by Ellen Wood
Janet Carey grew very ill as the day went on. Lettice offered to sit up with her, in case she wanted anything in the night. Janet had just the appearance of somebody worn out.
We went to bed at the usual time, quite unconscious that Mr. Stone had taken up his night watch in the summer-house at the end of the garden. The nights were very bright just then; the moon at about the full. Nothing came of it: neither the room nor the window was disturbed.
“They scented my watch,” remarked the officer in private next morning to Miss Deveen. “However, ma’am, I don’t think it likely you will be troubled again. Seeing you’ve put it into our hands, they’ll not dare to risk further annoyance.”
“I suppose not — if they know it,” dubiously spoke Miss Deveen.
He shook his head. “They know as much as that, ma’am. Depend upon it their little game is over.”
Mr. Stone was mistaken. On the following morning, the breakfast-room was found by Lettice in exactly the same state of confusion. The furniture dragged about, the ornaments moved from the mantelpiece, the bills and papers opened, as before. Miss Deveen was very silent over it, and said in the hearing of the servants that she should have to carry the grievance to Scotland Yard.
And I’m sure I thought she set out to do it. The carriage came to the door in the course of the morning. Miss Deveen, who was ready dressed, passed over the others, and asked me to go with her.
“Do you know what I’m going to do, Johnny?” she questioned, as George took his place on the box and the fat old coachman gave the word to his horses.
“I think I do, Miss Deveen. We are going to Scotland Yard.”
“Not a bit of it, Johnny,” she said. “My opinion has come round to Mr. Policeman Stone’s — that we must look indoors for the disturber. I have brought you out with me to talk about it. It is a great mystery — for I thought I could have trusted the servants and all the rest of you with my life.”
It was a mystery — and no mistake.
“A great mystery,” repeated Miss Deveen; “a puzzle; and I want you to help me to unravel it, Johnny. I intend to sit up to-night in the breakfast-room. But not being assured of my nerves while watching in solitude for thieves, or ghosts, or what not, I wish you to sit up with me.”
“Oh, I shall like it, Miss Deveen.”
“I have heard of houses being disturbed before in a similar manner,” she continued. “There was a story in the old days of the Cock-Lane ghost: I think that was something of the same kind, but my memory is rather cloudy on the point. Other cases I know have been traced to the sudden mania, solely mischievous or otherwise, of some female inmate. I hope it will not turn out to have been Lettice herself.”
“Shall I watch without you, Miss Deveen?”
“No, no; you will bear me company. We will make our arrangements now, Johnny — for I do not intend that any soul shall know of this; not even Miss Cattledon. You will keep counsel, mind, like the true and loyal knight you are.”
The house had gone to rest. In the dark breakfast-room sat Miss Deveen and I, side by side. The fire was dying away, and it gave scarcely any light. We sat back against the wall between the fireplace and the door, she in one armchair, I in another. The secretary was opposite the fire, the key in the lock as usual; the window, closed and barred, lay to the left, the door to the right, a table in the middle. An outline of the objects was just discernible in the fading light.
“Do you leave the key in the secretary as a rule, Miss Deveen?” I asked in a whisper.
“Yes. There’s nothing in it that any one would care to look at,” she replied in the same cautious tone. “My cash-box is generally there, but that is always locked. But I think we had better not talk, Johnny.”
So we sat on in silence. The faint light of the fire died away, giving place to total darkness. It was weary watching there, hour after hour, each hour seeming an age. Twelve o’clock struck; one; two! I’d have given something to be able to fall asleep. Just to speak a word to Miss Deveen would be a relief, and I forgot her injunctions.
“Are you thinking of ghosts, Miss Deveen?”
“Just then I was thinking of God, Johnny. How good it is to know that He is with us in the dark as in the light.”
Almost with the last word, my ears, younger and quicker than Miss Deveen’s, caught the sound of a faint movement outside — as though steps were descending the stairs. I touched Miss Deveen’s arm and breathed a caution.
“I hear something. I think it is coming now.”
