warm water. Taking out one of the pills she proceeded to crush it into
small bits, and then mixed it with the sugar. It formed a sort of paste.
Dose the first.
"That ain't moist enough, Hester Reed," pronounced Mrs. Dovey,
critically.
"No? I'll put a drop more warm water."
The water was added, and one of the children was fed with the delectable
compound--Hetty. Mrs. Dovey spoke again.
"Is it all for her? Won't a whole pill be too much for one, d'ye think?"
"Not a bit. When I asked old Abel whether one pill would be too much for
Georgy, he said, No--two wouldn't hurt him. I tell ye, Ann Dovey, the
pills be as mild as milk."
Hetty took in the whole dose by degrees. Susy had a similar one made
ready, and swallowed it in her turn. Then the two babies were conveyed
upstairs and put to bed side by side in their mother's room.
Mrs. Dovey, the ceremony being over, took her departure. George Reed
came in to his early supper, and soon afterwards he and his wife went
up to bed. Men who have to be up at five in the morning must go to rest
betimes. The fire and candle were put out, the doors locked, and the
cottage was steeped in quietness at a time when in larger houses the
evening was not much more than beginning.
How long she slept, Mrs. Reed could not tell. Whether it might be the
first part of the night, early or late, or whether morning might be
close upon the dawn, she knew not; but she was startled out of her
sleep by the cries of the babies. Awful cries, they seemed, coming from
children so young; and there could be no mistaking that each was in
terrible agony.
"Why, it's convulsions!" exclaimed George Reed, when he had lighted a
candle. "Both of them, too!"
Going downstairs as he was, he hastily lighted the kitchen fire and
put a kettle of water on. Then, dressing himself, he ran out for Mr.
Duffham. The doctor came in soon after George Reed had got back again.
Duffham was accustomed to scenes, and he entered on one now. Mrs. Reed,
in a state of distress, had put the babies in blankets and brought
them down to the kitchen fire; the three elder children, aroused
by the cries, had come down too, and were standing about in their
night-clothes, crying with fright. One of the babies was dead--Hetty.
She had just expired in her father's arms. The other was dying.
"What on earth have you been giving to these children?" exclaimed
Duffham, after taking a good look at the two.
"Oh, sir, what is it, please?" sobbed Mrs. Reed, in her terror.
"Convulsions?"
"Convulsions--no," said the doctor, in a fume. "It is something else, as
I believe--poison."
At which she set up a shriek that might have been heard out of doors.
"Well, Hetty was dead, I say;" and Duffham could not do anything to
save the other. It died whilst he stood there. Duffham repeated his
conjecture as to poison; and Mrs. Reed, all topsy-turvy though she was,
three-parts bereft of her senses, resented the implication almost
angrily.
"Poison!" cried she. "How can you think of such a thing, sir!"
"I tell you that to the best of my belief these children have both died
from some irritant poison," asserted Duffham, coolly imperative. "I ask
what you have been giving them?"
"They have not been well this three or four days past," replied she,
wandering from the point; not evasively, but in her mind's bewilderment.
"It must have been their teeth, sir; I thought they were cutting 'em
with fever."
"Did you give them any physic?"
"Yes, sir. A pill apiece when I put 'em to bed."
"Ah!" said Mr. Duffham. "What pill was it?"
"One of Abel Crew's."
This answer surprised him. Allowing that his suspicion of poison was
correct, he assumed that these pills must have contained it; and he had
never had cause to suppose that Abel Crew's pills were otherwise than
innocent.
Mrs. Reed, her voice broken by sobs, explained further in answer to his
questions, telling him how she had procured these pills from Abel Crew
some time before, and had given one of the said pills to each of the
babies. Duffham stood against the dresser, taking it all in with a
solemn face, his cane held up to his chin.
"Let me see this box of pills, Mrs. Reed."
She went upstairs to get it. A tidy woman in her ways, she had put the
box in its place again on the top of the press. Duffham took off the
lid, and examined the pills.
"Do you happen to have a bit of sealing-wax in the house, Reed?" he
asked presently.
George Reed, who had stood like a man bewildered, looking first on one,
then on the other of his dead little ones, answered that he had not. But
the eldest child, Annie, spoke up, saying that there was a piece in her
little work-box; Cathy had given it her last week when she was at home.
It was produced--part of a small stick of fancy wax, green and gold.
