NED MITCHELL was not the sort of man to waste much time in the indulgence of an outbreak of passion. After a few minutes’ contemplation of the dead bodies of his hounds, he pulled himself together and prepared for action. There had flashed into his mind the recollection of the evening on which his illness began. He had forgotten until that moment all the details of his arrival home, his groping about for a light, the sounds he had heard as of a person moving in one of the rooms, and the glimpse he had caught of an opening door as he fell senseless to the floor. It now occurred to him for the first time, as he went over the small incidents of that night one by one, that the fall from the effects of which he was suffering was caused by a heavy blow from some one who had forced an entrance into the little cottage during his absence.
“A murderous blow!” he muttered to himself as—alone, in the dusk, with his dead hounds encumbering the ground at his feet—he staggered along by the walls, reproducing the sensations he had felt just before his fall. “It must have been in here that he was hidden,” he went on to himself, as he found himself at the door of the room where he had first kept his hounds. “For it was on my right hand as I came in that I heard the noise; I am sure of it.” Speaking thus, slowly, to himself, he at last turned the handle and went into the unused room. It was musty and close, and he had to open the windows before he could breathe easily. He had a match box in his pocket; striking a light, he examined every corner of the empty room with the utmost care, and discovered at last, close to the wall in a nook where the light from the windows scarcely penetrated, two dried-up, evil-smelling scraps of meat. “Ah!” said he to himself. “Poisoned, of course! And as the first attempt wouldn’t do, he had to try again.”
He removed the meat carefully from the room, and hid it away for further examination. Poor, trembling Mrs. Wall having by this time returned to her place in the kitchen, he went in and asked her, in a dry voice, if she had heard anybody about the place in his absence.
“No, sir,” quavered she. “Indeed I didn’t.”
“You were out, of course?”
“No, sir; at least, I’d only gone just half-way down t’ hill as far as t’ post office, to get in a pound of sugar because you’re out of it, sir; and I give you my word, sir, I’d never ha’ gone if I hadn’t ha’ thought as Abel was upstairs, and—”
“And you came back just a minute or two before I did?”
“Yes, sir; not so very long.”
“Not long at all, or you’d have had the whole village up here, poking and prying into every corner, I know,” said Ned, grimly. “And when you opened the door you saw the dogs lying as they are lying now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’ve heard nobody about?”
“No, sir; at least, no, not to-day.”
“Not to-day! Then you have heard somebody in the place since I’ve been ill?”
“Oh, no, sir, not nobody to matter—nobody at all. Only one day, as I wur talking to Miss Denison from t’ Hall, as wur at t’ door asking about you, I wur pushed aside quite sudden like; and when I looked it wur parson Brander.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper as she uttered the name. For in spite of her cautious way of putting it, Sarah Wall felt a decided suspicion that the Vicar of St. Cuthbert’s, against whom her prejudice was strong, was at the root of this business.
“I don’t know where he come from, sir,” she croaked on, rather mysteriously. “But it wasn’t through t’ door, for it wur on t’ chain.”
Ned, having got out of her all she had tell, turned with an abrupt nod, left the kitchen, and again went out into the garden. Abel Squires, who was hobbling up the hill on his crutch, redoubled his pace when he saw his master at the gate.
“So ye’re aht, Ah see,” he called out, as soon as he was near enough. “Ah guessed how ’t would be as soon as ma back wur turned.”
As he drew nearer he saw by his master’s face, not only that he was greatly fatigued, but that something serious had happened.
In a few short sentences Ned told him the events which had occurred in his absence: his visit to St. Cuthbert’s, the finding of the dogs’ bodies, and the discovery of meat which he believed to be poisoned.
“Wall tells me,” said he, “that Vernon Brander got into the place one day while I was laid up.”
Abel nodded.
“Reight enough: so he did. Got in at t’ ooper floor by t’ water boott.”
“What reason did he give?”
“Wanted to knaw heow mooch you knew. So Ah told him. He’s been going abaht loike a churchyard ghost ever since. Ah met ’un just neow on’s way oop to t’ Vicarage.”
“To the Vicarage?”
“Ay.”
“Well, I’m going up there now.”
And he turned and began to walk up the hill. Abel hopped after him, assuming his most persuasive mien.
“Doan’t ’e, Mester Mitchell—doan’t ’e,” he entreated. “It’s naught but cruelty to him as hasn’t done it; an’ as for him as has, you’ve got plenty in store for him wi’out worriting of him now.”
