"No one knows what has become of him," said Redwood.
"I dessay "_e_ knows," said Mrs. Skinner.
"He doesn"t tell."
"He was always a great one for looking after "imself and leaving them that was near and dear to "im in trouble, was Skinner. Though clever as could be," said Mrs. Skinner....
"Where"s this child?" asked Redwood abruptly.
She begged his pardon.
"This child I hear about, the child you"ve been giving our stuff to--the child that weighs two stone."
Mrs. Skinner"s hands worked, and she dropped the onions. "Reely, Sir,"
she protested, "I don"t hardly know, Sir, what you mean. My daughter, Sir, Mrs. Caddles, "_as_ a baby, Sir." And she made an agitated curtsey and tried to look innocently inquiring by tilting her nose to one side.
"You"d better let me see that baby, Mrs. Skinner," said Redwood.
Mrs. Skinner unmasked an eye at him as she led the way towards the barn.
"Of course, Sir, there may "ave been a _little_, in a little can of Nicey I give his father to bring over from the farm, or a little perhaps what I happened to bring about with me, so to speak. Me packing in a hurry and all ..."
"Um!" said Redwood, after he had cluckered to the infant for a s.p.a.ce.
"Oom!"
He told Mrs. Caddles the baby was a very fine child indeed, a thing that was getting well home to her intelligence--and he ignored her altogether after that. Presently she left the barn--through sheer insignificance.
"Now you"ve started him, you"ll have to keep on with him, you know," he said to Mrs. Skinner.
He turned on her abruptly. "Don"t splash it about _this_ time," he said.
"Splash it about, Sir?"
"Oh! _you_ know."
She indicated knowledge by convulsive gestures.
"You haven"t told these people here? The parents, the squire and so on at the big house, the doctor, no one?"
Mrs. Skinner shook her head.
"I wouldn"t," said Redwood....
He went to the door of the barn and surveyed the world about him. The door of the barn looked between the end of the cottage and some disused piggeries through a five-barred gate upon the highroad. Beyond was a high, red brick-wall rich with ivy and wallflower and pennywort, and set along the top with broken gla.s.s. Beyond the corner of the wall, a sunlit notice-board amidst green and yellow branches reared itself above the rich tones of the first fallen leaves and announced that "Trespa.s.sers in these Woods will be Prosecuted." The dark shadow of a gap in the hedge threw a stretch of barbed wire into relief.
"Um," said Redwood, then in a deeper note, "Oom!"
There came a clatter of horses and the sound of wheels, and Lady Wondershoot"s greys came into view. He marked the faces of coachman and footman as the equipage approached. The coachman was a very fine specimen, full and fruity, and he drove with a sort of sacramental dignity. Others might doubt their calling and position in the world, he at any rate was sure--he drove her ladyship. The footman sat beside him with folded arms and a face of inflexible certainties. Then the great lady herself became visible, in a hat and mantle disdainfully inelegant, peering through her gla.s.ses. Two young ladies protruded necks and peered also.
The Vicar pa.s.sing on the other side swept off the hat from his David"s brow unheeded....
Redwood remained standing in the doorway for a long time after the carriage had pa.s.sed, his hands folded behind him. His eyes went to the green, grey upland of down, and into the cloud-curdled sky, and came back to the gla.s.s-set wall. He turned upon the cool shadows within, and amidst spots and blurs of colour regarded the giant child amidst that Rembrandtesque gloom, naked except for a swathing of flannel, seated upon a huge truss of straw and playing with its toes.
"I begin to see what we have done," he said.
He mused, and young Caddles and his own child and Cossar"s brood mingled in his musing.
He laughed abruptly. "Good Lord!" he said at some pa.s.sing thought.
He roused himself presently and addressed Mrs. Skinner. "Anyhow he mustn"t be tortured by a break in his food. That at least we can prevent. I shall send you a can every six months. That ought to do for him all right."
Mrs. Skinner mumbled something about "if you think so, Sir," and "probably got packed by mistake.... Thought no harm in giving him a little," and so by the aid of various aspen gestures indicated that she understood.
So the child went on growing.
And growing.
"Practically," said Lady Wondershoot, "he"s eaten up every calf in the place. If I have any more of this sort of thing from that man Caddles--"
VII.
But even so secluded a place as Cheasing Eyebright could not rest for long in the theory of Hypertrophy--Contagious or not--in view of the growing hubbub about the Food. In a little while there were painful explanations for Mrs. Skinner--explanations that reduced her to speechless mumblings of her remaining tooth--explanations that probed her and ransacked her and exposed her--until at last she was driven to take refuge from a universal convergence of blame in the dignity of inconsolable widowhood. She turned her eye--which she constrained to be watery--upon the angry Lady of the Manor, and wiped suds from her hands.
"You forget, my lady, what I"m bearing up under."
And she followed up this warning note with a slightly defiant:
"It"s "IM I think of, my lady, night _and_ day."
She compressed her lips, and her voice flattened and faltered: "Bein"
et, my lady."
And having established herself on these grounds, she repeated the affirmation her ladyship had refused before. "I "ad no more idea what I was giving the child, my lady, than any one _could_ "ave...."
Her ladyship turned her mind in more hopeful directions, wigging Caddles of course tremendously by the way. Emissaries, full of diplomatic threatenings, entered the whirling lives of Bensington and Redwood.
They presented themselves as Parish Councillors, stolid and clinging phonographically to prearranged statements. "We hold you responsible, Mister Bensington, for the injury inflicted upon our parish, Sir. We hold you responsible."
A firm of solicitors, with a snake of a style--Banghurst, Brown, Flapp, Codlin, Brown, Tedder, and Snoxton, they called themselves, and appeared invariably in the form of a small rufous cunning-looking gentleman with a pointed nose--said vague things about damages, and there was a polished personage, her ladyship"s agent, who came in suddenly upon Redwood one day and asked, "Well, Sir, and what do you propose to do?"
To which Redwood answered that he proposed to discontinue supplying the food for the child, if he or Bensington were bothered any further about the matter. "I give it for nothing as it is," he said, "and the child will yell your village to ruins before it dies if you don"t let it have the stuff. The child"s on your hands, and you have to keep it. Lady Wondershoot can"t always be Lady Bountiful and Earthly Providence of her parish without sometimes meeting a responsibility, you know."
"The mischief"s done," Lady Wondershoot decided when they told her--with expurgations--what Redwood had said.
"The mischief"s done," echoed the Vicar.
Though indeed as a matter of fact the mischief was only beginning.