But whether a child is ugly or handsome, it’s all the same to the parents, and for some years the only white spot in Thomas Rymer’s life had been the love of his little Benjamin. For the matter of that, as a child, Ben was rather pretty. He grew up and turned out wild; and it was just as great a blow as could have fallen upon Rymer. But when that horrible thing was brought home to him—taking the bank-note out of the letter, and substituting the stolen one for it—then Rymer’s heart gave in. Ever since that time it had been as good as breaking.
Well, that was Thomas Rymer’s lot in life. Some people seem, on the contrary, to have nothing but sunshine. Do you know what Mrs. Todhetley says?—that the greater the cloud here, the brighter will be the recompense hereafter. Looking at Thomas Rymer’s face as the fire played on it—its goodness of expression, almost that of a martyr; remembering his prolonged battle with the world’s cares, and his aching heart; knowing how inoffensive he had been towards his fellow-creatures, ever doing them a good turn when it lay in his power, and never an ill one—one could only hope that his recompense would be of the largest.
“Had many people in this afternoon, Margaret?”
“Pretty well, papa.”
Mr. Rymer sighed. “When I get stronger——”
“Margaret! Shop.”
The loud coarse summons was Mrs. Rymer’s. Margaret’s spirit recoiled from it the least in the world. In spite of her having been brought up to the “shop,” there had always been something in her innate refinement that rebelled against it and against having to serve in it.
“A haperth o’ liquorish” was the extensive order from a small child, whose head did not come much above the counter. Margaret served it at once: the liquorice, being often in demand, was kept done up in readiness. The child laid down the halfpenny and went out with a bang.
“I may as well run over with the letter,” thought Margaret—alluding to an order she had written to London for some drug they were out of. “And there’s my mother’s. Mother,” she added, going to the parlour-door, “do you want your letter posted?”
“I’ll post it myself when I do,” replied Mrs. Rymer. “Ain’t it almost time you had the gas lighted? That shop must be in darkness.”
It was so, nearly. But the gas was never lighted until really needed, in the interests of economy. Margaret ran across the road, put her letter into the post in Salmon’s window, and ran back again. She stood for a moment at the door, looking at a huge lumbering caravan that was passing—a ménage on wheels, as seen by the light within its small windows. “It must be on its way to Worcester fair,” she thought.
“Is it you, Margaret? How d’ye do?”
Some great rough man had come up, and was attempting to kiss her. Margaret started back with a cry. She would have closed the door against him; but he was the stronger and got in.
“Why, what possesses the child! Don’t you know me?”
Every pulse in Margaret Rymer’s body tingled to pain as she recognized him. It was her brother Benjamin. Better, than this, that it had been what she fancied—some rude stranger, who in another moment would have passed on and been gone for ever. Benjamin’s coming was always the signal for discomfort at home, and Margaret felt half-paralyzed with dismay.
“How are the old folk, Maggie?”
“Papa is very ill,” she answered, her voice slightly trembling. “My mother is well as usual. I think she was writing to you this afternoon.”
“Governor ill! So I’ve heard. Upstairs a good deal, is he not?”
“Quite half his time, I think.”
“Who attends here?”
“I do.”
“You!—you little mite! Brought your knowledge of rhubarb to good use, eh? What’s the matter with papa?”
“He has not been well for a long while. I don’t know what it is. Mr. Darbyshire says”—she dropped her voice a little—“that he is sure there’s something on his mind.”
“Poor old dad!—just like him! If a woman came in with a broken arm, he’d take it to heart.”
“Benjamin, I think it is you that he has most at heart,” the girl took courage to say.
Mr. Benjamin laughed. “Me! He needn’t trouble about me. I am as steady as old Time, Maggie. I’ve come home to stay; and I’ll prove to him that I am.”
“Come home to stay!” faltered Margaret.
“I can take care of things here. I am better able to do it than you.”
“My father will not put me out of my place here,” said Margaret, steadily. “He has confidence in me; he knows I do things just as he does.”
“And for that reason he makes you his substitute! Don’t assume, Miss Maggie; you’d be more in your place stitching wristbands in the parlour than as the presiding genius in a drug-shop. How d’ye do, mother?”
The sound of his voice had reached Mrs. Rymer. She did not believe her own ears, and came stealing forth to look, afraid of what she might see. To give Madam Rymer her due, she was quite as honest-natured as her husband; and the matter of the bank-note, the wrong use made of the keys she was foolish enough to lend surreptitiously to Mr. Benjamin, had brought her no light shock at the time. Ill-conduct in the shape of billiards, and beer, and idleness, she had found plenty of excuse for in her son; but when it came to felony, it was another thing altogether.
“It is him!” she muttered, as he saw her, and turned. “Where on earth have you sprung from?” demanded Mrs. Rymer.
“Not from the skies, mother. Hearing the governor was on the sick list, I thought I ought to come over and see him.”
“None of your lies, Ben,” said Mrs. Rymer. “That has not brought you here. You are in some disgraceful mess again.”
“It has brought me here—and nothing else,” said Ben: and he spoke truth. “Ashton of Timberdale——”
A faint groan—a crash as of breaking glass. When they turned to look, there was Rymer, fallen against the counter in his shock of surprise and weakness. His arm had thrown down an empty syrup-bottle.
And that’s how Benjamin Rymer came home. His father and mother had never seen him since before the discovery of the trouble; for as soon as he had changed the bank-note in the letter, he was off. The affair had frightened him a little—that is, the stir made over it, of which he had contrived to get notice; since then he had been passably steady, making a living for himself in Birmingham as assistant to a surgeon and druggist. He had met Robert Ashton a short time ago (this was the account he now gave), heard from that gentleman rather a bad account of his father, and so thought it his duty to give up what he was about, and come home. His duty! Ben Rymer’s duty!!
Ben was a tall, bony fellow, with a passably liberal education. He might not have been unsteady but for bad companions. Ben did not aid in robbing the butcher’s till—he had not quite come to that—neither was he privy to it; but he did get persuaded into trying to dispose of one of the stolen notes. It had been the one desperate act of his life, and it had sobered him. Time, however, effaces impressions; from two to three years had gone on since then; nothing had transpired, never so much as a suspicion had fallen on Mr. Benjamin, and he grew bold and came home.
Timberdale rubbed its eyes with astonishment that next autumn day, when it woke up to see Benjamin Rymer in his father’s shop, a white apron on, and serving the customers who went in, as naturally as though he had never left it. Where had he been all that while? they asked. Improving himself in his profession, coolly avowed Ben with unruffled face.
And so the one chance—rest of mind—for the father’s return to health and life, went out. The prolonged time, passing without discovery, giving a greater chance day by day that it might never happen, could but have a beneficial effect on Mr. Rymer. But when Ben made his appearance, put his head, so to say, into the very stronghold of danger, all his sickness and his fear came back again.
