OLIVIA DENISON’S thoughts on the morning after the haymaking, were entirely occupied with Vernon Brander, his illness, the possibility of his innocence, and the chances of his escape if guilty; so that when, on entering the poultry yard with her basket on her arm, she found Fred Williams, amusing himself by setting two cocks to fight each other, she uttered a cry of unmistakable annoyance and astonishment.
“You look as if you hadn’t expected to see me, and as if, by Jove, you hadn’t wanted to!” said he, frankly. As she made no answer, but only raised her eyebrows he went on—“Don’t you remember I said I should be here this morning?”
“I had forgotten it, or only remembered it as a kind of nightmare.”
“Do you mean me to take your rudeness seriously?” asked Fred, after a pause in which he had at last struggled with the amazing fact that he had met a girl to whom his admiration, and all the glorious possibilities it conveyed, meant absolutely nothing.
“As seriously as I have always taken yours.”
Fred was silent again for some moments, during which Olivia went on throwing handfuls of grain to the chickens, and calling softly “Coop-coop-coop-coop!” in a most persuasive and unconcerned manner.
“And you really mean that this is your last answer? I can tell you, it’s your last chance with me?”
Olivia turned, making the most of her majestic height, and looked down on him with the loftiest disdain.
“I assure you that if it were my ‘last chance,’ as you call it, not only with you, but with anybody, I should say just the same.”
Fred Williams leaned against the wall of the yard, turned out the heterogeneous contents of one of his pockets, and began turning them over with shaking fingers to hide his mortification.
Still Olivia went on with her occupation, without paying the slightest attention to him. Suddenly the rejected suitor shovelled all the things he had taken out back into his pockets, and with a monkey-like spring placed himself right in front of her.
“I wish there was somebody about to tell you what a jolly fool you’re making of yourself,” he said, looking up at her rather viciously.
“You may go and fetch somebody to do so if you like,” said she, serenely.
“And leave you in peace for a little while, I suppose you mean?”
“Perhaps some such thought may have crossed my mind.”
Mr. Fred Williams had not a high opinion of himself, but experience had taught him that his “expectations” gave him an adventitious value; to find neither his modesty nor his money of any avail was a discovery which destroyed for once his habitual good humor, and showed a side of his character which he should by all means have kept concealed from a lady he wished to charm.
“Very well,” he snarled, while an ugly blush spread over his face, and his fingers twitched with anger; “very well. You may think it very smart to snub me, and high-spirited and all that. I’ve stood a good deal of it—a good deal more than I’d have stood from anybody else—because you’re handsome. I know I’m not handsome, or refined either; but I don’t pretend to be. And I’m a lot handsomer than the hatchet-faced parson, anyhow. And as for refinement, you can get a lot more for twenty-five thousand a year than for a couple of hundred, which is quite a decent screw for one of your preaching fellows. But now I’ve done with you, I tell you, I’ve done with you.”
“Isn’t that rather a singular expression, considering that I’ve never given you the slightest encouragement?” asked Olivia, coldly.
“Encouragement! I don’t expect encouragement; but I expect a girl like you to know a good thing when she sees it.”
“I am afraid we differ as to what constitutes a good thing.”
“Very likely; but we shan’t ‘differ as to what constitutes’ a bad thing for Vernon Brander; and if you don’t see all those twopenny geraniums pulled up out of St. Cuthbert’s churchyard, and every stone grubbed up, and every brick of that old tower pulled down, before another week’s up, my name’s not Fred Williams. There, Miss Denison; now, what do you say to that?”
“I say that you have fully justified your low opinion of yourself.”
“And I’ll justify my low opinion of Vernon Brander. If he’s got any secrets buried in those old stones, we’ll have them dragged out, and make you jolly well ashamed of your friend.”
“Oh, no, you won’t do that,” said Olivia, who had turned pale to the lips, and grown very majestic and stern; “though you have succeeded in making me ashamed of having called you even an acquaintance.”
“Perhaps you have a weakness for—”
Before he could finish his sentence, he found himself seized by the shoulders, and saw towering over him a beautiful countenance, so aglow with passionate indignation that it looked like the face of a Fury.
“If you dare to say that word I’ll shake you like a rat!” hissed out Olivia, giving him an earnest of her promise with great good will.
“Stop! stop! unless you—want—to—kill somebody—to be more—like—your—precious—friend,” panted Fred, who was not a coward.
Olivia let him go with a movement which sent him spinning among the chickens.
