think of it, the less I believe it could have been one. If I had only
heard the call in my sleep, or in the moment of waking, why of course it
might have been a dream; but when I heard it the second time it was
_after_ I awoke. I heard it as plain as I hear my own voice now; and
plainer, too."
"But what else, except a dream, do you fancy it could have been?"
"Well, sir, that's what is puzzling me. But for Hill's convincing me
Davy could not have got out of here after he had locked him and
Macintosh in for safety, I should have said it was the boy himself,
calling me from outside. It sounded in the room, close to me: but the
fright I was in might have deceived me. What's that?"
A loud rapping at the window. I am not ashamed to say that coming so
unexpectedly it startled me. Mrs. Hill, with a shrill scream, darted
forward to catch hold of my arm.
"Let me go. Some one wants to be let in. I dare say it's Hill."
"Master Johnny, I beg your pardon," she said, going back. "Hill ought to
know better than to come frightening me at night like this."
I opened the door, and Miss Timmens walked in: not Hill. The knocking
had not been intended to frighten any one, but as a greeting to Mrs.
Hill--Miss Timmens having seen her through the glass.
"You know you always were one of the quaking ones, Nanny," she said,
scoffing at the alarm. "I have just got back from Worcester, and thought
you'd like to hear that mother's better."
"And it is well you are back, Miss Timmens," I put in. "The school
has been in rebellion. Strangers, going by, have taken it for a bear
garden."
"That Maria Lease is just good for nothing," said Miss Timmens,
wrathfully. "When she offered to take my place I knew she'd not be of
much use. Yes, sir; it was the thought of the school that brought me
back so soon."
"And mother is really better!" cried Mrs. Hill. "I am so thankful. If
she had died and I not able to get over to her, I should never have
forgiven myself. How is David?"
"Are you getting straight, Nancy?" asked Miss Timmens, looking round the
room, and not noticing the question about David.
"Straight! and only moved in this morning! and me with this ankle!"
Miss Timmens laughed. She was just as capable as her sister was the
contrary.
"About David?" added Mrs. Hill, "I was so vexed that he went over in his
old clothes! It was Hill's fault. Have you brought me a letter from
him?"
"How could I bring you a letter from him?" returned Miss Timmens. "A
letter from where?"
It was a minute or two before elucidation was arrived at, for both were
at cross-purposes. David Garth had not been at Worcester at all, so far
as Miss Timmens knew; certainly not at his grandmother's.
To see Mrs. Hill sink back into her chair at this information, and let
her hands fall on her lap, and gaze helplessly from her frightened eyes,
was only to be expected. Miss Timmens kept asking what it all meant, and
where David was, but she could get no answer. So I told her what Mother
Hill had just told me--about Hill's sending him off to Worcester. She
stared like anything.
"Why, where in the name of wonder can the boy have got to?"
"I see it all," spoke the mother then, in a whisper. "Davy did find his
way out of this house; and it was his voice I heard, and not a dream. I
knew it. I knew it at the time."
These words would have sounded mysterious to any one given to mystery.
Miss Timmens was not. She was a long, thin female, with a chronic
redness on her nose and one cheek, and she was as practical as could be.
Demanding what Mrs. Hill meant by "not a dream," she stood warming her
boots at the fire while she was enlightened.
"The boy is keeping away for fear of Hill tanning him," spoke Miss
Timmens, summing up the question. "Don't you think so, Master Ludlow?"
"I should, if I could see how he got out of the cottage, after Hill had
locked him in it."
"Luke Macintosh put him out at this window," said Miss Timmens,
decisively. "Hill couldn't lock that up. They'd open the shutters, and
Luke would pop him out: to get rid of the boy, no doubt. Mr. Luke ought
to be punished for it."
I did not contradict her. Of course it might have been so; but knowing
Luke, I did not think he would care to be left in the house alone.
Unless--the thought flashed over me--unless Luke sent away David that
he might be off himself. Amidst a good deal of uncertainty, this view
seemed the most probable.
"Where is David?" bemoaned Mrs. Hill; "where is he? And with these
bitter cold nights----"
"Now don't you worry yourself, Nanny," interrupted strong-minded Miss
Timmens. "I'll see to David; and bring him home, too."
Hill's cough was heard outside. Miss Timmens--who had been in a dead
rage at the marriage, and consequently hated Hill like poison--hastened
to depart. We went away together, passing Hill by the dried-up brook.
