with respect as a pillar of society. When his wife died, which she did at the very time the widow lay on a bed from which she was never to rise, the funeral was attended by rich and poor.

Many were the moralisings when news went round among the mourners how on that very day word had come to Adam that a cousin who had emigrated to America had left him a fortune, some said a thousand, some said two thousand pounds. The tenant of the mdl — which was let separate from the farm after the widow's husband died — was thought very ill-natured, or out of his head, for saying Adam was the wiliest blackguard in the Glen. It was known that he hoped one day to be tenant of the Red Scaur, and as a suspicion was getting abroad that this also was the object for which the steward all these long years had pinched and screwed and starved, what one said of the other was not worth serious attention. My kinsman at the time was so grief-stricken at the approaching loss of his old sweetheart, that he did not think much about it ; yet he afterwards remembered that when he told John, who was at the time eating cold pie in the Grange kitchen, the youth, to whom his father had not men tioned this good fortune, burst out with " The lia — ," and then gulped down his pie and said not another word.

But the story of Adam's windfall went through cottage and farmhouse and rectory, and at length reached the castle, the destination meant for it by the inventor, if he did invent it, from the beginning. The miller wras an honest man, but he had little chance against the steward in the game they were playing for the tenancy of the Red Scaur. " He wunna have any use for the cairt-whup now," was one of his sarcasms after Mrs. Harbottle's death ; and he would ask triumphantly, " If he has the money to carry on the farm " — it was rented at six hundred a year in those days — " where did he get it ? " Adam had too much sense to answer the implied charge ; but his retorts always told heavily with those who knew the squire's natural preference for good and substantial tenants. "A useless body," he would say with un measured contempt ; " he couldna' make the mill pay.

Wad he ruin the fairm as weel ? " And because the miller had once or twice taken a glass too much on market days, he set it abroad that he had "ruined hissel' wi' drink." Best of aU, he caught time by the forelock, and went up to the castle before there was a vacancy. Sir Hugh lay on a couch, twisting and coughing more than ever. " If you have the capital — honestly got — if your accounts will stand looking into," he jerked out. And the stew-ard scraped, and twirled his hat, and reminded him how punctually the rent had been paid, how comfortable the widow had been, and how the farm had paid under his management better than it had ever done before, " Because, sir, me and the bairns worked for very bare life and sma' wages to keep it frae gaun back ; and if I've been fortinate wi' my awn yowes and lambs, and gathered and saved a bit money, it's been naebody's loss ; " and, in short, he made out a tale so plausible that he received a promise of the holding, subject to a favourable report on the accounts by Simpson, Sir Hugh's factotum.

He went away well pleased ; but on passing the nidi he stopped, and with a look of anger and hatred muttered, "Ay, that's the next job. My gentleman, I'U have ee oot o' that yet, and gar ee craw about something else than cairt-whups." So exciting was the contest, that when the widow at last rejoined her husband in the graveyard, my kinsman was probably alone in his protracted mourning. From his diary I can see his mind went back to the time when he used to see her, a slight and handsome eirl riding out on her white pony ; but it would be a dese cration to reveal his sad thoughts and tender musings and painful recollections, his conjectures as to what might have been, and his weary pain for the years that were lost. When he at last awoke out of this melancholy mood, and began to think over the ordinary affairs of life, and to see that Adam Harbottle was established as tenant of the Red Scaur, indignation burned within him, and he wrote across his diary : "A fortune gained out of woman's tod, and children's suffering, and fraud and lying.

If evil follows evil, if the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, this money is accursed." So much was he taken possession of by the spirit of prophecy, that he wove all this into his elegy " On the Death of my Mistress," where it will be read when his poems are published ; but often I have thought in the light of subsequent events that a curse did really attend the fortunes of the Harbottles.

Chapter II The Shepherd

Often afterwards when I began to piece together John Harbottles history from the diary of my kinsman, I thought of a little incident in my chddhood that some how had got imprinted in my memory. The Skelter is a rushing, dangerous river as it passes the Grange, and many were the anxious hours caused by my habit of stealing away to hunt the water-rats on its banks, or climb out on the overhanging willows to get at the moorhens' nests. In order to keep me out of danger, and perhaps also to find employment for the lazy basket-maker, he was frequently engaged to carry me on his donkey's back as far up stream as the shepherd's cottage. There the clear water sparkles and foams in shallow channels, in which drowoiing is impossible. And it was all the more pleasant because John Harbottle had a little grandson of my own age who already could lure the bright two-ounce trout, and had a genius for finding where the sandpipers and water ouzels bred.