"Let us go to the Torr, Johnny, and ask Radcliffe if he hears it!"
We bounded forward under the cry, which rose again and again incessantly; but in nearing the house it seemed to get further off and to be higher than ever in the air. Leaping the gate into the lane, we reached the front-door, and seized the bell-handle. It brought Mrs.
Radcliffe; a blue cap and red roses adoring her straggling hair. Holding the candle above her head, she peered at us with her small, sly eyes.
"Oh, is it you, young gentlemen? Do you want anything? Will you walk in?"
I was about to say No, when Tod pushed me aside and strode up the damp stone pa.s.sage. They did not make fires enough in the house to keep out the damp. As he told me afterwards, he wanted to get in to listen. But there was no sound at all to be heard; the house seemed as still as death. Wherever the cries might come from, it was certainly not from inside the Torr.
"Radcliffe went over to Wire-Piddle this afternoon, and he"s not back yet," she said; opening the parlour-door when we got to the hall. "Did you want him? You must ha" been in a hurry by the way you pulled the bell."
She put the candle down on the table. Her work lay there--a brown woollen stocking about half-way knitted.
"There is the most extraordinary noise outside that you ever heard, Mrs.
Radcliffe," began Todd, seating himself without ceremony on the old-fashioned mahogany sofa. "It startled us. Did you hear it in here?"
"I have heard no noise at all," she answered quietly, taking up the stocking and beginning to knit standing. "What was it like?"
"An awful shrieking and crying. Not loud; nearly faint enough for dying cries. As it is not in your house--and we did not think it was, or could be--it must be, I should say, in the air."
"Ay," she said, "just so. I can tell you what it is, Mr. Joseph: the night-birds."
Tod looked at her, plying the knitting-needles so quickly, and looked at me, and there was a silence. I wondered what was keeping him from speaking. He suddenly bent his head forward.
"Have you heard any talk of these noises, Mrs. Radcliffe? People say they are to be heard almost any night."
"I"ve not heard no talk, but I have heard the noise," she answered, whisking out a needle and beginning another of the three-cornered rows.
"One evening about a month ago I was a-coming home up the lane, and I hears a curious kind o" prolonged cry. It startled me at the moment, for, thinks I, it must be in this house; and I hastens in. No. Eunice said she had heard no cries: as how should she, when there was n.o.body but herself indoors? So I goes out again, and listens," added Mrs.
Radcliffe, lifting her eyes from the stocking and fixing them on Tod, "and then I finds out what it really was--the night-birds."
"The night-birds?" he echoed.
""Twas the night-birds, Mr. Joseph," she repeated, with an emphatic nod.
"They had congregated in these thick trees, and was crying like so many human beings. I have heard the same thing many a time in Wiltshire when I was a girl. I used to go there to stay with aunt and uncle."
"Well, I never heard anything like it before," returned Tod. "It"s just as though some unquiet spirit was in the air."
"Mayhap it sounds so afore you know what it is. Let me give you young gentlemen a drop o" my home-made cowslip wine."
She had taken the decanter of wine and some gla.s.ses off the sideboard with her long arms, before we could say Yes or No. We are famous for cowslip wine down there, but this was extra good. Tod took another gla.s.s of it, and got up to go.
"Don"t be frighted if you hear the noise again, now that you know what it is," she said, quite in a motherly way. "For my part I wish some o"
the birds was shot. They don"t do no good to n.o.body."
"As there is not any house about here, except this, the thought naturally arises that the noise may be inside it--until you know to the contrary," remarked Tod.
"I wish it was inside it--we"d soon stop it by wringing all their necks," cried she. "You can listen," she added, suddenly going into the hall and flinging wide every door that opened from it and led to the different pa.s.sages and rooms. "Go to any part of the house you like, and hearken for yourselves, young gentlemen."
Tod laughed at the suggestion. The pa.s.sages were all still and cold, and there was nothing to hear. Taking up the candle, she lighted us to the front-door. Outside stood the woman-servant Eunice, a basket on her arm, and just about to ring, Mrs. Radcliffe inquired if she had heard any noise.
"Only the shrieking birds up there," she answered readily. "They be in full cry to-night."
"They"ve been startling these gentlemen finely."
"There bain"t nothing to be startled at," said the woman, roughly, turning a look of contempt upon us. "If I was the master I"d shoot as many as I could get at; and if that didn"t get rid of "em, I"d cut the trees down."
"They make a queerer noise than any birds I ever heard before," said Tod, standing his ground to say it.
"They does," a.s.sented the woman. "That queer, that some folks believes it"s the shrieks o" the skeleton on the gibbet."
Pleasant! When I and Tod had to pa.s.s within a few yards of its corner.
The posts of the old gibbet were there still, but the skeleton had mouldered away long ago. A bit of chain, some few inches long, adhered to its fastening in the post still, and rattled away on windy nights.
"What donkeys we were, Johnny, not to know birds" cries when we heard them!" exclaimed Tod, as we tumbled over the gate and went flying across the field. "Hark! Listen! There it is again!"
There it was. The same despairing sort of wail, faintly rising and dying on the air. Tod stood in hushed silence.
"Johnny, I believe that"s a human cry!--I could almost fancy," he went on, "that it is speaking words. No bird, that ever I met with, native or foreign, could make the like."
It died away. But still occurred the obvious question, What was it, and where did it come from? With nothing but the empty air above and around us, that was difficult to answer.
"It"s not in the trees--I vow it," said Tod; "it"s not inside the Torr; it can"t rise up from under the ground. I say, Johnny, is it a case of ghost?"
The wailing arose again as he spoke, as if to reprove him for his levity. I"d rather have met a ghost; ay, and a real ghost; than have carried away that sound to haunt me.
We tore home as fast as our heels could take us, and told of the night"s adventure. After the pater had blown us up for being late, he treated us to a dose of ridicule. Human cries, indeed? Ghosts and witches? I might be excused, he said, being a m.u.f.f; but Joe must be just going back to his childhood. That settled Tod. Of all disagreeable things he most hated to be ridiculed.
"It must have been the old birds in those trees, after all, Johnny,"
said he, as we went up to bed. "I think the moon makes people fanciful."
And after a sound night"s rest we woke up to the bright sunshine, and thought no more of the cries.
That morning, being close to Pitchley"s Farm, we called in to see Mrs.
Frank Radcliffe. But she was not to be seen. Her brother, David Skate, just come in to his mid-day dinner, came forward to meet us in his fustian suit. Annet had been hardly able to keep about for some time, he said, but this was the first day she had regularly broken down so as to be in bed.
"It has brought on a touch of fever," said he, pressing the bread-and-cheese and cider upon us, which he had ordered in.
"What has?" asked Tod.
"This perpetual torment that she keeps her mind in. But she can"t help it, poor thing, so it"s not fair to blame her," added David Skate. "It grows worse instead of better, and I don"t see what the end of it is to be. I"ve thought for some time she might go and break up to-day."
"Why to-day?"
"Because it is the anniversary of her husband"s death, Master Johnny. He died twelve months ago to-day."
Back went my memory to the morning we heard of it. When the pater was scolding Dwarf Giles in the yard, and Tod stood laughing at the young ducks taking to the water, and Stephen Radcliffe loomed into sight, grim and surly, to disclose to us the tidings that the post had brought in--his brother Frank"s death.
"Has she still that curious fancy in her, David?--that he did not come by his death fairly."
"She has it in her, and she can"t get it out of her," returned David.