Ben did not know why his father kept so poorly and looked so ill. Never a word, in his sensitiveness, had Mr. Rymer spoken to his son of that past night’s work. Ben might suspect, but he did not know. Mr. Rymer would come down when he was not fit to do so, and take up his place in the shop on a stool. Ben made fun of it: in sport more than ill-feeling: telling the customers to look at the old ghost there. Ben made himself perfectly at home; would sometimes hold a levée in the shop if his father was out of it, when he and his friends, young men of Timberdale, would talk and laugh the roof off.
People talk of the troubles of the world, and say their name is legion: poverty, sickness, disappointment, disgrace, debt, difficulty; but there is no trouble the human heart can know like that brought by rebellious children. To old Rymer, with his capacity for taking things to heart, it had been as a long crucifixion. And yet—the instinctive love of a parent cannot die out: recollect David’s grief for wicked Absalom: “Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”
Still, compared with what he used to be, Ben Rymer was steady. As the winter approached, there set in another phase of the reformation; for he pulled up even from the talking and laughing, and became as good as gold. You might have thought he had taken his dead grandfather, the clergyman, for a model, and was striving to walk in his steps. He went to church, read his medical works, was pleasant at home, gentle with Margaret, and altogether the best son in the world.
“Will it last, Benjamin?” his father asked him sorrowfully.
“It shall last, father; I promise it,” was the earnestly-spoken answer. “Forget the past, and I will never, I hope, try you again.”
Ben kept his promise throughout the winter, and seemed likely to keep it always. Mr. Rymer grew stronger, and was in business regularly, which gave Ben more leisure for his books. It was thought that a good time had set in for the Rymers; but, as Mrs. Todhetley says, you cannot control Fate.
One day, when we were again staying at Crabb Cot, I had to call at the shop for a box of “Household Pills,” Rymer’s own making. When any one was ailing at home, Mrs. Todhetley would administer a dose of these pills. But that Rymer was so conscientious a man, I should have thought they were composed of bread and pepper. Mrs. Todhetley pinned her faith to them, and said they did wonders.
Well, I had to go to Timberdale on other matters, and was told to call, when there, for a box of these delectable Household Pills. Mr. Rymer and his son stood behind the counter, the one making up his books, Ben pounding something in a mortar. Winter was just on the turn, and the trees and hedges were beginning to shoot into bud. Ben left his pounding to get the pills.
“Is this Mr. Rymer’s? Halloa, Ben! All right. How goes it, old boy?”
The door had been opened with a burst, and the above words met our ears, in a tone not over-steady. They came from a man who wore sporting clothes, and his hat very much on one side. Ben Rymer stared in surprise; his mouth dropped.
But that it was early in the day, and one does not like to libel people, it might have been thought the gentleman had taken a little too much of something strong. He swaggered up to the counter, and held out his hand to Ben. Ben, just then wrapping up the box of pills, did not appear to see it.
“Had a hunt after you, old fellow,” said the loud-voiced stranger. “Been to Birmingham and all kinds of places. Couldn’t think where you’d hid yourself.”
“You are back pretty soon,” growled Ben, who certainly did not seem to relish the visit.
“Been back a month. Couldn’t get on in the New World; its folks are too down for me. I say, I want a word with you. Can’t say it here, I suppose?”
“No,” returned Ben, rather savagely.
“Just come out a bit, Ben,” resumed the stranger, after a short pause.
“I can’t,” replied Ben—and his tone sounded more like I won’t. “I have my business to attend to.”
“Bother business! Here goes, then: it’s your fault if you make me speak before people. Gibbs has come out of hiding, and is getting troublesome——”
“If you will go outside and wait, I’ll come to you,” interrupted Ben at this, very quickly.
The man turned and swaggered out. Ben gave me the pills with one hand, and took off his apron with the other. Getting his hat, he was hastening out, when Mr. Rymer touched his arm.
“Who is that man, Benjamin?”
“A fellow I used to know in Tewkesbury, father.”
“What’s his name?”
“Cotton. I’ll soon despatch him and be back again,” concluded Ben, as he disappeared.
I put down half-a-crown for the pills, and Mr. Rymer left his place to give me the change. There had been a sort of consciousness between us, understood though not expressed, since the night when I had seen him giving way to his emotion in Crabb Ravine. This man’s visit brought the scene back again. Rymer’s eyes looked into mine, and then fell.
“Ben is all right now, Mr. Rymer.”
“I could not wish him better than he is. It’s just as though he were striving to atone for the past. I thought it would have killed me at the time.”
“I should forget it.”
“Forget it I never can. You don’t know what it was, Mr. Johnny,” he continued in a sort of frightened tone, a red spot coming into his pale thin cheeks, “and I trust you never will know. I never went to bed at night but to lie listening for a summons at my door—the officers searching for my son, or to tell me he was taken. I never rose in the morning but my spirit fainted within me, as to what news the day might bring forth.”
Mr. Benjamin and his friend were pacing side by side in the middle of the street when I went out, probably to be out of the reach of eavesdroppers. They did not look best pleased with each other; seemed to be talking sharply.
“I tell you I can’t and I won’t,” Ben was saying, as I passed them in crossing over. “What do you come after me for? When a fellow wants to be on the square, you won’t let him. As to Gibbs——”
The voices died out of hearing. I went home with the pills, and thought no more about the matter.
Spring weather is changeable, as we English know only too well. In less than a week, a storm of sleet and snow was drifting down. In the midst of it, who should present himself at Crabb Cot at midday but Lee, the letter-carrier. His shaky old legs seemed hardly able to bear him up against the storm, as he came into the garden. I opened the door, wondering what he wanted.
“Please can I see the Squire in private, sir?” asked Lee, who was looking half angry, half rueful. Lee had never been in boisterous spirits since the affair of the bank-note took place. Like a great many more people, he grew fanciful with years, and could not be convinced but that the suspicion in regard to it lay on him.
“Come in out of the storm, Lee. What’s up?”
“Please, Mr. Ludlow, sir, let me get to see the Squire,” was all his answer.
The Squire was in his little room, hunting for a mislaid letter in the piece of furniture he called his bureau. As I shut old Lee in, I heard him, Lee, begin to say something about the bank-note and Benjamin Rymer. An instinct of the truth flashed over me—as sure as fate something connecting Ben with it had come out. In I shot again, to make one at the conference. The Squire was looking too surprised to notice me.
“It was Mr. Rymer’s son who took out the good note and put in the bad one?” he exclaimed. “Take care what you say, Lee.”
Lee stood near the worn hearthrug; his old hat, covered with snow-flakes, held between his hands. The Squire had put his back against the bureau and was staring at him through his spectacles, his nose and face a finer red than ordinary.
The thing had been tracked home to Benjamin Rymer by the man Cotton, Lee explained in a rambling sort of tale. Cotton, incensed at Rymer’s not helping him to some money—which was what he had come to Timberdale to ask for—had told in revenge of the past transaction. Cotton had not been connected with it, but knew of the part taken in it by Rymer.
