look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood,
dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep
beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath
over-arching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of
unseen companions. Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern,
followed her glance.
"That's where they are," she said casually. "They like being in the
dark."
"Joan!" Joyce spoke earnestly. "Say truly truly, mind! do you think
there is wood-ladies at all?"
"'Course there is," replied Joan, cheerfully. "Fairies in fields and
angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods."
"But," objected Joyce, "nobody ever sees them."
Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with
innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns.
She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and
Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were
brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.
"There's one now," she said, and fell to work with her fern again.
Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread
and curiosity the child's avid curiosity for the supernatural alight
in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the
shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague
movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a
flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that
passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed
to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of
a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway towards her. There was an
impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and
fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of
the wood; and as she drew her breath, it was all no more. The trees,
the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but
something was gone from them.
"Joan!" she cried, hesitating.
"Yes," said Joan, without looking up. "What?"
The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that
she had seen anything.
"I thought, just now, I could see something," she said. "But I s'pose
I didn't."
"I did," remarked Joan.
Joyce crawled through the crisp ferns till she was close to Joan,
sitting solid and untroubled and busy upon the ground, with broken
stems and leaves all round her.
"Joan," she begged. "Be nice. You're trying to frighten me, aren't
you?"
"I'm not," protested Joan. "I did see a wood-lady. Wood-ladies
doesn't hurt you; wood-ladies are nice. You're a coward, Joyce."
"I can't help it," said Joyce, sighing. "But I won't go into the dark
spots of the wood any more."
"Coward," repeated Joan absently, but with a certain relish.
"You wouldn't like to go there by yourself!" cried Joyce. "If I
wasn't with you, you'd be a coward, too. You know you would."
She stopped, for Joan had swept her lap free of debris and was rising
to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile softness, had
a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her mettle. She
eyed her sister with a calm and very galling superiority.
"I'm going there now," she answered; "all by mineself."
"Go, then!" retorted Joyce, angrily.
Without a further word Joan turned her back and began to plough her
way across the ferns towards the dark wood. Joyce, watching her, saw
her go at first with wrath, for she had been stung, and then with
compunction. The plump baby was so small in the brooding solemnity of
the pines, thrusting indefatigably along, buried to the waist in
ferns. Her sleek, brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her
seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence towards those peopled and
uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back.
"Joan!" she cried. The baby turned. "Joan! Come back; come back an'
be friends!"
Joan, maintaining her offing, replied with a gesture. It was a
gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had
once been spanked for practicing it on the piano-tuner. The
boot-and-knife boy called it "cocking a snook," and it consisted in
raising a thumb to one's nose and spreading the fingers out. It was
defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on.
The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew
its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed
through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock,
and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood
closed behind her like a lid.
Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift
from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for
her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even
when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood
was a place to which they came every day.
"Besides," she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort;
"besides, there can't be such things as wood-ladies, really."
But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny
stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural;
the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and
nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a
blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The under-note of
alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to
spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the
morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her, and presently
there came Mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her
babies.
"Isn't there a clock inside you that tells you when it's lunch time?"
asked Mother. "You're ever so late. Where's Joan?"
Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy perplexity
on her face. It was difficult to speak even to Mother about
wood-ladies without a pretence of skepticism.
"I forgot about lunch," she said, taking the slim, cool hand which
Mother held out to her. "Joan's in there." She nodded at the bushes.
"Is she?" said Mother, and called aloud in her singing voice that was
so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. "Joan! Joan!"
A cheeky bird answered with a whistle, and Mother called again.
"She said," explained Joyce; "she said she saw a wood-lady, and then
she went in there to show me she wasn't afraid."
"What's a wood-lady, chick?" asked Mother. "The rascal!" she said,
smiling, when Joyce had explained as best she could. "We'll have to
go and look for her."
They went hand in hand, and Mother showed herself clever in parting a
path among the bushes. She managed so that no bough sprang back to
strike Joyce, and without tearing or soiling her own soft, white
dress; one could guess that when she had been a little girl she, too,
had had a wood to play in. They cut down by the Secret Pond, where
the old rhododendrons were, and out to the edge of the fields; and
when they paused Mother would lift her head and call again, and her
voice rang in the wood like a bell. By the pond, which was a black
water with steep banks, she paused and showed a serious face; but
there were no marks of shoes on its clay slopes, and she shook her
head and went on. But to all the calling there was no answer, no
distant cheery bellow to guide them to Joan.
