by Ellen Wood
“Is it in the Torr?” exclaimed Tod, breaking the silence. “I don’t see how that could be, though.”
“It is up in the air, Tod.”
We stood utterly puzzled; and gazing at the Torr. At as much of it, at least, as could be seen — the tops of the chimneys, and the sugar-loaf of a tower shooting up to its great height amidst them. The windows of the house and its old stone walls, on which the lichen vegetated, were hidden by the clustering old trees, in full foliage then.
“Hark! There it is again!”
The same horrible, low, distressing sound, something between a howl and a wail; enough to make a stout man shiver in his shoes.
“Is it a woman’s cry, Tod?”
“I don’t know, lad. It’s like a person being murdered and crying out for help.”
“Radcliffe can’t be tanning his wife.”
“Not he, Johnny. She’d take care of that. Besides, they’ve never been cat-and-dog. Birds of a feather: that’s what they are. Oh, by Jove! there it comes again! Just listen to it! I don’t like this at all, Johnny. It must be witches, and nothing else.”
Decidedly it must be. It came from the air. The open fields lay around, white and still under the moonlight, and nothing was on their surface of any kind, human or animal. Now again! that awful cry, rising on the bit of breeze there was, and dying away in pain to a faint echo.
“Let us go to the Torr, Johnny, and ask Radcliffe if he hears it!”
We bounded forward under the cry, which rose again and again incessantly; but in nearing the house it seemed to get further off and to be higher than ever in the air. Leaping the gate into the lane, we reached the front-door, and seized the bell-handle. It brought Mrs. Radcliffe; a blue cap and red roses adoring her straggling hair. Holding the candle above her head, she peered at us with her small, sly eyes.
“Oh, is it you, young gentlemen? Do you want anything? Will you walk in?”
I was about to say No, when Tod pushed me aside and strode up the damp stone passage. They did not make fires enough in the house to keep out the damp. As he told me afterwards, he wanted to get in to listen. But there was no sound at all to be heard; the house seemed as still as death. Wherever the cries might come from, it was certainly not from inside the Torr.
“Radcliffe went over to Wire-Piddle this afternoon, and he’s not back yet,” she said; opening the parlour-door when we got to the hall. “Did you want him? You must ha’ been in a hurry by the way you pulled the bell.”
She put the candle down on the table. Her work lay there — a brown woollen stocking about half-way knitted.
“There is the most extraordinary noise outside that you ever heard, Mrs. Radcliffe,” began Todd, seating himself without ceremony on the old-fashioned mahogany sofa. “It startled us. Did you hear it in here?”
“I have heard no noise at all,” she answered quietly, taking up the stocking and beginning to knit standing. “What was it like?”
“An awful shrieking and crying. Not loud; nearly faint enough for dying cries. As it is not in your house — and we did not think it was, or could be — it must be, I should say, in the air.”
“Ay,” she said, “just so. I can tell you what it is, Mr. Joseph: the night-birds.”
Tod looked at her, plying the knitting-needles so quickly, and looked at me, and there was a silence. I wondered what was keeping him from speaking. He suddenly bent his head forward.
“Have you heard any talk of these noises, Mrs. Radcliffe? People say they are to be heard almost any night.”
“I’ve not heard no talk, but I have heard the noise,” she answered, whisking out a needle and beginning another of the three-cornered rows. “One evening about a month ago I was a-coming home up the lane, and I hears a curious kind o’ prolonged cry. It startled me at the moment, for, thinks I, it must be in this house; and I hastens in. No. Eunice said she had heard no cries: as how should she, when there was nobody but herself indoors? So I goes out again, and listens,” added Mrs. Radcliffe, lifting her eyes from the stocking and fixing them on Tod, “and then I finds out what it really was — the night-birds.”
“The night-birds?” he echoed.
“’Twas the night-birds, Mr. Joseph,” she repeated, with an emphatic nod. “They had congregated in these thick trees, and was crying like so many human beings. I have heard the same thing many a time in Wiltshire when I was a girl. I used to go there to stay with aunt and uncle.”
