Kitabı oku: «Johnny Ludlow, Second Series», sayfa 4

III.
HESTER REED’S PILLS

We were at our other and chief home, Dyke Manor: and Tod and I were there for the short Easter holidays, which were shorter in those days than they are in these.

It was Easter Tuesday. The Squire had gone riding over to old Jacobson’s with Tod. I, having nothing else to do, got the mater to come with me for a practice on the church organ; and we were taking the round home again through the village, Church Dykely.

Easter was very late that year. It was getting towards the end of April: and to judge by the weather, it might have been the end of May, the days were so warm and glorious.

In passing the gate of George Reed’s cottage, Mrs. Todhetley stopped.

“How are the babies, Hester?”

Hester Reed, sunning her white cap and clean cotton gown in the garden, the three elder children around, watering the beds with a doll’s watering-pot, and a baby hiding its face on her shoulder, dropped a curtsy as she answered—

“They be but poorly, ma’am, thank you. Look up, Susy,” turning the baby’s face upwards to show it: and a pale mite of a face it was, with sleepy eyes. “For a day or two past they’ve not seemed the thing; and they be both cross.”

“I should think their teeth are troubling them, Hester.”

“Maybe, ma’am. I shouldn’t wonder. Hetty, she seems worse than Susy. She’s a-lying there in the basket indoors. Would you please spare a minute to step in and look at her, ma’am?”

Mrs. Todhetley opened the gate. “I may as well go in and see, Johnny,” she said to me in an undertone: “I fear both the children are rather sickly.”

The other baby, “Hetty,” lay in the kitchen in a clothes-basket. It had just the same sort of puny white face as its sister. These two were twins, and about a year old. When they were born, Church Dykely went on finely at Hester Reed, asking her if she would not have had enough with one new child but she must go and set up two.

“It does seem very poorly,” remarked Mrs. Todhetley, stooping over the young mortal (which was not cross just now, but very still and quiet), and letting it clasp its little fist round one of her fingers. “No doubt it is the teeth. If the children do not get better soon, I think, were I you, Hester, I should speak to Mr. Duffham.”

The advice seemed to strike Hester Reed all of a heap. “Speak to Dr. Duffham!” she exclaimed. “Why, ma’am, they must both be a good deal worse than they be, afore we does that. I’ll give ’em a dose o’ mild physic apiece. I dare say that’ll bring ’em round.”

“I should think it would not hurt them,” assented Mrs. Todhetley. “They both seem feverish; this one especially. I hear you have had Cathy over,” she went on, passing to another subject.

“Sure enough us have,” said Mrs. Reed. “She come over yesterday was a week and stayed till Friday night.”

“And what is she doing now?”

“Well, ma’am, Cathy’s keeping herself; and that’s something. She has got a place at Tewkesbury to serve in some shop; is quite in clover there, by all accounts. Two good gownds she brought over to her back; and she’s pretty nigh as lighthearted as she was afore she went off to enter on her first troubles.”

“Hannah told me she was not looking well.”

“She have had a nasty attack of—what was it?—neuralgy, I think she called it, and been obliged to go to a doctor,” answered Hester Reed. “That’s why they gave her the holiday. She was very well while she was here.”

I had stood at the door, talking to the little ones with their watering-pot. As the mater was taking her final word with Mrs. Reed, I went on to open the gate for her, when some woman whisked round the corner from Piefinch Lane, and in at the gate.

“Thank ye, sir,” said she to me: as if I had been holding it open for her especial benefit.

It was Ann Dovey, the blacksmith’s wife down Piefinch Cut: a smart young woman, fond of fine gowns and caps. Mrs. Todhetley came away, and Ann Dovey went in. And this is what passed at Reed’s—as it leaked out to the world afterwards.

The baby in the basket began to cry, and Ann Dovey lifted it out and took it on her lap. She understood all about children, having been the eldest of a numerous flock at home, and was no doubt all the fonder of them because she had none of her own. Mrs. Dovey was moreover a great gossip, liking to have as many fingers in her neighbours’ pies as she could conveniently get in.

“And now what’s amiss with these two twins?” asked she in confidential tones, bending her face forward till it nearly touched Mrs. Reed’s, who had sat down opposite to her with the other baby. “Sarah Tanken, passing our shop just now, telled me they warn’t the thing at all, so I thought I’d run round.”

“Sarah Tanken looked in while I was a-washing up after dinner, and saw ’em both,” assented Mrs. Reed. “Hetty’s the worst of the two; more peeky like.”

