THE estimable Sarah Wall was, as she herself would have said, “not in the best of tempers” at being intercepted in her proposed flight.
“Ah thowt ye’d got all ye wanted,” she grumbled, as Olivia Denison followed her out on to the doorstep and asked her where she was going. “Ah wur goin’ whoam to get a coop o’ tea, for Ah’m fair clemmed.”
“You thought we’d got all we wanted!” said Olivia, ironically. “Why, we’ve got nothing at all—not even a chair to sit on. I think, if you have tea going at your cottage, you might ask us to come and have some.”
“Hey, that ye might, Sally,” said a gruff voice, which Olivia had now learnt to recognize as that of a friend.
Turning, she saw Mat Oldshaw, his blushes, if he were still blushing, invisible in the darkness, standing at the foot of the steps, mounting guard over the luggage, which he had piled together.
“Oh,” cried the girl, with a sudden change to melting gratitude, “you haven’t been waiting out here in the cold all this time for us, have you?”
“Weel, miss,” said Mat, laughing uneasily, and shifting from one heavy foot to the other, “t’ door was shut, an’ Ah couldn’t get in.”
And, to put an end to conversation, which was an art in which he felt he did not shine, the young fellow seized the two smallest trunks and carried them straight into the big farm living room, whistling a lively tune as he did so. Olivia stood back quite silently while he fetched in the rest of the luggage in the same way, and then stood looking at it dubiously by the light of Mrs. Wall’s candle.
“It bean’t naw good onfastenin’ t’ cords,” he said at last, “for they won’t stay in here. An’ Ah dunno reightly what to be doin’ for ye if yer goods bean’t coom.”
He went back again to the front door and looked out. Not that he could see anything of the road, for the huge barn opposite, completely blocked the view from this point. But he was a good deal affected by the predicament in which this beautiful lady and her attendant found themselves, and he was shy of meeting the lady’s eyes, being without means of comforting her. Suddenly a figure darted out from the gloom under the barn walls, a strong hand was laid upon the lad’s arm, and, willy-nilly, he was dragged down the steps and heartily cuffed before he had recovered from his first surprise.
“Eh, feyther, what art doin’ now?” he asked, as soon as he had recovered breath, having speedily recognized the touch of his parent’s loving hand.
“Eh, thou feaul, thoo teastrill; Ah’ve got tha! Ah know’d wheer thoo’d got to. This cooms o’ followin’ fowk wha can’t keep off t’ lasses. Coom whoam; coom tha whoam, and if ivver Ah catch tha again a-slitherin’ about yon house, Ah’ll turn ye oot o’ ma house, and oot o’ ma farm, as if ye wur nobbut a ploughboy, thet Ah will!”
Mat wriggled and writhed till he got loose from his father’s grasp, and slinking back a step or two, he called out, not loudly or defiantly, but with the same rough kindliness which he had shown from the first towards the friendly girls—
“Now mind, Sally, thou maun mash t’ best coop o’ tea thoo can for t’ leddies.”
John Oldshaw turned round at these words, and addressed the old woman in a thick and angry voice.
“Sarah Wall, get back to tha whoam an’ tha own business. An’ if thoo canna keep tha owd fingers oot o’ other fowks’ affairs, tha needna coom oop oor way o’ Soondays for t’ broaken meat. So now thoo knaws.”
And, with a jerk of the head to his son to intimate that Mat could go on in front and he would follow, the farmer stamped slowly and heavily away down the yard.
His coarse unkindness affected the three women differently. Little Lucy began to whimper and to sob out indignant maledictions upon “the ol-ol-old brute;” Mrs. Wall, after dropping half a dozen frightened curtseys, manifested a great eagerness to go; Olivia drew herself up and became very stern and grave.
“You need not mind what that man says, Mrs. Wall,” she said, in a firm quiet voice. “You may be very sure that any kindness you do us will be amply repaid. And as for the broken meat he talks about, if you will really lose that by letting us rest a little while in your cottage and giving us a cup of tea, I can promise you a good dinner every Sunday while my father lives here.”
But Mrs. Wall was too far timorous and cautious a person to risk the substantial reality of broken meat on Sundays from the great man of the village for the flimsy vision of a good dinner from a total stranger. She thrust her flickering tallow candle into Lucy’s hands, and began to tie her wispy bonnet strings with a resolute air.
“I’ll leave t’ candle,” she said, as if making a great and generous concession; “an’ that’s a’ I can do for ye. For I’ve nowt in my place I could set afore a leddy; an’ as for tea, the bit fire I left will be out by this time.”
“But I can light your fire again for you, and boil your kettle in two twos,” burst in Lucy. “And we’ve brought some tea with us.”
Her young mistress put a light hand on her arm.