Ned paid not the slightest heed to these remonstrances, but went on his way, still closely attended by Abel the length of the Vicarage garden wall.
Abel redoubled his pleadings as they caught sight of the two brothers and Mrs. Brander walking in the garden.
“Look ’e here, Mester Mitchell,” said he, in a rough voice that, plead as he would, could get no softer. “Ah’ve kept away from Rishton ten year fur to please parson Vernon, ’cause Ah’m t’ only chap as see what happened that neight, an’ he wouldn’t trust me to hawd ma toongue. What Ah could do fur ten year, couldn’t you do fur a neight?”
Still Ned walked stolidly on, vouchsafing no answer, until the party in the garden caught sight of them, and the Vicar of Rishton came down to the side gate to meet them. As he drew near, Abel, after one futile attempt to drag Ned bodily away, tried to escape himself. But Mr. Brander was too quick and too strong for him.
“Why, who have we here?” he said, curiously, seizing Squires by the arm, and looking into his wooden face. “Isn’t it Abel Squires, the man who picked up my father’s signet ring on the Sheffield road?”
“Ay, sir,” said Abel, very bashfully, while he persistently avoided meeting the vicar’s eye.
“I thought so,” said the vicar, good-humoredly. And without noticing the lowering expression of Ned’s face, he turned and shook his hand. “Glad to see you about again, Mr. Mitchell. I must tell you a story about our friend here,” he continued, putting a kind hand on the tramp’s shoulder. “Years ago, when I was scarcely more than a boy, my father lost a signet ring one night as he was returning home from a sick bed. It was an old-fashioned thing; much too large for his finger. He never expected to see it again; but a fortnight afterwards who should turn up but Abel Squires, inquiring of the servants if anybody in the house had lost a ring. He had picked it up, and having no means of advertising his find, had perseveringly called at house after house on the outskirts of Sheffield where he found it, until he at last got directed to my father as the owner. He was so much struck by the circumstance that he declared it should be treasured up for ever by the head of the family as a reminder that the world had contained at least one ideally honest man.”
“You’re t’ head of t’ family, yet you don’t wear it though, parson,” said Abel, glancing at his hands.
He had listened in much confusion to the account, changing from his wooden leg to his sound one and back again, and looking as if the vicar’s speech contained some revelation particularly painful for him to hear.
The vicar, who had been touched by his excessive modesty, was surprised at this retort.
“No, I don’t wear it now,” he said, laughing genially. “I did though, until I had the misfortune to lose it myself, some years ago. It was too large for me, as it had been for my father, and I never knew how it had gone. And you were not about to find it for me.”
“Nay, sir,” was all Abel said, with one shy glance at the bystanders.
They had formed a strange group while the vicar’s recital lasted. Each one seemed to know that something serious was impending, and to listen, in silence not all attentive, to the vicar’s innocently told reminiscences. He was the only person at ease in the little circle. Ned was standing solid and square, listening to Mr. Brander’s little story with a contemptuous face; Vernon Brander, who seemed of late to be growing daily more lean, more haggard, kept his eyes fixed upon Ned with an expression of undisguised apprehension; while Mrs. Brander, whose great black eyes were flashing with excitement to which she allowed no other vent, looked steadily from one to the other of the rest of the group, as she stood a little away from them all, motionless and silent, like a beautiful statue.
When the vicar’s prattle had come to an end, there was a pause. He seemed himself to become at last aware that the minds about him were occupied with some more serious matter, and he turned to Ned with a look of inquiry—
“Is anything the matter, Mr. Mitchell?” he asked. “You look less happy than a man should do who has just been released from the confinement of a sick bed. Can I advise you or counsel you in any way? Would you like to come into my study?”
Ned raised his head and looked at him like a bull in the arena.
“No,” he said, savagely, “the garden will do for what I have to say. It’s only this: My bloodhounds have been poisoned”—a little shiver of intense excitement seemed to run through the group—“And by the same hand that killed my sister. Now I give the man who did both those acts till this time to-morrow to confess publicly that he’s been a great hypocrite for ten years, with good words on his lips and bad thoughts in his heart. But if in those four-and-twenty hours he don’t confess, then he shall be buried at the country’s expense before the year’s out.”
There was dead silence after this speech, which Ned delivered, not in his usual coarse, loud tones, but in husky, spasmodic jerks, and with the manner of a man bitterly in earnest. The vicar listened with great attention; Abel Squires seemed to wish, but not to dare, to move away; Vernon shook from head to foot with high nervous excitement; while Mrs. Brander moved to the side of her brother-in-law, and stole her hand within his arm.
