“Ah, yes, so I did,” yawned Mr. Murray. “What a bore! I will get up directly. You can go, Davis. I will ring if I want you.”
Davis was standing, as his master spoke, looking down at the floor. “Yes, sir,” he answered, after the fashion of a man who has something on his mind—and went.
He had not, however, got to the bottom of the first flight when peal after peal summoned him back.
Mr. Murray was out of bed and in the middle of the room, the ghastly pallor of his face brought into full prominence by the crimson dressing-gown he had thrown round him on rising.
“What is that?” he asked. “What in the world is that, Davis?” and he pointed to the carpet, which was covered, Mrs. Murray being an old-fashioned lady, with strips of white drugget.
“I am sure I do not know, sir,” answered Davis. “I noticed it the moment I came into the room. Looks as if some one with wet feet had been walking round and round the bed.”
It certainly did. Round and round, to and fro, backwards and forwards, the feet seemed to have gone and come, leaving a distinct mark wherever they pressed.
“The print is that of a rare small foot, too,” observed Davis, who really seemed half stupefied with astonishment.
“But who would have dared—” began Mr. Murray.
“No one in this house,” declared Davis stoutly. “It is not the mark of a boy or woman inside these doors;” and then the master and the man looked at each other for an instant with grave suspicion.
But for that second they kept their eyes thus occupied; then, as by common consent, they dropped their glances to the floor. “My God!” exclaimed Davis. “Where have the footprints gone?”
He might well ask. The drugget, but a moment before wet and stained by the passage and repassage of those small restless feet, was now smooth and white, as when first sent forth from the bleach-green. On its polished surface there could not be discerned a speck or mark.
Chapter Two
Where Is Lucy?
In the valley of the Thames early hours are the rule. There the days have an unaccountable way of lengthening themselves out which makes it prudent, as well as pleasant, to utilize all the night in preparing for a longer morrow.
For this reason, when eleven o’clock p.m. strikes, it usually finds Church Street, Walton, as quiet as its adjacent graveyard, which lies still and solemn under the shadow of the old grey tower hard by that ancient vicarage which contains so beautiful a staircase.
About the time when Mr. Travers’ friends were beginning their evening, when talk had abated and play was suggested, the silence of Church Street was broken and many a sleeper aroused by a continuous knocking at the door of a house as venerable as any in that part of Walton. Rap—rap—rap—rap awoke the echoes of the old-world village street, and at length brought to the window a young man, who, flinging up the sash, inquired,—
“Who is there?”
“Where is Lucy? What have you done with my girl?” answered a strained woman’s voice from out the darkness of that summer night.
“Lucy?” repeated the young man; “is not she at home?”
“No; I have never set eyes on her since you went out together.”
“Why, we parted hours ago. Wait a moment, Mrs. Heath; I will be down directly.”
No need to tell the poor woman to “wait.” She stood on the step, crying softly and wringing her hands till the door opened, and the same young fellow who with the pretty girl had taken boat opposite the Ship Hotel bade her “Come in.”
Awakened from some pleasant dream, spite of all the trouble and hurry of that unexpected summons, there still shone the light of a reflected sunshine in his eyes and the flush of happy sleep on his cheek. He scarcely understood yet what had happened, but when he saw Mrs. Heath’s tear-stained face, comprehension came to him, and he said abruptly,—
“Do you mean that she has never returned home?”
“Never!”
They were in the parlour by this time, and looking at each other by the light of one poor candle which he had set down on the table.
“Why, I left her,” he said, “I left her long before seven.”
“Where?”
“Just beyond Dockett Point. She would not let me row her back. I do not know what was the matter with her, but nothing I did seemed right.”
“Had you any quarrel?” asked Mrs. Heath anxiously. “Yes, we had; we were quarrelling all the time—at least she was with me; and at last she made me put her ashore, which I did sorely against my will.”
“What had you done to my girl, then?”
“I prayed of her to marry me—no great insult, surely, but she took it as one. I would rather not talk of what she answered. Where can he be? Do you think she can have gone to her aunt’s?”
“If so, she will be back by the last train. Let us get home as fast as possible. I never thought of that. Poor child! She will go out of her mind if she finds nobody to let her in. You will come with me. O, if she is not there, what shall I do—what ever shall I do?”
The young man had taken his hat, and was holding the door open for Mrs. Heath to pass out.
“You must try not to fret yourself,” he said gently, yet with a strange repression in his voice. “Very likely she may stay at her aunt’s all night.”
“And leave me in misery, not knowing where she is? Oh, Mr. Grantley, I could never believe that.”
Mr. Grantley’s heart was very hot within him; but he could not tell the poor mother he believed that when Lucy’s temper was up she would think of no human being but herself.
“Won’t you take my arm, Mrs. Heath?” he asked with tender pity. After all, though everything was over between him and Lucy, her mother could not be held accountable for their quarrel; and he had loved the girl with all the romantic fervour of love’s young dream.
“I can walk faster without it, thank you,” Mrs. Heath answered. “But Mr. Grantley, whatever you and Lucy fell out over, you’ll forget it, won’t you? It isn’t in you to be hard on anybody, and she’s only a spoiled child. I never had but the one, and I humoured her too much; and if she is wayward, it is all my own fault—all my own.”