The door softly opened. Some white figure was standing there — as might be seen by the glimmer of light that came in through the passage window. Who or what it was, we could not gather. It closed the door behind it, and came slowly gliding along the room on the other side the table, evidently feeling its way as it went, and making for the window. We sat in breathless silence. Miss Deveen had caught my hand and was holding it in hers.
Next, the shutters were unfastened and slowly folded back; then the window was unbolted and its doors were flung wide. This let in a flood of moonlight: after the darkness the room seemed bright as day. And the white figure doing all this was — Janet Carey in her nightgown, her feet bare.
Whether Miss Deveen held my hand the tighter, or I hers, I dare say neither of us could tell. Janet’s eyes turned on us, as we sat: and I fully expected her to go into a succession of shrieks.
But no. She took no manner of notice. It was just as though she did not see us. Steadily, methodically as it seemed, she proceeded to search the room, apparently looking for something. First, she took the chintz cover off the nearest chair, and shook it out; turned over the chair and felt it all over; a small round stand was served the same; a blotting-case that happened to lie on the table she carried to the window, knelt down, and examined it on the floor by the moonlight, passing her fingers over its few pages, unfolding a letter that was inside and shaking it out to the air. Then all that was left on the floor, and she turned over another chair, and so went on.
I felt as cold as charity. Was it her ghost that was doing this? How was it she did not see us sitting there? Her eyes were open enough to see anything!
Coming to the secretary, she turned the key, and began her search in it. Pulling out one drawer first, she opened every paper it contained, shook them one by one, and let them drop on the floor. As she was commencing at the next drawer, her back towards us, Miss Deveen whispered to me.
“We will get away, Johnny. You go on first. No noise, mind.”
We got out without being seen or heard. At least, there was no outcry; no sign to tell we had been. Miss Deveen drew me into the dining-room; her face, as it caught the glimmer, entering by the fan-light over the hall-door, looked deadly pale.
“I understand it all, Johnny. She is doing it in her sleep.”
“In her sleep?”
“Yes. She is unconscious. It was better to come away. As she came round to search our part of the room, she might have found us, and awoke. That would have been dangerous.”
“But, Miss Deveen, what is she searching for?”
“I know. I see it all perfectly. It is for a bank-note.”
“But — if she is really asleep, how can she go about the search in that systematic way? Her eyes are wide open: she seems to examine things as though she saw them.”
“I cannot tell you how it is, Johnny. They do seem to see things, though they are asleep. What’s more, when they awake there remains no consciousness of what they have done. This is not the first case of somnambulism I have been an eye-witness to. She throws the window and shutters open to admit the light.”
“How can she have sense to know in her sleep that opening them will admit it?”
“Johnny, though these things are, I cannot explain them. Go up to your bed now and get to sleep. As I shall go to mine. You shall know about Janet in the morning. She will take no harm if left alone: she has taken none hitherto. Say nothing to any one.”
It was the solution of the great puzz
le. Janet Carey had done it all in her sleep. And what she had been searching for was a bank-note.
In the situation where Janet had been living as nursery-governess, a bank-note had disappeared. Janet was suspected and accused of taking it. Constitutionally timid and nervous, her spirits long depressed by circumstances, the accusation had a grave effect upon her. She searched the house for it incessantly, almost night and day, just as we had seen her searching the parlour at Miss Deveen’s in her sleep, and then fell into a fever — which was only saved by great care from settling on the brain. When well enough, Miss Cattledon had her removed to London to Miss Deveen’s; but the stigma still clung to her, and the incipient fever seemed still to hover about her. The day William Whitney left, she moved from Miss Cattledon’s chamber to the one he had occupied: and that night, being unrestrained, she went down in her sleep to search. The situation of the room in which the note had been lost was precisely similar to this breakfast-room at Miss Deveen’s — in her troubled sleep, poor girl, she must have taken it for the same room, and crept down, still asleep, to renew the endless search she had formerly made when awake. The night the policeman was watching in the summer-house, Lettice sat up with Janet; so that night nothing occurred. Lettice said afterwards that Miss Carey twice got out of bed in her sleep and seemed to be making for the door, but Lettice guided her back to bed again. And so there was the elucidation: and Janet was just as unconscious of what she had done as the bed-post.