“I don’t believe a syllable of it,” said the Squire, stoutly, flinging himself into his bureau chair, which he twisted round to face the fire. “You can sit down, Lee. Where did you say you heard this?”
Lee had heard it at the Plough and Harrow, where the man Cotton had been staying. Jelf, the landlord, had been told it by Cotton himself, and Jelf in his turn had whispered it to Lee. That was last night: and Lee had come up with it now to Mr. Todhetley.
“I tell you, Lee, I don’t believe a syllable of it,” repeated the Squire.
“It be true as gospel, sir,” asserted Lee. “Last night, when I went in to Jelf’s for a drop of beer, being stiff all over with the cold, I found Jelf in a passion because a guest had gone off without paying part of his score, leaving nothing but a letter to say he’d send it. Cotton by name, Jelf explained, and a sporting gent to look at. A good week, Jelf vowed he’d been there, living on the best. And then Jelf said I had no cause to be looked down upon any longer, for it was not me that had done that trick with the bank-notes, but Benjamin Rymer.”
“Now just stop, Lee,” interrupted the Squire. “Nobody looked down upon you for it, or suspected you: neither Jelf nor other people. I have told you so times enough.”
“But Jelf knows I thought they did, sir. And he told me this news to put me a bit at my ease. He——”
“Jelf talks at random when his temper’s up,” cried the Squire. “If you believe this story, Lee, you’ll believe anything.”
“Ben Rymer was staying at home at the time, sir,” urged Lee, determined to have his say. “If he is steady now, it’s known what he was then. He must have got access to the letters somehow, while they lay at his father’s that night, and opened yours and changed the note. Cotton says Mr. Ben had had the stolen note hid about him for ever so long, waiting an opportunity to get rid of it.”
“Do you mean to accuse Mr. Ben of being one of the thieves who robbed the butcher’s till?” demanded the Squire, growing wrathful.
“Well, sir, I don’t go as far as that. The man told Jelf that one of the stolen notes was given to young Rymer to pass, and he was to have a pound for himself if he succeeded in doing it.”
The Squire would hardly let him finish.
“Cotton said this to Jelf, did he?—and Jelf rehearsed it to you?”
“Yes, sir. Just that much.”
“Now look you here, Lee. First of all, to whom have you repeated this tale?”
“Not to anybody,” answered Lee. “I thought I’d better bring it up here, sir, to begin with.”
“And you’d better let it stop here to end with,” retorted the Squire. “That’s my best advice to you, Lee. My goodness! Accuse a respectable man’s son of what might transport him, on the authority of a drunken fellow who runs away from an inn without paying his bill! The likeliest thing is that this Cotton did it himself. How else should he know about it? Don’t you let your tongue carry this further, Lee, or you may find yourself in the wrong box.”
Lee looked just a little staggered. A faint flush appeared in his withered face. The Squire’s colour was at its fiercest. He was hard at the best of times to take in extraordinary tales, and utterly scouted this one. There was no man he had a greater respect for than Thomas Rymer.
“I hoped you might be for prosecuting, sir. It would set me right with the world.”
“You are a fool, Lee. The world has not thought you wrong yet. Prosecute! I! Upon this cock-and-bull story! Mr. Rymer would prosecute me in turn, I expect, if I did. You’d better not let this get to his ears: you might lose your post.”
“Mr. Rymer, sir, must know how wild his son has been.”
“Wild! Most of the young men of the present day are that, as it seems to me,” cried the Squire, in his heat. “Mine had better not let me catch them at it, though. I’d warm their ears well beforehand if I thought they ever would—— Do you hear, Mr. Johnny?”
I had been leaning on the back of a chair in the quietest corner for fear of being sent away. When the Squire put himself up like this, he would say anything.
“To be a bit wild is one thing, Lee; to commit felony quite another: Rymer’s son would be no more guilty of it than you would. It’s out of all reason. And do you take care of your tongue. Look here, man: suppose I took this up, as you want me, and it was found to have been Cotton or some other gaol-bird who did it, instead of young Rymer: where would you be? In prison for defamation of character, if the Rymers chose to put you there. Be wise in time, Lee, and say no more.”
“It might have been as you say, sir—Cotton himself; though I’m sure that never struck me,” returned Lee, veering round to the argument. “One thing that made me believe it, was knowing that Ben Rymer might easily get access to the letters.”
“And that’s just the reason why you should have doubted it,” contradicted the Squire. “He would be afraid to touch them because of the ease with which he could do it. Forgive you for coming up, you say?” added the Squire, as Lee rose with some humble words of excuse. “Of course I will. But don’t forget that a word of this, dropped abroad, might put your place, as postman, in jeopardy.”
“And that would never do,” said Lee, shaking his head.
“I should think not. It’s cold to-day, isn’t it?”
“Frightful cold, sir.”
“And you could come through it with this improbable story! Use your sense another time, Lee. Here, Johnny, take Lee into the kitchen, and tell them to give him some cold beef and beer.”
I handed him over, with the order, to Molly; who went into one of her tantrums at it, for she was in the midst of pastry-making. The Squire was sitting with his head bent, looking as perplexed as an owl, when I got back to the room.
“Johnny—shut the door. Something has come into my mind. Do you recollect Thomas Rymer’s coming up one evening, and wanting to give me a five-pound note?”
“Quite well, sir.”
“Well; I—I am not so sure now that there’s nothing in this fresh tale.”
I sat down; and in a low voice told him all. Of the fit of sobbing in which I had found Rymer that same night in the Ravine; and that I had known all along it was the son who had done it.
“Bless my heart!” cried the Squire, softly, very much taken aback. “It’s that, perhaps, that has been making Rymer so ill.”
“He said it was slowly killing him, sir.”
“Mercy on him!—poor fellow! An ill-doing scapegrace of a rascal! Johnny, how thankful we ought to be when our sons turn out well, and not ill! But I think a good many turn out ill nowadays. If you should live to have sons, sir, take care how you bring them up.”
“I think Mr. Rymer must have tried to bring Ben up well,” was my answer.
“Yes; but did the mother?” retorted the Squire. “More responsibility lies with them than with the father, Johnny; and she spoilt him. Take care, sir, how you choose a wife when the time comes. And there was that miserable lot the lad fell in with at Tewkesbury! Johnny, that Cotton must be an awful blackguard.”
“I hope he’ll live to feel it.”
“Look here, we must hush this up,” cried the Squire, sinking his voice and glancing round the room. “I wouldn’t bring fresh pain on poor Rymer for the world. You must forget that you’ve told me, Johnny.”
“Yes, that I will.”
“It’s only a five-pound note, after all. And if it were fifty pounds, I wouldn’t stir in it. No, nor for five hundred; be hanged if I would! It’s not I that would bring the world about Thomas Rymer’s ears. I knew his father and respected him, Johnny; though his sermons were three-quarters of an hour long, sometimes; and I respect Thomas Rymer. You and I must keep this close. And I’ll make a journey to Timberdale when this snow-storm’s gone, Johnny, and frighten Jelf out of his life for propagating libellous tales.”