He looked stealthily at us, and threw back a surly good night to me.
"I'm sure I don't know where I am to look for the boy first," began Miss
Timmens, as we went along. "Poor fellow! he is keeping away out of fear.
It would not surprise me if Macintosh is taking care of him. The man's
not ill-natured."
"I don't understand why Hill should have told his mother David was gone
to Worcester, unless he did go." Neither did I.
"David never went to Worcester; rely upon that, Master Ludlow," was her
answer. "He is well known at Shrub Hill Station, and I could not have
failed to hear of it, for one of the porters lodges in mother's house;
besides, David would have come down to us at once. Good night, sir. I
dare say he will turn up before to-morrow."
She went on towards the school-house, I the other way to Crabb Cot. Mrs.
Todhetley and the Squire were talking together by the blazing fire,
waiting until old Thomas announced dinner.
"Where have you been lingering this cold evening, Johnny?" began the
Squire. "Don't you get trying the ponds, sir; the ice is not wafer thick
yet."
Kneeling on the rug between them, holding my hands to the warmth, I told
where I had been, and what I had heard. Mrs. Todhetley, who seemed to
have been born with a sympathy for children, went into lamentation
over--it was what she said--that poor little gentle lamb, David.
"Macintosh is about somewhere," spoke the Squire, ringing the bell. "We
will soon hear whether he knows what has become of the boy."
Thomas was ordered to find Macintosh and send him in. He came presently,
shy and sheepish, as usual. Standing just inside the door, he blinked
his eyes and rubbed his hands one over the other, like an idiot. It was
only his way.
"Do you know where David Garth is?" began the Squire, who thought
himself a regular Q.C. at cross-examining. Luke stared and said No. The
fact was, he had not heard that David was missing.
"What time was it that you put him out of the window the night before
last?"
Luke's eyes and mouth opened. He had no more idea what the Squire meant
than the man in the moon.
"Don't stand there as if you were a born simpleton, but answer me,"
commanded the Squire. "When you and David Garth were put into Hill's new
cottage to take care of the things for the night, how came you to let
the boy out of it? Why did you do it? Upon what plea?"
"But I didn't do it, sir," said Luke.
"Now don't you stand there and say that to my face, Macintosh. It won't
answer; for I know all about it. You put that poor shivering boy out at
the window that you might be off yourself; that's about the English of
it. Where did he go to?"
"But I couldn't do it, sir," was Luke's answer to this. "I was not in
the place myself."
"You were not there yourself?"
"No, sir, I warn't. Knowing I should have to go off with the waggon
pretty early, I went down and telled Hill that I should sleep at home."
"Do you mean to say you did not go into Hill's place at all?"
"No, sir, I didn't. I conclude Hill slept there hisself. I know nothing
about it, for I don't happen to have come across Hill since. I've kept
out of his way."
This was a new turn to the affair. Luke quitted the room, and a silence
ensued. Mrs. Todhetley touched me on the shoulder.
"Johnny?"
"Yes!" I said, wondering at the startled look in her eyes.
"I hope Hill did not put that poor child into the house alone! If so, no
wonder that he made his escape from it."
* * * * *
The matter could not rest. One talked, and another talked: and before
noon next day it was known all over the place that David Garth had been
put to sleep by himself in the empty cottage. Miss Timmens attacked Hill
with her strong tongue, and told him it was enough to frighten the child
to death. Hill was sullen. He would answer nothing; and all she could
get out of him was, that it was no business of hers. In vain she
demanded his reasons for saying the boy had gone to Worcester by the
early train: whether he sent him--whether he saw him off. Hill said
David did go; and then took refuge in dogged silence.
The schoolmistress was not one to be played with. Of a tenacious turn,
she followed out things with a will. She called in the police; she
harangued people outside her door; she set the parish in a ferment. But
David could not be heard of, high or low. Since the midnight hour, when
that call of his awoke his mother, and was again repeated, he seemed to
have vanished.
There arose a rumour that Jim Batley could tell something. Miss Timmens
pounced upon him as he was going by the school-house, conveyed him
indoors, and ordered him to make a clean breast of it. It was not much
that Jim had to tell: but that little seemed of importance to Miss
Timmens, and he told it readily. One thing Jim persisted in--that the
boots he saw through the skylight must have been David's boots. Hill had
called them his, he said, but they were not big enough--not men's boots
at all. Hill was looking "ghastly white," as if he had had a fright, Jim
added, when he told him David was gone off to Worcester.