“Which is Hetty?” demanded Ann Dovey; who, with all her neighbourly visits, had not learnt to distinguish the two apart.

“The one that you be a-nursing.”

“Did the mistress of the Manor look at ’em?”

“Yes; and she thinks I’d better give ’em both some mild physic. Leastways, I said a dose might bring ’em round,” added Hester Reed, correcting herself, “and she said it might.”

“It’s the very thing for ’em, Hester Reed,” pronounced Mrs. Dovey, decisively. “There’s nothing like a dose of physic for little ones; it often stops a bout of illness. You give it to the two; and don’t lose no time. Grey powder’s best.”

“I’ve not got any grey powder by me,” said Mrs. Reed. “It crossed my mind to try ’em with one o’ them pills I had from Abel Crew.”

“What pills be they?”

“I had ’em from him for myself the beginning o’ the year, when I was getting the headache so much. They’re as mild as mild can be; but they did me good. The box is upstairs.”

“How do you know they’d be the right pills to give to babies?” sensibly questioned Mrs. Dovey.

“Oh, they be right enough for that! When little Georgy was poorly two or three weeks back, I ran out to Abel Crew, chancing to see him go by the gate, and asked whether one of his pills would do the child harm. He said no, it would do him good.”

“And did it get him round?”

“I never gave it. Georgy seemed to be so much pearter afore night came, that I thought I’d wait till the morrow. He’s a rare bad one to take physic, he is. You may cover a powder in treacle that thick, Ann Dovey, but the boy scents it out somehow, and can’t be got to touch it. His father always has to make him; I can’t. He got well that time without the pill.”

“Well, I should try the pills on the little twins,” advised Ann Dovey. “I’m sure they want something o’ the sort. Look at this one! lying like a lamb in my arms, staring up at me with its poor eyes, and never moving. You may always know when a child’s ill by its quietness. Nothing ailing ’em, they worry the life out of you.”

“Both of them were cross enough this morning,” remarked Hester Reed, “and for that reason I know they be worse now. I’ll try the pill to-night.”

Now, whether it was that Ann Dovey had any especial love for presiding at the ceremony of administering pills to children, or whether she only looked in again incidentally in passing, certain it was that in the evening she was for the second time at George Reed’s cottage. Mrs. Reed had put the three elder ones to bed; or, as she expressed it, “got ’em out o’ the way;” and was undressing the twins by firelight, when Ann Dovey tripped into the kitchen. George Reed was at work in the front garden, digging; though it was getting almost too dark to see where he inserted the spade.

“Have ye give ’em their physic yet?” was Mrs. Dovey’s salutation.

“No; but I’m a-going to,” answered Hester Reed. “You be just come in time to hold ’em for me, Ann Dovey, while I go upstairs for the box.”

Ann Dovey received the pair of babies, and sat down in the low chair. Taking the candle, Mrs. Reed ran up to the room where the elder children slept. The house was better furnished than cottages generally are, and the rooms were of a fairly good size. Opposite the bed stood a high deal press with a flat top to it, which Mrs. Reed made a shelf of, for keeping things that must be out of the children’s reach. Stepping on a chair, she put her hand out for the box of pills, which stood in its usual place near the corner, and went downstairs with it.

It was an ordinary pasteboard pill-box, containing a few pills—six or seven, perhaps. Mrs. Dovey, curious in all matters, lifted the lid and sniffed at the pills. Hester Reed was getting the moist sugar they were to be administered in.

“What did you have these here pills for?” questioned Ann Dovey, as Mrs. Reed came back with the sugar. “They bain’t over big.”

“For headache and pain in the side. I asked old Abel Crew if he could give me something for it, and he gave me these pills.”

Mrs. Reed was moistening a teaspoonful of the sugar, as she spoke, with warm water. Taking out one of the pills she proceeded to crush it into small bits, and then mixed it with the sugar. It formed a sort of paste. Dose the first.

“That ain’t moist enough, Hester Reed,” pronounced Mrs. Dovey, critically.

“No? I’ll put a drop more warm water.”

The water was added, and one of the children was fed with the delectable compound—Hetty. Mrs. Dovey spoke again.

“Is it all for her? Won’t a whole pill be too much for one, d’ye think?”

“Not a bit. When I asked old Abel whether one pill would be too much for Georgy, he said, No—two wouldn’t hurt him. I tell ye, Ann Dovey, the pills be as mild as milk.”

