Kitabı oku: «Johnny Ludlow, Fourth Series», sayfa 10

So, there we were again—baffled. The Squire went back in the cab to the Castle and Falcon, rubbing his face furiously, and giving things in general a few hard words.

Up to Islington again, and searching up and down the streets and roads. A bright thought took the pater. He got a policeman to show him to the district sorting-house, went in, and inquired whether such a place as Gibraltar Terrace existed, or whether it did not.

Yes. There was one. But it was not in Islington; only on the borders of it.

Away we went, after getting the right direction, and found it. A terrace of poor houses, in a quiet side-street. In nearly every other window hung a card with “Lodgings” on it, or “Apartments.” Children played in the road: two men with a truck were crying mackerel.

“I say, Johnny, these houses all look alike. What is the number we want?”

“Stephen Radcliffe did not give any number.”

“Bless my heart! We shall have to knock at every one of them.”

And so he did. Every individual door he knocked at, one after the other, asking if Mrs. Mapping lived there. At the very last house of all we found her. A girl, whose clothes were dilapidated enough to have come down from Noah’s Ark, got up from her knees, on which she was cleaning the door-flag, and told us to go into the parlour while she called Mrs. Mapping. It was a tidy threadbare room, not much bigger than a closet, with “Lodgings” wafered to the middle pane of the window.

Mrs. Mapping came in: a middle-aged, washed-out lady, with pink cheeks, who looked as if she didn’t have enough to eat. She thought we had come after the lodgings, and stood curtsying, and rubbing her hands down her black-silk apron—which was in slits. Apparently a “genteel” person who had seen better days. The Squire opened the ball, and her face took a puzzled look as she listened.

“Radcliffe?—Radcliffe?” No, she did not recollect any lodger of the name. But then, nine times out of ten, she did not know the names of her lodgers. She didn’t want to know them. Why should she? If the gentlemen’s names came out incidental, well and good; if not, she never presumed to inquire after them. She had not been obliged to let lodgings always.

“But this gentleman died here—died, ma’am,” interrupted the Squire, pretty nearly beside himself with impatience. “It’s about twelve months ago.”

“Oh, that gentleman,” she said. “Yes, he did die here, poor young man. The doctor—yes, his name was Pitt, sir—he couldn’t save him. Drink, that was the cause, I’m afeard.”

The Squire groaned—wishing all drink was at the bottom of the Thames. “And he was buried in Finchley Cemetery, ma’am, we hear?”

“Finchley? Well, now yes, I believe it was Finchley, sir,” replied Mrs. Mapping, considering—and I could see the woman was speaking the truth according to her recollection. “The burial fees are low at Finchley, sir.”

“Then he did die here, ma’am—Mr. Francis Radcliffe?”

“Sure enough he did, sir. And a sad thing it was, one young like him. But whether his name was Radcliffe, or not, I couldn’t take upon myself to say. I don’t remember to have heard his name.”

“Couldn’t you have read it on the coffin-plate?” asked the Squire, explosively. “One might have thought if you heard it in no other way, you’d see it there.”

“Well, sir, I was ill myself at the time, and in a good deal of trouble beside, and didn’t get upstairs much out of my kitchen below. Like enough it was Radcliffe: I can’t remember.”

“His brother brought him—and lodged here with him—did he not?”

“Like enough, sir,” she repeated. “There was two or three of ’em out and in often, I remember. Mr. Pitt, and others. I was that ill, myself, that some days I never got out of bed at all. I know it was a fine shock to me when my sister came down and said the young man was dead. She was seeing to things a bit for me during my illness. His rantings had been pitiful.”

“Could I see your sister, ma’am?” asked the Squire.

“She’s gone to Manchester, sir. Her husband has a place there now.”

“Don’t you recollect the elder Mr. Radcliffe?” pursued the Squire. “The young man’s brother? He was staying up in London two or three times about some shipping.”

“I should if I saw him, sir, no doubt. Last year I had rare good luck with my rooms, never hardly had ’em empty. The young man who died had the first-floor apartments. Well, yes, I do remember now that some gentleman was here two or three times from the country. A farmer, I think he was. A middle-aged man, sir, so to say; fifty, or thereabouts; with grey hair.”

“That’s him,” interrupted the Squire, forgetting his grammar in his haste. “Should know the description of him anywhere, shouldn’t we, Johnny? Was he here at the time of the young man’s death, ma’am?”

“No, sir. I remember as much as that. He had gone back to the country.”