Perhaps it was in that moment that a fear of something worse than had
been yet suspected dawned upon Miss Timmens. Tying on her bonnet, she
came up to Crabb Cot, and asked to see the Squire.
"It is getting more serious," she said, after old Thomas had shown her
in. "I think, sir, Hill should be forced to explain what he knows. I
have come here to ask you to insist upon it."
"The question is--what does he know?" rejoined the Squire.
"More than he has confessed," said Miss Timmens, in her positive manner.
"Jim Batley stands to it that those boots must, from the size, have been
David's boots. Now, Squire Todhetley, if David's boots were there, where
was David? That is what's lying on my mind, sir."
"What did Jim Batley see besides the boots?" asked the Squire.
"Nothing in particular," she answered. "He said the cupboard door stood
open, and hid the best part of the room. David would not be likely to
run away and leave his boots behind him."
"Unless he was in too great a fright to stop to put them on."
"I don't think that, sir."
"What is it you wish to imply?" asked the Squire, not seeing the drift
of the argument.
"I wish I knew myself," replied Miss Timmens, candidly. "I am certain
Hill has not told all he could tell: he has been deceitful over it from
the first, and he must be made to explain. Look here, sir: when he got
to Willow Cottage that morning, there's no doubt he thought David was in
it. Very well. He goes in to call him; stays a bit, and then comes out
and tells young Jim that David has gone to Worcester. How was he to
know David had gone to Worcester?--who told him? The boy says, too, that
Hill looked ghastly, as if he had been frightened."
"David must have gone somewhere, or he would have been in the room,"
argued the Squire. "He would not be likely to go back after quitting it,
and his mother heard him call to her in the middle of the night."
"Just so, sir. But--if Hill did not find him, why should he come out and
assert that David had started for Worcester?--Why not have said David
had escaped?"
"I am sure I don't know."
"It's the boots that come over me," avowed Miss Timmens; "I can't come
to the bottom of them. I mean to come to the bottom of Hill, though, and
make him disclose what he knows. You are his master, sir, and perhaps he
will tell you without trouble, if you will please to be so good as
question him. If he won't, I'll have him brought up before the Bench."
Away went Miss Timmens, with a parting remark that the school must be
rampant by that time. The Squire sat thinking a bit, and then put on his
hat and great-coat, telling me I might come with him and hear what Hill
had to say. We expected to find Hill in the ploughed field between his
cottage and North Crabb. But Hill was in his own garden; we saw him as
we went along. Without ceremony, the Squire opened the wooden gate, and
stepped in. Hill was raking the leaves together by the shed at the end
of the garden.
He threw down the rake when he saw us, as if startled, his red face
turning white. Coming forward, he began a confused excuse for being
at home at that hour of the day, saying there was so much to do when
getting into a fresh place; and that he had not been well for two days,
"had had a sickness upon him." The Squire, never hard with the men, told
him he was welcome to be there, and began talking about the garden.
"It is as rich a bit of land, Hill, as any in the parish, and you may
turn it to good account if you are industrious. Does your wife intend to
keep chickens?"
"Well, sir, I suppose she will. Town-bred women don't understand far
about 'em, though. It may be a'most as much loss as profit."
"Nonsense," said the Squire, in his quick way. "Loss! when you have
every convenience about you! This used to be the fowl-house in Hopton's
time," he added, rapping the side of the shed with his stick. "Why!
you've been putting a padlock on it, Hill!"
For the door was fastened with a padlock; a new one, to judge by its
look. Hill made no comment. He had taken up the rake again and was
raking vigorously at the dead leaves. I wondered what he was shaking
for.
"Have you any treasures here, that you should lock it up?"
"Only the watering-can, sir, and a few o' my garden tools," answered
Hill. "There's a heap of loose characters about, and nothing's safe from
'em."
Putting his back against the shed, the Squire suddenly called on Hill to
face him, and entered on the business he had come upon. "Where was David
Garth? Did he, Hill, know anything about him?"
Hill had looked pale before; I said so; but that was nothing to the
frightful whiteness that took him now. Ears, lips, neck; all turned the
hue of the dead. The rake shook in his grasp; his teeth chattered.
"Come, Hill," said the Squire; "I see you have something to say."
But Hill protested he had nothing to say: except that the boy's absence
puzzled him. The Squire put some home questions upon the points spoken
of by Miss Timmens, showing Hill that we knew all. He then told him he
might take his choice; answer, or go before the magistrates.