Duffham wrapped the pill-box up in the back of a letter that he took
from his pocket, and sealed it with a seal that hung to his watch-chain.
He put the parcel into the hand of George Reed.
"Take care of it," he said. "This will be wanted."
"There could not have been poison in them pills, sir," burst out Mrs.
Reed, her distress increasing at the possibility that he might be right.
"If there had been, they'd ha' poisoned me. One night I took three of
'em."
Duffham did not answer. He was nodding his head in answer to his own
thoughts.
"And who ever heard of Abel Crew mixing up poison in his pills?" went on
Mrs. Reed. "If you please, sir, I don't think he could do it."
"Well, that part of it puzzles me--how he came to do it," acknowledged
Duffham. "I like old Abel, and shall be sorry if it is proved that his
pills have done the mischief."
Mrs. Reed shook her head. She had more faith than that in Abel Crew.
* * * * *
Ever so many years before--for it was in the time of Sir Peter
Chavasse--there appeared one day a wanderer at Church Dykely. It was hot
weather, and he seemed to think nothing of camping out in the fields by
night, under the summer stars. Who he was, or what he was, or why he had
come, or why he stayed, nobody knew. He was evidently not a tramp, or a
gipsy, or a travelling tinker--quite superior to it all; a slender,
young, and silent man, with a pale and gentle face.
At one corner of the common, spreading itself between the village and
Chavasse Grange, there stood a covered wooden shed, formerly used to
impound stray cattle, but left to itself since the square space for
the new pound had been railed round. By-and-by it was found that the
wanderer had taken to this shed to sleep in. Next, his name leaked
out--"Abel Crew."
He lived how he could, and as simply as a hermit. Buying a penny loaf
at the baker's, and making his dinner of it with a handful of sorrel
plucked from the fields, and a drink from the rivulet that ran through
the wilderness outside the Chavasse grounds. His days were spent in
examining roots and wild herbs, now and then in digging one up; and his
nights chiefly in studying the stars. Sir Peter struck up a sort of
speaking acquaintanceship with him, and, it was said, was surprised
at his stock of knowledge and the extent of his travels; for he knew
personally many foreign places where even Sir Peter himself had never
been. That may have caused Sir Peter--who was lord of the manor and of
the common included--to tolerate in him what it was supposed he would
not in others. Anyway, when Abel Crew began to dig the ground about his
shed, and plant roots and herbs in it, Sir Peter let him do it and never
interfered. It was quite the opposite; for Sir Peter would sometimes
stand to watch him at his work, talking the while.
In the course of time there was quite an extensive garden round the
shed--comparatively speaking, you know, for we do not expect to see a
shed garden as large as that of a mansion. It was fenced in with a hedge
and wooden palings, all the work of Abel Crew's hands. Sir Peter was
dead then; but Lady Chavasse, guardian to the young heir, Sir Geoffrey,
extended to him the same favour that her husband had, and, if she did
not absolutely sanction what he was doing, she at any rate did not
oppose it. Abel Crew filled his garden with rare and choice and useful
field herbs, the valuable properties of which he alone understood;
and of ordinary sweet flowers, such as bees love to suck. He set up
bee-hives and sold the honey; he distilled lavender and bergamot for
perfumes; he converted his herbs and roots into medicines, which he
supplied to the poor people around, charging so small a price for them
that it could scarcely more than cover the cost of making, and not
charging at all the very poor. At the end of about ten years from
his first appearance, he took down the old shed, and built up a more
convenient cottage in its place, doing it all with his own pair of
hands. And the years went on and on, and Abel Crew and his cottage, and
his herbs, and his flowers, and his bees, and his medicines, were just
as much of an institution in the parish as was the Grange itself.
He and I became good friends. I liked him. You have heard how I take
likes and dislikes to faces, and I rarely saw a face that I liked as I
liked Abel Crew's. Not for its beauty, though it really was beautiful,
with its perfect shape and delicately carved features; but for its
unmistakable look of goodness and its innate refinement: perhaps also
for the deep, far-seeing, and often _sad_ expression that sat in the
earnest eyes. He was old now--sixty, I dare say; tall, slender, and very
upright still; his white hair brushed back from his forehead and worn
rather long. What his original condition of life might have been did not
transpire; he never talked of it. More than once I had seen him reading
Latin books; and though he fell into the diction of the country people
around when talking with them, he changed his tones and language when
conversing with his betters. A character, no doubt, he was, but a man to
be respected; a man of religion, too--attending church regularly twice
on a Sunday, wet or dry, and carrying his religion into the little
things of everyday life.
