Johnny Ludlow First Series Part 82

"Nothing in particular," she answered. "He said the cupboard door stood open, and hid the best part of the room. David would not be likely to run away and leave his boots behind him."

"Unless he was in too great a fright to stop to put them on."

"I don't think that, sir."

"What is it you wish to imply?" asked the Squire, not seeing the drift of the argument.

"I wish I knew myself," replied Miss Timmens, candidly. "I am certain Hill has not told all he could tell: he has been deceitful over it from the first, and he must be made to explain. Look here, sir: when he got to Willow Cottage that morning, there's no doubt he thought David was in it. Very well. He goes in to call him; stays a bit, and then comes out and tells young Jim that David has gone to Worcester. How was he to know David had gone to Worcester?--who told him? The boy says, too, that Hill looked ghastly, as if he had been frightened."

"David must have gone somewhere, or he would have been in the room,"

argued the Squire. "He would not be likely to go back after quitting it, and his mother heard him call to her in the middle of the night."

"Just so, sir. But--if Hill did not find him, why should he come out and a.s.sert that David had started for Worcester?--Why not have said David had escaped?"

"I am sure I don't know."

"It's the boots that come over me," avowed Miss Timmens; "I can't come to the bottom of them. I mean to come to the bottom of Hill, though, and make him disclose what he knows. You are his master, sir, and perhaps he will tell you without trouble, if you will please to be so good as question him. If he won't, I'll have him brought up before the Bench."

Away went Miss Timmens, with a parting remark that the school must be rampant by that time. The Squire sat thinking a bit, and then put on his hat and great-coat, telling me I might come with him and hear what Hill had to say. We expected to find Hill in the ploughed field between his cottage and North Crabb. But Hill was in his own garden; we saw him as we went along. Without ceremony, the Squire opened the wooden gate, and stepped in. Hill was raking the leaves together by the shed at the end of the garden.

He threw down the rake when he saw us, as if startled, his red face turning white. Coming forward, he began a confused excuse for being at home at that hour of the day, saying there was so much to do when getting into a fresh place; and that he had not been well for two days, "had had a sickness upon him." The Squire, never hard with the men, told him he was welcome to be there, and began talking about the garden.

"It is as rich a bit of land, Hill, as any in the parish, and you may turn it to good account if you are industrious. Does your wife intend to keep chickens?"

"Well, sir, I suppose she will. Town-bred women don't understand far about 'em, though. It may be a'most as much loss as profit."

"Nonsense," said the Squire, in his quick way. "Loss! when you have every convenience about you! This used to be the fowl-house in Hopton's time," he added, rapping the side of the shed with his stick. "Why!

you've been putting a padlock on it, Hill!"

For the door was fastened with a padlock; a new one, to judge by its look. Hill made no comment. He had taken up the rake again and was raking vigorously at the dead leaves. I wondered what he was shaking for.

"Have you any treasures here, that you should lock it up?"

"Only the watering-can, sir, and a few o' my garden tools," answered Hill. "There's a heap of loose characters about, and nothing's safe from 'em."

Putting his back against the shed, the Squire suddenly called on Hill to face him, and entered on the business he had come upon. "Where was David Garth? Did he, Hill, know anything about him?"

Hill had looked pale before; I said so; but that was nothing to the frightful whiteness that took him now. Ears, lips, neck; all turned the hue of the dead. The rake shook in his grasp; his teeth chattered.

"Come, Hill," said the Squire; "I see you have something to say."

But Hill protested he had nothing to say: except that the boy's absence puzzled him. The Squire put some home questions upon the points spoken of by Miss Timmens, showing Hill that we knew all. He then told him he might take his choice; answer, or go before the magistrates.

Apparently Hill saw the futility of holding out longer. His very aspect would have convicted him, as the Squire said: if he had committed murder, he could not have looked more guilty. Glancing shudderingly around on all sides, as though the air had phantoms in it, he whispered his version of the morning's work.

It was true that he _had_ gone to the house expecting to find David in it; and it was true that when he entered he found him flown. Not wis.h.i.+ng to alarm the boy's mother, he told Jim Batley that David had gone by early train to Worcester: he told the mother so. As to the boots, Hill declared they were his own, not David's; and that Jim's eyes must have been deceived in the size. And he vowed and declared he knew no more than this, or where David could have got to.

