I!



OF



ETTINAvo



TIEN



By BETTINA VON HUTTEN



The Bag of Saffron
Mag Pye Bird's Fountain
Maria Sharrow

D. APPLETON & COMPANY, NEW YORK



or CAIJF. TJBIMBY. 1.0*




"Take them," she said, "take them, the horrible, dread-
ful things." [P AGE 445 ]



The

BAG OF SAFFRON



BY

BETTINA VON HUTTEN

AUTHOR o "MAO PTE," "BIBD'S FOUSTAIM," ETC.




ILLUSTRATED BT

STOCKTON MULFORD



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK 1918



COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY



Printed in the United States of America



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Take them," she said, "take them, the horrible,

dreadful things" Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

"He was too handsome to be anything but bad," she

declared 10

He dropped his portmanteau and held her close

against his well-worn old coat 156

"You must come," he said, "my little Nicoleta" . 326



2130427



PART I



CHAPTER I

THE little old house, which, although it was some
six hundred feet above sea-level, yet lay in a
hollow, was, seen eye to eye, just one of hundreds
of old Yorkshire moorland houses.

Like them it was square-built and low; like theirs, its
windows were too small to satisfy people of our day ; but
one has an odd feeling that to such houses people of our
day matter as little as people of yesterday now lying in
the churchyard.

These rough-built old dwellings have an air of staid
durability, of disregarding the flight of time, which so
nearly leaves them untouched in their great solidity.
They are a part of the soil out of which they are dug.

Thus Roseroofs, seen from the level, was an unimpos-
ing, commonplace, old building likeable only for the sake
of the wide-spread, lavish garden in which it stood; its
triumph came when the observer looked down at it.

The winding road, after a long, lazy, coiling progress
through the dale, was met at the third of the Warcop
bridges by a tributary which, in its turn, climbed the hill
towards the edge in great bold laps that passed the
house. And from any point of the road above the house,
the glory and beauty of the old place revealed itself, its
roofs.

Ample, generous roofs they were, the great middle one
surrounded by the smaller ones of the stable and out-
houses ; and the deep rose-color that must have been too
brilliant when they and George II were newly on their
thrones, had been chastened by time into a lovely dim-

3



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

ness which was further beautified by a mosaic of lichens,
mosses, and burly bunches of tough stonecrop, thus seem-
ing to claim kinship with the neighboring moors, rather
than with the uneven, cream-washed walls they topped.

Miss Flora and Miss Effie Plues were very proud of
their roofs, which had been brought up by carrier from
the south to embellish the dour-looking dwelling for their
grandfather's bride, an Essex maid ; and high up amongst
the heather, close against the sky, they had had built,
many years before, a stout stone bench from which their
rare visitors might have a good view of the object of their
innocent vain-glory. Owing to the effects of weather on
its rough surface, the bench had long since been painted
a vivid green and the Green Bench was known as a land-
mark by everybody for miles around.

The view from it was very beautiful. Two fair, flowing
dales lay below and where they joined, sloping together
from their secret heights in a pleasant way as of two
people smiling as they meet, three old bridges spanned a
rushing stream which, just below the last one, plunged
noisily and foamingly over a high jut of rock and then
settled for a little into an almost circular pool of vivid
green, quiet water where rushes grew ; and pleasant green
meadows of all shapes and sizes, inexorably and inhos-
pitably divided by high walls of heather-colored stone,
stretched away up on all sides to the brown and purple
moors to whose ultimate edges the sky seemed to come
very near.

Westward up Wiskedale beyond the beck that met the
river at High Warcop bridge, half stretched a desultory
way up the slope towards the largest of the deserted lead-
mines on Ay cliff e Head, lay the village of Widdybank, a
square church tower rising from the dark mass of the
trees that grew in a double row outside the churchyard
wall.



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

The Widdybank church tower and the bright white
splash that was Thornby Lodge, halfway up Cotherside,
beyond Warcop, were the two chief points of departure
for the investigating eye.

"Ye see yon white house ; that's Judge Capel's shooting
lodge. Well, off to t' left" or : "Halfway up Laverock,
in a direct line with t' old church tower" thus was the
stranger taught the topography of the place. There
were naturally other points by which one's eyes found
their way; there was Aycliffe Head, a hill whose crest,
made uneven on the south side by a heavy fall of rocks
some time in Queen Anne's day, stood out sharply against
the west in a kind of grotesque profile ; there was Watlass
Mill, a large, orange-colored building in Cotherdale, where
the road to Middleton turned sharply to the left and was
for a while lost to view ; there was Widdybank Bottom, a
small wood in Wiskedale on the near side of the river,
just opposite the village church.