“Well, that’s cool,” panted he, as he picked up his hat and looked at it ruefully. “You talk about refinement one minute and the next you treat me in this unladylike way!”
“Oh, I apologize for my vulgar manners,” laughed Olivia, who was already rather ashamed of her outbreak. “I’m only a farmer’s daughter, you know.”
“Yes, and you couldn’t give yourself more airs if you were a duchess. Your father isn’t so proud by a long way, I can tell you,” he added with meaning.
Olivia became in an instant very quiet.
“What do you mean?” she asked sternly.
“Oh, nothing but that he’s been in the habit of borrowing money of me for some time; only trifling sums, but still they seemed to come in handy, judging by the way he thanked me.”
He was disappointed to see that Olivia took this information without any of the tragic airs he had expected.
“I daresay they did,” said she. “We are not too well off, as everybody knows.”
The simplicity with which she uttered these words made the young man feel at last rather ashamed of himself.
“Of course, I know he’ll pay me back,” he said hastily.
Olivia opened great proud eyes, full of astonishment and disdain, and said, superbly, “Of course he will.”
“And you don’t feel annoyed at the obligation, eh?” asked Fred, rather bewildered.
“I don’t see any obligation,” said she quietly.
“Oh, don’t you? Well, most people would consider it one.”
“How much does he owe you?”
“Oh, only a matter of forty or fifty pounds.”
He thought the amount would astonish and distress her; but as, apparently, it failed to do either, he hastened to add—
“Of course, that’s a mere nothing; but he let me know, a day or two ago, that he should want a much larger loan, and of course, I informed him he could have it for the asking.”
She did wince at that; but the manner in which she resented his impertinence was scarcely to his taste.
“And you think the obligation is on our side?” she said, sweetly, but with a tremor of subdued anger in her voice. “What have you done except to lend my father a few pounds, which you would never have missed, even if you had thrown them into a well instead of lent them to an honorable man! While he, by accepting the loan, has given you a chance of putting on patronizing airs towards a man in every respect your superior.”
“All right—all right! Go on! Vernon Brander shall pay for this!” snarled Fred, at last rendered thoroughly savage by her contempt.
“Vernon Brander will never be the worse for having you for an enemy. I should be sorry for him if you were his friend,” she said, defiantly.
“Oh, all right, I’m glad to hear it,” said Fred, glad at last to beat a retreat, and delivering his parting words at the gate of the poultry yard, with one foot in the new-laid egg basket. “Then if anything unpleasant happens to your father or your parson through me, you’ll be able to make light of it!”
Olivia felt rather frightened when she saw how discolored and distorted with rage his little weasel’s face had become. But she bore a brave front, and only said, for all reply to his threats—
“Won’t you find it more convenient to stand on the ground, Mr. Williams? To walk about among eggs without accident requires a great deal of skill and experience.”
But when, with an impatient exclamation, he left the poultry yard, Olivia’s heart gave way, and she began to reproach herself bitterly for not having kept a bridle upon her tongue. On the other hand, she was glad that her words had provoked the mean little fellow to confess his loans to her father; for she thought she had influence enough with the latter to prevent any more such transactions, and as for the money already owing, means must somehow be found to repay it.
It was late in the afternoon before she was able to start on the way to St. Cuthbert’s. She felt, as usual, some self-reproach at the thought that she was acting contrary to her father’s wishes; but, as usual, she was too self-willed to give up her own in deference to his. The sun was still glowing on the fields, and pouring its hot rays on the roads, which were parched and cracked for want of rain. The cart-tracks made faint lines in a thick layer of white dust, which the lightest breeze from the hills blew up in clouds, coating the leaves on the hedges and swirling into heaps by the well-worn foot path. The wood that bordered the road for some distance between Rishton and Matherham was as silent as if the birds had all left it; oak and beech and dusty pine looked dry and brown in the glare. It was a long, hot, weary walk; but at last she came near the lonely Vicarage, and slipping down the final few yards of the steep lane, in a cloud of dust which was raised by her own feet at each step, Olivia heard the faint sound of voices coming from the house, and stopped short, fancying she could detect Vernon’s voice, and wondering who was with him. But the sounds ceased, and she went slowly on, thinking she had perhaps been mistaken. She entered the garden gate, and walked up the stone pathway, still without hearing anything more, until, suddenly, just as she was within a few paces of the door, she heard a woman’s voice, low, but clear and strong, utter these words—
“Remember, you swore it. Ten years ago you swore it to me, and it is still as binding on you as it was then.”
