by Ellen Wood
“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 befor
e 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.