“Never mind, Lucy,” she said, quietly. “If Mrs. Wall doesn’t care for us to go to her cottage we will not trouble her.”
As she spoke her eyes brightened, for at the end of the long barn she descried in the dusk the figure of the gentleman who had come to their aid that afternoon and then left them with such unaccountable suddenness. Lucy saw him too, and being more demonstrative than her mistress, she gave vent to her delight in words.
“No, Mrs. Wall, ma’am; you needn’t go for to put yourself out, for there’s better folks than you coming along, that are a deal more obliging than ever you’d be, and that have some Christian kindness in them, which is more than can be said for you. Ugh, you grumpy old woman, you!”
“Hush, Lucy,” said her mistress in gentle rebuke; “the gentleman will hear you. And I don’t suppose he is coming here at all,” she added, reluctantly, as the figure they had both so quickly recognized disappeared again in the gloom.
“What gentleman? What gentleman?” asked the old woman, shrilly.
“How should we know, when we’re strangers here?” retorted Lucy, who, now, that her tongue was once loosened, was delighted to have what she afterwards called “a go-in” at their disobliging guide. “But he was a real gentleman; not like your pig-faced friend in the corduroy trousers that you’re so mighty civil to; and he wears knickerbockers and gaiters and a cap over his eyes, if that is anything you can tell him by.”
Apparently it was, for Sarah gave a step back in horror, and ejaculated “Mercy on us!” two or three times, as if too much shocked for further speech.
“What’s the matter?” asked Olivia, rather sharply, remembering the stranger’s warning that she would hear no good of him from Sarah Wall, and curious to learn the reason. “If you know who the gentleman is, tell me his name. And what do you know against him?” she added, indiscreetly.
Mrs. Wall, though not brilliantly intelligent, had the splendid gift of reticence where she thought that things might “go round.” She only shook her head, therefore, and muttered something about getting herself into trouble and desiring to be allowed to go home.
“Well, just tell me first who he is, then, and you shall go at once,” said Olivia, persuasively.
The old woman, writhing nervously under the clasp of Miss Denison’s hand, evidently cast about in her mind for a means of getting free while committing herself as little as possible. The reluctant words which at last came out were not very well chosen, however.
“I’ll tell ye this, then,” she croaked, in a broken whisper, peering round with her sunken eyes as if to be sure the treasonable communication she was making was not overheard by the person concerned. “Yon gentleman, as ye call him, is not fit company for young ladies. And others have found it oot to their cost—so fowk say,” she added, hastily. Then, as Olivia released her arm and she tottered away over the hard ground, she looked back to add, in a querulous and anxious tone, “But don’t ye tak’ it frae me, mind. I nobbut told ye what I’ve heerd say.”
Olivia turned back towards the open door of the dreary house, feeling beyond measure miserable and disconsolate. The dimly seen figure of her friend of the afternoon had disappeared; the disobliging old woman who was at least a fellow-creature, was rapidly hobbling out of sight; while the words which had just, with so much difficulty, been forced out of her, seemed in the hag’s mouth to have acquired the chilling significance of a curse. Lucy felt this too, for coming closer to her mistress she half whispered—
“Oh, Miss Olivia, if there was really such things as witches, I should believe that old crone was one.”
“Nonsense! Come inside, and let us see what’s to be done.”
“Oh, you’re not going in again—all by ourselves! Oh, miss, just think of that upstairs room!” wailed the poor girl.
“Now, look here, Lucy, you mustn’t be ridiculous. We’re in a dreadful plight, and we’ve got to make the best of it. If you give way to silly fancies instead of doing your best to help me, I shall have to take you to that inn at the corner and leave you there while I come back and shift for myself as best I can.”
Lucy, who loved her young mistress, grew sober and good immediately.
“You know I’ll do what I can, Miss Olivia,” she said, suppressing a sob of alarm as a dull sound, apparently from the barn opposite, reached their ears.
Olivia listened. The sound was repeated.
“It sounds like some person chopping wood,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “I daresay, now the place is uninhabited, the villagers take what liberties they like with it, and use the barns and sheds to store their own wood and hay and things in. Now, come in, and let us undo some of the trunks before the candle goes out.”
With most reluctant feet, but without another word of remonstrance, Lucy followed her young mistress. Olivia, with resolute steps and a mouth set with an expression which said to the phantoms of the old house, “Come on if you dare!” re-entered the hall, and kneeling down before a trunk which had been placed there, attacked the cord round it with inexpert but strong fingers. They had got it open, and were congratulating themselves that in this, the first trunk unpacked, were candles, tea, and a little spirit lamp, when, suddenly, there fell upon their ears a noise which even to the brave spirited Olivia was, in a lonely, empty house, undeniably alarming. It came from the long living room where most of their luggage lay, and was as of some heavy body falling with a crash on to the floor.
Olivia sprang to her feet.