Not a look, not a movement, was lost on Ned, whose features suddenly broke up into a grim and horrible smile as he noted the action of the lady. It was a smile of cunning, of mockery. But Mr. Brander had treated him with dislike and contempt.
“You think,” said the vicar of Rishton at last, “that the man who poisoned your dogs was the same who made away with your sister?”
“I don’t think; I know.”
“I don’t want to be hard on you, Mitchell. But it seems to me that you feel the latter loss the more acutely of the two.”
“It showed,” returned Ned, doggedly “that the fellow is no better minded now than he was then.”
“You might say so if they were human beings whose lives he had taken,” said the vicar, continuing his gentle remonstrance. “As they were only dogs, I am inclined to take a more lenient view; while admitting that this unknown person——”
“No, not unknown,” interpolated Ned.
The vicar went on without noticing the interruption.
“—had no right either to trespass on your premises or destroy your dogs, allowance must be made for the state of mind of a desperate man, who believes, rightly or wrongly, that these animals will be used to discover his guilt.”
“Well, vicar,” said Ned, who had been staring straight into the clergyman’s face with a cynical smile, “I’ve said my say; that’s what I came here for. Now it’s done, I’ll wish you, and your good lady, and Mr. Vernon there, a very good-night.”
The vicar held out his hand.
“Good-night. You will not be offended with me for saying that I hope Heaven will soften your heart,” he said in a low voice, in the gentle, almost apologetic tones which he always used when touching upon religious matters.
“No, I’m not offended,” said Ned, in a hard, mocking voice.
“And will you come to our haymaking to-morrow?” Mr. Brander continued in a lighter tone. “It will be a very simple sort of festivity, but it may serve as a change from your hermit-like solitude and your gloomy reflections.”
Ned began to shake his head rather contemptuously, muttering something rather surlily about being “too old to pick buttercups.”
“Mr. Williams, of the Towers, will be here,” went on the vicar, as pleasantly as ever. “He is exceedingly anxious to make your acquaintance.”
The expression of Ned’s face changed.
“Is that the Mr. Williams who has been bothering so about repairing the old church down there—St. Cuthbert’s?” he asked, with affected carelessness.
And the vicar’s expression changed also.
“I believe he did talk about it at one time; but as my brother objected to it, he had to give up the idea,” he said, in a low voice, glancing at Vernon, who was talking to Mrs. Brander.
“Ah!” said Ned, with a look down at his boots and a nod. “Yes, I’ll come, vicar, and thank you kindly for your invitation,” he said, more graciously. “I can’t make hay, but I’ll be most happy to stand about and look pretty,” he added, with a short laugh.
Raising his hat ceremoniously to Mrs. Brander, whom he admired, and whose indifferently concealed dislike therefore irritated him, Ned Mitchell turned on his heel without so much as a glance at Vernon, and made his way down the hill to his cottage, leaning on the arm of Abel Squires, who had bade “t’ gentle fowk” a humble and bashful farewell, and hastened to the support of his patient, upon whom the fatigue and excitement of the evening had begun to tell heavily.
Solemnly and almost in silence, Meredith Brander and his wife then parted from Vernon, who took his lonely way over the fields in a state of suppressed excitement so acute that on reaching St. Cuthbert’s Vicarage he was highly feverish, with a burning head, hot, dry hands, and a mouth that seemed parched and withered. He lay awake for the greater part of the night. Next morning, his old housekeeper, not hearing him rise as usual, went up to his room, and found him in a restless, uneasy sleep. Seeing that something was wrong with him, and deciding that it was the result of overwork, Mrs. Warmington applied a characteristically rough-and-ready remedy. She ransacked his wardrobe, selecting everything that was fit to wear, and quitted the room as softly as she had entered it, leaving pinned to his pillow the following note:—
“I see you have had no sleep and are unwell. So I have taken away your clothes and locked the door. If you are ready to promise to stay in bed all the morning, and not to go out to-day, knock three times, and I will bring up your breakfast.”
When he woke up, Vernon gave the three knocks, after very little hesitation. He felt so ill that he was glad of an excuse to spend an idle day—glad too that in this way he could escape the ordeal of the haymaking at his brother’s, and a meeting with Olivia Denison. For, haunted as he was by the remembrance of her gentle touch, of her softly uttered words of sympathy as he sat beside her by Mrs. Warmington’s fireside, he felt that another cold look, another frigid bow, like those she had given him on their last meeting, would be a torture more than he could bear.