Apparently Hill saw the futility of holding out longer. His very aspect
would have convicted him, as the Squire said: if he had committed
murder, he could not have looked more guilty. Glancing shudderingly
around on all sides, as though the air had phantoms in it, he whispered
his version of the morning's work.
It was true that he _had_ gone to the house expecting to find David in
it; and it was true that when he entered he found him flown. Not wishing
to alarm the boy's mother, he told Jim Batley that David had gone by
early train to Worcester: he told the mother so. As to the boots, Hill
declared they were his own, not David's; and that Jim's eyes must have
been deceived in the size. And he vowed and declared he knew no more
than this, or where David could have got to.
"What do you think you deserve for locking the child in the house by
himself?" asked the Squire, sternly.
"Everything that'll come upon me through it," readily acknowledged Hill.
"I could cut my hands off now for having done it; but I never thought
he'd be really frightened. It's just as if his ghost had been haunting
me ever since; I see him a-following of me everywhere."
"His ghost!" exclaimed the Squire. "Do you suppose he is dead?"
"I don't know," said the man, passing his shaking hand across his damp
forehead. "I wish to Heaven I had let him go off to his grandmother's
that same blessed night!"
"Then you wish me to understand, Hill, that you absolutely know nothing
of where the boy may be?"
"Nothing at all, sir."
"Don't you think it might have been as well if you had told the truth
from the first?" asked the Squire, rather sarcastically.
"Well, sir, one's mind gets confused at times, and I thought of his
mother. I could not be off seeing that if anything had happened, it lay
on my shoulders for having left him alone, in there."
Whether the Squire believed Hill could tell more, I don't know. I did.
As we went on to the school-house, the Pater kept silence. Miss Timmens
was frightfully disappointed at the result, and said Hill was a shifty
scoundrel.
"I cannot tell what to think," the Squire remarked to her. "His manner
is the strangest I ever saw; it is just as though he had something on
his conscience. He said the boy's ghost seemed to haunt him. Did you
notice that, Johnny?"
"Yes, sir. A queer idea."
"He--he--never could have found David dead in the morning?" cried Miss
Timmens, in a low tone, herself turning a little pale. "Dead of fright?"
"That could not be," said the Squire. "You forget that David had made
his escape before midnight, and was at his mother's, calling to her."
"True, true," assented Miss Timmens. "Any way, I am certain Hill is
somehow or other deceiving us, and he is a born villain for doing it."
But Hill, deceiving us though he had been, could not hold out. In going
back, we saw him leaning over the palings waiting for us. But that the
man is living yet, I should have said he was going to die there and
then, for he looked exactly like it.
It seemed that just after we left him, a policeman had made his
appearance. Not as a policeman, but as a friend; for he and Hill were
cronies. He told Hill confidentially that there was "going to be a row
over that there lost boy; that folks were saying that he might have been
murdered; that unless Hill could tell something satisfactory about him,
he and others might be in custody before the day was over." Whether Hill
found himself brought to a point from which there was neither advance
nor retreat, or that he inevitably saw that concealment could no longer
be maintained, or that he was stricken to despair and felt helpless, I
know not. There he stood, his head over the palings, saying he would
tell all.
It was a sad tale to listen to. Miss Timmens's last supposition was
right--Hill, upon going up to release David Garth, had found him dead.
And, so far as the man's experience of death went, he must have been
dead for six or seven hours.
"I'd like you to come and see him, sir," panted Hill.
Gingerly stepped the Squire in Hill's wake across the garden to the
shed. Unlocking the door, Hill stepped back for us to enter. On a
mattress on the ground was David, laid straight in his every-day
clothes, and covered with a blanket; his pretty hair, which his mother
had so loved, carefully smoothed. Hill,--rough, burly, cross-grained
Hill,--burst into tears and sobbed like a child.
"I'd give my life to undo it, and bring him back again, Squire; I'd give
my life twice over, Master Johnny; but I declare before Heaven, I never
thought to harm the boy. When I see him the next morning, lying dead,
I'd not have minded if the Lord had struck me dead too. I've been a'most
mad ever since."
"Johnny," said the Squire, in low tones, "go you to South Crabb, and
bring over Mr. Cole. Do not talk of this."
The surgeon was at home, and came back with me. I did not quite
understand why the Squire sent for him, seeing he could do no good.