“Why should I forget it?”
Olivia knew that it was Mrs. Brander’s voice that answered, in a tone full of contempt and dislike—
“Why, this Denison girl, this——”
Neither she nor Vernon had paid any heed to the footsteps on the stone flags.
Now Olivia hastened to ring the bell sharply, and there was silence immediately.
“How is Mr. Brander to-day?” asked she of Mrs. Warmington when the housekeeper opened the door.
“He’s not much better, and not likely to be while that uncivilized creature from the Antipodes continues to make his abode here, and worry my master morning, noon, and night,” said the housekeeper, tartly.
“Mr. Mitchell? Where is he now?” asked Olivia, eagerly.
“He’s out in the churchyard there, poking about among the gravestones. I’ve been watching him from the window of the little room he sleeps in. I don’t know how he got hold of the key. I have a duplicate, for cleaning the church. I don’t know myself where my master keeps his.”
“I think I’ll go and speak to Mr. Mitchell, and come back when Mr. Brander is disengaged.”
“Disengaged! He’s disengaged now, as far as I know——”
“I think I heard Mrs. Brander’s voice as I came up the path.”
The housekeeper’s lips tightened, and she drew herself up in evident disapproval.
“Indeed! I was not aware she was here.”
“Well, I’ll be back in about a quarter of an hour, as I should like to see Mr. Brander,” said Olivia, hastily.
Mrs. Warmington raised her eyebrows. She was longing to tell Miss Denison that she thought, under the circumstances, it would be more modest to stay away; but she did not dare. So Olivia tripped down the stone path, and was in the churchyard before the housekeeper had had time to make up her mind how much of her suspicions it would be proper to communicate to a young girl.
It was some minutes before Olivia succeeded in finding Ned Mitchell. The sun was setting by this time, and there were dark shadows among the ruined portions of the church. It seemed to her as she walked between the newly laid out flower beds with their bright array of geranium, calceolaria, and verbena, that this innovation was out of place, and only showed up, in a more striking manner, the havoc time and tempest had made among the old stones, just as the mowing of the grass upon them had accentuated the irregular mounds and hillocks which filled the ruined south aisle. Olivia stepped in and out and over the mounds, calling softly, “Mr. Mitchell!” At last, in the corner where the old crypt was, she heard a sound coming, as it were, from the ground under her feet. She stopped and listened, holding her breath. The sounds continued, a soft, muffled “thud, thud,” as of some heavy instrument brought again and again down on the earth. She advanced, step by step, always listening, fancying that she felt the ground tremble under her feet at the force of the blows. At last she came close to the place where the rugged steps leading down into the crypt had been blocked up years before. With her senses keenly on the alert, Olivia noticed that some of the stones and earth which blocked the entrance had been recently moved; and prying more closely, she found, behind a bramble and a tuft of rank grass, a small hole, low down in the ground, which looked scarcely large enough for the passage of a man’s body. However, this seemed to be the only outlet from the vault, so Olivia sat down on a broken gravestone, and waited.
It seemed to Olivia to be growing quite cold and dark before a scraping and rumbling noise, as of falling stones and earth, drew her attention to the concealed hole in the ground. She got up, and the noise almost ceased.
“It is I, Mr. Mitchell,” she said, without being able to see him; “I’ve been waiting for you.”
For answer, Mr. Mitchell’s unmistakable, gruff voice murmured a string of sullen imprecations, of which, luckily, nothing was distinctly audible. However, he put his head out of the hole, and then proceeded to extricate the whole of his person with such exceeding neatness and cleverness that the hole was scarcely enlarged, and the bramble and grass remained intact. He presented a strange appearance, however, for he was in his shirt sleeves; a colored silk handkerchief was bound round his head down to his eyes; in his right hand he held a common kitchen poker; while he was so covered with mould and dust from head to foot that but for his peculiarly heavy movements and rough voice he would have been unrecognizable.
“Well, what are you doing here?” he asked, very ill-humoredly, as he shook himself free from some of the dust he had collected in his subterranean exploration. “I thought I heard somebody messing about up here. How did you get in?”
“In the same way that you did, except that I asked for a key instead of taking one without asking.”
She was alarmed to see, when he had wiped some of the dirt off his face with his handkerchief, that he looked savagely self-satisfied, and quite beyond all reasoning. This was proved clearly by his next words. He nodded his head quietly while she spoke, and then said—
“All right. That’s so. Now you had better run home, and be careful not to say anything about what you’ve just seen. For I tell you, little girl, if you do anything to interfere with me and my actions just now, it’ll be the worst day’s work for your little parson up yonder that ever was done. So now you know.”