Hetty took in the whole dose by degrees. Susy had a similar one made ready, and swallowed it in her turn. Then the two babies were conveyed upstairs and put to bed side by side in their mother’s room.

Mrs. Dovey, the ceremony being over, took her departure. George Reed came in to his early supper, and soon afterwards he and his wife went up to bed. Men who have to be up at five in the morning must go to rest betimes. The fire and candle were put out, the doors locked, and the cottage was steeped in quietness at a time when in larger houses the evening was not much more than beginning.

How long she slept, Mrs. Reed could not tell. Whether it might be the first part of the night, early or late, or whether morning might be close upon the dawn, she knew not; but she was startled out of her sleep by the cries of the babies. Awful cries, they seemed, coming from children so young; and there could be no mistaking that each was in terrible agony.

“Why, it’s convulsions!” exclaimed George Reed, when he had lighted a candle. “Both of them, too!”

Going downstairs as he was, he hastily lighted the kitchen fire and put a kettle of water on. Then, dressing himself, he ran out for Mr. Duffham. The doctor came in soon after George Reed had got back again.

Duffham was accustomed to scenes, and he entered on one now. Mrs. Reed, in a state of distress, had put the babies in blankets and brought them down to the kitchen fire; the three elder children, aroused by the cries, had come down too, and were standing about in their night-clothes, crying with fright. One of the babies was dead—Hetty. She had just expired in her father’s arms. The other was dying.

“What on earth have you been giving to these children?” exclaimed Duffham, after taking a good look at the two.

“Oh, sir, what is it, please?” sobbed Mrs. Reed, in her terror. “Convulsions?”

“Convulsions—no,” said the doctor, in a fume. “It is something else, as I believe—poison.”

At which she set up a shriek that might have been heard out of doors.

“Well, Hetty was dead, I say;” and Duffham could not do anything to save the other. It died whilst he stood there. Duffham repeated his conjecture as to poison; and Mrs. Reed, all topsy-turvy though she was, three-parts bereft of her senses, resented the implication almost angrily.

“Poison!” cried she. “How can you think of such a thing, sir!”

“I tell you that to the best of my belief these children have both died from some irritant poison,” asserted Duffham, coolly imperative. “I ask what you have been giving them?”

“They have not been well this three or four days past,” replied she, wandering from the point; not evasively, but in her mind’s bewilderment. “It must have been their teeth, sir; I thought they were cutting ’em with fever.”

“Did you give them any physic?”

“Yes, sir. A pill apiece when I put ’em to bed.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Duffham. “What pill was it?”

“One of Abel Crew’s.”

This answer surprised him. Allowing that his suspicion of poison was correct, he assumed that these pills must have contained it; and he had never had cause to suppose that Abel Crew’s pills were otherwise than innocent.

Mrs. Reed, her voice broken by sobs, explained further in answer to his questions, telling him how she had procured these pills from Abel Crew some time before, and had given one of the said pills to each of the babies. Duffham stood against the dresser, taking it all in with a solemn face, his cane held up to his chin.

“Let me see this box of pills, Mrs. Reed.”

She went upstairs to get it. A tidy woman in her ways, she had put the box in its place again on the top of the press. Duffham took off the lid, and examined the pills.

“Do you happen to have a bit of sealing-wax in the house, Reed?” he asked presently.

George Reed, who had stood like a man bewildered, looking first on one, then on the other of his dead little ones, answered that he had not. But the eldest child, Annie, spoke up, saying that there was a piece in her little work-box; Cathy had given it her last week when she was at home.

It was produced—part of a small stick of fancy wax, green and gold. Duffham wrapped the pill-box up in the back of a letter that he took from his pocket, and sealed it with a seal that hung to his watch-chain. He put the parcel into the hand of George Reed.

“Take care of it,” he said. “This will be wanted.”

“There could not have been poison in them pills, sir,” burst out Mrs. Reed, her distress increasing at the possibility that he might be right. “If there had been, they’d ha’ poisoned me. One night I took three of ’em.”

Duffham did not answer. He was nodding his head in answer to his own thoughts.

“And who ever heard of Abel Crew mixing up poison in his pills?” went on Mrs. Reed. “If you please, sir, I don’t think he could do it.”

“Well, that part of it puzzles me—how he came to do it,” acknowledged Duffham. “I like old Abel, and shall be sorry if it is proved that his pills have done the mischief.”

Mrs. Reed shook her head. She had more faith than that in Abel Crew.

