THE SEARCH.
Shrinking away from the body of the unhappy Grimjaw, and fleeing from
the solitary spot in which it lay, I ran down towards the Heronry,
where, in the distance, I could now perceive a number of persons
assembled upon the lake-side. Below and above it, the stream flowed on
as usual; but the larger area of water which contained the island, was
frozen over with a thin coating of ice. This was being broken by men
armed with long and heavy poles, after which the work of dragging the
water was commenced. The scene was as desolate as the occupation was
ghastly and depressing. Perched upon stony slabs of their now leafless
home, the huge birds watched the proceedings with grave and serious air:
at first, they imagined, I think, that the thing was done for their own
behoof, and to the end that they might supply themselves with fish as
usual; but the appearance of the grappling-irons disabused them of this
idea. Now one, and now another, unable to restrain their curiosity,
would rise slowly and warily into the air, and making a circuit over our
heads, return to their old position to reflect, with head aside, upon
what they had seen. The presence as spectators of these gigantic
creatures, certainly increased the weird and awful character of the
employment in which we were engaged, and struck quite a terror into the
village folk, who were unaccustomed to see them in such close proximity.
Still the work was not gone about by any means in reverent and solemn
silence. If any man wishes his neighbours to speak their mind about him
thoroughly and unreservedly, I should say, judging from what I heard on
that occasion, Let him disappear, and be dragged for. It is not so
certain he is dead, that any delicacy need be exercised in telling the
severest truths about him; nor yet is there sufficient chance of his
reappearance to make folks reticent through fear. Only when the drags
halted a little, meeting with some hidden obstruction, all tongues were
silent, and pale faces clustered about the toilers, expecting that the
dreadful thing they sought was about to be brought to land.
"I thought we had him then," said one of the men, after an occasion of
this sort; "but it was only a piece of stone."
"It might have been his _heart_, for all that," muttered another,
cynically; and a murmur of "Ay, that's true," went round them all.
"Has anybody been about the Home Spinney this morning?" inquired I of
Oliver Bradford, who had just given up his place at the ropes to a fresh
man.
"No, sir, nor last night either, as it turns out. It will be bad for
somebody if Sir Massingberd does return, and finds out that the watcher
who ought to have been there was wiled away elsewhere by what he thought
was poachers holloing to one another--some owl's cry, as I should judge.
And to-day, I doubt if a creature has been near the place, for none of
my men seem to fancy going there alone."
"And who _was_ the watcher there last night, Oliver?"
"Well, sir, we must not make mischief; he was a young chap new at the
business, a sort of grand-nevvy of mine by the wife's side. He'll do
better next time, will young Dick Westlock. He was over-eager, that's
all. And when you hear a cry in these woods, unless you are thoroughly
accustomed to them, it may lead you a pretty dance: it takes a practised
ear to tell rightly where it comes from."
"You should know me better, Bradford," returned I, "than to suppose I
would bring a lad to harm by mentioning such a matter; but I should like
to ask him a question or two, if you will point him out."
"There he is then, sir," answered Oliver, pointing to a good-looking,
honest lad enough, but one who perhaps would scarcely have been
considered sufficiently old for so trustworthy a part as sentinel of the
home preserves, had he not been grand-nephew to the head keeper.
"Why, Dick," said I, "your uncle telly me that you took an owl for a
poacher last night, and followed his voice all over the Chase."
"It wasn't no owl," sir, quoth Dick, stoutly; "it were the voice of a
man, whosoever it was."
"Don't thee be a fool," exclaimed his uncle, roughly. "I tell thee it
was a bird, and called like this;" and the keeper gave a very excellent
imitation of the cry of an owl.
This was not greatly unlike the sound which had so recently affrighted
my own ears; but then owls rarely cry in the daytime.
"Dick," cried I, "never mind your uncle; listen to me. If you thought it
was a human voice, what do you think it said?"
"Well, I can't rightly say as it said anything; it seemed to me to be a
sort of wobbling in the throat; and I thought it might be a sound among
some poaching fellars, made with a bird-call, or the like of that."
"Supposing it said any word at all, Dick, what word was it most like?"
Mr. Richard Westlock looked as nonplused and embarrassed as though I had
propounded to him some extremely complicated riddle.
"Was it anything like 'Hel--p, hel--p?'" said I, imitating as well as I
could those terrible tones.
"Bless my body," quoth Mr. Richard, slapping his legs with his hands, in
admiration of my sagacity, "if them ain't the very words as it _did_
say!"
"What think you of that, Oliver Bradford?" inquired I, gravely.
"As the bell tinks, so the fool thinks," responded the head keeper,
sententiously. "If you had asked Dick whether the word wasn't
'Jerusalem,' he would have said, 'Ay, that was the very word.'"