Olivia shivered, but she did not answer or contradict him. She only said, in a subdued and tremulous voice, “Good-evening, Mr. Mitchell,” and walked away towards the gate, stumbling over the chips of stone that lay hidden in the grass, which had been allowed to remain long and rank in this the south side of the graveyard. She unlocked the gate, passed out, and was relocking it when she heard rapid footsteps behind her.
“Give me that key!” said Mrs. Brander’s voice, so hoarse, so agitated that Olivia looked round before she could be sure that it was really the vicar’s calm, cold wife.
Her large eyes had deep black semicircles under them; her usually firm lips were trembling; her whole appearance showed a disorder, a lack of that dainty preciseness in little things which was so strongly characteristic of her.
“This key!” said Olivia, doubtfully. “Do you know who is in there?”
Mrs. Brander examined the girl from head to foot with passionate mistrust, while at the same time she struggled to regain a calmer manner.
“Who is it?” she asked, with an attempt at an indifferent tone.
“Mr. Mitchell.”
The vicar’s wife drew back from the gate.
“You mean this? You are not playing me a trick?”
“A trick? No. Why should I?”
There was a pause, during which Mrs. Brander stood looking at her fixedly. As she did not speak, Olivia presently asked—
“Do you still wish to go in?”
Mrs. Brander hesitated, and then drew back with a shudder.
“No,” she murmured, scarcely above her breath, “I—I won’t go in.”
As, however, she did not attempt to go away, Olivia bade her “good-night,” without getting any answer, and went up the lane towards the house. She did not wish to call at the Vicarage now; she wanted first to have time to think over what she had seen and heard in the churchyard, as well as her interview with Mrs. Brander. A new idea, which promised to throw light on the whole mystery, had come into her mind. But there was the key to be returned to Mrs. Warmington. After a moment’s thought, she decided that she would leave it at the back door, and thus escape the risk of a meeting with Vernon.
But when she had reached the gate of the yard behind the house, she heard Vernon’s voice calling her.
“Miss Denison, Miss Denison, wait one moment!”
He had caught sight of her from a side window, and in another minute he had come down to her.
“Why did you come round this way?” he asked, taking her hand in one of his, which was hot, and dry, and feverish.
“I—I have the key of the churchyard to return to Mrs. Warmington.”
“And you wanted to escape the chance of seeing me. But I was watching for you, you know,” said he, looking at her tenderly. Then he suddenly changed his manner. “I thought you would come and see me to-day,” he said. “It would be like your usual kindness when any one is ill.”
“I did call and inquire,” said Olivia, demurely. “But Mrs. Brander was with you.”
Vernon looked at her earnestly.
“Ah!” he exclaimed; “then I know when you came. I heard your footsteps.” Then he looked at her curiously, and asked, “Didn’t you hear voices? Didn’t you hear us talking?”
“Yes,” answered Olivia, simply. “And I heard something of what you were saying.”
“You will tell me what you heard?”
Olivia answered, looking down—
“I heard her remind you to keep an oath that you had made to her, and I heard her mention—me!”
“And didn’t you want to know what she meant?”
“I suppose I did.”
“And will you be content not to know?”
“Perhaps I shall. For I think I have guessed something of the truth already.”
Vernon’s eyes glowed with passionate yearning as they met hers.
“Impossible!” said he, below his breath. “And yet—you women have such quick perception. If it is true that you know,” he went on, in a firmer and sterner voice, “I shall never dare to speak to you again.”
Olivia was trembling with excitement. It was not true that she was mistress of the secret, but there a dim intuition in her mind which bewildered, sometimes almost maddened, her. She did not attempt to answer Vernon Brander; but drawing sharply away from him the hand he still held, she abruptly wished him “good-night,” and putting the church keys on the wall beside him, ran away up the lane as fast as her active feet could carry her.
When Olivia reached home she was greeted by severe silence on the part of her step-mother; while her father, who was usually so careful to try to make amends for any unkindness of his wife’s by little unobtrusive attentions, carefully avoided her. The girl learned the reason of this treatment by remarks which Mrs. Denison, apropos of nothing, addressed from time to time to the children, warning them not to spoil their clothes, as they were the last they would have; telling them not to disturb their father, as he was writing to a gentleman to whom he owed money, asking for time in which to repay it; and finally admonishing them to be courteous to Olivia, as she could have the place sold up in a moment by insulting her father’s creditors; from which Olivia gathered that Fred Williams had already vented his spite on her father, and thereby prepared a most uncomfortable domestic life for her for some time to come.