Mrs. Mapping stood, smoothing down the apron, waiting to hear what we wanted next, and perhaps not comprehending the drift of the visit yet.

“Where’s that Mr. Pitt to be found?”

“Law, sir! as if I knew!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never set eyes on him since that time. He didn’t live here, sir; only used to come in and out to see to the sick young man. I never heard where he did live.”

There was nothing more to wait for. The Squire slipped half-a-crown into the woman’s hand as we went out, and she curtsied again and thanked him—in spite of the better days. Another question occurred to him.

“I suppose the young man had everything done for him that could be? Care?—and nourishment?—and necessary attendance?”

“Surely, sir. Why not? Mr. Pitt took care of that, I suppose.”

“Ay. Well, it was a grievous end. Good-morning, ma’am.”

“Good-day to you, gentlemen.”

The Squire went looming up the street in the dumps; his hands in his pockets, his steps slow.

“I suppose, Johnny, if one tried to get at Pitt in this vast London city, it would be like looking for a needle in a bottle of hay.”

“We have no clue to him, sir.”

“No. And I don’t know that it would answer any purpose if we did get at him. He could only confirm what we’ve heard. Well, this is fine news to take back to poor Annet Radcliffe!”

“I should think she had better not be told, sir.”

“She must know it some time.”

The Squire sent for David Skate when we got home, and told him what we knew; and the two marched to the Torr in the blazing June sun, and held an interview with Stephen Radcliffe. Ste was sullen and reserved, and (for him) haughty. It was a mistake, of course, as things turned out, his having taken Frank from the asylum, he admitted that, admitted he was sorry for it, but he had done it for the best. Frank got drinking again, and it was too much for him; he died after a few days of delirium, and Pitt couldn’t save him. That was the long and the short of the history; and the Squire and Skate might make the best and the worst of it.

The Squire and Skate were two of the simplest of men; honest-minded themselves, and unsuspicious of other people. They quitted the Torr for the blazing meadows, on their road home again.

“I shall not say anything about this to Annet,” observed David Skate. “In her present frame of mind it would not do. The fever seems better, and she is up, and about her work again. Later perhaps we may tell her of it.”

“I wish we could have found Pitt,” said the Squire.

“Yes, it would be satisfactory to hear what he has to say,” replied David. “Some of these days, when work is slack, I’ll take a run up to London and try and search him out. Though I suppose he could not tell us much more than the landlady has told.”

“There it is,” cried the Squire. “Even Johnny Ludlow, with his crotchets about people and his likes and dislikes, says he’s sure Mrs. Mapping might be trusted; that she was relating facts.”

So matters subsided, and the weeks and our holidays went on together. Stephen Radcliffe, by this act of deceit, added another crooked feather to his cap of ills in the estimation of the neighbourhood; though that would not be likely to trouble him. Meeting Mr. Brandon one day in the road, just out of Church Dykely, Stephen chanced to say that he wished to goodness it was in his power to sell the Torr, so that he might be off to Canada to his son: that was the land to make money at, by all accounts.

“You and your son might cut off the entail, now poor Francis is gone,” said old Brandon, thinking what a good riddance it would be if Stephen went.

“I don’t know who’d buy it—at my price,” growled Stephen. “I mean to get shut o’ them birds, though,” he added, as an afterthought. “They’re not entailed. They’ve never cried and shrieked as they do this summer. I’d as soon have an army of squalling cats around the place.”

“The noise is becoming a subject of common talk,” said old Brandon.

Ste Radcliffe bit his lips and turned his face another way, and emitted sundry daggers from his looks. “Let folks concern themselves with their own business,” said he. “The birds is nothing to them.”

Four weeks had gone by, and the moon was nearly at the full again. Its light streamed on the hedges, and flickered amidst the waving trees, and lay on the fields like pale silver. It was Sunday evening, and we had run out for a stroll before supper, Tod and I.

On coming out of church, Duffham had chanced to get talking of the cries. He had heard them the previous night. They gave him the shivers, he said, they were so like human cries. This put it into our heads to go again ourselves, which we had not done since that first time. How curiously events are brought about!

Leaping the last stile, the Torr was right before us at the opposite side of the large field, the tops of its chimneys and its towering sugar-loaf tower showing out white in the moonlight. The wind was high, blowing in gusts from the south-west.

“I say, Johnny, it’s just the night for witches. Whirr! how it sweeps along! They’ll ride swimmingly on their broomsticks.”