"I wish she wouldn't play these tricks," said Mother. "I don't like
them a bit."
"I expect she's hiding," said Joyce. "There aren't wood-ladies
really, are there, Mother?"
"There's nothing worse in these woods than a rather naughty baby,"
Mother replied. "We'll go back by the path and call her again."
Joyce knew that the hand which held hers tightened as they went, and
there was still no answer to Mother's calling. She could not have
told what it was that made her suddenly breathless; the wood about
her turned desolate; an oppression of distress and bewilderment
burdened them both. "Joan! Joan!" called Mother in her strong
beautiful contralto, swelling the word forth in powerful music, and
when she ceased the silence was like a taunt. It was not as if Joan
were there and failed to answer; it was as if there were no longer
any Joan anywhere. They came at last to the space of sparse trees
which bordered their garden.
"We mustn't be silly about this," said Mother, speaking as much to
herself as to Joyce. "Nothing can have happened to her. And you must
have lunch, chick."
"Without waiting for Joan?" asked Joyce.
"Yes. The gardener and the boot-boy must look for Joan," said Mother,
opening the gate.
The dining-room looked very secure and homelike, with its big window
and its cheerful table spread for lunch. Joyce's place faced the
window, so that she could see the lawn and the hedge bounding the
kitchen garden; and when Mother had served her with food, she was
left alone to eat it. Presently the gardener and the boot-boy passed
the window, each carrying a hedge-stake and looking war-like. There
reached her a murmur of voices; the gardener was mumbling something
about tramps.
"Oh, I don't think so," replied Mother's voice.
Mother came in presently and sat down, but did not eat anything.
Joyce asked her why.
"Oh, I shall have some lunch when Joan comes," answered Mother. "I
shan't be hungry till then. Will you have some more, my pet?"
When Joyce had finished, they went out again to the wood to meet Joan
when she was brought back in custody. Mother walked quite slowly,
looking all the time as if she would like to run. Joyce held her hand
and sometimes glanced up at her face, so full of wonder and a sort of
resentful doubt, as though circumstances were playing an unmannerly
trick on her. At the gate they came across the boot-boy.
"I bin all acrost that way," said the boot-boy, pointing with his
stumpy black forefinger, "and then acrost that way, an' Mister Jenks"
Jenks was the gardener "'e've gone about in rings, 'e 'ave. And there
ain't no sign nor token, mum, not a sign there ain't."
From behind him sounded the voice of the gardener, thrashing among
the trees. "Miss Joan!" he roared. "Hi! Miss Jo-an! You're
a-frightin' your Ma proper. Where are ye, then?"
"She must be hiding," said Mother. "You must go on looking, Walter.
You must go on looking till you find her."
"Yes'm," said Walter. "If's she's in there us'll find her, soon or
late."
He ran off, and presently his voice was joined to Jenks's, calling
Joan calling, calling, and getting no answer.
Mother took Joyce's hand again.
"Come," she said. "We'll walk round by the path, and you must tell me
again how it all happened. Did you really see something when Joan
told you to look?"
"I expect I didn't," replied Joyce, dolefully. "But Joan's always
saying there's a fairy or something in the shadows, and I always
think I see them for a moment."
"It couldn't have been a live woman or a man that you saw?"
"Oh, no!" Joyce was positive of that. Mother's hand tightened on hers
understandingly, and they went on in silence till they met Jenks.
Jenks was an oldish man with bushy grey whiskers, who never wore a
coat, and now he was wet to the loins with mud and water.
"That there ol' pond," he explained. "I've been an' took a look at
her. Tromped through her proper, I did, an' I'll go bail there ain't
so much as a dead cat in all the mud of her. Thish yer's a mistry,
mum, an' no mistake."
Mother stared at him. "I can't bear this," she said suddenly. "You
must go on searching, Jenks, and Walter must go on his bicycle to the
police station at once. Call him, please!"
"Walter!" roared Jenks obediently.
"Comin'!" answered the boot-boy, and burst forth from the bushes. In
swift, clear words, which no stupidity could mistake or forget,
Mother gave him his orders, spoken in a tone that meant urgency.
Walter went flying to execute them.
"Oh, Mother, where do you think Joan can be?" begged Joyce when Jenks
had gone off to resume his search:
"I don't know," said Mother. "It's all so absurd."