A fine and noble view, to bring content to the eyes and
the restfulness of all spacious and beautiful places to the
heart.

One June evening, not many years ago, the two Misses
Flues had climbed the steep path from their house to the
Green Bench and were sitting in that place of pilgrimage
discussing a domestic event whose importance had cer-
tainly never been overtopped in their simple lives.

The Bench stood about ten feet back from the edge of
the little niche in the moor which the sisters, after weeks of
heart-searching discussion, had selected for its site, and
the years that had passed since its completion had suf-
ficed to make of the man-hollowed half-circle behind it a
thing of beauty.

Tufted, irregularly-placed clumps of grass covered the
greater part of its earthen nakedness. A flat-leafed
creeper had festooned its upper edge, and in the deeper

5



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

recesses of the little excavation flowers grew in all the
seasons with singular abundance. Just now purple-red
cranesbill, and a thick-growing yellow flower of glossy
leaf caught the red glow of the westering sun and shone
bravely back at it as it slid down the sky towards Aycliffe
Head.

Above the hollow stretched the open moor, at that
moment glowing with the rich color that it reveals only
at evening, and full of half-unfurled fern painting it with
a clear green that at that hour almost melted to gold.
Below the Green Bench the winding path by which the
two ladies had reached their eyrie seemed to leap down-
wards like a small, pebbly torrent; indeed, but for the
lack of water, its stony way was precisely like that of a
tiny hillside beck, and further down, below the beloved rose-
colored roofs now, in the beautifying sunset light, in their
second most splendid hour of the twenty-four their most
splendid hour was that of sunrise lay spread both dales.

Off to the left, a window in Thornby Lodge blazed away
as if on fire and the dim, gray-brown roofs of Warcop
huddled together in an early darkness unknown to the
heights.

For some time Miss Flora and Miss Effie sat silent,
gazing with eyes that saw little of the familiar beauties of
their home place. Miss Flora, sitting down, with her
pink-flowered muslin gown gracefully settled round her,
a mushroom-shaped, rose-decked hat tilted over her
nose Miss Flora hated sunburn was, though not
young, a pretty woman; pretty in a way that to a sym-
pathetic observer was not without pathos. There was
pathos in her very name, for in her youth it must have
suited her deliciously; in her day she must have been a
most flower-like maiden, and now in her middle-age she
was still like a flower, but like one that has been pressed
in a book.



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

She was thin almost to invisibility, but the pathos lay
somehow in her sweet, faded, rather high-nosed little
face. Her eyes were of a velvety dark blue and one saw
clearly, by the close clinging to them of her delicately
wrinkled lids, that the globes of her eyes were unusually
large and set a little loosely in her head. The youth
had so irrevocably departed from her skin that the child-
like, unfaded blue of the irises, and the skimmed-milk color
of her eyeballs, gave a pang to some sympathetic people.
In mercy to the sensitive beholder these things should
have grown old with the rest of her, and this they had not
done.

Her delicate chin had lost its unwavering line, but
there was no ugly sagging to lament, and her slightly
sunken, coral-pink mouth revealed little square teeth that
still flashed when she laughed.

Mr. Burns, the chemist at Middleton, alone could have
told what an expenditure of money and care this flash
cost its owner, but then Mr. Burns his mother was a
Watlass never mentioned Miss Flora's hesitating, shy,
bold visits to his shop in the Market Place, nor her short-
sighted, nervous, excited investigation of the low glass
case at the left of the door, where he kept all his tooth-
powders, washes and pastes.

And as the tall, thin lady left the shop, springing along
over the cobble-stones in her odd, bounding way the
way in which the goddess Flora might have half-skipped
over the grass in her flower-strewing moments she al-
ways took with her in her green-lined rush basket at least
one of the latest products of the teeth-beautifying in-
dustry.

Miss Effie was very different. She was two years
younger than her sister but looked to careless eyes five
years older; a short, pony-built woman, with oily black
hair that clung close to her head, a weather-beaten, dark

7



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

skin and teeth that were her own only by right of purchase
and long possession.