Ever so many years before—for it was in the time of Sir Peter Chavasse—there appeared one day a wanderer at Church Dykely. It was hot weather, and he seemed to think nothing of camping out in the fields by night, under the summer stars. Who he was, or what he was, or why he had come, or why he stayed, nobody knew. He was evidently not a tramp, or a gipsy, or a travelling tinker—quite superior to it all; a slender, young, and silent man, with a pale and gentle face.

At one corner of the common, spreading itself between the village and Chavasse Grange, there stood a covered wooden shed, formerly used to impound stray cattle, but left to itself since the square space for the new pound had been railed round. By-and-by it was found that the wanderer had taken to this shed to sleep in. Next, his name leaked out—“Abel Crew.”

He lived how he could, and as simply as a hermit. Buying a penny loaf at the baker’s, and making his dinner of it with a handful of sorrel plucked from the fields, and a drink from the rivulet that ran through the wilderness outside the Chavasse grounds. His days were spent in examining roots and wild herbs, now and then in digging one up; and his nights chiefly in studying the stars. Sir Peter struck up a sort of speaking acquaintanceship with him, and, it was said, was surprised at his stock of knowledge and the extent of his travels; for he knew personally many foreign places where even Sir Peter himself had never been. That may have caused Sir Peter—who was lord of the manor and of the common included—to tolerate in him what it was supposed he would not in others. Anyway, when Abel Crew began to dig the ground about his shed, and plant roots and herbs in it, Sir Peter let him do it and never interfered. It was quite the opposite; for Sir Peter would sometimes stand to watch him at his work, talking the while.

In the course of time there was quite an extensive garden round the shed—comparatively speaking, you know, for we do not expect to see a shed garden as large as that of a mansion. It was fenced in with a hedge and wooden palings, all the work of Abel Crew’s hands. Sir Peter was dead then; but Lady Chavasse, guardian to the young heir, Sir Geoffrey, extended to him the same favour that her husband had, and, if she did not absolutely sanction what he was doing, she at any rate did not oppose it. Abel Crew filled his garden with rare and choice and useful field herbs, the valuable properties of which he alone understood; and of ordinary sweet flowers, such as bees love to suck. He set up bee-hives and sold the honey; he distilled lavender and bergamot for perfumes; he converted his herbs and roots into medicines, which he supplied to the poor people around, charging so small a price for them that it could scarcely more than cover the cost of making, and not charging at all the very poor. At the end of about ten years from his first appearance, he took down the old shed, and built up a more convenient cottage in its place, doing it all with his own pair of hands. And the years went on and on, and Abel Crew and his cottage, and his herbs, and his flowers, and his bees, and his medicines, were just as much of an institution in the parish as was the Grange itself.

He and I became good friends. I liked him. You have heard how I take likes and dislikes to faces, and I rarely saw a face that I liked as I liked Abel Crew’s. Not for its beauty, though it really was beautiful, with its perfect shape and delicately carved features; but for its unmistakable look of goodness and its innate refinement: perhaps also for the deep, far-seeing, and often sad expression that sat in the earnest eyes. He was old now—sixty, I dare say; tall, slender, and very upright still; his white hair brushed back from his forehead and worn rather long. What his original condition of life might have been did not transpire; he never talked of it. More than once I had seen him reading Latin books; and though he fell into the diction of the country people around when talking with them, he changed his tones and language when conversing with his betters. A character, no doubt, he was, but a man to be respected; a man of religion, too—attending church regularly twice on a Sunday, wet or dry, and carrying his religion into the little things of everyday life.

His style of dress was old-fashioned and peculiar. So far as I saw, it never varied. A stout coat, waistcoat, and breeches every day, all of one colour—drab; with leathern gaiters buttoned nearly to the knee. On Sundays he wore a suit of black silk velvet, and a frilled shirt of fine cambric. His breeches were tied at the knee with black ribbon, in which was a plain, glistening steel buckle; buckles to match shone in his shoes. His stockings were black, and in the winter he wore black-cloth gaiters. In short, on Sundays Abel Crew looked like a fine old-fashioned English gentleman, and would have been taken for one. The woman who got up his linen declared he was more particular over his shirt-frills than Sir Peter himself.