"If there was wood-ladies, they wouldn't hurt a baby like Joan,"
suggested Joyce.
"Oh, who could hurt her!" cried Mother, and fell to calling again.
Her voice, of which each accent was music, alternated with the harsh
roars of Jenks.
Walter on his bicycle must have hurried, in spite of his permanently
punctured front tire, for it was a very short time before bells rang
in the steep lane from the road and Superintendent Farrow himself
wheeled his machine in at the gate, massive and self-possessed, a
blue-clad minister of comfort. He heard Mother's tale, which embodied
that of Joyce, with a half-smile lurking in his moustache and his big
chin creased back against his collar. Then he nodded, exactly as if
he saw through the whole business and could find Joan in a minute or
two, and propped his bicycle against the fence.
"I understand, then," he said, "that the little girl's been missing
for rather more than an hour. In that case, she can't have got far. I
sent a couple o' constables round the roads be'ind the wood before I
started, an' now I'll just 'ave a look through the wood myself."
"Thank you," said Mother. "I don't know why I'm so nervous, but--."
"Very natural, ma'am," said the big superintendent, comfortingly, and
went with them to the wood.
It was rather thrilling to go with him and watch him. Joyce and
Mother had to show him the place from which Joan had started and the
spot at which she had disappeared. He looked at them hard, frowning a
little and nodding to himself, and went stalking mightily among the
ferns. "It was 'ere she went?" he inquired, as he reached the dark
path, and being assured that it was, he thrust in and commenced his
search. The pond seemed to give him ideas, which old Jenks disposed
of, and he marched on till he came out to the edge of the fields,
where the hay was yet uncut. Joan could not have crossed them without
leaving a track in the tall grass as clear as a cart-rut.
"We 'ave to consider the possibilities of the matter," said the
superintendent. "Assumin' that the wood 'as been thoroughly searched,
where did she get out of it?"
"Searched!" growled old Jenks. "There ain't a inch as I 'aven't
searched an' seen, not a inch."
"The kidnappin' the'ry," went on the superintendent, ignoring him and
turning to Mother, "I don't incline to. 'Owever, we must go to work
in order, an' I'll 'ave my men up 'ere and make sure of the wood. All
gypsies an' tramps will be stopped and interrogated. I don't think
there's no cause for you to feel anxious, ma'am. I 'ope to 'ave some
news for you in the course of the afternoon."
They watched him free-wheel down the lane and shoot round the corner.
"Oh, dear," said Mother, then: "Why doesn't the baby come? I wish
Daddy weren't away."
Now that the police had entered the affair Joyce felt that there
remained nothing to be done. Uniformed authority was in charge of
events; it could not fail to find Joan. She had a vision of the
police at work, stopping straggling families of tramps on distant
by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles,
flashing the official bull's eye lantern into the mysterious interior
of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly women give an
account of their wanderings. No limits to which they would not go;
how could they fail? She wished their success seemed as inevitable to
her mother as it did to her.
"They're sure to bring her back, Mother," she repeated.
"Oh, chick," said Mother, "I keep telling myself so. But I wish I
wish."
"What, Mother?"
"I wish," said Mother in a sudden burst of speech, as if she were
confessing something that troubled her; "I wish you hadn't seen that
wood-lady."
The tall young constables and the plump fatherly sergeant annoyed old
Jenks by searching the wood as though he had done nothing. It was a
real search this time. Each of them took a part of the ground and
went over it as though he were looking for a needle which had been
lost, and no fewer than three of them trod every inch of the bottom
of the Secret Pond. They took shovels and opened up an old fox's
earth; and a sad-looking man in shabby plain clothes arrived and
walked about smoking a pipe a detective! Up from the village, too,
came the big young curate and the squire's two sons, civil and
sympathetic and eager to be helpful; they all thought it natural that
Mother should be anxious, but refused to credit for an instant that
anything could have happened to Joyce.
"That baby!" urged the curate. "Why, my dear lady, Joan is better
known hereabouts than King George himself. No one could take her a
mile without having to answer questions. I don't know what's keeping
her, but you may be sure she's all right."
"Course she is," chorused the others, swinging their sticks
lightheartedly. "'Course she's all right."
"Get her for me, then," said Mother. "I don't want to be silly, and
you're awfully good. But I must have her; I must have her. I, I want
her."
The squire's sons turned as if on an order and went towards the wood.
The curate lingered a moment. He was a huge youth, an athlete and a
gentleman, and his hard clean-shaven face could be kind and serious.