“The wind must have got up suddenly,” I answered. “There was none to-day. It was too hot for it. Talking of witches and broomsticks, Tod, have you read–”

He put his arm out to stop my words and steps, halting himself. We had been rushing on like six, had traversed half the field.

“What’s that, Johnny?” he asked in a whisper. “There”—pointing onwards at right angles. “Something’s lying there.”

Something undoubtedly was—lying on the grass. Was it an animal?—or a man? It did not look much like either. We stood motionless, trying to make the shape out.

“Tod! It is a woman.”

“Gently, lad! Don’t be in a hurry. We’ll soon see.”

The figure raised itself as we approached, and stood confronting us. The last pull of wind that went brushing by might have brushed me down, in my surprise. It was Mrs. Francis Radcliffe.

She drew her grey cloak closer round her and put her hand upon Tod’s arm. He went back half a step: I’m not sure but he thought it might be her ghost.

“Do not think me quite out of my mind,” she said—and her voice and manner were both collected. “I have come here every evening for nearly a week past to listen to the cries. They have never been so plain as they are to-night. I suppose the wind helps them.”

“But—you—were lying on the grass, Mrs. Francis,” said Tod; not knowing yet what to make of it all.

“I had put my ear on the ground, wondering whether I might not hear it plainer,” she replied. “Listen!”

The cry again! The same painful wailing sound that we heard that other night, making one think of I know not what woe and despair. When it had died away, she spoke further, her voice very low.

“People are talking so much about the cries that I strolled on here some evenings ago to hear them for myself. In my mind’s tumult I can hardly rest quiet, once my day’s work is done: what does it matter which way I stroll?—all ways are the same to me. Some people said the sounds came from the birds, some said from witches, some from the ghost of the man on the gibbet: but the very first night I came here I found out what they were really like—my husband’s cries.”

“What!” cried Tod.

“And I believe from my very soul that it is his spirit that cries!” she went on, her voice taking as much excitement as any voice, only half raised, can take. “His spirit is unable to rest. It is here, hovering about the Torr. Hush! there it comes again.”

It was anything but agreeable, I can assure you, to stand in that big white moonlit plain, listening to those mysterious cries and to these ghostly suggestions. Tod was listening with all his ears.

“They are the very cries he used to make in his illness at the farm,” said Mrs. Radcliffe. “I can’t forget them. I should know them anywhere. The same sound of voice, the same wail of anguish: I could almost fancy that I hear the words. Listen.”

It did seem like it. One might have fancied that his name was repeated with a cry for help. “Help! Frank Radcliffe! Help!” But at such a moment as this, when the nerves are strung up to concert pitch, imagination plays us all sorts of impossible tricks.

“I’ll be shot if it’s not like Frank Radcliffe’s voice!” exclaimed Tod, breaking the silence. “And calling out, too.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Francis. “I shall not be able to bear this long: I shall have to speak of it to the world. When I say that you have recognized his voice also, they will be less likely to mock at me as a lunatic. David did, when I told him. At least, I could make no impression on him.”

Tod was lying down with his ear to the ground. But he soon got up, saying he could not hear so well.

“Did Stephen kill him, do you think?” she asked, in a dread whisper, drawing closer to us. “Why, else, should his poor unquiet spirit haunt the region of the Torr?”

“It is the first time I ever heard of spirits calling out in a human voice,” said Tod. “The popular belief is, that they mostly appear in dumb show.”

He quitted us, as he spoke, and went about the field with slow steps, halting often to look and listen. The trees around the Torr in particular seemed to attract his attention, by the length of time he stared up at them. Or, perhaps, it might be at the tops of the chimneys: or perhaps at the tapering tower. We waited in nearly the same spot, shivering and listening. But the sounds never came so distinctly again: I think the wind had spent itself.

“It is a dreadful weight to have to carry about with me,” said poor Annet Radcliffe as we walked homewards. “And oh! what will be the ending? Will it be heard always?”

I had never seen Tod so thoughtful as he was that night. At supper he put down his knife and fork perpetually to fall into a brown study; and I am sure he never knew a word of the reading afterwards.

It was some time in the night, and I was fast asleep and dreaming of daws and magpies, when something shook my shoulder and awoke me. There stood Tod, his nightshirt white as snow in the moonlight.

“Johnny,” said he, “I have been trying to get daylight out of that mystery, and I think I’ve done it.”

“What mystery? What’s the matter?”

“The mystery of the cries. They don’t come from Francis Radcliffe’s ghost, but from Francis himself. His ghost! When that poor soft creature was talking of the ghost, I should have split with laughter but for her distress.”