His style of dress was old-fashioned and peculiar. So far as I saw, it
never varied. A stout coat, waistcoat, and breeches every day, all of
one colour--drab; with leathern gaiters buttoned nearly to the knee. On
Sundays he wore a suit of black silk velvet, and a frilled shirt of fine
cambric. His breeches were tied at the knee with black ribbon, in which
was a plain, glistening steel buckle; buckles to match shone in his
shoes. His stockings were black, and in the winter he wore black-cloth
gaiters. In short, on Sundays Abel Crew looked like a fine old-fashioned
English gentleman, and would have been taken for one. The woman who got
up his linen declared he was more particular over his shirt-frills than
Sir Peter himself.
Strangers in the place would sometimes ask what he was. The answer was
not easy to give. He was a botanist and herbalist, and made pills, and
mixtures, and perfumes, and sold honey, and had built his cottage and
planted out his garden, and lived alone, cooking his food and waiting
on himself; doing all in fact with his own hands, and was very modest
always. On the other side, he had travelled in his youth, he understood
paintings, studied the stars, read his store of Latin and classical
books, and now and then bought more, and was as good a doctor as Duffham
himself. Some people said a better one. Certain it was, that more than
once when legitimate medical nostrums had failed--calomel and blisters
and bleeding--Abel Crew's simple decoctions and leaves had worked a
cure. Look at young Mrs. Sterling at the Court. When that first baby of
hers came to town--and a fine squalling young brat he was, with a mouth
like a crocodile's!--gatherings arose in her chest or somewhere, one
after another; it was said the agony was awful. Duffham's skill seemed
to have gone a blackberrying, the other doctor's also, for neither of
the two could do anything for her, and the Court thought she would have
died of it. Upon that, some relation of old Sterling's was summoned from
London--a great physician in great practice. He came in answer, and was
liberal with his advice, telling them to try this and to try the other.
But it did no good; and she only grew worse. When they were all in
despair, seeing her increasing weakness and the prolonged pain, the
woman who nursed her spoke of old Abel Crew; she had known him cure in
these cases when the doctor could not; and the poor young lady, willing
to catch at a straw, told them to send for Abel Crew. Abel Crew took
a prepared plaster of herbs with him, green leaves of some sort, and
applied it. That night the patient slept more easily than she had for
weeks; and in a short time was well again.
But, skilful though he seemed to be in the science of herbs, as remedies
for sickness and sores, Abel Crew never obtruded himself upon the
ailing, or took money for his advice, or willingly interfered with
the province of Duffham; he never would do it unless compelled in the
interests of humanity. The patients he chiefly treated were the poor,
those who could not have paid Duffham a coin worth thinking about.
Duffham knew this. And, instead of being jealous of him, as some medical
men might have been, or ridiculing him for a quack, Duffham liked and
respected old Abel Crew. He was simple in his habits still: living
chiefly upon bread and butter, with radishes or mustard and cress for
a relish, cooking vegetables for his dinner, but rarely meat: and his
drink was tea or spring water.
So that Abel Crew was rather a notable character amongst us; and when it
was known abroad that two of his pills had caused the death of Mrs.
Reed's twins, there arose no end of a commotion.
It chanced that the same night this occurred, just about the time in
fact that the unfortunate infants were taking down the pills under the
superintendence of their mother and the blacksmith's wife, Abel Crew met
with an accident; though it was curious enough that it should be so. In
taking a pan of boiling herbs off the fire, he let one of the handles
slip out of his fingers; it sent the pan down on that side, spilled a
lot of the stuff, and scalded his left foot on the instep. Therefore he
was about the last person to hear of the calamity; for his door was not
open as usual the following morning, and no one knocked to tell him of
it.
Duffham was the first. Passing by on his morning rounds, the doctor
heard the comments of the people, and it arrested him. It was so unusual
a thing for Abel Crew not to be about, and for his door to be closed,
that some of them had been arriving at a sensible conclusion--Abel Crew,
knowing the mischief his pills had done, was shutting himself up within
the house, unable to face his neighbours.