Miss Deveen’s medical man was called in, for brain-fever, escaped, appeared to be fastening on Janet in earnest now. He gave it as his opinion that she was no natural sleep-walker, but that the mind’s disturbance had so acted on the brain and system, coupled with her fright at meeting the policeman at the Colosseum, as to have induced the result. At any rate, whatever may have caused it, and strange though it was, I have only given facts. And in the next paper we shall hear more about the bank-note.
JANET CAREY.
I.
It was a summer’s evening, some two years or so previous to the events told of in the last chapter, and the sun was setting in clouds of crimson and gold. On the green lawn at the back of Rose Villa — a pretty detached house, about twenty minutes’ walk from the town of Lefford — sat a lady in a gay dress. She was dark and plain, with crinkled black hair, and a rough voice. A girl of twelve, fair, pretty, and not in the least like her, sat on the same bench. Three younger girls were scampering about at some noisy play; and a boy, the youngest of all, lay on the grass, whistling, and knotting a whip-cord. The sun’s slanting rays tinted all with a warm hue.
“Get up, Dicky,” said the lady to the boy.
Dicky, aged five, whistled on, without taking any notice.
“Did you hear mamma tell you to get up, Dicky?” spoke the fair girl by her mother’s side. “Get up, sir.”
“Shan’t,” said Dicky.
“You go in for me, Mina,” said Mrs. Knox. “I want to know the time. Arnold took my watch into town this morning to have the spring mended.”
Mina seemed in no more hurry to obey than Dicky was. Just then a low pony-chaise, driven by a boy-groom, rattled out from the stable-yard at the side of the house. Mina looked across at it.
“It must be about a quarter-past eight,” she said. “You told James not to be later than that in going to the station.”
“You might go and see,” spoke Mrs. Knox: “James is not sure to be to time. How glad I shall be when that governess is here to take the trouble of you children off me!” she added, fretfully. Mina did not take the hint about going in: she made off to her sisters instead.
This house had once been a doctor’s residence. Soon after Thomas Knox, surgeon and apothecary, set up in practice at Lefford, now five-and-twenty years ago, he married Mary Arnold. Rose Villa was hers, and some money besides, and they came to live at it, Mr. Knox keeping on his surgery in Lefford. They had one son, who was named Arnold. When Arnold was ten years old, his mother died. A year later his father married a second wife, Miss Amelia Carey: after which these five other young ones came to town. Arnold was to be a doctor like his father. His studies were in progress, when one morning a letter came to him in London — where he was walking Bartholomew’s Hospital under that clever man, William Lawrence — saying that his father was alarmingly ill. Arnold reached Lefford just in time to see him die. The little one, Dicky, was a baby then in long-clothes. Arnold was only nineteen. No chance that he could set up in, and keep together the practice, which fell through. So he went back to London to study on, and pass, and what not; and by-and-by he came down again Dr. Knox: for he had followed the fashion just then getting common, of taking the M.D. degree. Arnold Knox had his share of good plain sense, and of earnestness too; but example is catching, and he only followed that of his fellow-students in going in thus early for the degree. He arrived at Lefford “Dr. Knox.” Mr. Tamlyn laughed at him, before his face and behind his back, asking him what experience he had had that he should hasten to tack on M.D. to his name: why, not more experience than a country apothecary’s apprentice. Arnold, feeling half ashamed of himself, for he was very modest, pleaded the new custom. Custom! returned old Tamlyn; in his days medical men had worked for their honours before taking them. Arnold engaged himself as assistant to Mr. Tamlyn, who had dropped into the best part of Dr. Knox’s practice since that gentleman’s death, in addition to his own.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Knox, the widow, had continued to live at Rose Villa. It belonged to Arnold, having descended to him in right of his mother. Mr. Knox had bequeathed by will five hundred pounds to Arnold for the completion of his studies; and all the rest of his money to his wife and second family. Lefford talked of it resentfully, saying it was an unjust will: for a good portion of the money had been Mary Arnold’s and ought to have gone to her son. It was about three hundred and fifty pounds a-year in all; and Mrs. Knox bewailed and bemoaned her hard fate at having to bring up her children upon so little. She was one of those who must spend; and her extravagance had kept her husband poor, in spite of his good practice.