“From Francis himself! What on earth do you mean?”

“Stephen has got him shut up in that tower.”

“Alive?”

“Alive! Go along, Johnny! You don’t suppose he’d keep him there if he were dead. Those cries we heard to-night were human cries; words; and that was a human voice uttering them, as my ears and senses told me; and my brain has been in a muddle ever since, all sleep gone clean out of it. Just now, turning and twisting possibilities about, the solution of the mystery came over me like a flash of lightning. Ste has got Frank shut up in the Torr.”

He, standing there upright by the bed, and I, digging my elbow into the counterpane and resting my cheek on my hand, gazed at one another, the perplexity of our faces showing out strongly in the moonlight.

IV

Mr. Duffham the surgeon stood making up pills and powders in his surgery at Church Dykely, the mahogany counter before him, the shelves filled with glass bottles of coloured liquids behind him. Weighing out grains of this and that in the small scales that rested beside the large ones, both sets at the end of the counter, was he, and measuring out drops with a critical eye. The day promised to be piping-hot, and his summer house-coat, of slate-coloured twill, was thrown back on his shoulders. Spare and wiry little man though he was, he felt the heat. He was rather wondering that no patients had come in yet, for people knew that this was the time to catch him, before he started on his rounds, and he generally had an influx on Monday morning.

Visitor the first. The surgery-door, standing close to the open front one, was tapped at, and a tall, bony woman entered, dressed in a big straw bonnet with primrose ribbons, a blue cotton gown and cotton shawl. Eunice Gibbon, Mrs. Stephen Radcliffe’s sister.

“Good-morning, Mr. Duffham,” she said, lodging her basket on the counter. “I’m frightfully out o’ sorts, sir, and think I shan’t be right till I’ve took a bottle or two o’ physic.”

“Sit down,” said the doctor, coming in front of the counter, preparatory to inquiring into the symptoms.

She sat down in one of the two chairs: and Duffham, after sundry questions, told her that her liver was out of order. She answered that she could have told him that, for nothing but “liver” was ever the matter with her. He went behind the counter again to make up a bottle of some delectable stuff good for the complaint, and Eunice sat waiting for it, when the surgery-door was pushed open with a whirl and a bang, and Tod and I burst in. To see Eunice Gibbon there, took us aback. It seemed a very curious coincidence, considering what we had come about.

“Well, young gentlemen,” quoth Duffham, looking rather surprised, and detecting our slight discomfiture, “does either of you want my services?”

“Yes,” said Tod, boldly; “Johnny does: he has a headache. We’ll wait, Mr. Duffham.”

Leaning on the counter, we watched the progress of the making-up in silence, Duffham exchanging a few words with Eunice Gibbon at intervals. Suddenly he opened upon a subject that caused Tod to give me a private dig with his elbow.

“And how were the cries last night?” asked Duffham. “Did you hear much of them?”

“There was no cries last night,” answered Eunice—which brought me another dig from Tod. “But wasn’t the wind high! It went shrieking round the Torr like so many mad cats. Two spoonfuls twice a-day, did you say, sir?”

“Three times a-day. I am putting the directions on the bottle. You will soon feel better.”

“I’ve been subject to these bilious turns all my life,” she said, speaking to me and Tod. “But I don’t know when I’ve had as bad a one as this. Thank ye, sir.”

Taking the bottle of physic, she put it into her basket, said good-morning, and went away. Duffham came to the front, and Tod jumped on the counter and sat there facing us, his long legs dangling. I had taken one of the chairs.

“Mr. Duffham, what do you think we have come about?” began Tod, dropping his voice to a mysterious key. “Don’t you go and faint away when you hear it.”

“Faint away!” retorted old Duffham.

“I’ll be shot if it would not send some people into a faint! That Gibbon woman has just said that no cries were to be heard last night.”

“Well?”

“Well, there were cries; plenty of them. And awful cries they were. I, and Johnny, and Mrs. Frank Radcliffe—yes, she was with us—stood in that precious field listening to them till our blood ran cold. You heard them, you know, on Saturday night.”

“Well?” repeated Duffham, staring at Tod.

“Look here. We have found it out—and have come over to tell you—and to ask you what can be done,” went on Tod earnestly, jumping off the counter and putting his back against the door to make sure of no interruption. “The cries come from Frank Radcliffe. He is not dead.”

“What?” shouted Duffham, who had turned to face Tod and stood in the middle of the oil-cloth, wondering whether Tod was demented.

