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“That must have been part of her plan,” I answered. “It was the great kindness that won you to her. After that, she took care that you should have no will of your own.”
“And the poor thing might have been so happy with me had she only chosen to be straightforward, and not try to play tricks! I gave her a handsome salary, and new gowns besides; and I don’t suppose I should have forgotten her at my death.”
“Well, it is all over, dear Lady Jenkins, and you will be just as well and brisk as you used to be.”
“Not quite that, Johnny,” she said, shaking her head; “I cannot expect that. At seventy, grim old age is laying its hand upon us. What we need then, my dear,” she added, turning her kindly blue eyes upon me, in which the tears were gathering, “is to go to the mill to be ground young again. And that is a mill that does not exist in this world.”
“Ah no!”
“I thank God for the mercy He has shown me,” she continued, the tears overflowing. “I might have gone to the grave in the half-witted state to which I was reduced. And, Johnny, I often wonder, as I lie awake at night thinking, whether I should have been held responsible for it.”
The first use Lady Jenkins made of her liberty was to invite all her relations, the young nephews and nieces, up to dinner, as she used to do. Madame St. Vincent had set her face against these family entertainments, and they had fallen through. The ex-mayor, William Lawrence, and his good old wife, made part of the company, as did Dr. Knox and Janet. Lady Jenkins beamed on them once more from her place at the head of the table, and Tamlyn sat at the foot and served the big plum-pudding.
“Never more, I trust, shall I be estranged from you, my dears, until it pleases Heaven to bring about the final estrangement,” she said to the young people when they were leaving. And she gave them all a sovereign a-piece.
Cattledon could not remain on for ever. Miss Deveen wanted her: so Mina Knox went to stay at Jenkins House, until a suitable lady should be found to replace Madame St. Vincent. Upon that, Dan Jenkins was taken with an anxious solicitude for his aunt’s health, and was for ever finding his way up to inquire after it.
“You will never care to notice me again, Dan,” Mina said to him, with a swelling heart and throat, one day when he was tilting himself by her on the arm of the sofa.
“Shan’t I!” returned Dan.
“Oh, I am so ashamed of my folly; I feel more ashamed of it, day by day,” cried Mina, bursting into tears. “I shall never, never get over the mortification.”
“Won’t you!” added Dan.
“And I never liked him much: I think I dis-liked him. At first I did dislike him; only he kept saying how fond he was of me; and Madame St. Vincent was always praising him up. And you know he was all the fashion.”
“Quite so,” assented Dan.
“Don’t you think it would be almost as well if I were dead, Dan—for all the use I am likely to be to any one?”
“Almost, perhaps; not quite,” laughed Dan; and he suddenly stooped and kissed her.
That’s all. And now, at the time I write this, Dan Jenkins is a flourishing lawyer at Lefford, and Mina is his wife. Little feet patter up and down the staircase and along the passages that good old Lady Jenkins used to tread. She treads them no more. There was no mill to grind her young again here; but she is gone to that better land where such mills are not needed.
Her will was a just one. She left her property to her nephews and nieces; a substantial sum to each. Dan had Jenkins House in addition. But it is no longer Jenkins House; for he had that name taken off the entrance pillars forthwith, replacing it by the one that had been there before—Rose Bank.
THE ANGELS’ MUSIC
I
How the Squire came to give in to it, was beyond the ken of mortal man. Tod turned crusty; called the young ones all the hard names in the dictionary, and said he should go out for the night. But he did not.
“Just like her!” cried he, with a fling at Mrs. Todhetley. “Always devising some rubbish or other to gratify the little reptiles!”
The “little reptiles” applied to the school children at North Crabb. They generally had a treat at Christmas; and this year Mrs. Todhetley said she would like it to be given by us, at Crabb Cot, if the Squire did not object to stand the evening’s uproar. After vowing for a day that he wouldn’t hear of it, the Squire (to our astonishment) gave in, and said they might come. It was only the girls: the boys had their treat later on, when they could go in for out-of-door sports. After the pater’s concession, she and the school-mistress, Miss Timmens, were as busy planning-out the arrangements as two bees in a honeysuckle field.
The evening fixed upon was the last in the old year—a Thursday. And the preparations seemed to me to be in full flow from the previous Monday. Molly made her plum-cakes and loaves on the Wednesday; on the Thursday after breakfast, her mistress went to the kitchen to help her with the pork-pies and the tartlets. To judge by the quantity provided, the school would require nothing more for a week to come.