“Well, I never heard anything like it before,” returned Tod. “It’s just as though some unquiet spirit was in the air.”
“Mayhap it sounds so afore you know what it is. Let me give you young gentlemen a drop o’ my home-made cowslip wine.”
She had taken the decanter of wine and some glasses off the sideboard with her long arms, before we could say Yes or No. We are famous for cowslip wine down there, but this was extra good. Tod took another glass of it, and got up to go.
“Don’t be frighted if you hear the noise again, now that you know what it is,” she said, quite in a motherly way. “For my part I wish some o’ the birds was shot. They don’t do no good to nobody.”
“As there is not any house about here, except this, the thought naturally arises that the noise may be inside it — until you know to the contrary,” remarked Tod.
“I wish it was inside it — we’d soon stop it by wringing all their necks,” cried she. “You can listen,” she added, suddenly going into the hall and flinging wide every door that opened from it and led to the different passages and rooms. “Go to any part of the house you like, and hearken for yourselves, young gentlemen.”
Tod laughed at the suggestion. The passages were all still and cold, and there was nothing to hear. Taking up the candle, she lighted us to the front-door. Outside stood the woman-servant Eunice, a basket on her arm, and just about to ring, Mrs. Radcliffe inquired if she had heard any noise.
“Only the shrieking birds up there,” she answered readily. “They be in full cry to-night.”
“They’ve been startling these gentlemen finely.”
“There bain’t nothing to be startled at,” said the woman, roughly, turning a look of contempt upon us. “If I was the master I’d shoot as many as I could get at; and if that didn’t get rid of ‘em, I’d cut the trees down.”
“They make a queerer noise than any birds I ever heard before,” said Tod, standing his ground to say it.
“They does,” assented the woman. “That queer, that some folks believes it’s the shrieks o’ the skeleton on the gibbet.”
Pleasant! When I and Tod had to pass within a few yards of its corner. The posts of the old gibbet were there still, but the skeleton had mouldered away long ago. A bit of chain, some few inches long, adhered to its fastening in the post still, and rattled away on windy nights.
“What donkeys we were, Johnny, not to know birds’ cries when we heard them!” exclaimed Tod, as we tumbled over the gate and went flying across the field. “Hark! Listen! There it is again!”
There it was. The same despairing sort of wail, faintly rising and dying on the air. Tod stood in hushed silence.
“Johnny, I believe that’s a human cry! — I could almost fancy,” he went on, “that it is speaking words. No bird, that ever I met with, native or foreign, could make the like.”
It died away. But still occurred the obvious question, What was it, and where did it come from? With nothing but the empty air above and around us, that was difficult to answer.
“It’s not in the trees — I vow it,” said Tod; “it’s not inside the Torr; it can’t rise up from under the ground. I say, Johnny, is it a case of ghost?”
The wailing arose again as he spoke, as if to reprove him for his levity. I’d rather have met a ghost; ay, and a real ghost; than have carried away that sound to haunt me.
We tore home as fast as our heels could take us, and told of the night’s adventure. After the pater had blown us up for being late, he treated us to a dose of ridicule. Human cries, indeed
? Ghosts and witches? I might be excused, he said, being a muff; but Joe must be just going back to his childhood. That settled Tod. Of all disagreeable things he most hated to be ridiculed.
“It must have been the old birds in those trees, after all, Johnny,” said he, as we went up to bed. “I think the moon makes people fanciful.”
And after a sound night’s rest we woke up to the bright sunshine, and thought no more of the cries.
That morning, being close to Pitchley’s Farm, we called in to see Mrs. Frank Radcliffe. But she was not to be seen. Her brother, David Skate, just come in to his mid-day dinner, came forward to meet us in his fustian suit. Annet had been hardly able to keep about for some time, he said, but this was the first day she had regularly broken down so as to be in bed.
“It has brought on a touch of fever,” said he, pressing the bread-and-cheese and cider upon us, which he had ordered in.
“What has?” asked Tod.
“This perpetual torment that she keeps her mind in. But she can’t help it, poor thing, so it’s not fair to blame her,” added David Skate. “It grows worse instead of better, and I don’t see what the end of it is to be. I’ve thought for some time she might go and break up to-day.”