That’s where it ought to have ended. The worst is, “oughts” don’t go for much in the world; as perhaps every reader of this paper has learned to know.
When Lee appeared the next morning with the letters as usual, I went out to him. He dropped his voice to speak, as he put them in my hand.
“They say Benjamin Rymer is off, sir.”
“Off where?”
“Somewhere out of Timberdale.”
“Off for what?”
“I don’t know, sir. Jelf accused me of having carried tales there, and called me a jackass for my pains. He said that what he had told me wasn’t meant to be repeated again, and I ought not to have gone telling it about, especially to the Rymers themselves; that it might not be true——”
“As the Squire said yesterday, you know, Lee.”
“Yes, sir. I answered Jelf that it couldn’t have been me that had gone talking to the Rymers, for I had not as much as seen them. Any way, he said, somebody had, for they knew of it, and Benjamin had gone off in consequence. Jelf’s as cross over it as two sticks. It’s his own fault; why did he tell me what wasn’t true?”
Lee went off—looking cross also. After breakfast I related this to the Squire. He didn’t seem to like it, and walked about thinking.
“Johnny, I can’t stir in it, you see,” he said presently. “If it got abroad, people might talk about compromising a felony, and all that sort of rubbish: and I am a magistrate. You must go. See Rymer: and make him understand—without telling him in so many words, you know—that there’s nothing to fear from me, and he may call Ben back again. If the young man has begun to lead a new life, Heaven forbid that I, having sons myself, should be a stumbling-block in the way of it.”
It was striking twelve when I reached Timberdale. Margaret said her father was poorly, having gone out in the storm of the previous day and caught a chill. He was in the parlour alone, cowering over the fire. In the last few hours he seemed to have aged years. I shut the door.
“What has happened?” I whispered. “I have come on purpose to ask you.”
“That which I have been dreading all along,” he said in a quiet, hopeless tone. “Benjamin has run away. He got some information, it seems, from the landlord of the Plough and Harrow, and was off the next hour.”
“Well, now, the Squire sent me to you privately, Mr. Rymer, to say that Ben might come back again. He has nothing to fear.”
“The Squire knows it, then?”
“Yes. Lee came up about it yesterday: Jelf had talked to him. Mr. Todhetley did not believe a word of it: he blew up Lee like anything for listening to such a tale; he means to blow up Jelf for repeating anything said by a vagabond like Cotton. Lee came round to his way of thinking. Indeed there’s nothing to be afraid of. Jelf is eating his words. The Squire would not harm your son for the world.”
Rymer shook his head. He did not doubt the Squire’s friendly feeling, but thought it was out of his hands. He told me all he knew about it.
“Benjamin came to me yesterday morning in a great flurry, saying something was wrong, and he must absent himself. Was it about the bank-note, I asked—and it was the first time a syllable in regard to it had passed between us,” broke off Rymer. “Jelf had given him a friendly hint of what had dropped from the man Cotton—you were in the shop that first day when he came in, Mr. Johnny—and Benjamin was alarmed. Before I had time to collect my thoughts, or say further, he was gone.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I went round at once to Jelf, and the man told me all. Jelf knows the truth; that is quite clear. He says he has spoken only to Lee; is sorry now for having done that, and he will hush it up as far as he can.”
“Then it will be quite right, Mr. Rymer. Why should you be taking it in this way?”
“I am ill,” was all he answered. “I caught a chill going round to the Plough and Harrow. So far as mental illness goes, we may battle with it to the end, strength from above being given to us; but when it takes bodily form—why, there’s nothing for it but giving in.”
Even while we spoke, he was seized with what seemed to be an ague. Mrs. Rymer appeared with some scalding broth, and I said I would run for Darbyshire.
A few days went on, and then news came up to Crabb Cot that Mr. Rymer lay dying. Robert Ashton, riding back from the hunt in his scarlet coat and white cords on his fine grey horse (the whole a mass of splashes with the thaw) pulled up at the door to say How d’ye do? and mentioned it amidst other items. It was just a shock to the Squire, and nothing less.
“Goodness preserve us!—and all through that miserable five-pound note, Johnny!” he cried in a wild flurry. “Where’s my hat and top-coat?”
Away to Timberdale by the short cut through the Ravine, never heeding the ghost—although its traditional time of appearing, the dusk of evening, was drawing on—went the Squire. He thought Rymer must be ill through fear of him; and he accused me of having done my errand of peace badly.
It was quite true—Thomas Rymer lay dying. Darbyshire was coming out of the house as the Squire reached it, and said so. Instead of being sorry, he flew in a passion and attacked the doctor.
“Now look you here, Darbyshire—this won’t do. We can’t have people dying off like this for nothing. If you don’t cure him, you had better give up doctoring.”
“How d’you mean for nothing?” asked Darbyshire, who knew the Squire well.
“It can’t be for much: don’t be insolent. Because a man gets a bit of anxiety on his mind, is he to be let die?”
“I’ve heard nothing about anxiety,” said Darbyshire. “He caught a chill through going out that day of the snow-storm, and it settled on a vital part. That’s what ails him, Squire.”
“And you can’t cure the chill! Don’t tell me.”
“Before this time to-morrow, Thomas Rymer will be where there’s neither killing nor curing,” was the answer. “I told them yesterday to send for the son: but they don’t know where he is.”
The Squire made a rush through the shop and up to the bedroom, hardly saying, “With your leave,” or, “By your leave.” Thomas Rymer lay in bed at the far end; his white face whiter than the pillow; his eyes sunken; his hands plucking at the counterpane. Margaret left the room when the Squire went in. He gave one look; and knew that he saw death there.
“Rymer, I’d almost have given my own life to save you from this,” cried he, in the shock. “Oh, my goodness! what’s to be done?”
“I seem to have been waiting for it all along; to have seen the exposure coming,” said Thomas Rymer, his faint fingers resting in the Squire’s strong ones. “And now that it’s here, I can’t battle with it.”
“Now, Rymer, my poor fellow, couldn’t you—couldn’t you make a bit of an effort to live? To please me: I knew your father, mind. It can’t be right that you should die.”
“It must be right; perhaps it is well. I can truly say with old Jacob that few and evil have the days of my life been. Nothing but disappointment has been my lot here; struggle upon struggle, pain upon pain, sorrow upon sorrow. I think my merciful Father will remember it in the last great account.”
He died at five o’clock in the morning. Lee told us of it when he brought up the letters at breakfast-time. The Squire let fall his knife and fork.
“It’s a shame and a sin, though, Johnny, that sons should inflict this cruel sorrow upon their parents,” he said later. “Rymer has been brought down to the grave by his son before his hair was grey. I wonder how their accounts will stand at the great reckoning?”
We were at our other and chief home, Dyke Manor: and Tod and I were there for the short Easter holidays, which were shorter in those days than they are in these.