Miss Effie, that June evening, wore a short gray skirt
of some unpropitious woollen material and a stiffly
starched blouse made very like a man's shirt. Its high
collar held up her little, brown chin in a way that Iqpked
extremely uncomfortable, and its austerities were made
more conspicuous by a scarlet tie that was drawn very
tight at its base and hung down on her hard-looking
breast. Someone once said, in describing and differen-
tiating the two sisters, that their natures were explained
to the discerning eye by the fact that, whereas Miss Effie
in profile showed the average feminine curve from chin to
waist and Miss Flora was if anything a little concave, yet
Miss Flora's poor breast in some indescribable way looked
the more feminine, the better adapted to pillow a sorrow-
ful head. However that may be and no matter how they
differed in character, the two ladies, though they possessed
not only the reserve and silence of most people who, with-
out children's faces about them, dwell in high places and
alone, but also the almost tangible Yorkshire shyness, were
devoted sisters.

But although they loved each other, and had spent by
far the greater part of their lives under the same roof,
neither of them, when unhappy, ever confided in the other.
They were very Northern in their little austerities. Miss
Effie was unsmiling and as monosyllabic as possible with
strangers, and Miss Flora's little, soft giggle and gentle,
fluttering ways covered a reserve as iron as her sister's ;
and now in this, their hour of extreme perplexity, when
they had come to the Green Bench for the purpose of
discussing their problem, they sat side by side for almost
half an hour in complete silence.

The letter had arrived only two hours before; it had
been brought up from Warcop by Esther Oughtenshaw,

8



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

their old servant her mother was a Watlass who had
chanced, through a sudden need for a new frying-pan, to
go down after lunch on Monday of all days. Miss Effie
had read the letter and handed it to Miss Flora in silence,
after which each lady went to her own room and stayed
there for some time behind a closed door. At tea they
said nothing about the news, but at last Miss Flora, set-
ting down her untouched cup, asked tentatively :

"Don't you think we might walk up to the Green
Bench, Effie ?" And in unbroken silence they had climbed
the steep path and sat down.

Finally someone walking along the Edge a hundred feet
above them broke the silence that both felt almost as if
it were a tangible thing, by startling a peewit who
flew down the hillside uttering its wearying, raucous
cry.

"That will be Thomas John Skelton driving his cows
home to Flaye. It must be six, Flora."

Miss Effie's voice was a little harsh and had a queer
break in it ; it was a voice that seemed to suit her plain,
dark face with its nearly meeting eyebrows and its faded,
raspberry-colored lips.

Miss Flora raised her gloved hands and dropped them
limply on her lap. After a minute she exclaimed, "Effie,
what are we going to do?"

"There is nothing to do now ; we cannot turn him away
from the door, can we ? I have told Esther to get a room
ready."

"Perhaps," Miss Flora said after a pause, her troubled
voice sounding, with its queer little tinkle, almost like a
child's, "he won't die after all. He may get better in
this air."

Miss Effie laughed unmusically. "Yes, that would be
just like him."

"Oh, Effie, even Robert could not help dying !"

9



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

"I mean," Miss Effie returned, in a weighty and relent-
less voice, "that it would be just like him to live."

Miss Flora did not answer but her dim little face
changed almost imperceptibly. "You never liked him,
Effie ; you were never quite fair, I think "

Miss Effie frowned. "No," she said, "I did not like
him, but that has nothing to do with this. Besides, he
did not care whether I liked him or not, for there were
others who did."

To Miss Flora's face came something very transitory,
almost unnoticeable, something between a wince and a
smile, but she was silent and Miss Effie went on:

"He sa} r s that he is dying and that he is coming to us.
That implies, if I know Robert Blundell at all, that he is
coming to give us the pleasure of his dying in, and being
buried from, our house. That is bad, but, as I have sug-
gested, he might do worse."

"Oh, Effie!"

Miss Effie looked gloomily at her sister, her opaque
eyes curiously empty of light.

"I am sorry, Flora; I didn't mean to hurt you; of
course you never saw through him, you never see through
anyone, and naturally you do not see through him. And
I did!"

Again the strange, half-flinching quiver touched Miss
Flora's lips, but instead of speaking she rose and with
her peculiar skimming step walked away and stood at the
edge of the slope.

"I may not have seen through him as you say, I am
not observant," she said after a moment's silence. "Poor
Bob!"

Miss Effie coughed. "He was too handsome to be any-
thing but bad," she declared, obviously ending the dis-
cussion so far as she was concerned.

