Bob Son of Battle | Page 8

one
statement anent the gentle lady of the manor is the only personal
remark ever credited to little M'Adam not born of malice and all
uncharitableness. And that is why it is ever memorable.
The little Scotsman with the sardonic face had been the tenant of the
Grange these many years; yet he had never grown acclimatized to the

land of the Southron. With his shrivelled body and weakly legs he
looked among the sturdy, straight-limbed sons of the hill-country like
some brown, wrinkled leaf holding its place midst a galaxy of green.
And as he differed from them physically, so he did morally.
He neither understood them nor attempted to. The North-country
character was an unsolved mystery to him, and that after ten years'
study. "One-half o' what ye say they doot, and they let ye see it; t'ither
half they -disbelieve, and they tell ye so," he once said. And that
explained his attitude toward them, and consequently theirs toward
him.
He stood entirely alone; a son of Hagar, mocking. His sharp, ill tongue
was rarely still, and always bitter. There was hardly a. man in the land,
from Langholm How to the market-cross in Grammoch-town, but had
at one time known its sting, endured it in silence,--for they are slow of
speech, these men of the fells and meres,--and was nursing his
resentment till a day should bring that chance which always comes.
And when at the Sylvester Arms, on one of those rare occasions when
M'Adam was not present, Tammas summed up the little man in that
historic phrase of his, "When he's drunk he's wi'lent, and when he bain't
he's wicious," there was an applause to gratify the blas‚ heart of even
Tammas Thornton.
Yet it had not been till his wife's death that the little man had allowed
loose rein to his ill-nature. With her firmly gentle hand no longer on the
tiller of his life, it burst into. fresh being. And alone in the world with
David, the whole venom of his vicious temperament was ever directed
against the boy's head. It was as though he saw in his fair-haired son
the unconscious cause of his ever-living sorrow. All the more strange
this, seeing that, during her life, the boy had been to poor Flora
M'Adam as her heart's core. And the lad was growing up the very
antithesis of his father. Big and hearty, with never an ache or ill in the
whole of his sturdy young body; of frank, open countenance; while
even his speech was slow and burring like any Dale-bred boy's. And
the fact of it all, and that the lad was palpably more Englishman than
Scot--ay, and gloried in it--exasperated the little man, a patriot before

everything, to blows. While, on top of it, David evinced an amazing
pertness fit to have tried a better man than Adam M'Adam.
On the death of his wife, kindly Elizabeth Moore had, more than once,
offered such help to the lonely little man as a woman only can give in a
house that knows no mistress. On the last of these occasions, after
crossing the 'Stony Bottom, which divides the two farms, and toiling up
the hill to the Grange, she had met M'Adam in the door.
"Yo' maun let me put yo' bit things straight .for yo', mister," she had
said shyly; for she feared the little man.
"Thank ye, Mrs. Moore," he had answered with the sour smile the
Dalesmen knew so well, "but ye maun think I'm a waefu' cripple." And
there he had stood, grinning sardonically, opposing his small bulk in
the very centre of the door.
Mrs. Moore had turned down the hill, abashed and hurt at the reception
of her offer; and her husband, proud to a fault, had forbidden her to
repeat it. Nevertheless her motherly heart went out in a great tenderness
for the little orphan David. She knew well the desolateness of his life;
his father's aversion from him, and its inevitable consequences.
It became an institution for the boy to call every morning at Kenmuir,
and trot off to the village school with Maggie Moore. And soon the lad
came to look on Kenmuir as his true home, and James and Elizabeth
Moore as his real parents. His greatest happiness was to be away from
the Grange. And the ferret-eyed little man there noted the fact, bitterly
resented it, and vented his ill-humor accordingly.
It was this, as he deemed it, uncalled-for trespassing on his authority
which was the chief cause of his animosity against James Moore. The
Master of Kenmuir it was at whom he was aiming when he remarked
one day at the Arms: "Masel', I aye prefaire the good man who does no
go to church, to the bad man