Strangers in the place would sometimes ask what he was. The answer was not easy to give. He was a botanist and herbalist, and made pills, and mixtures, and perfumes, and sold honey, and had built his cottage and planted out his garden, and lived alone, cooking his food and waiting on himself; doing all in fact with his own hands, and was very modest always. On the other side, he had travelled in his youth, he understood paintings, studied the stars, read his store of Latin and classical books, and now and then bought more, and was as good a doctor as Duffham himself. Some people said a better one. Certain it was, that more than once when legitimate medical nostrums had failed—calomel and blisters and bleeding—Abel Crew’s simple decoctions and leaves had worked a cure. Look at young Mrs. Sterling at the Court. When that first baby of hers came to town—and a fine squalling young brat he was, with a mouth like a crocodile’s!—gatherings arose in her chest or somewhere, one after another; it was said the agony was awful. Duffham’s skill seemed to have gone a blackberrying, the other doctor’s also, for neither of the two could do anything for her, and the Court thought she would have died of it. Upon that, some relation of old Sterling’s was summoned from London—a great physician in great practice. He came in answer, and was liberal with his advice, telling them to try this and to try the other. But it did no good; and she only grew worse. When they were all in despair, seeing her increasing weakness and the prolonged pain, the woman who nursed her spoke of old Abel Crew; she had known him cure in these cases when the doctor could not; and the poor young lady, willing to catch at a straw, told them to send for Abel Crew. Abel Crew took a prepared plaster of herbs with him, green leaves of some sort, and applied it. That night the patient slept more easily than she had for weeks; and in a short time was well again.

But, skilful though he seemed to be in the science of herbs, as remedies for sickness and sores, Abel Crew never obtruded himself upon the ailing, or took money for his advice, or willingly interfered with the province of Duffham; he never would do it unless compelled in the interests of humanity. The patients he chiefly treated were the poor, those who could not have paid Duffham a coin worth thinking about. Duffham knew this. And, instead of being jealous of him, as some medical men might have been, or ridiculing him for a quack, Duffham liked and respected old Abel Crew. He was simple in his habits still: living chiefly upon bread and butter, with radishes or mustard and cress for a relish, cooking vegetables for his dinner, but rarely meat: and his drink was tea or spring water.

So that Abel Crew was rather a notable character amongst us; and when it was known abroad that two of his pills had caused the death of Mrs. Reed’s twins, there arose no end of a commotion.

It chanced that the same night this occurred, just about the time in fact that the unfortunate infants were taking down the pills under the superintendence of their mother and the blacksmith’s wife, Abel Crew met with an accident; though it was curious enough that it should be so. In taking a pan of boiling herbs off the fire, he let one of the handles slip out of his fingers; it sent the pan down on that side, spilled a lot of the stuff, and scalded his left foot on the instep. Therefore he was about the last person to hear of the calamity; for his door was not open as usual the following morning, and no one knocked to tell him of it.

Duffham was the first. Passing by on his morning rounds, the doctor heard the comments of the people, and it arrested him. It was so unusual a thing for Abel Crew not to be about, and for his door to be closed, that some of them had been arriving at a sensible conclusion—Abel Crew, knowing the mischief his pills had done, was shutting himself up within the house, unable to face his neighbours.

“Rubbish!” said Duffham. And he strode up the garden-path, knocked at the door with his cane, and entered. Abel had dressed, but was lying down on the bed again to rest his lame foot.

Duffham would have asked to look at it, but that he knew Abel Crew was as good at burns and scalds as he himself was. It had been doctored at once, and was now wrapped up in a handkerchief.

“The fire is nearly out of it,” said Abel, “but it must have rest; by to-night I shall be able to dress it with my healing-salve. I am much obliged to you for coming in, sir: though in truth I don’t know how you could have heard of the accident.”

“Ah! news flies,” said Duffham, evasively, knowing that he had not heard of the foot, or the neighbours either, and had come in for something altogether different. “What is this about the pills?”

“About the pills?” repeated Abel Crew, who had got up out of respect, and was putting on his coat. “What pills, sir?”

The doctor told him what had happened. Hester Reed had given one of his pills to each of her babies, and both had died of it. Abel Crew listened quietly; his face and his eyes fixed on Duffham.

“The children cannot have died of the pills,” said he, speaking as gently as you please. “Something else must have killed them.”

“According to Hester Reed’s account, nothing can have done it but the pills,” said Duffham. “The children had only taken their ordinary food throughout the day, and very little of that. George Reed came running to me in the night, but it was too late; one was dead before I got there. There could be no mistaking the children’s symptoms—that both were poisoned.”

“This is very strange,” exclaimed Abel, looking troubled. “By what kind of poison?”