Never a hint did she offer her step-son of paying him rent for his house; never a word of thanks did she tender for the use of it.
Arnold said nothing: he was thoroughly warm-hearted and generous, considering every one before himself, and he would not have hurt her feelings or cramped her pocket for the world. As long as he did not want the house, she and his half-sisters and brother were welcome to it. When he came back from London he naturally went to it; it was his home; and Mrs. Knox did not at all like the addition he made to her housekeeping expenses: which could not be very much amongst the nine others to provide for. The very day after Arnold’s bargain was made with Mr. Tamlyn, she asked him how much he was going to pay her for his board. Half his salary, Arnold promptly replied; seventy-five pounds a-year. And Mrs. Knox would have liked to say it was not enough.
“Seventy-five pounds a-year!” cackled Lefford, when it got hold of the news. “Why, it won’t cost her half that. And she using his house and enjoying all the money that was his poor mother’s! Well, she has a conscience, that Widow Knox!”
The arrangement had continued until now. Three years had elapsed since then, and Arnold was four-and-twenty. Mrs. Knox found herself often in money difficulties; when she would borrow from Arnold, and never think of repaying him. She was now going to increase expenses by taking a nursery-governess. Awfully tiresome those children were, and Mrs. Knox said they wore her out. She should have managed the little brats better: not indulged and neglected them by turns. One hour she’d let them run wild, the next hour was shrieking at them in words next door to swearing.
The governess engaged was a distant relative of her own, a Miss Janet Carey. She was an orphan, and had for a year or two been teacher in a boys’ preparatory school, limited to thirty pupils. Mrs. Knox wrote to offer her twelve pounds a-year and a “very comfortable home at Rose Villa; to be as one of the family.” It must have sounded tempting to Miss Carey after the thirty little boys,
and she gratefully accepted it. Mrs. Knox had never seen her; she pictured to herself a tall, bony young woman with weak eyes, for that had been the portrait of her second cousin, Miss Carey’s father.
“Crack! crack! Tally-ho! tally-ho!” shouted Dicky, who had completed his whip, and got up to stamp and smack it. “Yo-ho! Tally-ho, tally-ho!”
“Oh, do for goodness’ sake be quiet, Dick!” screamed Mrs. Knox. “I can’t have that noise now: I told you I had a headache. Do you hear me, then! Mina, come and take away this horrible whip.”
Mina came running at the call. Master Dicky was so much given way to as a general rule, that to thwart him seemed to his sisters something delightful. Dicky dodged out of harm’s way amongst the shrubs; and Mina was about to go after him, when some one came through the open glass-doors of what was called the garden-room.
“Here’s Arnold,” she cried.
Dr. Knox was a tall, strongly built, fair man, looking older than his four-and-twenty years. Nobody could help liking his thin face, for it was a good face, full of sense and thought, but it was not a handsome one. His complexion was sallow, and his light hair had a habit of standing up wild.
“You are home betimes,” remarked Mrs. Knox.
“Yes; there was nothing more to do,” he answered, sitting down in a rustic garden-chair. “I met James in the pony-chaise: where’s he gone?”
“Why, Arnold, don’t you know that the governess is coming this evening?” cried the second girl, Lotty, who was fanning her hot face with a cabbage-leaf. “James has gone to the station for her.”
“I forgot all about the governess,” said Dr. Knox. “Lotty, what a heat you are in!”
“We have been running races,” said the child; “and the sun was blazing.”