“Frank is no more dead than I am. I’d lay my life upon it. Stephen Radcliffe has got him shut up in the tower; and the piteous cries are his—crying for release.”

“Bless my heart and mind!” exclaimed Duffham, backing right against the big scales. “Frank Radcliffe alive and shut up in the tower! But there’s no way to the tower. He could not be got into it.”

“I don’t care. I know he is there. That huzzy, now gone out, does well to say no cries were abroad last night; her business is to throw people off the scent. But I tell you, Duffham, the cries never were so loud or so piteous, and I heard what they said as distinctly as you can hear me speak now. ‘Help! Frank Radcliffe! Help!’ they said. And I swear the voice was Frank’s own.”

“If ever I heard the like of this!” ejaculated Duffham. “It is really not—not to be credited.”

“The sound of the cries comes out on the air through the openings in the tower,” ran on Tod, in excitement. “Oh, he is there, poor fellow, safe enough. And to think what long months he has been kept there, Stephen’s prisoner! Twelve. Twelve, as I’m alive. Now, look you here, Duffham! you are staring like an unbeliever.”

“It’s not altogether that—that I don’t believe,” said Duffham, whose wide-open eyes were staring considerably. “I am thinking what is to be done about it—how to set the question at rest.”

Tod left the door unguarded and flung himself into the other chair. He went over the whole narrative quietly: how Mrs. Frank Radcliffe—who had been listening to the cries for a week past—had first put him into a puzzle, how he had then heard the words and the voice, and how the true explanation came flashing into his mind later. With every sentence, Duffham grew more convinced, and at last he believed it as much as we did.

“And now how is he to be got out?” concluded Tod.

Holding a council together, we decided that the first step must be to get a magistrate’s order to search the Torr. That involved the disclosure of the facts to the magistrate—whosoever he might be. Mr. Brandon was pitched upon: Duffham proposed the Squire at first; but, as Tod pointed out, the Squire would be sure to go to work in some hot and headlong manner, and perhaps ruin all. Let Stephen Radcliffe get only half an inkling of what was up, and he might contrive to convey Frank to the ends of the earth.

All three of us started at once, Duffham leaving his patients for that one morning to doctor themselves, and found Mr. Brandon at breakfast. He had been distracted with face-ache all night, he said, which caused him to rise late. The snow-white table-cloth was set off with flowers and plate, but the fare was not luxurious. The silver jug held plenty of new milk, the silver tea-pot a modicum of the weakest of tea, the silver rack the driest of dry toast. A boiled egg and the butter-dish remained untouched. One of the windows was thrown up wide to the summer air, and to the scent from the clustering flower-beds and the hum of the bees dipping over them to sip their sweets.

Breaking off little bits of toast, and eating them slowly, Mr. Brandon listened to the tale. He did not take it in. That was check the first. And he would not grant a warrant to search the Torr. That was check the second.

“Stephen Radcliffe is bad enough in the way of being sullen and miserly,” said he. “But as to daring such a thing as this, I don’t think he would. Pass his brother off to the world for dead, and put him into his house and keep him there in concealment! No. No one of common sense would believe it.”

Tod set on again, giving our experience of the past night, earnestly protesting that he had recognized Frank’s voice, and heard the words it said—“Help! Frank Radcliffe!” He added that Annet Radcliffe, Frank’s widow—or wife, whichever it might turn out to be—had been listening to the cries for days past and knew them for her husband’s: only she, poor daft woman, took them to come from his ghost. Mr. Brandon sipped his tea and listened. Duffham followed on: saying that when he heard the cries on Saturday night, in passing the Torr on his way from the Court, he could then almost have staked his existence upon their being human cries, proceeding from some human being in distress, but for the apparent impossibility of such a thing. And I could see that an impression was at length made on Mr. Brandon.

“If Stephen Radcliffe has done so infamous an act, he must be more cruel, more daring than man ever was yet,” remarked he, in answer. “But I must be more satisfied of it before I sign the warrant you ask for.”

Well, there we sat, hammering at him. That is, they did. Being my guardian, I did not presume to put in a word edgeways, so far as pressing him to act went. In all that he thought right, and in spite of his quiet manner and his squeaky voice, old Brandon was a firm man, not to be turned by argument.

“But won’t you grant this warrant, sir?” appealed Tod for the tenth time.

“I have told you, no,” he replied. “I will not at the present stage of the affair. In any case, I should not grant it without consulting your father–”

“He is so hot-headed,” burst in Tod. “He’d be as likely as not to go off knocking at the Torr door without his hat, demanding Frank Radcliffe.”