“Arsenic, I think. I–”

But here they were interrupted. Dovey, the blacksmith, hearing of the calamity, together with the fact that it was his wife who had assisted in administering the suspected doses, deemed it his duty to look into the affair a little, and to resent it. He had left his forge and a bar of iron red-hot in it, and come tearing along in his leather apron, his shirt-sleeves stripped up to the elbow, and his arms grimy. A dark-eyed, good-natured little man in general, was Dovey, but exploding with rage at the present moment.

“Now then, Abel Crew, what do you mean by selling pills to poison people?” demanded he, pushing back the door with a bang, and stepping in fiercely. Duffham, foreseeing there was going to be a contest, and having no time to waste, took his departure.

“I have not sold pills to poison people,” replied Abel.

“Look here,” said Dovey, folding his black arms. “Be you going to eat them pills, or be you not? Come!”

“What do you mean, Dovey?”

“What do I mean! Ain’t my meaning plain? Do you own to having selled a box of pills to Hester Reed last winter?—be you thinking to eat that there fact, and deny of it? Come, Abel Crew!”

“I remember it well,” readily spoke up Abel. “Mrs. Reed came here one day, complaining that her head ached continually, and her side often had a dull pain in it, and asked me to give her something. I did so; I gave her a box of pills. It was early in January, I think. I know there was ice on the ground.”

“Then do you own to them pills,” returned Dovey, more quietly, his fierceness subdued by Abel’s civility. “It were you that furnished ’em?”

“I furnished the box of pills I speak of, that Hester Reed had from me in the winter. There’s no mistake about that.”

“And made ’em too?”

“Yes, and made them.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that; and now don’t you go for to eat your words later, Abel Crew. Our Ann, my wife, helped to give them there two pills to the children; and I’m not a-going to let her get into trouble over it. You’ve confessed to the pills, and I’m a witness.”

“My pills did not kill the children, Dovey,” said Abel, in a pleasant tone, resting his lame foot upon an opposite chair.

“Not kill ’em?”

“No, that they did not. I’ve not made pills all these years to poison children at last.”

“But what done it if the pills didn’t?”

“How can I say? ’Twasn’t my pills.”

“Dr. Duffham says it was the pills. And he–”

“Dr. Duffham says it was?”

“Reed telled me that the doctor asked outright, all in a flurry, what his wife had gave the babies, and she said she had gave ’em nothing but them there two pills of Abel Crew’s. Duffham said the pills must have had poison in ’em, and he asked for the box; and Hester Reed, she give him the box, and he sealed it up afore their eyes with his own seal.”

Abel nodded. He knew that any suspected medicine must in such a case be sealed up.

“And now that I’ve got that there word from ye, I’ll say good-day to ye, neighbour, for I’ve left my forge to itself, and some red-hot iron in it. And I hope with all my heart and mind,”—the blacksmith turned round from the door to say more kindly, his good-nature cropping up again,—“that it’ll turn out it warn’t the pills, but some’at else: our Ann won’t have no cause to be in a fright then.” Which was as much as to say that Ann Dovey was frightened, you observe.

That same afternoon, going past the common, I saw Abel Crew in his garden, sitting against the cottage wall in the sun, his foot resting on a block of wood.

“How did it all happen, Abel?” I asked, turning in at the gate. “Did you give Mrs. Reed the wrong pills?”

“No, sir,” he answered, “I gave her the right pills; the pills I make expressly for such complaints as hers. But if I had, in one sense, given her the wrong, they could not have brought about any ill effect such as this, for my pills are all innocent of poison.”

“I should say it could not have been the pills that did the mischief, after all, then.”

“You might swear it as well, Master Johnny, with perfect safety. What killed the poor children, I don’t pretend to know, but my pills never did. I tried to get down as far as Reed’s to inquire particulars, and found I could not walk. It was a bit of ill-luck, disabling myself just at this time.”

“Shall you have to appear at the inquest to-morrow?”

He lifted his head quickly at the question—as though it surprised him. Perhaps not having cast his thoughts that way.

“Is there to be an inquest, Master Johnny?”

“I heard so from old Jones. He has gone over to see the coroner.”

“Well, I wish the investigation was all over and done with,” said he. “It makes me uneasy, though I know I am innocent.”

Looking at him sitting there in the sun, at his beautiful face with its truthful eyes and its silver hair, it was next to impossible to believe he could be the author of the two children’s death. Only—the best of us are liable to mistakes, and sometimes make them. I said as much.