“In case she does not return by this train,” said the young man, wisely ignoring Mrs. Heath’s inquiry, “had I not better telegraph to her aunt directly the office opens?”
“I will be on my way to London long before that,” was the reply. “But what makes you think she won’t come? Surely you don’t imagine she has done anything rash?”
“What do you mean by rash?” he asked evasively.
“Made away with herself.”
“That!” he exclaimed. “No, I feel very sure she has done nothing of the sort.”
“But she might have felt sorry when you left her—vexed for having angered you—heartbroken when she saw you leave her.”
“Believe me, she was not vexed or sorry or heartbroken; she was only glad to know she had done with me,” he answered bitterly.
“What has come to you, Mr. Grantley?” said Mrs. Heath, in wonder. “I never heard you speak the same before.”
“Perhaps not; I never felt the same before. It is best to be plain with you,” he went on. “All is at an end between us; and that is what your daughter has long been trying for.”
“How can you say that, and she so fond of you?”
“She has not been fond of me for many a day. The man she wants to marry is not a poor fellow like myself, but one who can give her carriages and horses, and a fine house, and as much dress as she cares to buy.”
“But where could she ever find a husband able to do that?”
“I do not know, Mrs. Heath. All I do know is that she considers I am no match for her; and now my eyes are opened, I see she was not a wife for me. We should never have known a day’
s happiness.”
It was too dark to see his face, but his changed voice and words and manner told Lucy’s mother the kindly lad, who a couple of years before came courting her pretty daughter, and offended all his friends for her sake, was gone away for ever. It was a man who walked by her side—who had eaten of the fruit of the tree, and had learned to be as a god, knowing good from evil.
“Well, well,” she said brokenly, “you are the best judge, I suppose; but O, my child, my child!”
She was so blinded with tears she stumbled, and must have fallen had he not caught and prevented her. Then he drew her hand within his arm, and said,—
“I am so grieved for you. I never received anything but kindness from you.”
“And indeed,” she sobbed, “you never were anything except good to me. I always knew we couldn’t be considered your equals, and I often had my doubts whether it was right to let you come backwards and forwards as I did, parting you from all belonging to you. But I thought, when your mother saw Lucy’s pretty face—for it is pretty, Mr. Grantley—”
“There never was a prettier,” assented the young man, though, now his eyes were opened, he knew Lucy’s beauty would scarcely have recommended her to any sensible woman.
“I hoped she might take to her, and I’d never have intruded. And I was so proud and happy, and fond of you—I was indeed; and I used to consider how, when you came down, I could have some little thing you fancied. But that’s all over now. And I don’t blame you; only my heart is sore and troubled about my foolish girl.”
They were on Walton Bridge by this time, and the night air blew cold and raw down the river, and made Mrs. Heath shiver.
“I wonder where Lucy is,” she murmured, “and what she’d think if she knew her mother was walking through the night in an agony about her? Where was it you said you left her?”
“Between Dockett Point and Chertsey. I shouldn’t have left her had she not insisted on my doing so.”
“Isn’t that the train?” asked Mrs. Heath, stopping suddenly short and listening intently.
“Yes; it is just leaving Sunbury Station. Do not hurry; we have plenty of time.”
They had: they were at Lucy’s home, one of the small houses situated between Battlecreese Hill and the Red Lion in Lower Halliford before a single passenger came along The Green, or out of Nannygoat Lane.
“My heart misgives me that she has not come down,” said Mrs. Heath.
“Shall I go up to meet her?” asked the young man; and almost before the mother feverishly assented, he was striding through the summer night to Shepperton Station, where he found the lights extinguished and every door closed.
Chapter Three
Poor Mrs. Heath
By noon the next day every one in Shepperton and Lower Halliford knew Lucy Heath was “missing.”
Her mother had been up to Putney, but Lucy was not with her aunt, who lived not very far from the Bridge on the Fulham side, and who, having married a fruiterer and worked up a very good business, was inclined to take such bustling and practical views of life and its concerns as rather dismayed her sister-in-law, who had spent so many years in the remote country, and then so many other years in quiet Shepperton, that Mrs. Pointer’s talk flurried her almost as much as the noise of London, which often maddens middle-aged and elderly folk happily unaccustomed to its roar.
Girt about with a checked apron which lovingly enfolded a goodly portion of her comfortable figure, Mrs. Pointer received her early visitor with the sportive remark, “Why, it’s never Martha Heath! Come along in; a sight of you is good for sore eyes.”
But Mrs. Heath repelled all such humorous observations, and chilled those suggestions of hospitality the Pointers were never backward in making by asking in a low choked voice,—“Is Lucy here?”
“Lor! Whatever put such a funny notion into your head?”
“Ah! I see she is,” trying to smile. “After all, she spent the night with you.”