And the boots were David's, after all; the only things he had taken off.
Hill had brought him to this shed the next night; with some vague idea
of burying him in the ground under the leaves. "But I couldn't do it,"
he avowed amid his sobs; "I couldn't do it."
There was an examination, Cole and another making it; and they gave
evidence at the inquest. One of them (it was Cole) thought the boy must
have died from fright, the other from the cold; and a nice muff this
last must have been.
"I did not from the first like that midnight call, or the apparently
causeless terror the poor mother awoke in," said Mrs. Todhetley, to me.
"The child's spirit must have cried out to her in his death-agony. I
have known a case like this before."
"But----"
"Hold your tongue, Johnny, You have not lived long enough to gain
experience of these things."
And I held it.
XX.
DAVID GARTH'S GHOST.
"Is it true that she's going to marry him, Miss Timmens?"
"True! _I_ don't know," retorted Miss Timmens, in wrath. "It won't be
for lack of warning, if she does. I told her so last night; and she
tossed her head in answer. She's a vain, heartless girl, Hannah Baber,
with no more prudence about her than a female ostrich."
"There may be nothing in it, after all," said Hannah. "She is generally
ready to flirt, you know."
"Flirt!" shrieked Miss Timmens in her shrillest tone. "She'd flirt with
a two-legged wheelbarrow if it had trousers on."
This colloquy was taking place at the private door of the school-house.
And you must understand that we have gone back a few months, for at this
time David Garth was not dead. Hannah, who had gone down from Crabb Cot
on an errand, came upon Miss Timmens standing there to look out. Of
course she stayed to gossip.
The object of Miss Timmens's wrath was her niece, Harriet Roe. A vain,
showy, handsome, free-natured girl, as you have heard, with bright dark
eyes and white teeth--who had helped to work the mischief between Maria
Lease and Daniel Ferrar which had led to Ferrar's dreadful death.
Humphrey Roe, Harriet's father, was half-brother to Miss Timmens and
Mrs. Hill; he had settled in France, and married a Frenchwoman. Miss
Harriet chose to call herself French, and politely said the English were
not fit to tie that nation's shoes. Perhaps that was why she had now
taken up with a cousin, Louis Roe. Not that Louis Roe was really French:
he had been born in France of English parents, and so was next door to
it. A fashionable-looking young man North Crabb considered him, for he
wore well-cut coats and a moustache. A moustache was a thing to be
stared at in simple country places then. It may have had something to
do with Miss Timmens's dislike to the young man. Louis Roe was only a
distant relative: a tenth cousin, or so; of whom Miss Timmens had heard
before, but never seen. When he appeared unexpectedly one January day
at the school-house (it was the January after Daniel Ferrar's death),
ostensibly to see Harriet, whom he had known in France, Miss Timmens,
between surprise and the moustache, was less gracious than she might
have been. From that time to this--March--he had (as Miss Timmens put
it) haunted the place, though chiefly taking up his abode at Worcester.
Harriet had struck into a flirtation with him at once, after her native
fashion: and now it was reported that they were going to be married.
Miss Timmens could not find out that he was doing anything for a living.
He talked of his fine "affaires" over in France: but when she questioned
him of what nature the "affaires" were, he either evaded her like an
eel, or gave rambling answers that she could make neither head nor tail
of. The way in which he and Harriet would jabber French in her presence,
not a word of which language could she comprehend, and the laughing
that went on at the same time, put Miss Timmens's back up worse than
anything, for she thought they were making game of her. She could be
tart when she pleased; and when that happened, the redness in the nose
and cheek grew redder. Very tart indeed was she, recounting these
grievances to Hannah.
"My firm belief, Hannah Baber, is, that he wants to get hold of Harriet
for her two-hundred pounds. She has that much, you know: it came to her
from her mother. Roe would rather play the gentleman than work. It is
the money he's after, not Harriet."
"The money may put him into some good way of business, and they may live
comfortably together," suggested Hannah.
"Pigs may fly," returned Miss Timmens. "There's something in that
young man, Hannah Baber, that I could not trust. Oh, but girls are
wilful!--and simple, at the best, where the men are concerned! They
can't see an inch beyond their noses: no, and they won't let others,
who have sight, see for them. Look there!"
Emerging into the spring sunshine from the withy walk, came the
gentleman in question; Harriet Roe in her gay ribbons at his side. Miss
Timmens gave her door a bang, regardless of good manners, and Hannah
pursued her way.