"Rubbish!" said Duffham. And he strode up the garden-path, knocked at
the door with his cane, and entered. Abel had dressed, but was lying
down on the bed again to rest his lame foot.
Duffham would have asked to look at it, but that he knew Abel Crew was
as good at burns and scalds as he himself was. It had been doctored at
once, and was now wrapped up in a handkerchief.
"The fire is nearly out of it," said Abel, "but it must have rest; by
to-night I shall be able to dress it with my healing-salve. I am much
obliged to you for coming in, sir: though in truth I don't know how you
could have heard of the accident."
"Ah! news flies," said Duffham, evasively, knowing that he had not heard
of the foot, or the neighbours either, and had come in for something
altogether different. "What is this about the pills?"
"About the pills?" repeated Abel Crew, who had got up out of respect,
and was putting on his coat. "What pills, sir?"
The doctor told him what had happened. Hester Reed had given one of his
pills to each of her babies, and both had died of it. Abel Crew listened
quietly; his face and his eyes fixed on Duffham.
"The children cannot have died of the pills," said he, speaking as
gently as you please. "Something else must have killed them."
"According to Hester Reed's account, nothing can have done it but the
pills," said Duffham. "The children had only taken their ordinary food
throughout the day, and very little of that. George Reed came running to
me in the night, but it was too late; one was dead before I got there.
There could be no mistaking the children's symptoms--that both were
poisoned."
"This is very strange," exclaimed Abel, looking troubled. "By what kind
of poison?"
"Arsenic, I think. I----"
But here they were interrupted. Dovey, the blacksmith, hearing of the
calamity, together with the fact that it was his wife who had assisted
in administering the suspected doses, deemed it his duty to look into
the affair a little, and to resent it. He had left his forge and a bar
of iron red-hot in it, and come tearing along in his leather apron, his
shirt-sleeves stripped up to the elbow, and his arms grimy. A dark-eyed,
good-natured little man in general, was Dovey, but exploding with rage
at the present moment.
"Now then, Abel Crew, what do you mean by selling pills to poison
people?" demanded he, pushing back the door with a bang, and stepping
in fiercely. Duffham, foreseeing there was going to be a contest, and
having no time to waste, took his departure.
"I have not sold pills to poison people," replied Abel.
"Look here," said Dovey, folding his black arms. "Be you going to eat
them pills, or be you not? Come!"
"What do you mean, Dovey?"
"What do I mean! Ain't my meaning plain? Do you own to having selled a
box of pills to Hester Reed last winter?--be you thinking to eat that
there fact, and deny of it? Come, Abel Crew!"
"I remember it well," readily spoke up Abel. "Mrs. Reed came here one
day, complaining that her head ached continually, and her side often had
a dull pain in it, and asked me to give her something. I did so; I gave
her a box of pills. It was early in January, I think. I know there was
ice on the ground."
"Then do you own to them pills," returned Dovey, more quietly, his
fierceness subdued by Abel's civility. "It were you that furnished 'em?"
"I furnished the box of pills I speak of, that Hester Reed had from me
in the winter. There's no mistake about that."
"And made 'em too?"
"Yes, and made them."
"Well, I'm glad to hear you say that; and now don't you go for to eat
your words later, Abel Crew. Our Ann, my wife, helped to give them there
two pills to the children; and I'm not a-going to let her get into
trouble over it. You've confessed to the pills, and I'm a witness."
"My pills did not kill the children, Dovey," said Abel, in a pleasant
tone, resting his lame foot upon an opposite chair.
"Not kill 'em?"
"No, that they did not. I've not made pills all these years to poison
children at last."
"But what done it if the pills didn't?"
"How can I say? 'Twasn't my pills."
"Dr. Duffham says it was the pills. And he----"
"Dr. Duffham says it was?"
"Reed telled me that the doctor asked outright, all in a flurry, what
his wife had gave the babies, and she said she had gave 'em nothing but
them there two pills of Abel Crew's. Duffham said the pills must have
had poison in 'em, and he asked for the box; and Hester Reed, she give
him the box, and he sealed it up afore their eyes with his own seal."
Abel nodded. He knew that any suspected medicine must in such a case be
sealed up.
"And now that I've got that there word from ye, I'll say good-day to
ye, neighbour, for I've left my forge to itself, and some red-hot iron
in it. And I hope with all my heart and mind,"--the blacksmith turned
round from the door to say more kindly, his good-nature cropping up
again,--"that it'll turn out it _warn't_ the pills, but some'at else:
our Ann won't have no cause to be in a fright then." Which was as much
as to say that Ann Dovey was frightened, you observe.