She affected to take no notice of this treatment however, and did not even go in search of her father, thinking it would be better to let the first effects both of Fred’s and of his wife’s ill temper pass off before she spoke to him on the subject of the former’s addresses.
Telling Lucy to bring her supper up to her rooms, Olivia left the inharmonious family circle without bidding good-night to any one, and shut herself up in the east wing, where she could always draw the bolt of the outer door and be free from molestation. This she did, and being in a restless and excited state of mind, passed the next two hours in wandering from one room to the other, considering the mystery of Nellie Mitchell’s disappearance by the light of all the facts which, one by one, had come to her knowledge. She had become so accustomed to these rooms that it was only now and then that she remembered their connection with the murdered girl. To-night, however, the recollection startled her at every turn she took in her walks up and down. She seemed again to see the bedroom as it had looked on her first entrance, nearly six months ago, the rat scurrying down the curtains, the carpet lying in damp strings upon the floor, the mouldy books, and the dust lying thickly on chairs and mantelpiece. Everything had been changed since then; fresh hangings put to the bed; bright cretonne coverings to the old furniture; a new carpet, soft and warm, had replaced the damp rags. But on this particular evening her imagination seemed stronger than reality; as she walked from the one room to the other, she pictured to herself always that the chamber she was not in at the moment was in the state in which she had first seen it. These fancies grew so strong that they drove more serious thoughts out of her head; just when she wanted to be able to analyze the ideas which the day’s occurrences had suggested, she had lost all power of thinking connectedly; nothing but bewildering recollections of the words she had heard and the scenes she had witnessed could be got to occupy her excited mind.
She ran at last to one of her bedroom windows, threw it open, and looked out. It was dark now, for it was past nine o’clock, and the evening had turned wet. A light, drizzling summer rain was falling, and the sky was heavy with clouds. The outlook was so dreary that after a few minutes she shut the window, shivering, lit the candles, and tried to read. But she was in such a nervous state that she uttered a little scream when Lucy, bringing her supper, knocked at the outer door. Very much disgusted with herself for this display of feminine weakness, she would not even allow Lucy, who loved to linger about when she had any little service to perform for “Miss Olivia,” to stay for a few minutes’ chat. When the supper had been laid on the table in the outer room, and the bright little maid had run down stairs, Olivia did not, as usual, lock the outer door after her. She felt so unaccountably lonely and restless that she went into the little passage outside her two rooms, and set the outer door open, so as to feel that her connection with the rest of the human life in the house was not altogether severed. She even walked to the end of the corridor and glanced out through the large square window at the end, listening all the while for some sounds of household life downstairs. But in this east wing very little could be heard, and this evening everything seemed to Olivia to be unusually quiet.
The corridor window looked out over fields, showing the farm garden, with its fruit trees and vegetable beds on the right, and barns and various other outbuildings on the left. Right underneath was a neglected patch of land—a corner of the garden not considered worth cultivation. Lying among the rank grass were an old ladder and a pile of boards, which had been there when the Denisons took the farm, and had remained undisturbed ever since. It suddenly occurred to Olivia, for the first time, how alarmingly easy it would be for an evilly disposed person to place the ladder against the wall, and to effect an entrance through the window, the fastening of which she noticed was broken, and had evidently been so a long time. Not that such a thing was likely to happen, burglaries being unheard-of things in this neighborhood. Still, the idea got such firm hold of her excited fancy that, two hours later, when all the household had retired to rest, she came out of her apartments in her dressing-gown, to give a final glance outside, and to make sure that her absurd fears were as groundless as she told herself they were.
Opening the window and putting her head out into the drizzling rain, Olivia saw, in the gloom of the misty night, a dark object creeping stealthily along outside the garden wall. Just as it reached that part of the wall which was immediately opposite the window, a watery gleam of moonlight showed through the clouds, and enabled her to see that the object was a man. The next moment she saw him climb over into the garden beneath. Still keeping close to the wall, he crept rapidly along until he was close under the window. Holding her breath, Olivia watched him as he stooped and lifted the ladder from the ground. Her blood suddenly seemed to rush to her brain, and then to trickle slowly back through her veins as cold as ice.
For she recognized him.