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"There's Boyd Connoway has been sitting on my front doorstep," cried my Aunt Jen, "and if I've telled the man once, I've telled him twenty times!" "But how do ye ken, Janet?" said her mother out of the still-room where she was brewing nettle-beer. "He is not there now!" "How do I ken fine that!" snapped Jen.
"But He can make use of instruments," argued Boyd, who had learned his lesson, "and Israel Kinmont is one of them. He has showed me where to get grace." "Maybe," snapped Jen, that unswerving Calvinist, "seeing is believing. Boyd Connoway may have got grace. I put no limit to the Almighty's power. But it takes more than grace to convert a man from laziness!"
If she got me, I made sure that she would instantly come to the great house of Marnhoul with all the King's horses and all the King's men and so, as it were, spoil the night from which I expected so much. But it was the slouching figure of Boyd Connoway which had attracted her attention. To these inquiries, all put within the space of half-a-minute, I could not catch Connoway's replies.
"I put it to the honourable gentlemen now assembled," said Boyd Connoway, "if a man can rightly be called a lazy good-for-nothing when he rose at four of the morning to cut his wife's firewood " "Should have done it the night before," interrupted my grandmother.
She halted in astonishment at the sight which met her eyes. At first it seemed to her that she was dreaming, or that her voice must have betrayed her. She gave her husband the benefit of the doubt. "I thought I tould ye, Boyd Connoway," she said in a voice dangerously low and caressing, "to be getting off to your bed and not disturbin' the childer'!"
The wig fell off, and as life gave place to the stillness of death, out of the lined and twisted lineaments of the half-deformed lawyer Poole emerged the pale, calm, clear-cut features of Lalor Maitland. The key of the mystery was brought us by one who seemed the most unlikely person in the world, Boyd Connoway.
So Boyd and Jerry brought Bridget Connoway in to the outhouse where the dead man lay. "Tis all my fault my fault," wailed Bridget, "yet 'twas because him that's me husband gave me no help with the arning of money to bring up the childer. So I was tempted and took in this man after the Black Smugglers had tried to burn the great house of Marnhoul. "Well might I think so, indeed, your honours.
A little behind went Connoway, in the same manner holding a "bourtree" pop-gun which he had just been fashioning for some lucky callant of his acquaintance. Almost for the first time in his life Boyd Connoway had all the humour to himself. Nobody laughed at his imitation of Officer Jocky's pompous ways. They would do it afterwards in the safety of their own dwellings and about the winter fire.
"When I require you, Janet Lyon, to decide for your mother what is Gospel and what is not, I'll let ye ken," said my grandmother, "and if I have accepted a responsibility from the Most High for these children, I will do my best to render an account of my stewardship at the Great White Throne. In the meantime, you have no more right to task me for it, than than Boyd Connoway!"
Boyd Connoway saw a prospect of finding a husband and the father of a family turned from his own door, and obliged to return and take up his quarters with this earlier exile. The Connoway family residence was a small and almost valueless leasehold from the estate of General Johnstone. The house had always been tumbledown, and the tenancy of Bridget and her brood had not improved it externally.
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