That same afternoon, going past the common, I saw Abel Crew in his
garden, sitting against the cottage wall in the sun, his foot resting on
a block of wood.
"How did it all happen, Abel?" I asked, turning in at the gate. "Did you
give Mrs. Reed the wrong pills?"
"No, sir," he answered, "I gave her the right pills; the pills I make
expressly for such complaints as hers. But if I had, in one sense, given
her the wrong, they could not have brought about any ill effect such as
this, for my pills are all innocent of poison."
"I should say it could not have been the pills that did the mischief,
after all, then."
"You might swear it as well, Master Johnny, with perfect safety. What
killed the poor children, I don't pretend to know, but my pills never
did. I tried to get down as far as Reed's to inquire particulars, and
found I could not walk. It was a bit of ill-luck, disabling myself just
at this time."
"Shall you have to appear at the inquest to-morrow?"
He lifted his head quickly at the question--as though it surprised him.
Perhaps not having cast his thoughts that way.
"Is there to be an inquest, Master Johnny?"
"I heard so from old Jones. He has gone over to see the coroner."
"Well, I wish the investigation was all over and done with," said he.
"It makes me uneasy, though I know I am innocent."
Looking at him sitting there in the sun, at his beautiful face with its
truthful eyes and its silver hair, it was next to impossible to believe
he could be the author of the two children's death. Only--the best of us
are liable to mistakes, and sometimes make them. I said as much.
"_I_ made none, Master Johnny," was his answer. "When my pills come to
be analyzed--as of course they must be--they will be found wholesome and
innocent."
* * * * *
The inquest did not take place till the Friday. Old Jones had fixed it
for the Thursday, but the coroner put it off to the next day. And by the
time Friday morning dawned, opinion had veered round, and was strongly
in favour of Abel Crew. All the parish had been to see him; and his
protestations, that he had never in his life put any kind of poison into
his medicines, made a great impression. The pills could not have been in
fault, said everybody. Dr. Duffham might have sealed them up as a matter
of precaution, but the mischief would not be found there.
In the middle of Church Dykely, next door to Perkins the butcher's,
stood the Silver Bear Inn; a better sort of public-house, kept by Henry
Rimmer. It was there that the inquest was held. Henry Rimmer himself and
Perkins the butcher were two of the jurymen. Dobbs the blacksmith was
another. They all dressed themselves in their Sunday-going clothes to
attend it. It was called for two in the afternoon; and soon after that
hour the county coroner (who had dashed up to the Silver Bear in a fast
gig, his clerk driving) and the jury trooped down to George Reed's
cottage and took a look at the two pale little faces lying there side by
side. Then they went back again, and the proceedings began.
Of course as many spectators went crowding into the room as it would
hold. Three or four chairs were there (besides those occupied by the
jury at the table), and a bench stood against the wall. The bench was
speedily fought for and filled; but Henry Rimmer's brother, constituting
himself master of the ceremonies, reserved the chairs for what he called
the "big people," meaning those of importance in the place. The Squire
was bowed into one; and to my surprise I had another. Why, I could not
imagine, unless it was that they remembered I was the owner of George
Reed's cottage. But I did not like to sit down when so many older
persons were standing, and I would not take the chair.
Some little time was occupied with preliminaries before what might be
called the actual inquest set in. First of all, the coroner flew into a
passion because Abel Crew had not put in an appearance, asking old Jones
if he supposed that was the way justice must be administered in England,
and that he ought to have had Crew present. Old Jones who was in a
regular fluster with it all, and his legs more gouty than ever, told the
coroner, calling him "his worship," that he had understood Crew meant to
be present. Upon which the coroner sharply answered that "understanding"
went for nothing, and Jones should know his business better.
However, in walked Abel Crew in the midst of the contest. His delayed
arrival was caused by his difficulty in getting his damaged foot there;
which had been accomplished by the help of a stick and somebody's arm.
Abel had dressed himself in his black velvet suit; and as he took off
his hat on entering and bowed respectfully to the coroner, I declare he
could not be taken for anything but a courtly gentleman of the old
school. Nobody offered him a chair. I wished I had not given up mine: he
should have had it.