“I opened one of the windows,” she said, “and forgot to shut it. Some one has got in! No, don’t scream!”
She clapped her hand on Lucy’s mouth and reduced the threatened shriek to a moan; then, the noise having by this time ceased, she turned, heedless of the maid’s whispered supplications, to the door of the long room. The lock was stiff with rust and the handle difficult to turn; so that, perhaps not much against her will, she left the intruder, if intruder it was, time to escape. But there was no fresh sound, and the young girl’s brave heart fluttered a little with the fear that perhaps, on opening the door, she would come face to face with a defiant marauder. At last the door opened. It was dark by this time; through the opened shutters of the four windows came only just enough light to show that the trunks, piled up on the bare floor, had at least not been removed. The air blew in, very keen and cold, through the one open window, which was at the other end of the room, nearest to the fireplace.
“Is anybody there?” asked Olivia, scarcely without a tremor.
Her voice echoed without reply in the desolate department.
She held up the candle and advanced slowly, examining every gloomy corner. No one was there; no trace of any one having been there until, as she reached the other end, her glance fell on some dark object lying close under the open window. At this sight Lucy could not suppress the long-stifled scream, and it was not until her mistress pouncing down upon the mysterious thing, revealed the fact that it was only a couple of logs and a bundle of sticks, neatly tied together with a piece of string, that she found enough relief from terror to burst into tears.
“Who’s the benevolent burglar, I wonder,” cried Olivia, her spirits rising instantly at the discovery of the little anonymous act of kindness.
She ran to the window and looked out. There was no one to be seen; but on the window-ledge lay a box of cigar lights.
“The mysterious stranger again!” she said to herself. Then turning to the maid, said, “Now, Lucy, make a fire as fast as you can. There are some newspapers with the rugs. Here are sticks and logs and matches. We shall feel different creatures when we are once warm.”
She shut down the window and boiled some water with her little spirit lamp; while Lucy, with cunning hands, made in the huge rusty grate a fire which was soon roaring up the chimney, and pouring its bright warm light on floor and wall and ceiling. The spirits both of mistress and maid began to rise a little as they drew up one of the smaller trunks to the fire, and made a frugal meal of biscuits and milkless tea.
“It is a horrid place, though, Miss Olivia,” said Lucy, who had been chilled to the heart by Sarah Wall’s utterances, and did not feel wholly sure that she herself had not been bewitched by that uncanny person.
“Oh, I suppose it might have been worse. They might have thrown bricks at us,” said her mistress; “and remember that two people have already been very kind to us.”
“Perhaps the young farmer-man only took to us just out of aggravation because his father didn’t,” suggested Lucy, who was a well-brought-up girl, and affected to take cynical views of young men. “And as for the gentleman, why, the old woman as good as said decent folk had better have nothing to do with him.”
“But you surely wouldn’t take that miserable old woman’s word for it?”
“No, but I’d take his own face, miss. I watched him when the old farmer was going on so; and, my gracious! I never see such a black look on any one’s face before. He seemed to grow all dark and purple-looking, and his eyes were quite red-like. It was just like as if he’d have knocked the other man down, miss, that it was.”
“Well, I don’t think I should have thought any the worse of him if he had.”
“Oh, miss, it’s an evil face. And I’m never deceived about faces. I said, first time I saw her, that nursery-maid Mrs. Denison sent away without a character was no good. And then that under-gardener——”
“You mustn’t let your prejudices run away with you. Judge people by their actions; not their looks. Now, I saw something quite different in that gentleman’s face, and we can’t both be right. It seemed to me that he looked like a man who had had a very hard life and a great deal of trouble; as if he had done nothing but struggle, struggle with—I don’t know exactly with what; poverty, perhaps, or perhaps with a violent temper, or——”
She stopped, and stared into the fire, having ceased to remember that she was carrying on a conversation. Her wandering thoughts, however, soon took a practical turn again. “The cabman!” she cried, starting up tragically; “I never paid him.”
She was instinctively turning towards the door, haunted by an alarming sum in addition of innumerable hours at sixpence every quarter of an hour, when Lucy’s voice, in tones of great shrewdness, stopped her.
“Oh, Miss Olivia,” she said, shaking her head knowingly; “he’s gone away long ago. If this was a place where cabmen would wait for their fares for two hours without so much as knocking at the door, we might think ourselves in heaven, which the other people shows us we’re not.”
“Well, but who paid his fare, then?”
Lucy began to look not only mysterious, but rather alarmed.
“Oh, Miss Olivia, perhaps it’s a plot to get us into his power!”
They had both come to the same conclusion as to the person who paid the fare, but at this point their reflections branched off into widely different channels.
“You’re a little goose, Lucy, and you’ve been filling your head with penny novels, I can see,” said she.