The Squire went over to Islip on some matter of business, taking Tod with him. Our children, Hugh and Lena, were spending the day with the little Letsoms, who would come back with them for the treat; so we had the house to ourselves. The white deal ironing-board under the kitchen window was raised on its iron legs; before it stood Mrs. Todhetley and Molly, busy with the mysteries of pastry-making and patty-pan filling. I sat on the edge of the board, looking on. The small savoury pies were done, and in the act of baking, a tray-load at a time; every now and then Molly darted into the back kitchen, where the oven was, to look after them. For two days the snow had come down thickly; it was falling still in great flakes; far and near, the landscape showed white and bright.
“Johnny, if you will persist in eating the jam, I shall have to send you away.”
“Put the jar on the other side then, good mother.”
“Ugh! Much jam Master Johnny would leave for the tarts, let him have his way,” struck in Molly, more crusty than her own pastry, when I declare I had only dipped the wrong end of the fork in three or four times. The jam was not hers.
“Mind you don’t give the young ones bread-and-scrape, Molly,” I retorted, catching sight of no end of butter-pats through the open door. At which advice she only threw up her head.
“Who is this, coming up through the snow?” cried the mater.
I turned to the window and made it out to be Mrs. Trewin: a meek little woman who had seen better days, and tried to get her living as a dressmaker since the death of her husband. She had not been good for very much since: never seemed quite to get over the shock. Going out one morning, as usual, to his duties as an office clerk, he was brought home dead. Killed by an accident. It was eighteen months ago now, but Mrs. Trewin wore deep mourning still.
Not standing upon ceremony down in our country, Mrs. Todhetley had her brought into the kitchen, going on with the tartlets all the same, while she talked. Mrs. Trewin was making a frock for Lena, and had come up to say that the trimming ran short. The mater told her she was too busy to see to it then, and was very sorry she had come through the snow for such a trifle.
“’Twas not much further, ma’am,” was her answer: “I had to go out to the school to fetch home Nettie. The path is so slippery, through the boys making slides, that I don’t altogether like to trust the child to go to and fro to school by herself.”
“As if Nettie would come to any harm, Mrs. Trewin!” I put in. “If she went down, it would only be a Christmas gambol.”
“Accidents happen so unexpectedly, sir,” she answered, a shadow crossing her sad face. And I was sorry to have said it: it had put her in mind of her husband.
“You are coming up this evening, you know, Mrs. Trewin,” said mother. “Don’t be late.”
“It is very good of you to have asked me, ma’am,” she answered gratefully. “I said so to Miss Timmens. I’m sure it will be something new to have such a treat. Nettie, poor child, will enjoy it too.”
Molly came banging in with a tray of pork-pies, just out of the oven. The mater told Mrs. Trewin to take one, and offered her a glass of beer.
But, instead of eating the pie, she wrapped it in paper to take with her home, and declined the beer, lest it should give her a headache for the evening.
So Mrs. Trewin took her departure; and, under cover of it, I helped myself to another of the pork-pies. Weren’t they good! After that the morning went on again, and the tart-making with it.
The last of the paste was being used up, the last of the jam jars stood open, and the clock told us that it was getting on for one, when we had another visitor: Miss Timmens, the schoolmistress. She came in, stamping the snow from her shoes on the mat, her thin figure clad in an old long cloth cloak, and the chronic redness in her face turned purple.
“My word! It is a day, ma’am, this is!” she exclaimed.
“And what have you come through it for?” asked Mrs. Todhetley. “About the forms? Why, I sent word to you by Luke Mackintosh that they would be fetched at two o’clock.”
“He never came, then,” said Miss Timmens, irate at Luke’s negligence. “That Mackintosh is not worth his salt. What delicious-looking tartlets!” exclaimed she, as she sat down. “And what a lot of them!”
“Try one,” said the mother. “Johnny, hand them to Miss Timmens, and a plate.”
“That silly Sarah Trewin has gone and tumbled down,” cried Miss Timmens, as she thanked me and took the plate and one of the tartlets. “Went and slipped upon a slide near the school-house. What a delicious tart!”
“Sarah Trewin!” cried the mater, turning round from the board. “Why, she was here an hour ago. Has she hurt herself?”
“Just bruised all the one side of her black and blue, from her shoulder to her ankle,” answered Miss Timmens. “Those unruly boys have made slides all over the place, ma’am; and Sarah Trewin must needs go down upon one, not looking, I suppose, to her feet. She had only just turned out of the schoolroom with Nettie.”
“Dear, dear! And she is so unable to bear a fall!”