Vernon Brander was far too ignorant of the peculiarities of the feminine character to know the significance of that coldness; he thought that it meant in her what it meant in him, a firm determination that all sentiment between them should be for ever at an end. While, as every one knows, if that had been the case she would have been gentle, tender, anxious to soften the cruel blow she was preparing for him, anxious also that there should, after the parting, be a little sentiment left. As it was, poor Olivia, on her side, was suffering a good many torments. While never allowing herself to believe the worst she heard against Vernon Brander, her common sense was continually warring with her feelings, and calling her all sorts of unflattering names for her prejudice in his favor. She hated and despised him, she loved and respected him, all in a breath. She resolved never to see him again, she determined to encourage him in spite of all opposition, in the course of the same day. But the value of the former resolution may be gauged by the fact that she made it very strongly on the morning of the haymaking, and was bitterly disappointed when, on arriving with her father and step-mother at the big field by the churchyard, where the tent had been put up, she learnt from little Kate that he had sent word to say he could not come.
But Olivia was not to go without admirers. Approaching the tent as she came out of it was Fred Williams, dressed in a light grey suit of a check so large that there was only room for one square and a half across his narrow little chest, a very pale brown hat, and a salmon-colored tie. He greeted Mr. Denison effusively, and asked Olivia if he might get her a cup of tea.
“No, thank you,” said she, coldly.
But her father, surprised and displeased at her tone, interfered.
“Yes, my dear, I am sure you would like a cup of tea,” said he.
“Take her to the tent, Fred, and look after her.”
Then, as the young man, who looked delighted at her discomfiture, turned to shake hands with her step-mother, Mr. Denison whispered to his daughter, in as peremptory a tone as he ever used to her—
“You mustn’t put on these airs, Olivia. Young Williams is a very good fellow, and has obliged me considerably, more than once. I insist on your being civil to him.”
Olivia turned white, and bit her lips. A suspicion of the truth, that her father was under monetary obligations to this wretched little stripling, flashed into her mind. She waited very quietly, but with a certain erect carriage of the head which promised ill for the treatment Fred would receive at her hands. He, however, was not the man to be scrupulous about the way in which he attained his ends. He trotted beside her to the tent in a state of great elation.
“Awfully slow these bun scuffles, ain’t they?” he said in his most insinuating tones. “I shouldn’t have come at all if it hadn’t been for the chance of meeting—some one I wanted to see.”
This was accompanied by a most significant look; but unfortunately Olivia, who was considerably taller than he, was looking over his head at some fresh arrivals.
“Indeed,” she said, absently.
Fred reddened; that is to say, a faint tint, like the color in his tie, appeared for a moment in his cheeks, and then left them as yellow as before. He tried again. She should look at him; it didn’t matter how, but she should look.
“Those country girls look at me as if they’d never seen anything like this get-up before. It’s the proper thing down in the south, isn’t it?”
“I should think so—on Margate ‘excursionists,’” answered Olivia, briefly.
Fred was quite unmoved.
“Now what would your father say if he heard you?” he asked, good-humoredly. “You know he told you to be civil. Ho, yes, I’ve sharp ears enough—always catch up anything I want to hear.”
Olivia said nothing to this, and presently he went on, in a persuasive tone—
“You know it’s worse than wasting your time to be rude to me, because I’m not a bad chap to people I like, and to people I don’t like I can do awfully nasty turns.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt your power of making yourself unpleasant,” said Olivia, quietly.
Still Fred Williams only chuckled. They had by this time reached the tent, and he gave her a chair with a flourish of satisfaction.
“There, now you must look up to me to fire off your spiteful little shots, instead of down at me as if I were a worm or a beetle. It’s not many men of my size, mind you, that would walk with a girl as tall as you—it puts a fellow at a disadvantage. And as your six-footers are not too plentiful in these parts, it would be wiser of you to make your peace with the little ones.”
“I assure you,” said Olivia, looking up at him gravely, “that I could get on very well without either six-footers or four-feet-sixers.”
“That’s a nasty cut. There’s not many fellows would stand that,” said the irrepressible one. “But, there, I tell you there’s nothing I wouldn’t put up with from you. I suppose you won’t insult my guv’nor if I introduce him to you,” he continued, glancing towards a corner of the tent where the elder Mr. Williams was engaged in animated talk with Ned Mitchell.
“Certainly not;” answered Olivia, “I am told by every one that you could scarcely be told for father and son.”