Suddenly Miss Flora turned and, clasping her hands,

10




fcuo

C



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

held them up before her and began to speak in her high-
est pitched voice.

"Augustus Csesar, Titus Vespasianus, Philippe le Bel of
France, Edward the Fourth of England, Alcibiades of
Athens, or was it Aristides? no, he was the just one
were all great and good men, and yet the most beautiful
men of their time."

Her excited triumph attracted the attention of Miss
Effie, who, used to her sister's ways, had relapsed into a
somber contemplation of the dale.

"How on earth," Miss Effie asked, "do you know about
those men, Flora Plues?"

"Bacon, Lord Bacon, Verulam, he said it. I read it the
other day at the Vicarage."

Far away up the dale to the left, a small black speck
now broke the monotony of the dusty road; a carriage
of some kind. Before Miss Effie had time to answer Miss
Flora had seen this speck, and Lord Bacon vanished from
her mind.

"Effie, it is the fly look, just there this side of the
Mill. It will be them !"

Miss Effie rose. "Nonsense, he has no money to waste
on flies, and the carrier's cart is comfortable enough for
anyone. The train is not due till sitf-forty-five any-
way."

"Effie, I feel it is him !"

"You feel it is he if you feel anything," Miss Effie
returned grimly, "which you don't. However, he they
will be here by eight, so we had better go down. After
all, there is no good discussing it, we can't refuse to take
them in. Come!"

At the edge of the path they both stood still, looking
at each other, in each face an expectant look.

"Effie "

"Flora "

11



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

Miss Flora gave a little skip, "No, we must be kind
to him for poor May's sake, and perhaps he has im-
proved."

Miss Effie drew her brows closely together and pro-
truded her discolored lower lip. "Such men," she de-
clared, "never improve. However, as you say, for poor
May's sake and then" she broke off, her dark face
melting in an extraordinary way, her voice gentling al-
most to a whisper, "there is the baby."

They made their way down the footpath, the stones
rolling from under their feet and clattering against each
other, Miss Flora's face saddened by a little smile that
meant nothing, Miss Effie's settled into its usual aspect
of grimness.

"I hope," Miss Flora broke out suddenly as they crossed
the road, "that it will be fair, like poor May "

They opened the little wicket gate, after crossing a
hundred yards of common land that lay between it and
the road, and went up the garden path to the house.
At the door under the rose-covered porch, stood Esther
Oughtenshaw, their old servant, waiting for them.

"I was just cooming oop to t' Green Bench to seek
you, Miss Effie," she said, holding out a telegram.
"Mary Christie's girl brought un oop "

Miss Effie took the telegram and opened it, although
it was addressed to Miss Plues and she was two years
younger than her sister, and as she read the message, Miss
Flora tiptoed delicately away and stooped over a tree of
yellow roses, inhaling their scent with tactful ostenta-
tion.

"Flora!"

"Yes, Effie?"

The two women stood looking at each other, Esther
Oughtenshaw, her apron rolled up over her arms, plainly
waiting for the news.

12



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

"You are right, Flora, they are coming in the Red
Dragon fly. It was they you saw."

"Oh, but I was only guessing, Effie; I could not pos-
sibly know, could I? It was only my luck to be right!"
Miss Flora constantly referred to her luck though no
one could have said of what it consisted.

To this small apology Miss Effie vouchsafed no
acknowledgment. She turned to Esther, whose red, old
face was alight with an interest she naturally shared
with her two mistresses, and gave some hasty orders.
A moment later she turned to her sister and asked her
not snappishly, not sourly, but with a curious lack of
tenderness, why she was cutting roses from Father's
rose-tree.

Miss Flora, who had taken off her hood, and whose
bright, brindled hair was shining like silver in the sun,
tripped to the far side of the rose bush and bent over it,
thus not looking at Miss Effie.

"I think I remember he used to like Father's roses,"
she murmured.

Miss Effie gave a slight grunt and went indoors.

A few minutes later the ladies, issuing from their rooms,
both of which lay at the front of the house, met in the
broad corridor; Miss Flora was all in white; Miss Effie
had smoothed her hair and washed her face and hands,
but she still wore the gray skirt and the hard, unbecom-
ing shirt with the cut-throat collar.

"Your new gown, Flora!"

Poor Miss Flora blushed and twiddled her dry old
fingers, on which, in a very mild way, sparkled several
old-fashioned rings. "I thought it would look more hos-
pitable," she protested.