It was Easter Tuesday. The Squire had gone riding over to old Jacobson’s with Tod. I, having nothing else to do, got the mater to come with me for a practice on the church organ; and we were taking the round home again through the village, Church Dykely.
Easter was very late that year. It was getting towards the end of April: and to judge by the weather, it might have been the end of May, the days were so warm and glorious.
In passing the gate of George Reed’s cottage, Mrs. Todhetley stopped.
“How are the babies, Hester?”
Hester Reed, sunning her white cap and clean cotton gown in the garden, the three elder children around, watering the beds with a doll’s watering-pot, and a baby hiding its face on her shoulder, dropped a curtsy as she answered—
“They be but poorly, ma’am, thank you. Look up, Susy,” turning the baby’s face upwards to show it: and a pale mite of a face it was, with sleepy eyes. “For a day or two past they’ve not seemed the thing; and they be both cross.”
“I should think their teeth are troubling them, Hester.”
“Maybe, ma’am. I shouldn’t wonder. Hetty, she seems worse than Susy. She’s a-lying there in the basket indoors. Would you please spare a minute to step in and look at her, ma’am?”
Mrs. Todhetley opened the gate. “I may as well go in and see, Johnny,” she said to me in an undertone: “I fear both the children are rather sickly.”
The other baby, “Hetty,” lay in the kitchen in a clothes-basket. It had just the same sort of puny white face as its sister. These two were twins, and about a year old. When they were born, Church Dykely went on finely at Hester Reed, asking her if she would not have had enough with one new child but she must go and set up two.
“It does seem very poorly,” remarked Mrs. Todhetley, stooping over the young mortal (which was not cross just now, but very still and quiet), and letting it clasp its little fist round one of her fingers. “No doubt it is the teeth. If the children do not get better soon, I think, were I you, Hester, I should speak to Mr. Duffham.”
The advice seemed to strike Hester Reed all of a heap. “Speak to Dr. Duffham!” she exclaimed. “Why, ma’am, they must both be a good deal worse than they be, afore we does that. I’ll give ’em a dose o’ mild physic apiece. I dare say that’ll bring ’em round.”
“I should think it would not hurt them,” assented Mrs. Todhetley. “They both seem feverish; this one especially. I hear you have had Cathy over,” she went on, passing to another subject.
“Sure enough us have,” said Mrs. Reed. “She come over yesterday was a week and stayed till Friday night.”
“And what is she doing now?”
“Well, ma’am, Cathy’s keeping herself; and that’s something. She has got a place at Tewkesbury to serve in some shop; is quite in clover there, by all accounts. Two good gownds she brought over to her back; and she’s pretty nigh as lighthearted as she was afore she went off to enter on her first troubles.”
“Hannah told me she was not looking well.”
“She have had a nasty attack of—what was it?—neuralgy, I think she called it, and been obliged to go to a doctor,” answered Hester Reed. “That’s why they gave her the holiday. She was very well while she was here.”
I had stood at the door, talking to the little ones with their watering-pot. As the mater was taking her final word with Mrs. Reed, I went on to open the gate for her, when some woman whisked round the corner from Piefinch Lane, and in at the gate.
“Thank ye, sir,” said she to me: as if I had been holding it open for her especial benefit.
It was Ann Dovey, the blacksmith’s wife down Piefinch Cut: a smart young woman, fond of fine gowns and caps. Mrs. Todhetley came away, and Ann Dovey went in. And this is what passed at Reed’s—as it leaked out to the world afterwards.
The baby in the basket began to cry, and Ann Dovey lifted it out and took it on her lap. She understood all about children, having been the eldest of a numerous flock at home, and was no doubt all the fonder of them because she had none of her own. Mrs. Dovey was moreover a great gossip, liking to have as many fingers in her neighbours’ pies as she could conveniently get in.
“And now what’s amiss with these two twins?” asked she in confidential tones, bending her face forward till it nearly touched Mrs. Reed’s, who had sat down opposite to her with the other baby. “Sarah Tanken, passing our shop just now, telled me they warn’t the thing at all, so I thought I’d run round.”
“Sarah Tanken looked in while I was a-washing up after dinner, and saw ’em both,” assented Mrs. Reed. “Hetty’s the worst of the two; more peeky like.”
“Which is Hetty?” demanded Ann Dovey; who, with all her neighbourly visits, had not learnt to distinguish the two apart.
“The one that you be a-nursing.”
“Did the mistress of the Manor look at ’em?”
“Yes; and she thinks I’d better give ’em both some mild physic. Leastways, I said a dose might bring ’em round,” added Hester Reed, correcting herself, “and she said it might.”
“It’s the very thing for ’em, Hester Reed,” pronounced Mrs. Dovey, decisively. “There’s nothing like a dose of physic for little ones; it often stops a bout of illness. You give it to the two; and don’t lose no time. Grey powder’s best.”
“I’ve not got any grey powder by me,” said Mrs. Reed. “It crossed my mind to try ’em with one o’ them pills I had from Abel Crew.”
“What pills be they?”
“I had ’em from him for myself the beginning o’ the year, when I was getting the headache so much. They’re as mild as mild can be; but they did me good. The box is upstairs.”
“How do you know they’d be the right pills to give to babies?” sensibly questioned Mrs. Dovey.
“Oh, they be right enough for that! When little Georgy was poorly two or three weeks back, I ran out to Abel Crew, chancing to see him go by the gate, and asked whether one of his pills would do the child harm. He said no, it would do him good.”
“And did it get him round?”
“I never gave it. Georgy seemed to be so much pearter afore night came, that I thought I’d wait till the morrow. He’s a rare bad one to take physic, he is. You may cover a powder in treacle that thick, Ann Dovey, but the boy scents it out somehow, and can’t be got to touch it. His father always has to make him; I can’t. He got well that time without the pill.”
“Well, I should try the pills on the little twins,” advised Ann Dovey. “I’m sure they want something o’ the sort. Look at this one! lying like a lamb in my arms, staring up at me with its poor eyes, and never moving. You may always know when a child’s ill by its quietness. Nothing ailing ’em, they worry the life out of you.”
“Both of them were cross enough this morning,” remarked Hester Reed, “and for that reason I know they be worse now. I’ll try the pill to-night.”
Now, whether it was that Ann Dovey had any especial love for presiding at the ceremony of administering pills to children, or whether she only looked in again incidentally in passing, certain it was that in the evening she was for the second time at George Reed’s cottage. Mrs. Reed had put the three elder ones to bed; or, as she expressed it, “got ’em out o’ the way;” and was undressing the twins by firelight, when Ann Dovey tripped into the kitchen. George Reed was at work in the front garden, digging; though it was getting almost too dark to see where he inserted the spade.
“Have ye give ’em their physic yet?” was Mrs. Dovey’s salutation.
“No; but I’m a-going to,” answered Hester Reed. “You be just come in time to hold ’em for me, Ann Dovey, while I go upstairs for the box.”