“Mr. Todhetley was Frank Radcliffe’s trustee, and he is your father, young man; I do not stir a step in this matter without consulting him,” returned old Brandon, coolly persistent.

Well, there was nothing for it now but to go back home and consult the pater. It seemed like a regular damper—and we were hot and tired besides. Tod in his enthusiasm had pictured us storming the Torr at mid-day, armed with the necessary authority, and getting out Frank at once.

Mr. Brandon ordered his waggonette—a conveyance he did not like, and scarcely ever used himself, leaving it to the servants for their errands—and we all drove back to Dyke Manor, himself included. To describe the astonishment of the pater when the disclosure was made to him would take a strong pen. He rubbed his face, and blustered, and stared around, and then told Tod he was a fool.

“I know I am in some things,” said Tod, as equably as old Brandon could have put it; “but I’m not in this. If Frank Radcliffe is not alive in that tower of Stephen’s, and calling out nightly for his release, you may set me down as a fool to the end of my days, Father.”

“Goodness bless us all!” cried the poor bewildered Squire. “Do you believe this, Brandon?”

Mr. Brandon did not say whether he believed it or not. Both of them shook their heads about granting a warrant: upon which, Tod passionately asked whether Francis Radcliffe was to be left in the tower to die. It was finally decided that we should go in a body that night to the field again, so as to give the two doubters the benefit of hearing anything there might be to hear. And Mr. Brandon stayed with us for the day, telling his coachman to come back at night with the small pony-gig to take him home.

The moon was just as bright as on the previous night, and we started on our expedition stealthily. Tod and I went first; Duffham came strolling next; and the Squire and Mr. Brandon afterwards. Should Stephen Radcliffe or any of his people catch sight of the whole of us moving together, he might suspect there was something in the wind.

Annet did not make her appearance, which was a great relief. For we could talk without restraint; and it would never have done to let her know what we suspected: and so raise wild hopes within her that might not be fulfilled. We knew later that her mother was at Pitchley’s Farm that evening, and it kept Annet at home.

Was Heaven interfering in Frank’s behalf? It does interfere for the oppressed, you know; ay, more often than we heedless and ungrateful mortals think for. Never had the cries been so plain as they were this night, though there was no wind to waft them downwards, for the air was perfectly still: and the words were distinctly heard. “Help! Help! Frank Radcliffe.”

“Mercy upon us!” exclaimed the Squire, under his breath. “The voice does sound like Frank’s.”

Mr. Brandon was standing with his hand to his ear. Duffham leaned on his gold-headed cane, his face lifted upwards.

Tod stood by in dudgeon; he was angry with them for not having believed him at first.

“I think we may grant a search-warrant, Squire,” said Mr. Brandon.

“And send old Jones the constable, to execute it,” assented the Squire.

Tod flung back his head. “Old Jones! Much use he’d be! Why, father, Eunice Gibbon alone could settle old Jones with his shaky legs. She’d pitch him out at the first window.”

“Jones can take help, Joe.”

******

It was the breakfast hour at the Torr, eight o’clock. The meal was being taken in the kitchen. Less semblance of gentility than even in the former days was kept up; all usages of comfort and refinement had departed with old Mr. Radcliffe and Selina. Stephen was swallowing his eggs and rashers of bacon quickly. Tuesday is Alcester market-day, and he was going in to attend it, expecting to sell some of his newly-gathered crop of hay. Mrs. Stephen sat opposite him, eating bacon also; and Eunice Gibbon stood at the dresser, mixing some meal for the fattening of fowls. Miserly though Stephen was by nature, he liked a good table, and took care to have it.

“Could you bring some starch home, master?” asked Eunice, turning her head round to speak.

“Why can’t you get your starch here?” retorted Stephen.

“Well, it’s a farthing less a pound at Alcester than it is at Church Dykely,” said Eunice. “They’ve rose it here.”

Farthings were farthings in Stephen’s eyes, and he supposed he might as well bring the starch. “How much is wanted of it?” he growled.

“We’d better have a pound,” interposed Becca. “Half pounds don’t get the benefit of the farthing: you can’t split a farthing in two. Shall you be home early?” she continued to her husband.

“Don’t know. Not afore afternoon.”

“Because we shall want some of the starch to-day. There’s none to go on with, is there, Eunice?”

“Yes, there’s a bit. I can make it do.”

“You’ll have to wait till you get it,” remarked Stephen as he pushed his plate away and rose from table. “And mind you don’t forget to give the pigs their dinner.”