"About David?" added Mrs. Hill, "I was so vexed that he went over in his old clothes! It was Hill"s fault. Have you brought me a letter from him?"
"How could I bring you a letter from him?" returned Miss Timmens. "A letter from where?"
It was a minute or two before elucidation was arrived at, for both were at cross-purposes. David Garth had not been at Worcester at all, so far as Miss Timmens knew; certainly not at his grandmother"s.
To see Mrs. Hill sink back into her chair at this information, and let her hands fall on her lap, and gaze helplessly from her frightened eyes, was only to be expected. Miss Timmens kept asking what it all meant, and where David was, but she could get no answer. So I told her what Mother Hill had just told me--about Hill"s sending him off to Worcester. She stared like anything.
"Why, where in the name of wonder can the boy have got to?"
"I see it all," spoke the mother then, in a whisper. "Davy did find his way out of this house; and it was his voice I heard, and not a dream. I knew it. I knew it at the time."
These words would have sounded mysterious to any one given to mystery.
Miss Timmens was not. She was a long, thin female, with a chronic redness on her nose and one cheek, and she was as practical as could be.
Demanding what Mrs. Hill meant by "not a dream," she stood warming her boots at the fire while she was enlightened.
"The boy is keeping away for fear of Hill tanning him," spoke Miss Timmens, summing up the question. "Don"t you think so, Master Ludlow?"
"I should, if I could see how he got out of the cottage, after Hill had locked him in it."
"Luke Macintosh put him out at this window," said Miss Timmens, decisively. "Hill couldn"t lock that up. They"d open the shutters, and Luke would pop him out: to get rid of the boy, no doubt. Mr. Luke ought to be punished for it."
I did not contradict her. Of course it might have been so; but knowing Luke, I did not think he would care to be left in the house alone.
Unless--the thought flashed over me--unless Luke sent away David that he might be off himself. Amidst a good deal of uncertainty, this view seemed the most probable.
"Where is David?" bemoaned Mrs. Hill; "where is he? And with these bitter cold nights----"
"Now don"t you worry yourself, Nanny," interrupted strong-minded Miss Timmens. "I"ll see to David; and bring him home, too."
Hill"s cough was heard outside. Miss Timmens--who had been in a dead rage at the marriage, and consequently hated Hill like poison--hastened to depart. We went away together, pa.s.sing Hill by the dried-up brook.
He looked stealthily at us, and threw back a surly good night to me.
"I"m sure I don"t know where I am to look for the boy first," began Miss Timmens, as we went along. "Poor fellow! he is keeping away out of fear.
It would not surprise me if Macintosh is taking care of him. The man"s not ill-natured."
"I don"t understand why Hill should have told his mother David was gone to Worcester, unless he did go." Neither did I.
"David never went to Worcester; rely upon that, Master Ludlow," was her answer. "He is well known at Shrub Hill Station, and I could not have failed to hear of it, for one of the porters lodges in mother"s house; besides, David would have come down to us at once. Good night, sir. I dare say he will turn up before to-morrow."
She went on towards the school-house, I the other way to Crabb Cot. Mrs.
Todhetley and the Squire were talking together by the blazing fire, waiting until old Thomas announced dinner.
"Where have you been lingering this cold evening, Johnny?" began the Squire. "Don"t you get trying the ponds, sir; the ice is not wafer thick yet."
Kneeling on the rug between them, holding my hands to the warmth, I told where I had been, and what I had heard. Mrs. Todhetley, who seemed to have been born with a sympathy for children, went into lamentation over--it was what she said--that poor little gentle lamb, David.
"Macintosh is about somewhere," spoke the Squire, ringing the bell. "We will soon hear whether he knows what has become of the boy."
Thomas was ordered to find Macintosh and send him in. He came presently, shy and sheepish, as usual. Standing just inside the door, he blinked his eyes and rubbed his hands one over the other, like an idiot. It was only his way.
"Do you know where David Garth is?" began the Squire, who thought himself a regular Q.C. at cross-examining. Luke stared and said No. The fact was, he had not heard that David was missing.
"What time was it that you put him out of the window the night before last?"
Luke"s eyes and mouth opened. He had no more idea what the Squire meant than the man in the moon.
"Don"t stand there as if you were a born simpleton, but answer me,"
commanded the Squire. "When you and David Garth were put into Hill"s new cottage to take care of the things for the night, how came you to let the boy out of it? Why did you do it? Upon what plea?"
"But I didn"t do it, sir," said Luke.
"Now don"t you stand there and say that to my face, Macintosh. It won"t answer; for I know all about it. You put that poor shivering boy out at the window that you might be off yourself; that"s about the English of it. Where did he go to?"
"But I couldn"t do it, sir," was Luke"s answer to this. "I was not in the place myself."
"You were not there yourself?"
"No, sir, I warn"t. Knowing I should have to go off with the waggon pretty early, I went down and telled Hill that I should sleep at home."
"Do you mean to say you did not go into Hill"s place at all?"
"No, sir, I didn"t. I conclude Hill slept there hisself. I know nothing about it, for I don"t happen to have come across Hill since. I"ve kept out of his way."
This was a new turn to the affair. Luke quitted the room, and a silence ensued. Mrs. Todhetley touched me on the shoulder.
"Johnny?"
"Yes!" I said, wondering at the startled look in her eyes.
"I hope Hill did not put that poor child into the house alone! If so, no wonder that he made his escape from it."
The matter could not rest. One talked, and another talked: and before noon next day it was known all over the place that David Garth had been put to sleep by himself in the empty cottage. Miss Timmens attacked Hill with her strong tongue, and told him it was enough to frighten the child to death. Hill was sullen. He would answer nothing; and all she could get out of him was, that it was no business of hers. In vain she demanded his reasons for saying the boy had gone to Worcester by the early train: whether he sent him--whether he saw him off. Hill said David did go; and then took refuge in dogged silence.
The schoolmistress was not one to be played with. Of a tenacious turn, she followed out things with a will. She called in the police; she harangued people outside her door; she set the parish in a ferment. But David could not be heard of, high or low. Since the midnight hour, when that call of his awoke his mother, and was again repeated, he seemed to have vanished.
There arose a rumour that Jim Batley could tell something. Miss Timmens pounced upon him as he was going by the school-house, conveyed him indoors, and ordered him to make a clean breast of it. It was not much that Jim had to tell: but that little seemed of importance to Miss Timmens, and he told it readily. One thing Jim persisted in--that the boots he saw through the skylight must have been David"s boots. Hill had called them his, he said, but they were not big enough--not men"s boots at all. Hill was looking "ghastly white," as if he had had a fright, Jim added, when he told him David was gone off to Worcester.
Perhaps it was in that moment that a fear of something worse than had been yet suspected dawned upon Miss Timmens. Tying on her bonnet, she came up to Crabb Cot, and asked to see the Squire.
"It is getting more serious," she said, after old Thomas had shown her in. "I think, sir, Hill should be forced to explain what he knows. I have come here to ask you to insist upon it."
"The question is--what does he know?" rejoined the Squire.
"More than he has confessed," said Miss Timmens, in her positive manner.
"Jim Batley stands to it that those boots must, from the size, have been David"s boots. Now, Squire Todhetley, if David"s boots were there, where was David? That is what"s lying on my mind, sir."
"What did Jim Batley see besides the boots?" asked the Squire.