As if in obedience she ate a little of the pudding, cut a quarter of the mince-pie with her fork, and ate that.
"There, Johnny, that"s quite enough for "luck." Go back now to your dinner; I dare say you"ve not had any pudding yourself."
"I"ll stay with you, and finish this: as it is going begging."
She neither said yes nor no. She was looking frightfully uneasy.
"Are you vexed that Robert Ashton"s not here, Jane?"
"I am not vexed, because I know he would have been here if he could. I think something has happened to him."
I stared at her. "What! because he is a little late in coming? Why, Jane, you must be nervous."
She kept looking into the fire, her eyes fixed. I sat on a stool on the other side of the hearth; the empty pudding-plate standing on the rug between us, where I had put it.
"Robert was _sure_ to come for this dinner, Johnny, all being well, and to be in time."
"Tell me what you fear, Jane--and why?"
"I think I will tell you," she said, after a pause. "I should like to tell some one. I wish I had told Robert when he called this morning; but I was afraid he would laugh at me. You will laugh too."
And Jane Coney told it. In a low, dread voice, her eyes staring into the fire as before, just as though they could see through the blaze into the future.
Early that morning she had had a dream; a disagreeable, ugly dream about Robert Ashton. She thought he was in some frightful peril, that she cried to him to avoid it, or it would stop their marriage. He seemed not to take the least notice of her, but to go right on to it, and in the alarm this brought her, she awoke. I listened in silence, saying nothing to the end; no, nor then.
"The dream was so intensely _real_, Johnny. It seemed to be to-day; this very day then dawning; and we both of us knew that it was; the one before our marriage. I woke up in a fever; and but that it was night and not day, should have had difficulty in persuading myself at first that we were not really enacting the scene--it was, as I say, so vividly real. And Robert went out to the peril, never heeding me."
"What was the peril?"
"That"s what I can"t tell. A consciousness lay upon me that it was something very bad and frightful; but of its nature I saw nothing. I did not go to sleep again: it must have been about six o"clock, but the mornings are very dark, you know. I got up soon: what with this dinner-party and other things, there has been a great deal to do to-day, and I soon forgot my dream. Robert called after breakfast, and the sight of him put me in mind of it. I felt a great inclination to tell him to take especial care of himself; but he would only have laughed at me. He drove away direct to the Timberdale Station, to take the train for Worcester."
She did not say, though, what he had gone for to Worcester. To get the ring and licence.
"I have not felt the smallest fear of the dream all along, Johnny, since I awoke. Excepting for the few minutes Robert was here, I don"t remember even to have thought of it. But when his brothers and Mr. West came in without him to-night, it flashed into my mind like a dart. I felt sure then that something had happened. I dare say we shall never be married now."
"Jane!"
"Well, Johnny Ludlow, I think it."
To me it seemed to be growing serious. There might be nothing at all in what she had said; most people would have said there was nothing; but, sitting there in the quiet room listening to her earnest voice, seeing her anxious face, a feeling came over me that there _was_. What had become of Robert Ashton? Where could he be?
"I wish you would give me that shawl of mamma"s," she said, pointing to one on a chair. "I feel cold."
She was shivering when I put it over her pretty white shoulders and arms. And yet the fire was roaring to the very top of the grate.
"Alone here, while you were at dinner, I went over all sorts of probabilities," she resumed, drawing the shawl round her as if she were out in the snow. "Of course there are five hundred things that might happen to him, but I can only think of one."
"Well?" for she had stopped. She seemed to be speaking very unwillingly.
"If he walked he would be almost sure to take the near way, across the Ravine."
Was she ever coming to the point? I said nothing. It was better to let her go on in her own way.
"I dare say you will say the idea is far-fetched, Johnny. What I think is, that he may have fallen down the Ravine, in coming here."
Well, I did think it far-fetched. I"d as soon have expected her to say fallen down the chimney.
"Those zigzag paths are not very safe in good weather, especially the one on the Timberdale side," she went on. "With the snow on them, perhaps ice, they are positively dangerous. One false step at the top--and the fall might kill him."
Put in this way, it seemed feasible enough. But yet--somehow I did not take to it.
"Robert Ashton is strong and agile, Jane. He has come down the zigzag hundreds of times."
"I seem to see him lying there, at the bottom of the Ravine," she said, staring as before into the fire. "I--wish--some of you would go and look for him."
"Perhaps we had better. I"ll make one. Who"s this?"
It was Tom Coney. His mother had sent him to see after me. I thought I"d tell him--keeping counsel about the dream--that Robert Ashton might have come to grief in the Ravine.
"What kind of grief?" asked Tom.
"Turned a summersault down the zigzag, and be lying with a leg broken."
Tom"s laugh displayed his small white teeth: the notion amused him excessively. "What else would you like to suppose, Johnny?"
"At any rate, Jane thinks so."
She turned round then, the tears in her eyes, and went up to Tom in an outburst of grief. It took him aback.
"Tom! Tom! if no one goes to see after him, I think I must go myself. I cannot bear the suspense much longer!"
"Why, Jenny girl, what has taken you?"
_That_ had taken her. The fear that Robert Ashton might be lying disabled, or dead, in the Ravine. Tom Coney called Tod quietly out of the dining-room, and we started. Putting on our dark great-coats in silence, we went out at the back-door, which was nearest the Ravine.
Jane came with us to the gate. I never saw eyes so eager as hers were, as she gazed across the snow in the moonlight.
"Look here," said Tom, "we had better turn our trousers up."
The expedition was not pleasant, I can a.s.sure you, especially the going down the zigzag. Jane was right about its being slippery: we had to hold on by the trees and bushes, and tread cautiously. When pretty near the bottom, Tod made a false step, and shot down into the snow.
"Murder!" he roared out.
"Any bones broken?" asked Tom Coney, who could hardly speak for laughing. Tod growled, and shied a handful of snow at him.
But the slip brought home to us the probability of the fear about Robert Ashton. To slip from where Tod did was fun; to slip from the top of the opposite zigzag, quite another thing. The snow here at the bottom was up to our calves, and our black evening trousers got rolled up higher. The moonlight lay cold and white on the Ravine: the cl.u.s.tering trees, thick in summer, were leafless now. Had any fellow been gazing down from the top, we must have looked, to him, like three black-coated undertakers, gliding along to a funeral.
"I"ll tell you what," cried Tod: "if Ashton did lose his footing, he wouldn"t come to such mortal grief. The depth of snow would save him."
"I don"t believe he did fall," said Tom Coney, stoutly. "Bob Ashton"s as sure-footed as a hare. But for Jane"s being so miserable, I"d have said, flatly, I wouldn"t come out on any such wild-goose errand."