This was true. Mr. Williams, though he was not free from the faults of the parvenu, was ostentatious in his charities and respectful towards wealth, had a handsome person and a dignified carriage, and was in every way his son’s superior. He had been most anxious to make Ned Mitchell’s acquaintance, feeling that in this man, who had begun with little and by his own exertions had made it much, he should meet with a congenial nature. And so it proved. Ned having the same feeling towards him, they had become, at their first interview, if not friends, at least mutually well-disposed acquaintances.
When Fred interrupted their tete-a-tete, they were deep in a conversation they found so interesting that Mr. Williams, in reply to his son’s request that he would come and be introduced to a lady, waved him away, saying, “Presently, my boy, presently.”
He came back, laughing at his father’s earnestness.
“He and that colonist fellow are so thick already that there’s no separatin’ ’em,” he said to Olivia. “They’re at it, hammer and tongs, about the old tower down at St. Cuthbert’s, and as the vicar has just come and shoved his little oar in, I expect they’ll be at it till breakfast time.”
“The tower of St. Cuthbert’s!” exclaimed Olivia, rising hastily from her chair. “What are they saying about that?”
Fred, who noticed everything, saw how keen was the interest she showed.
“Yes. You know my guv’nor was hot on building a new tower to the place, and paying for the repair of it. He likes things brand new, does the guv’nor, and he likes tablets and paragraphs with ‘Re-erected by the generosity of F. S. Williams, Esquire, of the Towers,’ on ’em. And he was put off it, I don’t exactly know how. So Mitchell’s working him up to it again.”
“Since your father won’t come to me, you shall take me to him,” said Olivia, brightly, though her lips were quivering.
Fred, still watching her carefully, noticed this also. As they crossed the floor of the tent, he could see that she was straining her ears to catch what she could of the talk of the three men. For Mr. Meredith Brander had now joined the other two, and was taking the chief share of the subject under discussion. This was no longer St. Cuthbert’s Tower, but the recent loss which the colonist had sustained by the poisoning of his hounds.
“My own impression,” the vicar was saying, in tones of conviction, “is that you must have caused their death yourself during your sleep.”
“How do you make that out, vicar?” asked Ned, very quietly.
Since that outburst of fury the evening before he had been very subdued—almost amiable.
“Why, I cannot conceive any motive strong enough to induce anybody else to make away with them. If they were really dangerous to some one’s secret, poisoning them was too suspicious an act. Besides, my brother—I mean the churchyard of St. Cuthbert’s has just been laid out as a garden, and the wall has been fringed with broken glass to keep out all unauthorized intruders. Now what could a man kill your dogs for?”
“I have my own ideas as to the reason,” said Ned. Then, after a short pause, he added, “You see, the poisoning of the hounds led to a delay. Now a hunted criminal lives by delays.”
“Hunted criminal!” Poor Olivia echoed these terrible words below her breath. The very sound of them blanched her cheeks and seemed to check the beating of her heart.
It was again Ned who spoke—
“Tell me, vicar, what you mean by suggesting that I poisoned my hounds in my sleep.”
“Don’t you know,” said Mr. Brander, “how an active man forced into inaction will brood over an idea until it is never out of his brain? I imagine that you, moved as you certainly were by fears for the safety of your dogs while you were ill, got these fears so strongly in your mind that at last you got up one night, and with your own hands did what it was always in your mind that some one else would do—laid about the poison which the dogs took as soon as they by some means got loose.”
“Dear me! Very ingenious theory—very ingenious!” said Mr. Williams.
“I don’t suppose,” went on the vicar, modestly, “that the idea would have come into my head if it had not been that in my own family there have been marvellous instances of somnambulism. An ancestor of mine, a very energetic man who loved the sound of his own voice, had been ordered a rest from preaching by his doctor. Well, I assure you that after obeying this injunction three months, he got up one night, got the church keys, let himself in, and was discovered there by his wife in the pulpit, preaching a sermon in his dressing-gown and slippers! And there have been numberless other instances in our family—some within this century.”
“Dear me, that is singular indeed,” said Mr. Williams.
“A very high-spirited family yours, vicar,” said Ned, who had not moved a muscle during this recital, “and the spirit is sure to peep out sooner or later. You, I think, though you’ll excuse my saying so, are about the only one of the bunch that hasn’t let it peep out rather discreditably.”
“Perhaps my sins are all to come,” said the vicar with a jolly laugh.
And, catching sight of the two young people who were waiting for a hearing, Mr. Brander himself introduced Olivia Denison to old Mr. Williams, and left the group to join his other guests.