“Of course it might have been worse, for there are no bones broken,” remarked Miss Timmens. “As to Nettie, the child was nearly frightened out of her senses; she’s sobbing and crying still. Never was such a timid child as that.”
“Will Sarah Trewin be able to come this evening?”
“Not she, ma’am. She’ll be as stiff as buckram for days to come. I’d like to pay out those boys—making their slides on the pathway and endangering people’s lives! Nicol’s not half strict enough with them; and I’m tired of telling him so. Tiresome, rude monkeys! Not that my girls are a degree better: they’d go down all the slides in the parish, let ’em have their way. What with them, and what with these fantastical notions of the new parson, I’m sure my life’s a martyrdom.”
The mother smiled over her pastry. Miss Timmens and the parson, civilly polite to one another, were mentally at daggers drawn.
The time I am writing of was before the movement, set in of later years, for giving the masses the same kind of education as their betters; but our new parson at Crabb was before his age in these ideas. To experienced Miss Timmens, and to a great many more clear-sighted people, the best word that could be given to the movement was “fantastical.”
“He came in yesterday afternoon at dusk,” she resumed, “when I was holding my Bible Class. ‘And what has been the course of instruction to-day, Miss Timmens?’ asked he, as mild as new milk, all the girls gaping and staring around him. ‘It has been reading, and writing, and summing, and spelling, and sewing,’ said I, giving him the catalogue in full: ‘and now I’m trying to teach them their duty to Heaven and to one another. And according to my old-fashioned notion, sir,’ I summed up, ‘if a poor girl acquires these matters thoroughly, she is a deal more fitted to go through life in the station to which God has called her (as the catechism says), than she would be if you gave her a course of fine mincing uppishness, with your poetry and your drawing and your embroidery.’ Oh, he gets his answer from me, ma’am.”
“Mr. Bruce may be kind and enlightened, and all that,” spoke Mrs. Todhetley, “but he certainly seems inclined to carry his ideas beyond reasonable bounds, so far as regards these poor peasant children.”
“Reasonable!” repeated Miss Timmens, catching up the word, and rubbing her sharp nose with excitement: “why, the worst is, that there’s no reason in it. Not a jot. The parson’s mind has gone a little bit off its balance, ma’am; that’s my firm conviction. This exalted education applied to young ladies would be all right and proper: but where can be the use of it to these poor girls? What good will his accomplishments, his branches of grand learning do them? His conchology and meteorology, and all the rest of his ologies? Of what service will it be to them in future?”
“I’d have got my living nicely, I guess, if I’d been taught them things,” satirically struck in Molly, unable to keep her tongue still any longer. “A fine cook I should ha’ made!—kept all my places a beautiful length of time; I wouldn’t come with such flighty talk to the Squire, Miss Timmens, if ’twas me.”
“The talk’s other people’s; it isn’t mine,” fired Miss Timmens, turning her wrath on Molly. “That is, the notions are. You had better attend to your baking, Molly.”
“So I had,” said Molly. “Baking’s more in my line than them other foreign jerks. But well I should have knowed how to do it if my mind had been cocketed up with the learning that’s only fit for lords and ladies.”
“Is not that my argument?” retorted Miss Timmens, flinging the last word after her as she went out to her oven. “Poor girls were sent into the world to work, ma’am, not to play at being fine scholars,” she added to Mrs. Todhetley, as she got up to leave. “And, as sure as we are born, this new dodge of education, if it ever gets a footing, will turn the country upside down.”
“I’m sure I hope not,” replied the mother in her mild way. “Take another tart, Miss Timmens. These are currant and raspberry.”
II
The company began to arrive at four o’clock. The snow had ceased to fall; it was a fine, cold, clear evening, the moon very bright. A large store-room at the back of the house had been cleared out, and a huge fire made in it. The walls were decorated with evergreens, and tin sconces holding candles; benches from the school-house were ranged underneath them. This was to be the principal play-room, but the other rooms were open. Mrs. Hill (formerly Mrs. Garth, who had not so very long before lost poor David) and Maria Lease came up by invitation to help Miss Timmens with the children; and Mrs. Trewin would have come but for her fall on the slide. Miss Timmens appeared in full feather: a purple gown of shot silk, with a red waist-band, and red holly berries in her lace cap. The children, timid at first, sat round on the forms in prim stillness, just like so many mice.
By far the most timid of all was a gentle little thing of seven years old, got up like a lady; white frock, black sash and sleeve ribbons. She was delicate-featured, blue-eyed, had curling flaxen hair. It was Nettie Trewin. Far superior she looked to all of them; out of place, in fact, amongst so many coarser natures. Her little arm and hand trembled as she clung to Miss Timmens’ gown.