Ann Dovey received the pair of babies, and sat down in the low chair. Taking the candle, Mrs. Reed ran up to the room where the elder children slept. The house was better furnished than cottages generally are, and the rooms were of a fairly good size. Opposite the bed stood a high deal press with a flat top to it, which Mrs. Reed made a shelf of, for keeping things that must be out of the children’s reach. Stepping on a chair, she put her hand out for the box of pills, which stood in its usual place near the corner, and went downstairs with it.
It was an ordinary pasteboard pill-box, containing a few pills—six or seven, perhaps. Mrs. Dovey, curious in all matters, lifted the lid and sniffed at the pills. Hester Reed was getting the moist sugar they were to be administered in.
“What did you have these here pills for?” questioned Ann Dovey, as Mrs. Reed came back with the sugar. “They bain’t over big.”
“For headache and pain in the side. I asked old Abel Crew if he could give me something for it, and he gave me these pills.”
Mrs. Reed was moistening a teaspoonful of the sugar, as she spoke, with warm water. Taking out one of the pills she proceeded to crush it into small bits, and then mixed it with the sugar. It formed a sort of paste. Dose the first.
“That ain’t moist enough, Hester Reed,” pronounced Mrs. Dovey, critically.
“No? I’ll put a drop more warm water.”
The water was added, and one of the children was fed with the delectable compound—Hetty. Mrs. Dovey spoke again.
“Is it all for her? Won’t a whole pill be too much for one, d’ye think?”
“Not a bit. When I asked old Abel whether one pill would be too much for Georgy, he said, No—two wouldn’t hurt him. I tell ye, Ann Dovey, the pills be as mild as milk.”
Hetty took in the whole dose by degrees. Susy had a similar one made ready, and swallowed it in her turn. Then the two babies were conveyed upstairs and put to bed side by side in their mother’s room.
Mrs. Dovey, the ceremony being over, took her departure. George Reed came in to his early supper, and soon afterwards he and his wife went up to bed. Men who have to be up at five in the morning must go to rest betimes. The fire and candle were put out, the doors locked, and the cottage was steeped in quietness at a time when in larger houses the evening was not much more than beginning.
How long she slept, Mrs. Reed could not tell. Whether it might be the first part of the night, early or late, or whether morning might be close upon the dawn, she knew not; but she was startled out of her sleep by the cries of the babies. Awful cries, they seemed, coming from children so young; and there could be no mistaking that each was in terrible agony.
“Why, it’s convulsions!” exclaimed George Reed, when he had lighted a candle. “Both of them, too!”
Going downstairs as he was, he hastily lighted the kitchen fire and put a kettle of water on. Then, dressing himself, he ran out for Mr. Duffham. The doctor came in soon after George Reed had got back again.
Duffham was accustomed to scenes, and he entered on one now. Mrs. Reed, in a state of distress, had put the babies in blankets and brought them down to the kitchen fire; the three elder children, aroused by the cries, had come down too, and were standing about in their night-clothes, crying with fright. One of the babies was dead—Hetty. She had just expired in her father’s arms. The other was dying.
“What on earth have you been giving to these children?” exclaimed Duffham, after taking a good look at the two.
“Oh, sir, what is it, please?” sobbed Mrs. Reed, in her terror. “Convulsions?”
“Convulsions—no,” said the doctor, in a fume. “It is something else, as I believe—poison.”
At which she set up a shriek that might have been heard out of doors.
“Well, Hetty was dead, I say;” and Duffham could not do anything to save the other. It died whilst he stood there. Duffham repeated his conjecture as to poison; and Mrs. Reed, all topsy-turvy though she was, three-parts bereft of her senses, resented the implication almost angrily.
“Poison!” cried she. “How can you think of such a thing, sir!”
“I tell you that to the best of my belief these children have both died from some irritant poison,” asserted Duffham, coolly imperative. “I ask what you have been giving them?”
“They have not been well this three or four days past,” replied she, wandering from the point; not evasively, but in her mind’s bewilderment. “It must have been their teeth, sir; I thought they were cutting ’em with fever.”
“Did you give them any physic?”
“Yes, sir. A pill apiece when I put ’em to bed.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Duffham. “What pill was it?”
“One of Abel Crew’s.”
This answer surprised him. Allowing that his suspicion of poison was correct, he assumed that these pills must have contained it; and he had never had cause to suppose that Abel Crew’s pills were otherwise than innocent.
Mrs. Reed, her voice broken by sobs, explained further in answer to his questions, telling him how she had procured these pills from Abel Crew some time before, and had given one of the said pills to each of the babies. Duffham stood against the dresser, taking it all in with a solemn face, his cane held up to his chin.
“Let me see this box of pills, Mrs. Reed.”
She went upstairs to get it. A tidy woman in her ways, she had put the box in its place again on the top of the press. Duffham took off the lid, and examined the pills.
“Do you happen to have a bit of sealing-wax in the house, Reed?” he asked presently.
George Reed, who had stood like a man bewildered, looking first on one, then on the other of his dead little ones, answered that he had not. But the eldest child, Annie, spoke up, saying that there was a piece in her little work-box; Cathy had given it her last week when she was at home.
It was produced—part of a small stick of fancy wax, green and gold. Duffham wrapped the pill-box up in the back of a letter that he took from his pocket, and sealed it with a seal that hung to his watch-chain. He put the parcel into the hand of George Reed.
“Take care of it,” he said. “This will be wanted.”
“There could not have been poison in them pills, sir,” burst out Mrs. Reed, her distress increasing at the possibility that he might be right. “If there had been, they’d ha’ poisoned me. One night I took three of ’em.”
Duffham did not answer. He was nodding his head in answer to his own thoughts.
“And who ever heard of Abel Crew mixing up poison in his pills?” went on Mrs. Reed. “If you please, sir, I don’t think he could do it.”
“Well, that part of it puzzles me—how he came to do it,” acknowledged Duffham. “I like old Abel, and shall be sorry if it is proved that his pills have done the mischief.”
Mrs. Reed shook her head. She had more faith than that in Abel Crew.
Ever so many years before—for it was in the time of Sir Peter Chavasse—there appeared one day a wanderer at Church Dykely. It was hot weather, and he seemed to think nothing of camping out in the fields by night, under the summer stars. Who he was, or what he was, or why he had come, or why he stayed, nobody knew. He was evidently not a tramp, or a gipsy, or a travelling tinker—quite superior to it all; a slender, young, and silent man, with a pale and gentle face.
At one corner of the common, spreading itself between the village and Chavasse Grange, there stood a covered wooden shed, formerly used to impound stray cattle, but left to itself since the square space for the new pound had been railed round. By-and-by it was found that the wanderer had taken to this shed to sleep in. Next, his name leaked out—“Abel Crew.”