"It does, oh, it undoubtedly does that!" returned the
other as they went down the shining shallow stairs, past
the plaster bust of Lord Byron on the window-seat, "and

13



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

what is more, he would be flattered, oh, aye, flattered that
you would wish to look your best for him. He will also
see," she added, a note of venom in her voice, "that I
didn't."

"I don't think," Miss Flora answered gently, "that he
ever thought you wanted to look your best for him,
Effie."

"I am sure he never did hark!" she broke off in a
different voice, "do you hear it that will be they!"

At that moment Esther Oughtenshaw came out of her
kitchen, clattering over the stone floor of the hall.

"Miss Effie, Miss Flora, it's cooming! It's just at t'
old may-tree! I can see from the kitchen window "

"Please return to the kitchen, Esther," Miss Effie an-
swered, every inch the mistress. "When I need you I
will ring."

A few moments later the old-fashioned fly crept up past
the kitchen-garden and round to the edge of the green.

"Shall you go to the gate, Effie?" Miss Flora asked,
fluttered and nervous, but Miss Effie had gone upstairs,
muttering something about her handkerchief.

Thus it came about that it was Miss Flora and not
Miss Effie who plucked Cuckoo Blundell out of the great
thicket of nettles into which, on being lifted from the
fly by the driver, she tumbled. When the child, scream-
ing and kicking, and using language it was just as well
Miss Flora could not understand, was safely withdrawn
from the perfidious greenery and lay sobbing in her arms,
Miss Flora turned to the fly.

"Oh, Robert," she began, shouting in a high key over
the black head of the outraged child "I am so sorry,"
and she broke off, for the skeleton-like man who, wrap-
ped in furs, still sat in the fly, was lying back helpless with
laughter.

"Cuckoo, Cuckoo!" he called out in French, between

14



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

two fits of apparently uncontrollable mirth. "You must
not swear, or your auntie won't love you."

Miss Flora never forgot that moment; the heaving,
sobbing little body in her arms, the wet face against
her own freshly-powdered neck, the grinning flyman
Matthew Christie's son from Stebley Old Hall, she saw it
was and, framed in the fly window, full in the merciless
western light, the dreadful, cadaverous face of Robert
Blundell.

His once beautiful nose had dwindled to a waxen, hook-
like thing; his eyes, crinkled with laughter, lay in deep
hollows that looked black. Between his pale, flat lips she
could see his yellow teeth with gaps towards the back,
and his tongue, pointed and dark-looking, lifted like a
snake's head, rigid with the paroxysm of laughter.



CHAPTER II

POOR Miss Flora stole away out of the house after
supper and crept down the hillside to the river,
where she sat under a may-tree and gave herself
up to thought. Supper had been dreadful, although Rob-
ert Blundell had appeared in no way oppressed by the
situation he was a south-country man, and as such, of
course, lighter in spirit and mind than if he had had the
good fortune to belong to Yorkshire and his talk flowed
along in a steady, shallow stream just as it had done in the
old days. Conversationally, he had jumped from Paris
to St. Petersburg, thence to Hyeres, and on to Spain,
and then, to settle for a while, to Avignon where the child
had been born.

"We had a wee cottage down by the river," he ex-
plained gaily, "with little canal-like threads of water all
round. It reminded us of Holland and of Venice, and me
of Japan rather like living in a paddy-field, it was."

Miss Flora, her head on one side, tried to look as if
she knew all about the paddy plant as she mentally called
it, but a blunt question from Miss Effie elicited the in-
formation that no such plant existed.

"It's rice, you know," Blundell explained, "grows in
swamps ; half -naked natives with hats like big mushrooms
wading about in it. Oh, not in Avignon," he added, an
amused grin scoring his skull-like face with deep lines;
"in Japan, that is."

"I should have thought that such excessive damp must
have been bad for your illness," commented Miss Effie
dryly.

16



THE BAG OF SAFFRON

Through the open windows the last of the summer
daylight fell full on the man's face, so tragic in its emacia-
tion, so much more tragic in its expression of hopefulness
and sociability. Poor Miss Flora could not eat. Her
thin throat, embellished in honor of the guest with a
string of facetted, purple rock crystals, worked nerv-
ously; something was preventing her from swallow-
ing.

Miss EfBe ate as usual though better than usual, for
Esther Oughtenshaw had made a little feast to celebrate
the arrival of Poor Miss May's Husband, and besides the
eternal cold mutton that in the south would have been