But the obligation to a stranger, which she could scarcely doubt she was under, troubled her.
“It is very, very awkward to be thrown out like this in a strange place with nobody to go to for help or advice,” she began; when suddenly a light came into her face, and she sprang up and ran to fetch her travelling bag. “I’d forgotten all about it!” she cried, as she drew out a closed letter directed in an old-fashioned, pointed, feminine hand to “Mrs. Brander, the Vicarage, Rishton.” “The wife of one of the curates at Streatham knows the wife of the vicar here, and gave me a letter of introduction to her. I will go and call upon her at once. If she is the least nice she will help us, and tell us how to treat with these savages.”
Olivia was fastening her mantle, which she had not taken off, and putting on her gloves. Lucy’s round face had grown very long.
“And must I stay here, miss, all by myself?” she asked, dolefully.
Olivia looked at her dubiously.
“I would rather you stayed here, certainly, because, you see, the furniture might come while we were away,” she said at last. “On the other hand, if you are going to frighten yourself into a fit at the scraping of every mouse——”
Lucy drew herself up. She was not really a coward, and this speech put her upon her mettle.
“I’ll stay, Miss Olivia,” she said, resolutely; adding, in a milder voice, “You won’t be very long, will you?”
“Indeed I won’t,” answered her mistress, promptly. “I don’t suppose it takes more than five minutes to go from one end of the village to the other. We saw the church from the cab windows; it’s on the top of the hill. I shall make for that; the Vicarage is sure not to be far off.”
Without more delay Olivia left the house, taking the way to the right by which they had approached the house, in the hope of meeting some one belonging to the inn who would direct her. She was fortunate enough to come upon a diminutive villager, who, after lengthy interrogation and apparent ignorance as to where “the Vicarage” was, acknowledged to knowing “where the parson lived.”
“Will you take me to the house if I give you twopence?”
“Hey,” replied the small boy, promptly.
He did not start, however, until he had taken an exhaustive survey of her, either for identification in case she should try to elude him at the other end of the journey, or to satisfy himself whether she was a person likely to possess twopence.
“Theer’s two ways,” he said, at last. “Short way over t’ brook, an’ oop t’ steps and through t’ churchyard; long way by t’ road an’ oop t’ hill.”
“Go the short way, then.”
“Mr. Midgley, t’ carpenter, fell an’ broak his leg goin’ oop theer this afternoon. An’ t’ churchyard geate’s cloased by now.”
“Well, then, we’ll go the other way, of course.”
The boy trudged along up the road, which was a continuation of that by which they had come to the farm, and made no attempt at conversation except in answer to Olivia’s questions. She made out, after much persevering pumping, that the vicar, Mr. Brander, was much liked, and that his wife was only a little less popular. After this there was a pause, which was broken by the boy, as they passed between a plain stone building, standing back from the road on the right, and a group of hay and straw stacks, sheds, and farm buildings on the left.
“That’s Mester Oldshaw’s farm,” said the boy.
“Ugh!” ejaculated Olivia below her breath, hurrying on with angrily averted eyes.
The whole place, seen by the weak light of the rising moon, seemed to her to display the repulsive hideousness of its master.
After this the road wound to the left up the hill, and they passed a few scattered cottages, one of which was the primitive village post office.
“That be t’ parson’s house,” said the boy, as they came in sight of an irregularly built stone house standing high, on the left-hand side of the road, in a well-wooded garden.
They had to go round this garden, and turn sharply to the left into a private road at the top of the hill. This brought them face to face with the gates of the little churchyard, while on the left was the front door of the Vicarage, a pretty building in the Tudor style, which, seen even in the faint moonlight, had a pleasant, welcoming air of comfort, peace, and plenty. Olivia gave the boy his twopence, and rang the bell with a hopeful heart. Everything seemed to promise well for the success of her errand. A neat maid soon came to the door, but to Olivia’s inquiry whether Mrs. Brander were at home came the dispiriting answer that she was away. Miss Denison reflected a moment.
“Is Mr. Brander at home?” she then asked.
“Yes, ma’am, Mr. Vernon Brander is in. Will you see him?”
“Yes, if I can.”
She followed the servant across the wide, well-formed hall, to a door at which the maid knocked.
“Come in,” said a voice, which seemed familiar to Olivia.
“A lady wishes to see you, sir,” said the servant.
“Show her in at once,” said the man’s voice.
Olivia drew back instead of advancing, as the servant made way for her to enter.
“It is Mr. Brander, the clergyman, I wish to see,” said Olivia, hurriedly, in a low voice.
“Oh, yes, ma’am, it’s all right. Mr. Brander is a clergyman,” answered the maid, reassuringly.
Before another word could pass, Mr. Brander himself, hearing a discussion, came to the door. Olivia looked at him in some confusion. It was her unknown friend of the afternoon!