“Why to-day?”
“Because it is the anniversary of her husband’s death, Master Johnny. He died twelve months ago to-day.”
Back went my memory to the morning we heard of it. When the pater was scolding Dwarf Giles in the yard, and Tod stood laughing at the young ducks taking to the water, and Stephen Radcliffe loomed into sight, grim and surly, to disclose to us the tidings that the post had brought in — his brother Frank’s death.
“Has she still that curious fancy in her, David? — that he did not come by his death fairly.”
“She has it in her, and she can’t get it out of her,” returned David. “Why, Master Johnny, it’s nothing but that that’s killing her. Ay, and that’s not too strong a word, sir, for I do believe she’ll die of it, unless something can be done to satisfy her mind, and give her rest,” he added earnestly. “She thinks there was foul play used in some way, and that Stephen Radcliffe was at the bottom of it.”
We had never heard a word about the fancy since that night when Annet first spoke of it at the stile, and supposed she had forgotten it long ago. The Squire and Mrs. Todhetley had often noticed how ill she looked, but they put it down to grief for Francis and to her anxiety about the farm.
“No, she has said no more since then,” observed David. “She took up an idea that the Squire ascribed it to a wandering brain; and so has held her peace since.”
“Is her brain wandering, do you think?” asked Tod.
“Well, I don’t know,” returned David, absently making little cuts at the edge of the cheese with the knife. “In all other respects she is as sane as sane can be; there’s not a woman of sounder sense, as to daily matters, anywhere. But this odd fancy has got hold of her mind; and it’s just driving her crazy. She says that her husband appears to her in her dreams, and calls upon her to help and release him.”
“Release him from what? From his grave in Finchley Cemetery?”
“From what indeed!” echoed David Skate. “That’s what I ask her. But she persists that, sleeping or waking, his spirit is always hovering near her, crying out to her to avenge him. She declares that it is no fancy. Of course it is, though.”
“I never met with such a case,” said Tod, forgetting the good cider in his astonishment. “Frank Radcliffe died up at Dr. Dale’s in London. Stephen could not have had anything to do with his death: he was down here at the time.”
“Well, Annet has the notion firmly fixed in her mind that he had, and there’s no turning her,” said David. “There will be no turning her this side the grave, unless we can free her from it. Any way, the fancy has come to such a pitch now, and is telling upon her so seriously, that something must be done. If it were not that just the busiest time has set in; the hay cut, and the wheat a’most ready to cut, I’d take her to London to Dr. Dale’s. Perhaps if she heard the account of Frank’s death from his own lips, and that it was a natural death, it might help her a bit.”
We went home full of this. The Squire was in a fine way when he heard it, and brimming over with pity for Annet. He had grown to like her; and he had always looked on Francis as in some degree belonging to him.
“Look here,” said he, in his impulsive good nature, “it will never do to let this go on: we shall have her in a mad-house too. That’s not a bad notion of David Skate’s; and if he can’t leave to take her up to London just now, I’ll take her.”
“She could not go,” said Tod. “She is in bed with low fever.”
“Then I’ll go up by myself,” stamped the Squire in his zeal. “And get Dr. Dale to write out all the particulars, and hurry down again with them to her as fast as the train will bring me. Poor thing! her disease must be a sort of mania.”
“Now, Johnny, mind you don’t make a mistake in the omnibus. Use your eyes; they are younger than mine.”
We were standing at Charing Cross in the hot afternoon sun, looking out for an omnibus that would take us westward. The Squire had lost no time in starting for London, and we had reached it an hour before. He let me come up with him, as Tod had gone to Whitney Hall.
“Here it is, sir. ‘Kensington, — Hammersmith, — Richmond.’ This is the right one.”
The omnibus stopped, and in we got; for the Squire said the sun was too fierce for the outside; and by-and-by, when the houses became fewer, and the trees and fields more frequent, we were set down near Dr. Dale’s. A large house, standing amidst a huge grass-plat, shut in by iron gates.