“Senseless little thing,” cried Miss Timmens, “to be afraid in a beautiful room like this, and with all these kind friends around her! Would you believe it, Mr. Johnny, that I could hardly get her here? Afraid, she said, to come without mother!”
“Oh, Nettie! Why, you are going to have lots of fun! Is mother better this evening?”
“Yes,” whispered Nettie, venturing to take a peep at me through her wet eyelashes.
The order of the day was this. Tea at once, consisting of as much bread-and-butter and plum-cake as they could eat; games afterwards. The savoury pies and tartlets later on; more cake to wind up with, which, if they had no room for, they might carry home.
After all signs of tea had disappeared, and our neighbours, the Coneys, had come in, and several round rings were seated on the floor at “Hunt-the-Slipper,” I, chancing to draw within earshot, found Miss Timmens had opened out her grievance to the Squire—the parson’s interference with the school.
“It would be reversing the proper and natural order of things, as I look upon it,” she was saying, “to give an exalted education to those who must get their living by the sweat of their brow; as servants, and what not. Do you think so, sir?”
“Think so! of course I think so,” spluttered the Squire, taking up the subject hotly as usual. “It’s good for them to read and write well, to add up figures, and know how to sew and clean, and wash and iron. That’s the learning they want, whether they are to pass their lives serving in families, or as the wives of working men.”
“Yes, sir,” acquiesced Miss Timmens, in a glow of satisfaction; “but you may as well try to beat common sense into a broomstick as into Mr. Bruce. The other day—what, is it you again, Nettie!” she broke off, as the little white-robed child sidled up and hid her head in what appeared to be her haven of refuge—the folds of the purple gown. “Never was such a child as this, for shyness. When put to play with the rest, she’ll not stay with them. What do you think you are good for?”—rather wrathfully. “Do you suppose the gentlefolk are going to eat you, Nettie?”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, little lassie. What child is it?” added the Squire, struck with her appearance.
“Tell your name to the Squire,” said Miss Timmens, with authority. And the little one lifted her pretty blue eyes appealingly to his face, as if beseeching him not to bite her.
“It’s Nettie Trewin, sir,” she said in a whisper.
“Dear me! Is that poor Trewin’s child! She has a look of her father too. A delicate little maid.”
“And silly also,” added Miss Timmens. “You came here to play, you know, Nettie; not hide your face. What are they all stirring at, now? Oh, going to have ‘Puss-in-the-corner.’ You can play at that, Nettie. Here, Jane Bright! Take Nettie with you and attend to her. Find her a corner: she has not had any play at all.”
A tall, awkward girl stepped up: slouching shoulders, narrow forehead, stolid features, coarse hair all ruffled; thick legs, thick boots—Miss Jane Bright. She seized Nettie’s hand.
“Yes, sir, you are right: the child is a delicate, dainty little thing, quite a contrast to most of these other girls,” resumed Miss Timmens, in answer to the Squire. “Look at that one who has just fetched Nettie away: she is only a type of the rest. They come, most of them, of coarse, stupid parents, and will be no better to the end of the chapter, whatever education you may try to hammer into them. As I said to Mr. Bruce the other day when– Well, I never! There he is!”
The young parson caught her eye, as he was looming in. Long coat, clerical waistcoat, no white tie to speak of round his bare neck; quite à la mode. The new fashions and the new notions that Mr. Bruce went in for, were not at all understood at North Crabb.
The Squire had gone on at first against the party; but no face was more sunshiny than his, now that he was in the thick of it. A select few of the children, with ours and the little Lawsons, had appropriated the dining-room for “Hunt-the-Whistle.” The pater chanced to look in just before it began, and we got him to be the hunter. I shall never forget it as long as I live. I don’t believe I had ever laughed as much before. He did not know the play, or the trick of it: and to see him whirling himself about in search of the whistle as it was blown behind his back, now seizing on this bold whistler, believing he or she must be in possession of the whistle, and now on that one, all unconscious that the whistle was fastened to the back button of his own coat; and to look at the puzzled wonder of his face as to where the whistle could possibly be, and how it contrived to elude his grasp, was something to be remembered. The shrieks of laughter might have been heard down at the Ravine. Tod had to sit on the floor and hold his sides; Tom Coney was in convulsions.