"What do you think you deserve for locking the child in the house by himself?" asked the Squire, sternly.

"Everything that'll come upon me through it," readily acknowledged Hill.

"I could cut my hands off now for having done it; but I never thought he'd be really frightened. It's just as if his ghost had been haunting me ever since; I see him a-following of me everywhere."

"His ghost!" exclaimed the Squire. "Do you suppose he is dead?"

"I don't know," said the man, pa.s.sing his shaking hand across his damp forehead. "I wish to Heaven I had let him go off to his grandmother's that same blessed night!"

"Then you wish me to understand, Hill, that you absolutely know nothing of where the boy may be?"

"Nothing at all, sir."

"Don't you think it might have been as well if you had told the truth from the first?" asked the Squire, rather sarcastically.

"Well, sir, one's mind gets confused at times, and I thought of his mother. I could not be off seeing that if anything had happened, it lay on my shoulders for having left him alone, in there."

Whether the Squire believed Hill could tell more, I don't know. I did.

As we went on to the school-house, the Pater kept silence. Miss Timmens was frightfully disappointed at the result, and said Hill was a s.h.i.+fty scoundrel.

"I cannot tell what to think," the Squire remarked to her. "His manner is the strangest I ever saw; it is just as though he had something on his conscience. He said the boy's ghost seemed to haunt him. Did you notice that, Johnny?"

"Yes, sir. A queer idea."

"He--he--never could have found David dead in the morning?" cried Miss Timmens, in a low tone, herself turning a little pale. "Dead of fright?"

"That could not be," said the Squire. "You forget that David had made his escape before midnight, and was at his mother's, calling to her."

"True, true," a.s.sented Miss Timmens. "Any way, I am certain Hill is somehow or other deceiving us, and he is a born villain for doing it."

But Hill, deceiving us though he had been, could not hold out. In going back, we saw him leaning over the palings waiting for us. But that the man is living yet, I should have said he was going to die there and then, for he looked exactly like it.

It seemed that just after we left him, a policeman had made his appearance. Not as a policeman, but as a friend; for he and Hill were cronies. He told Hill confidentially that there was "going to be a row over that there lost boy; that folks were saying that he might have been murdered; that unless Hill could tell something satisfactory about him, he and others might be in custody before the day was over." Whether Hill found himself brought to a point from which there was neither advance nor retreat, or that he inevitably saw that concealment could no longer be maintained, or that he was stricken to despair and felt helpless, I know not. There he stood, his head over the palings, saying he would tell all.

It was a sad tale to listen to. Miss Timmens's last supposition was right--Hill, upon going up to release David Garth, had found him dead.

And, so far as the man's experience of death went, he must have been dead for six or seven hours.

"I'd like you to come and see him, sir," panted Hill.

Gingerly stepped the Squire in Hill's wake across the garden to the shed. Unlocking the door, Hill stepped back for us to enter. On a mattress on the ground was David, laid straight in his every-day clothes, and covered with a blanket; his pretty hair, which his mother had so loved, carefully smoothed. Hill,--rough, burly, cross-grained Hill,--burst into tears and sobbed like a child.

"I'd give my life to undo it, and bring him back again, Squire; I'd give my life twice over, Master Johnny; but I declare before Heaven, I never thought to harm the boy. When I see him the next morning, lying dead, I'd not have minded if the Lord had struck me dead too. I've been a'most mad ever since."

"Johnny," said the Squire, in low tones, "go you to South Crabb, and bring over Mr. Cole. Do not talk of this."

The surgeon was at home, and came back with me. I did not quite understand why the Squire sent for him, seeing he could do no good.

And the boots were David's, after all; the only things he had taken off.

Hill had brought him to this shed the next night; with some vague idea of burying him in the ground under the leaves. "But I couldn't do it,"

he avowed amid his sobs; "I couldn't do it."

There was an examination, Cole and another making it; and they gave evidence at the inquest. One of them (it was Cole) thought the boy must have died from fright, the other from the cold; and a nice m.u.f.f this last must have been.