“I want to see Dr. Dale,” said the pater, bustling in as soon as the door was opened, without waiting to be asked.
The servant looked at him and then at me; as if he thought the one or the other of us was a lunatic about to be left there. “This way, sir,” said he to the Squire and put us into a small square room that had a blue and drab carpet, and a stand of plants before the window. A little man, with deep-set dark eyes, and the hair all gone from the top of his head, soon made his appearance — Dr. Dale.
The Squire plunged into explanations in his usual confusing fashion, mixing up many things together. Dr. Dale knitted his brow, trying to make sense of it.
“I’m sure I should be happy to oblige you in any way,” said he — and he seemed to be a very pleasant man. “But I do not quite understand what it is you ask of me.”
“Such a dreadful thing, you know, if she has to be put in a mad-house too!” went on the pater. “A pretty, anxious, hard-working little woman she is, as ever you saw, Dr. Dale! We think the account in your handwriting might ease her. I hope you won’t mind the trouble.”
“The account of what?” asked the doctor.
“Only this,” explained the Squire, laying hold, in his zeal, of the doctor’s button-hole. “Just dot down the particulars of Francis Radcliffe’s death. His death here, you know. I suppose you were an eye-witness to it.”
“But, my good sir, I — pardon me — I must repeat that I do not understand. Francis Radcliffe did not die here. He went away a twelvemonth ago, cured.”
“Goodness bless me!” cried the Squire, staggering back to a chair when he had fully taken in the sense of the words, and staring about him like a real maniac. “It cannot be. I must have come to the wrong place.”
“This is Dale House, and I am Dr. Dale. Mr. Francis Radcliffe was under my charge for some months: I can’t tell exactly how many without referring to my books; seven or eight, I think; and he then left, cured, or nearly so.”
“Johnny, hand me my handkerchief; it’s in my hat. I can’t make top or tail of this.”
“I did not advise his removal,” continued Dr. Dale, who, I do believe, thought the Squire was bad enough for a patient. “He was very nearly, if not quite well, but another month here would have established his recovery on a sure basis. However, his brother insisted on removing hi
m, and I had no power to prevent it.”
“What brother?” cried the Squire, rubbing his head helplessly.
“Mr. Radcliffe, of Sandstone Torr.”
“Johnny, I think we must all be dreaming. Radcliffe of the Torr got a letter from you one morning, doctor — in June, I think; yes, I remember the hay-making was about — saying Francis had died; here in this house, with you: and bidding him come up to see you about it.”
“I never wrote any such letter. Francis Radcliffe did not die here.”
“Well, it was written for you by one of your people. Not die! Why, you held a coroner’s inquest on him! You buried him in Finchley Cemetery.”
“Nothing of the sort, Mr. Todhetley. Francis Radcliffe was taken from this house, by his brother, last June, alive and well.”
“Well I never! — this beats everything. Was he not worn away to a skeleton before he went? — had he not heart disease? — did he not die of effusion on the brain?” ran on the Squire, in a maze of bewilderment.
“He was thin certainly: patients in asylums generally are; but he could not be called a skeleton; I never knew that he had heart disease. As to dying, he most assuredly did not die here.”
“I do think I must be lost,” cried the Squire. “I can’t find any way out of this. Can you let me see Mr. Pitt, your head assistant, doctor? Perhaps he can throw some light on it. It was Pitt who wrote the letter to Mr. Radcliffe.”
“You should see him with pleasure if he were still with me,” replied the doctor. “But he has left.”
“And Frank did not die here!” commented the Squire. “What can be the meaning of it?”
The meaning was evidently not to be found there. Dr. Dale said he could tell us no more than he had told, if he talked till night — that Francis Radcliffe was taken out by his brother. Stephen paid all charges at the time, and they went away together.
“And of course, Johnny, he is to be believed,” quoth the pater, turning himself round and round on the grass-plot, as we were going away, like a teetotum. “Dale would not deceive us: he could have no object in doing that. What in the world does it all mean? — and where is Francis? Ste Radcliffe can’t have shipped him off to Canada with the wheelbarrows!”