He lived how he could, and as simply as a hermit. Buying a penny loaf at the baker’s, and making his dinner of it with a handful of sorrel plucked from the fields, and a drink from the rivulet that ran through the wilderness outside the Chavasse grounds. His days were spent in examining roots and wild herbs, now and then in digging one up; and his nights chiefly in studying the stars. Sir Peter struck up a sort of speaking acquaintanceship with him, and, it was said, was surprised at his stock of knowledge and the extent of his travels; for he knew personally many foreign places where even Sir Peter himself had never been. That may have caused Sir Peter—who was lord of the manor and of the common included—to tolerate in him what it was supposed he would not in others. Anyway, when Abel Crew began to dig the ground about his shed, and plant roots and herbs in it, Sir Peter let him do it and never interfered. It was quite the opposite; for Sir Peter would sometimes stand to watch him at his work, talking the while.
In the course of time there was quite an extensive garden round the shed—comparatively speaking, you know, for we do not expect to see a shed garden as large as that of a mansion. It was fenced in with a hedge and wooden palings, all the work of Abel Crew’s hands. Sir Peter was dead then; but Lady Chavasse, guardian to the young heir, Sir Geoffrey, extended to him the same favour that her husband had, and, if she did not absolutely sanction what he was doing, she at any rate did not oppose it. Abel Crew filled his garden with rare and choice and useful field herbs, the valuable properties of which he alone understood; and of ordinary sweet flowers, such as bees love to suck. He set up bee-hives and sold the honey; he distilled lavender and bergamot for perfumes; he converted his herbs and roots into medicines, which he supplied to the poor people around, charging so small a price for them that it could scarcely more than cover the cost of making, and not charging at all the very poor. At the end of about ten years from his first appearance, he took down the old shed, and built up a more convenient cottage in its place, doing it all with his own pair of hands. And the years went on and on, and Abel Crew and his cottage, and his herbs, and his flowers, and his bees, and his medicines, were just as much of an institution in the parish as was the Grange itself.
He and I became good friends. I liked him. You have heard how I take likes and dislikes to faces, and I rarely saw a face that I liked as I liked Abel Crew’s. Not for its beauty, though it really was beautiful, with its perfect shape and delicately carved features; but for its unmistakable look of goodness and its innate refinement: perhaps also for the deep, far-seeing, and often sad expression that sat in the earnest eyes. He was old now—sixty, I dare say; tall, slender, and very upright still; his white hair brushed back from his forehead and worn rather long. What his original condition of life might have been did not transpire; he never talked of it. More than once I had seen him reading Latin books; and though he fell into the diction of the country people around when talking with them, he changed his tones and language when conversing with his betters. A character, no doubt, he was, but a man to be respected; a man of religion, too—attending church regularly twice on a Sunday, wet or dry, and carrying his religion into the little things of everyday life.
His style of dress was old-fashioned and peculiar. So far as I saw, it never varied. A stout coat, waistcoat, and breeches every day, all of one colour—drab; with leathern gaiters buttoned nearly to the knee. On Sundays he wore a suit of black silk velvet, and a frilled shirt of fine cambric. His breeches were tied at the knee with black ribbon, in which was a plain, glistening steel buckle; buckles to match shone in his shoes. His stockings were black, and in the winter he wore black-cloth gaiters. In short, on Sundays Abel Crew looked like a fine old-fashioned English gentleman, and would have been taken for one. The woman who got up his linen declared he was more particular over his shirt-frills than Sir Peter himself.
Strangers in the place would sometimes ask what he was. The answer was not easy to give. He was a botanist and herbalist, and made pills, and mixtures, and perfumes, and sold honey, and had built his cottage and planted out his garden, and lived alone, cooking his food and waiting on himself; doing all in fact with his own hands, and was very modest always. On the other side, he had travelled in his youth, he understood paintings, studied the stars, read his store of Latin and classical books, and now and then bought more, and was as good a doctor as Duffham himself. Some people said a better one. Certain it was, that more than once when legitimate medical nostrums had failed—calomel and blisters and bleeding—Abel Crew’s simple decoctions and leaves had worked a cure. Look at young Mrs. Sterling at the Court. When that first baby of hers came to town—and a fine squalling young brat he was, with a mouth like a crocodile’s!—gatherings arose in her chest or somewhere, one after another; it was said the agony was awful. Duffham’s skill seemed to have gone a blackberrying, the other doctor’s also, for neither of the two could do anything for her, and the Court thought she would have died of it. Upon that, some relation of old Sterling’s was summoned from London—a great physician in great practice. He came in answer, and was liberal with his advice, telling them to try this and to try the other. But it did no good; and she only grew worse. When they were all in despair, seeing her increasing weakness and the prolonged pain, the woman who nursed her spoke of old Abel Crew; she had known him cure in these cases when the doctor could not; and the poor young lady, willing to catch at a straw, told them to send for Abel Crew. Abel Crew took a prepared plaster of herbs with him, green leaves of some sort, and applied it. That night the patient slept more easily than she had for weeks; and in a short time was well again.
But, skilful though he seemed to be in the science of herbs, as remedies for sickness and sores, Abel Crew never obtruded himself upon the ailing, or took money for his advice, or willingly interfered with the province of Duffham; he never would do it unless compelled in the interests of humanity. The patients he chiefly treated were the poor, those who could not have paid Duffham a coin worth thinking about. Duffham knew this. And, instead of being jealous of him, as some medical men might have been, or ridiculing him for a quack, Duffham liked and respected old Abel Crew. He was simple in his habits still: living chiefly upon bread and butter, with radishes or mustard and cress for a relish, cooking vegetables for his dinner, but rarely meat: and his drink was tea or spring water.
So that Abel Crew was rather a notable character amongst us; and when it was known abroad that two of his pills had caused the death of Mrs. Reed’s twins, there arose no end of a commotion.
It chanced that the same night this occurred, just about the time in fact that the unfortunate infants were taking down the pills under the superintendence of their mother and the blacksmith’s wife, Abel Crew met with an accident; though it was curious enough that it should be so. In taking a pan of boiling herbs off the fire, he let one of the handles slip out of his fingers; it sent the pan down on that side, spilled a lot of the stuff, and scalded his left foot on the instep. Therefore he was about the last person to hear of the calamity; for his door was not open as usual the following morning, and no one knocked to tell him of it.
Duffham was the first. Passing by on his morning rounds, the doctor heard the comments of the people, and it arrested him. It was so unusual a thing for Abel Crew not to be about, and for his door to be closed, that some of them had been arriving at a sensible conclusion—Abel Crew, knowing the mischief his pills had done, was shutting himself up within the house, unable to face his neighbours.
“Rubbish!” said Duffham. And he strode up the garden-path, knocked at the door with his cane, and entered. Abel had dressed, but was lying down on the bed again to rest his lame foot.
Duffham would have asked to look at it, but that he knew Abel Crew was as good at burns and scalds as he himself was. It had been doctored at once, and was now wrapped up in a handkerchief.
“The fire is nearly out of it,” said Abel, “but it must have rest; by to-night I shall be able to dress it with my healing-salve. I am much obliged to you for coming in, sir: though in truth I don’t know how you could have heard of the accident.”