“Ah—I—ah—what do you think, Mr. Todhetley?” began Bruce, with his courteous drawl, catching the Squire, as he emerged later, red and steaming, from the whistle-hunt. “Suppose I collect these young ones around me and give them a quarter-of-an-hour’s lecture on pneumatics? I’ve been getting up the subject a little.”
“Pneumatics be hanged!” burst forth the pater, more emphatically than politely, when he had taken a puzzled stare at the parson. “The young ones have come here to play, not to have their brains addled. Be shot if I quite know myself what ‘pneumatics’ means. I beg your pardon, Bruce. You mean well, I know.”
“Pneumatics!” repeated old Coney, taking time to digest the word. “Don’t you think, parson, that’s more in the department of the Astronomer Royal?”
One required a respite after the whistle-hunt. I put my back against the wall in the large room, and watched the different sets of long tails, then pulling fiercely at “Oranges and Lemons.” Mrs. Hill and Maria Lease sat side by side on one of the benches, both looking as sad as might be, their memories, no doubt, buried in the past. Maria Lease had never, so to say, worn a smiling countenance since the dreadful end of Daniel Ferrar.
A commotion! Half-a-dozen of the “lemons,” pulling too fiercely, had come to grief on the ground. Maria went to the rescue.
“I was just thinking of poor David, sir,” Mrs. Hill said to me, with a sigh. “How he would have enjoyed this scene: so merry and bright!”
“But he is in a brighter scene than this, you know.”
“Yes, Master Johnny, I do know it,” she said, tears trickling slowly down her cheeks. “Where he is, all things are beautiful.”
In her palmy days Mrs. Todhetley used to sing a song, of which this was the first verse:—
“All that’s bright must fade,
The brightest still the fleetest;
All that’s sweet was made
But to be lost when sweetest.”
Mrs. Hill’s words brought this song to my memory, and with it the damping reminder that nothing lasts in this world, whether of pleasure or brightness. All things must fade, or die: but in that better life to come they will last for ever. And David had entered upon it.
“Now, where’s that senseless little Nettie?”
The words, spoken sharply, came from Miss Timmens. But if she did possess a sharp-toned tongue, she was good and kind at heart. The young crew were sitting down at the long table to the savoury pies and tartlets; Miss Timmens, taking stock of them, missed Nettie.
“Jane Bright, go and find Nettie Trewin.”
Not daring to disobey the curt command, but looking as though she feared her portion of the good things would be eaten up during her absence, Jane Bright disappeared. Back she came in a brace of shakes, saying Nettie “was not there.”
“Maria Lease, where’s Nettie Trewin?” asked Miss Timmens.
Maria turned from the table. “Nettie Trewin?” she repeated, looking about her. “I don’t know. She must be somewhere or other.”
“I wish to goodness you’d find her then.”
Maria Lease could not see anything of the child. “Nettie Trewin” was called out high and low; but it brought forth no response. The servants were sent to look over the house, with no better result.
“She is hiding somewhere in her shyness,” said Miss Timmens. “I have a great mind to punish her for this.”
“She can’t have got into the rain-water butt?” suggested the Squire. “Molly, go and look.”
It was not very likely: as the barrel was quite six feet high. But, as the Squire once got into the water-butt to hid himself when he was a climbing youngster, and had reasons for anticipating a whipping, his thoughts naturally flew to it.
“Well, she must be somewhere,” cried he when we laughed at him. “She could not sink through the floor.”
“Who saw her last?” repeated Miss Timmens. “Do you hear, children? Just stop eating for a minute, and answer.”
Much discussion—doubt—cross-questioning. The whole lot seemed to be nearly as stupid as owls. At last, so far as could be gathered, none of them had noticed Nettie since they began “Puss-in-the-corner.”
“Jane Bright, I told you to take Nettie to play with the rest, and to find her a corner. What did you do with her?”
Jane Bright commenced her answer by essaying to take a sly bite at her pie. Miss Timmens stopped her midway, and turned her from the table to face the company.
“Do you hear me? Now don’t stand staring like a gaby! Just answer.”
Like a “gaby” did Jane Bright stand: mouth wide open, eyes round, countenance bewildered.
“Please, governess, I didn’t do nothing with her.”
“You must have done something with her: you held her hand.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” repeated the girl, shaking her head stolidly.
“Now, that won’t do, Jane Bright. Where did you leave her?”
“’Twas in the corner,” answered Jane Bright, apparently making desperate efforts of memory. “When I was Puss, and runned across and came back again, I didn’t see her there.”
“Surely, the child has not stolen out by herself and run off home!” cried Mrs. Coney: and the schoolmistress took up the suggestion.