“Did what?” exclaimed Mrs. Pointer. “Spent the night—was that what you said? No, nor the day either, for this year nearly. Why, for the last four months she hasn’t set foot across that doorstep, unless it might be to buy some cherries, or pears, or apples, or grapes, or suchlike, and then she came in with more air than any lady; and after paying her money and getting her goods went out again, just as if I hadn’t been her father’s sister and Pointer my husband. But there! For any sake, woman, don’t look like that! Come into the parlour and tell me what is wrong. You never mean she has gone away and left you?”
Poor Mrs. Heath was perfectly incapable at that moment of saying what she did mean. Seated on a stool, and holding fast by the edge of the counter for fear of falling, the shop and its contents, the early busses, the people going along the pavement, the tradesmen’s carts, the private carriages, were, as in some terrible nightmare, gyrating before her eyes. She could not speak, she could scarcely think, until that wild whirligig came to a stand. For a minute or two even Mrs. Pointer seemed multiplied by fifty; while her checked apron, the bananas suspended from hooks, the baskets of fruit, the pine-apples, the melons, the tomatoes, and the cob-nuts appeared and disappeared, only to reappear and disappear like the riders in a maddening giddy-go-round.
“Give me a drop of water,” she said at last; and when the water was brought she drank a little and poured some on her handkerchief and dabbed her face, and finally suffered herself to be escorted into the parlour, where she told her tale, interrupted by many sobs. It would have been unchristian in Mrs. Pointer to exult; but it was only human to remember she had remarked to Pointer, in that terrible spirit of prophecy bestowed for some inscrutable reason on dear friends and close relations, she knew some such trouble must befall her sister-in-law.
“You made an idol of that girl, Martha,” she went on, “and now it is coming home to you. I am sure it was only last August as ever was that Pointer—but here he is, and he will talk to you himself.”
Which Mr. Pointer did, being very fond of the sound of his own foolish voice. He stated how bad a thing it was for people to be above their station or to bring children up above that rank of life in which it had pleased God to place them. He quoted many pleasing saws uttered by his father and grandfather; remarked that as folks sowed they were bound to reap; reminded Mrs. Heath they had the word of Scripture for the fact—than, which, parenthetically, no fact could be truer, as he knew—that a man might not gather grapes from thorns or even figs from thistles. Further he went on to observe generally—the observation having a particular reference to Lucy—that it did not do to judge things by their looks. Over and over again salesmen had tried to “shove off a lot of foreign fruit on him, but he wasn’t a young bird to be taken in by that chaff.” No; what he looked to was quality; it was what his customers expected from him, and what he could honestly declare his customers got. He was a plain man, and he thought honesty was the best policy. So as Mrs. Heath had seen fit to come to them in her trouble he would tell her what he thought, without beating about the bush. He believed Lucy had “gone off.”
“But where?” asked poor Mrs. Heath.
“That I am not wise enough to say; but you’ll find she’s gone off. Girls in her station don’t sport chains and bracelets and brooches for nothing—”
“But they did not cost many shillings,” interposed the mother.
“She might tell you that,” observed Mrs. Pointer, with a world of meaning.
“To say nothing,” went on Mrs. Pointer, “of grey gloves she could not abear to be touched. One day she walked in when I was behind the counter, and, not knowing she had been raised to the peerage, I shook hands with her as a matter of course; but when I saw the young lady look at her glove as if I had dirtied it, I said, ‘O, I beg your pardon, miss’—jocularly, you know. ‘They soil so easily,’ she lisped.”
“I haven’t patience wit
h such ways!” interpolated Mrs. Pointer, without any lisp at all. “Yes, it’s hard for you, Martha, but you may depend Pointer’s right. Indeed, I expected how it would be long ago. Young women who are walking in the straight road don’t dress as Lucy dressed, or dare their innocent little cousins to call them by their Christian names in the street. Since the Spring, and long before Pointer and me has been sure Lucy was up to no good.”
“And you held your tongues and never said a word to me!” retorted Mrs. Heath, goaded and driven to desperation.
“Much use it would have been saying any word to you,” answered Mrs. Pointer. “When you told me about young. Grantley, and I bid you be careful, how did you take my advice? Why, you blared out at me, went on as if I knew nothing and had never been anywhere. What I told you then, though, I tell you now: young Grantleys, the sons of rectors and the grandsons of colonels, don’t come after farmer’s daughters with any honest purpose.”
“Yet young Grantley asked her last evening to fix a day for their marriage,” said Mrs. Heath, with a little triumph.
“O, I daresay!” scoffed Mrs. Pointer.
“Talk is cheap,” observed Mr. Pointer.
“Some folks have more of it than money,” supplemented his wife.
“They have been, as I understand, keeping company for some time now,” said the fruiterer, with what he deemed a telling and judicial calmness. “So if he asked her to name the day, why did she not name it?”
“I do not know. I have never seen her since.”
“O, then you had only his word about the matter,” summed up Mr. Pointer. “Just as I thought—just as I thought.”
“What did you think?” inquired the poor troubled mother. “Why, that she has gone off with this Mr. Grantley.”
“Ah, you don’t know Mr. Grantley, or you wouldn’t say such a thing.”
“It is true,” observed Mr. Pointer, “that I do not know the gentleman, and, I may add, I do not want to know him; but speaking as a person acquainted with the world—”
The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack Page 7