“Ah! news flies,” said Duffham, evasively, knowing that he had not heard of the foot, or the neighbours either, and had come in for something altogether different. “What is this about the pills?”
“About the pills?” repeated Abel Crew, who had got up out of respect, and was putting on his coat. “What pills, sir?”
The doctor told him what had happened. Hester Reed had given one of his pills to each of her babies, and both had died of it. Abel Crew listened quietly; his face and his eyes fixed on Duffham.
“The children cannot have died of the pills,” said he, speaking as gently as you please. “Something else must have killed them.”
“According to Hester Reed’s account, nothing can have done it but the pills,” said Duffham. “The children had only taken their ordinary food throughout the day, and very little of that. George Reed came running to me in the night, but it was too late; one was dead before I got there. There could be no mistaking the children’s symptoms—that both were poisoned.”
“This is very strange,” exclaimed Abel, looking troubled. “By what kind of poison?”
“Arsenic, I think. I——”
But here they were interrupted. Dovey, the blacksmith, hearing of the calamity, together with the fact that it was his wife who had assisted in administering the suspected doses, deemed it his duty to look into the affair a little, and to resent it. He had left his forge and a bar of iron red-hot in it, and come tearing along in his leather apron, his shirt-sleeves stripped up to the elbow, and his arms grimy. A dark-eyed, good-natured little man in general, was Dovey, but exploding with rage at the present moment.
“Now then, Abel Crew, what do you mean by selling pills to poison people?” demanded he, pushing back the door with a bang, and stepping in fiercely. Duffham, foreseeing there was going to be a contest, and having no time to waste, took his departure.
“I have not sold pills to poison people,” replied Abel.
“Look here,” said Dovey, folding his black arms. “Be you going to eat them pills, or be you not? Come!”
“What do you mean, Dovey?”
“What do I mean! Ain’t my meaning plain? Do you own to having selled a box of pills to Hester Reed last winter?—be you thinking to eat that there fact, and deny of it? Come, Abel Crew!”
“I remember it well,” readily spoke up Abel. “Mrs. Reed came here one day, complaining that her head ached continually, and her side often had a dull pain in it, and asked me to give her something. I did so; I gave her a box of pills. It was early in January, I think. I know there was ice on the ground.”
“Then do you own to them pills,” returned Dovey, more quietly, his fierceness subdued by Abel’s civility. “It were you that furnished ’em?”
“I furnished the box of pills I speak of, that Hester Reed had from me in the winter. There’s no mistake about that.”
“And made ’em too?”
“Yes, and made them.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that; and now don’t you go for to eat your words later, Abel Crew. Our Ann, my wife, helped to give them there two pills to the children; and I’m not a-going to let her get into trouble over it. You’ve confessed to the pills, and I’m a witness.”
“My pills did not kill the children, Dovey,” said Abel, in a pleasant tone, resting his lame foot upon an opposite chair.
“Not kill ’em?”
“No, that they did not. I’ve not made pills all these years to poison children at last.”
“But what done it if the pills didn’t?”
“How can I say? ’Twasn’t my pills.”
“Dr. Duffham says it was the pills. And he——”
“Dr. Duffham says it was?”
“Reed telled me that the doctor asked outright, all in a flurry, what his wife had gave the babies, and she said she had gave ’em nothing but them there two pills of Abel Crew’s. Duffham said the pills must have had poison in ’em, and he asked for the box; and Hester Reed, she give him the box, and he sealed it up afore their eyes with his own seal.”
Abel nodded. He knew that any suspected medicine must in such a case be sealed up.
“And now that I’ve got that there word from ye, I’ll say good-day to ye, neighbour, for I’ve left my forge to itself, and some red-hot iron in it. And I hope with all my heart and mind,”—the blacksmith turned round from the door to say more kindly, his good-nature cropping up again,—“that it’ll turn out it warn’t the pills, but some’at else: our Ann won’t have no cause to be in a fright then.” Which was as much as to say that Ann Dovey was frightened, you observe.
That same afternoon, going past the common, I saw Abel Crew in his garden, sitting against the cottage wall in the sun, his foot resting on a block of wood.
“How did it all happen, Abel?” I asked, turning in at the gate. “Did you give Mrs. Reed the wrong pills?”
“No, sir,” he answered, “I gave her the right pills; the pills I make expressly for such complaints as hers. But if I had, in one sense, given her the wrong, they could not have brought about any ill effect such as this, for my pills are all innocent of poison.”
“I should say it could not have been the pills that did the mischief, after all, then.”
“You might swear it as well, Master Johnny, with perfect safety. What killed the poor children, I don’t pretend to know, but my pills never did. I tried to get down as far as Reed’s to inquire particulars, and found I could not walk. It was a bit of ill-luck, disabling myself just at this time.”
“Shall you have to appear at the inquest to-morrow?”
He lifted his head quickly at the question—as though it surprised him. Perhaps not having cast his thoughts that way.
“Is there to be an inquest, Master Johnny?”
“I heard so from old Jones. He has gone over to see the coroner.”
“Well, I wish the investigation was all over and done with,” said he. “It makes me uneasy, though I know I am innocent.”
Looking at him sitting there in the sun, at his beautiful face with its truthful eyes and its silver hair, it was next to impossible to believe he could be the author of the two children’s death. Only—the best of us are liable to mistakes, and sometimes make them. I said as much.
“I made none, Master Johnny,” was his answer. “When my pills come to be analyzed—as of course they must be—they will be found wholesome and innocent.”
The inquest did not take place till the Friday. Old Jones had fixed it for the Thursday, but the coroner put it off to the next day. And by the time Friday morning dawned, opinion had veered round, and was strongly in favour of Abel Crew. All the parish had been to see him; and his protestations, that he had never in his life put any kind of poison into his medicines, made a great impression. The pills could not have been in fault, said everybody. Dr. Duffham might have sealed them up as a matter of precaution, but the mischief would not be found there.
In the middle of Church Dykely, next door to Perkins the butcher’s, stood the Silver Bear Inn; a better sort of public-house, kept by Henry Rimmer. It was there that the inquest was held. Henry Rimmer himself and Perkins the butcher were two of the jurymen. Dobbs the blacksmith was another. They all dressed themselves in their Sunday-going clothes to attend it. It was called for two in the afternoon; and soon after that hour the county coroner (who had dashed up to the Silver Bear in a fast gig, his clerk driving) and the jury trooped down to George Reed’s cottage and took a look at the two pale little faces lying there side by side. Then they went back again, and the proceedings began.
Of course as many spectators went crowding into the room as it would hold. Three or four chairs were there (besides those occupied by the jury at the table), and a bench stood against the wall. The bench was speedily fought for and filled; but Henry Rimmer’s brother, constituting himself master of the ceremonies, reserved the chairs for what he called the “big people,” meaning those of importance in the place. The Squire was bowed into one; and to my surprise I had another. Why, I could not imagine, unless it was that they remembered I was the owner of George Reed’s cottage. But I did not like to sit down when so many older persons were standing, and I would not take the chair.