“It is the very thought that has been in my mind the last minute or two,” avowed she. “Yes, Mrs. Coney, that’s it, depend upon it. She has decamped through the snow and gone back to her mother’s.”
“Then she has gone without her things,” interposed Maria Lease, who was entering the room with a little black cloak and bonnet in her hand. “Are not these Nettie’s things, children?” And a dozen voices all speaking together, hastened to say Yes, they were Nettie’s.
“Then she must be in the house,” decided Miss Timmens. “She wouldn’t be silly enough to go out this cold night with her neck and arms bare. The child has her share of sense. She has run away to hide herself, and may have dropped asleep.”
“It must be in the chimbleys, then,” cried free Molly from the back of the room. “We’ve looked everywhere else.”
“You had better look again,” said the Squire. “Take plenty of light—two or three candles.”
It seemed rather a queer thing. And, while this talking had been going on, there flashed into my mind the old Modena story, related by the poet Rogers, of the lovely young heiress of the Donatis: and which has been embodied in our song “The Mistletoe Bough.” Could this timid child have imprisoned herself in any place that she was unable to get out of? Going to the kitchen for a candle, I went upstairs, taking the garret first, with its boxes and lumber, and then the rooms. And nowhere could I find the least trace or sign of Nettie.
Stepping into the kitchen to leave the candle, there stood Luke Mackintosh, whiter than death; his back propped against Molly’s press, his hands trembling, his hair on end. Tod stood in front of him suppressing his laughter. Mackintosh had just burst in at the back-door in a desperate state of fright, declaring he had seen a ghost.
It’s not the first time I have mentioned the man’s cowardice. Believing in ghosts and goblins, wraiths and witches, he could hardly be persuaded to cross Crabb Ravine at night, on account of the light sometimes seen there. Sensible people told him that this light (which, it was true, no one had ever traced to its source) was nothing but a will-o’-the-wisp, an ignis-fatuus arising from the vapour; but Luke could not be brought to reason. On this evening it chanced that the Squire had occasion to send Mackintosh to the Timberdale post-office, and the man had now just come in from the errand.
“I see the light, too, sir,” he was saying to Tod in a scared voice, as he ran his shaking hand through his hair. “It be dodging about on the banks of the Ravine for all the world like a corpse-candle. Well, sir, I didn’t like that, and I got up out of the Ravine as fast as my legs would bring me, and were making straight for home here, with my head down’ards, not wanting to see nothing more, when something dreadful met me. All in white, it was.”
“A man in his shroud, who had left his grave to take a moonlight walk,” said Tod, gravely, biting his lips.
“’Twere in grave-clothes, for sure; a long, white garment, whiter than the snow. I’d not say but it was Daniel Ferrar,” added Luke, in the low dread tones that befitted the dismal subject. “His ghost do walk, you know, sir.”
“And where did his ghost go to?”
“Blest if I saw, sir,” replied Mackintosh, shaking his head. “I’d not have looked after it for all the world. ’Twarn’t a slow pace I come at, over the field, after that, and right inside this here house.”
“Rushing like the wind, I suppose.”
“My heart was all a-throbbing and a-skeering. Mr. Joseph, I hope the Squire won’t send me through the Ravine after dark again! I couldn’t stand it, sir; I’d a’most rather give up my place.”
“You’ll not be fit for this place, or any other, I should say, Mackintosh, if you let this sort of fear run away with your senses,” I put in. “You saw nothing; it was all fancy.”
“Saw nothing!” repeated Mackintosh in the excess of desperation. “Why, Mr. Johnny, I never saw a sight plainer in all my born days. A great, white, awesome apparition it were, that went rushing past me with a wailing sound. I hope you won’t ever have the ill-luck to see such a thing yourself, sir.”
“I’m sure I shan’t.”
“What’s to do here?” asked Tom Coney, putting in his head.
“Mackintosh has seen a ghost.”
“Seen a ghost!” cried Tom, beginning to grin.
Mackintosh, trembling yet, entered afresh on the recital, rather improving it by borrowing Tod’s mocking suggestion. “A dead man in his shroud come out walking from his grave in the churchyard—which he feared might be Ferrar, lying on the edge on’t, just beyond consecrated ground. I never could abear to go by the spot where he was put in, and never a prayer said over him, Mr. Tom!”
But, in spite of the solemnity of the subject, touching Ferrar, Tom Coney could only have his laugh out. The servants came in from their fruitless search of the dairy and cellars, and started to see the state of Mackintosh.