"Still," urged I, "since there may be something more than fancy in the
thing, and the voice, if it was one, could not have come from under
water, let the Park woods be thoroughly searched at once. There are men
enough outside the gates to do that, without suspending the work that is
going on here, and why should we lose time?"
The head keeper sulkily muttered something about not wanting a caddel of
people poking their noses into every part of Fairburn Chase; then with
earnest distinctness, as though the thought had only just struck him,
"Besides, Mr. Meredith, let me tell you that they may get to know more
than is good for them."
At these words, I cast an involuntary glance at the plantation within a
few hundred feet of us, in the recesses of which dwelt Sinnamenta, Lady
Heath.
"_You_ may know, sir," continued the keeper, translating my thought,
"but everybody don't know, and it's much better that they shouldn't."
Certainly the objection was a grave one, and I was glad enough to
perceive Mr. Long coming down from the Hall towards us, an authority by
whom the question could be decided.
"You had better ask him yourself, Oliver," said I; for as my tutor had
never spoken to me of the existence of the unfortunate maniac, I did not
like to address him upon the subject. Bradford therefore went forward to
meet him; and after they had had some talk together, Mr. Long beckoned
me to him.
"I think with you, Peter," said he, "that in any case, we should lose no
time in searching the Chase. If we do not discover what we seek, we can
scarcely fail to find some trace of a struggle, if struggle there has
been, between such a man as Sir Massingberd and whoever may have
assailed him. If he has been murdered, it is, of course, just possible
that the assassins threw the body into the water, although not here,
since the ice would scarcely have formed over it like this; otherwise,
they could not have removed it without leaving some visible trace. Do
you, Bradford, and a couple of your own men, examine that plantation
yonder thoroughly, so that it need not be searched again; and in the
meantime I will go and fetch more help."
I have taken part in my time in many a "quest" for game, both large and
little: I have sought on foot in the rook-crannies of the north for the
hill-fox; I have penetrated the tangled jungles of Hindustan for tiger;
I have stood alone, gun in hand, on the skirts of a tropical forest, not
knowing what bird or beast the beaters within might chance at any moment
to drive forth; but I have never experienced such excitement as that
which I felt when, one of forty men, I walked from end to end of
Fairburn Chase in search of its lost master.
In one long line, and at the distance of about twenty yards from one
another, we plodded on slowly and steadily; and with eyes that left no
bush unexamined. This work, which in summer would have been toil indeed,
was rendered comparatively easy by the bareness of the season; the
frost, too, made the swamps in the hollows safe to the tread, and the
tangled underwood brittle before us. Many a sunken spot we found hidden
in brake and brier, and scarcely known to the keepers themselves, such
as might easily have held, and we could not but think how fitly, the
Thing we feared to find, and sometimes, when one man called to his
neighbours, the whole line would halt, and each could scarcely restrain
himself from running in, and seeing with his own eyes what trace of the
missing man it was which had provoked the exclamation. We began at the
outskirts of the Park, and worked towards the Hall, so that the Home
Spinney, which was the likeliest spot of all, since he had been last
seen going in that direction, was reserved for the end. As the men
approached it, the excitement increased; they almost ran over the large
open space in which stood the Wolsey Oak, extending its gnarled and
naked arms aloft, as if in horror; but when they searched the coppice
itself, and found the body of Grimjaw, stiffened into stone since I last
saw it, many of them were not so eager to push on. I had omitted to tell
them of the wretched animal's death, and the effect of the sight upon
them was really considerable.
That "the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense," is in
nothing more true than in the emotion produced by the sufferings or
decease of animals upon gentle folks and upon labouring persons. Greater
familiarity with such spectacles, and perhaps, too, a larger experience
of hardship and sorrow among his own fellow-creatures--which naturally
tends to weaken his sense of pity for mere animals--prevents the peasant
from being moved at all by some sights at which his superiors would be
really shocked: a dead horse lying in the road is, to the stonebreaker,
a dead horse, and nothing more; whereas, to him who goes by on wheels,
unless he is a veterinary surgeon, the sight is positively distressing.
I am sure that the spectacle of half a dozen ordinary dead dogs would
not have affected Oliver Bradford, for instance, in the least, while if
they had been "lurchers," and given to poaching practices, such a
funereal scene would have afforded him unmixed satisfaction. But when he
saw Grimjaw lying dead, and frozen, he shook his head very gravely, and
bade us mark his words, "That that ere dog didn't die for nothing, but
for a sign. That he would never have died, not he, if his master and
constant companion had still had breath in him, and more than that, we
should find, we might take his word for it, that that there body, and
that of Sir Massingberd Heath, were not very far from one another."
There were murmurs of hushed and awe-struck adhesion to these remarks,
but not a dissentient voice in all the company, and in a frame of mind
which would now undoubtedly be called "sensational," and not in a broken
line of march, as heretofore, but almost shoulder to shoulder, we
entered the Home Spinney.