The Witchs Head | Page 7

that preceded it having presumably left a painful impression; and Ernest, who was an observant youth, fell to watching little Dorothy doing the honours of the table; cutting up her crazed old grandfather's food for him, seeing that everybody had what he wanted, and generally making herself unobtrusively useful. In due course the meal came to an end, and Mr. Cardus and old Atterleigh went back to the office, leaving Dorothy alone with Ernest. Presently the former began to talk.
"I hope that your eye is not painful," she said. "Jeremy hits very hard."
"O no, it's all right. I'm used to it. When I was at school in London I often used to fight. I'm sorry for him, though--your brother, I mean."
"Jeremy! O yes, he is always in trouble, and now I suppose that it will be worse than ever. I do all I can to keep things smooth, but it is no good. If he won't go to Mr. Halford's, I am sure I don't know what will happen;" and the little lady sighed deeply.
"O, I daresay that he will go. Let's go and look for him, and try and persuade him."
"We might try," she said, doubtfully. "Stop a minute, and I will put on my hat, and then if you will take that nasty thing off your eye, we might walk on to Kesterwick. I want to take a book, out of which I have been teaching myself French, back to the cottage where old Miss Ceswick lives, you know."
"All right," said Ernest.
Presently Dorothy returned, and they went out by the back way to a little room near the coach-house, where Jeremy stuffed birds and kept his collection of eggs and butterflies; but he was not there. On inquiring of Sampson, the old Scotch gardener who looked after Mr. Cardus's orchid-houses, she discovered that Jeremy had gone out to shoot snipe, having borrowed Sampson's gun for that purpose.
"That is just like Jeremy," she sighed. "He is always going out shooting instead of attending to things."
"Can he hit birds flying, then?" asked Ernest.
"Hit them!" she answered, with a touch of pride; "I don't think he ever misses them. I wish he could do other things as well."
Jeremy at once went up at least fifty per cent. in Ernest's estimation.
On their way back to the house they peeped in through the office window, and Ernest saw "Hard-riding Atterleigh" at his work, copying deeds.
"He's your grandfather, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"Does he know you?"
"In a sort of way; but he is quite mad. He thinks that Reginald is the devil, whom he must serve for a certain number of years. He has got a stick with numbers of notches on it, and he cuts out a notch every month. It is all very sad. I think it is a very sad world;" and she sighed again.
"Why does he wear hunting-clothes?" asked Ernest.
"Because he always used to ride a good deal. He loves a horse now. Sometimes you will see him get up from his writing table, and the tears come into his eyes if anybody comes into the yard on horseback. Once he came out and tried to get on to a horse and ride off, but they stopped him."
"Why don't they let him ride?"
"O, he would soon kill himself. Old Jack Tares, who lives at Kesterwick, and gets his living by rats and ferrets, used to be whip to grandfather's hounds when he had them, and says that he always was a little mad about riding. One moonlight night he and grandfather went out to hunt a stag that had strayed here out of some park. They put the stag out of a little grove at a place called Claffton, five miles away, and he took them round by Starton and Ashleigh, and then came down the flats to the sea, about a mile and a half below here, just this side of the quicksand. The moon was so bright that it was almost like day, and for the last mile the stag was in view not more than a hundred yards in front of the hounds, and the pace was racing. When he came to the beach he went right through the waves out to the sea, and the hounds after him, and grandfather after them. They caught him a hundred yards out and killed him, and then grandfather turned his horse's head and swam with the hounds."
"My eye!" was Ernest's comment on this story. "And what did Jack Tares do?"
"O, he stopped on the beach and said his prayers; he thought that they would all be drowned."
Then they passed through the old house, which was built on a little ness or headland that jutted beyond the level of the shore-line, and across which the wind swept and raved all the winter long,