"We're sure to get her," he said in lower tones. "And you must help
us with your faith and courage. Can you?"
Mother's hand tightened on that of Joyce.
"We are doing our best," she said, and smiled she smiled. The curate
nodded and went his way to the wood.
A little later in the afternoon came Colonel Warden, the lord and
master of all the police in the county, a gay trim soldier whom the
children knew and liked. With him, in his big automobile, were more
policemen and a pair of queer liver-colored dogs, all baggy skin and
bleary eyes bloodhounds! Joyce felt that this really must settle it.
Actual living bloodhounds would be more than a match for Joan.
Colonel Warden was sure of it too.
"Saves time," he was telling Mother in his high snappy voice. "Shows
us which way she's gone, you know. Best hounds in the country, these
two; never known 'em fail yet."
The dogs were limp and quiet as he led them through the wood, strange
ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A
pinafore, which Joan had worn at breakfast, was served to them for an
indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly
for some seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.
They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till
one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry.
Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across
the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce's hand, followed. The hounds
made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had
entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and
crashed after them. Joyce and Mother came up with them at a place
where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf
that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and
scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without
interest about him.
"Dash it all," the colonel was saying; "she can't she simply can't
have been kidnapped in a balloon."
They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result.
They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up
as though the scent went no farther. Nothing could induce them to
hunt beyond it.
"I can't understand this," said Colonel Warden, dragging at his
moustache. "This is queer." He stood glancing, around him as though
the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.
The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to
bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by
scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to
thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the countryside. Joyce
found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.
"I know inside myself," she told Mother, "right down deep in the
middle of me, that Joan's all right."
"Bless you, my chick," said poor Mother. "I wish I could feel like
that. Go to bed now, like a good girl."
There was discomfort in the sight of Joan's railed cot standing empty
in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to
be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during
the night Mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream,
too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could not remember
much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning,
being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan, and Nurse
was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been
crying.
Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night,
"till she broke down, poor thing," said Nurse, and Joyce was bidden
to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But Mother was about again
at lunch time when Joyce went down to the dining room. She was very
pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow t she seemed
suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce's age, than ever
before. They kissed each other, and the child would have tried to
comfort.
"No," said Mother, shaking her head. "No dear. Don't let's be sorry
for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven't
done that, have we?"
"I haven't," said Joyce. "I know it's all right."
After lunch again Mother said she wouldn't be hungry till Joan came
home they went out together. There were no searchers now in the wood
and the garden was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and
they were away, combing the countryside and spreading terror among
the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn, and the smell of the
roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge, the land rolled away to
clear perspectives of peace and beauty.
"Let's walk up and down," suggested Mother. "Anything's better than
sitting still. And don't talk, chick not just now."
They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which
led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence.
It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the
gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved arm
thrust the gate open, and there advanced into the sunlight, coming
forth from the shadow as from a doorway Joan! Her round baby face,
with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body, the
sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a deep
sigh it sounded like that and in a moment she was kneeling on the
ground with her arms round the baby.
"Joan, Joan," she said over and over again. "My little, little baby!"
Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free, and then
rubbed her eyes drowsily.
"Hallo!" she said.
"But where have you been?" cried Mother. "Baby-girl, where have you
been all this time?"
Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm towards the wood, the
wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. "In
there," she answered carelessly. "Wiv the wood-ladies. I'm hungry!"
"My darling!" said Mother, and picked her up and carried her into the
house.
In the dining-room, with Mother at her side and Joyce opposite to
her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workmanlike fashion, and
between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only served to
darken the mystery of her absence.
"But there aren't any wood-ladies really, darling," remonstrated
Mother.
"There is," said Joan. "There's lots. They wanted to keep me but I
wouldn't stay. So I comed home, 'cause I was hungry."
"But," began Mother. "Where did they take you to?" she asked.
"I don't know," said Joan. "The one what I went to speak to gave me
her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a
place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they
gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!"
"Yes," said Mother. "What else?"
"There was anuvver little girl there," went on Joan. "Not a wood-lady
but a girl like me, what they'd tooked from somewhere. She was
wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they wanted me to
put one on too. But I wouldn't."
"Why wouldn't you?" asked Joyce.
"'Cause I didn't want to be a wood-lady," replied Joan.
"Listen to me, darling," said Mother. "Didn't these people whom you
call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the whole
wood, you know, and you weren't there at all."