“What! have you not gone?” he said roughly, and with a reddening cheek. “You do not help me by staring at me like a dead pig! If you can get food, no matter what it is, don’t bring it here. You may be followed. Lay it down at the opening of this rat-run, where you enter it from the house. I shall find it when the coast is clear.”
His manner was changed, and Jack would have been more than mortal if he had not felt the change. It hurt and disappointed him sorely; coming just when he had done all he could. But he hid his chagrin, and, turning obediently away, set off without a word down the rift, and thence through the wood of yews, where the sheltering gloom was now as welcome to him as it had been before alarming. As he approached the house, however, and the immediate necessity of facing Mistress Gridley and the brothers with an unmoved countenance forced itself upon him, he paused involuntarily, trembling under the sense of sudden fear which beset him. The horrible events of the morning, the cries of the men whom he had seen cut down on the moor, his brother’s danger, and the consequences of a hapless word, all rushed into his mind together, and for the moment, if the word may be used of so young a child, unmanned him. Clutching the trunk of the last tree he had to pass, he leaned against it in a very ague of terror; afraid to go forward, shaking at the very thought of going forward and facing those unfriendly eyes, yet knowing that if he would save his brother, if he would not shame his blood and breeding, he must go forward.
He leaned against it in a very ague of terror. — Page 75.
While he stood in this agony — for it was nothing less — butler Gridley, loitering about the back-door with thoughts and for a purpose of his own, espied him; and with a stealthy foot and a glance in the direction of the house, made towards him. The least observant eye must have detected the boy’s terror, or seen at least that he was laboring under some strange emotion. But Gridley’s eyes were not observant at all; they were only hungry. He had fasted against his will for twenty-four hours, and his plump cheeks were pallid. He had a wolf within him that demanded all his attention. He saw in the boy only a means of satisfying his craving.
“Jack!” he whispered, with his lips almost at the boy’s ear and his eyes devouring his face, “I have always been good to you. I want you to do something. It is a little thing,” he repeated feverishly. “It is a nothing. Just — —”
He had got so far — and alas! for him, no farther — when a harsh, discordant laugh behind him caused him to straighten himself as if an unseen hand had propelled him. “Let the child alone!” Mistress Gridley cried from the door; “do you hear me? I will have no plotting and colloguing in my house! And do you, Jack, come here!”
There was a world of sarcasm in the woman’s gibing tone; and it cut the butler like a knife. He crept away with a savage glare in his eyes. The boy went slowly to the door with thoughts happily diverted from the weighty issues which had a moment before overburdened him. The incident was, indeed, his salvation; for, though the woman could not fail to remark his embarrassment, she naturally set it down to the wrong cause, supposing merely that the butler had been trying to corrupt him.
“Where have you been all day?” she cried roughly, hustling him into the house — so violently that he stumbled on the threshold. “You don’t deserve your food either,” she continued, shaking him fiercely, “playing truant all day! But you shall have it, if only to tantalize that craven fool yonder. Where have you been, eh? You will stop at home in future, do you hear? This is your place — inside these four walls — until this business is over. You remember that, my lad, or it will be the worse for you!”
Simon Gridley and two men, whom the boy did not know, were in the kitchen, sitting dour and silent over the remains of a meal. They looked up on the boy’s entrance, but took no further notice of him. The woman set food before him, scolding all the while, and then went off to her work in the back premises. The boy had little heart to eat; but presently he found occasion while Simon was talking to the two strangers (who were brothers, of the name of Edgington, ex-troopers and weavers of Bradford) to secrete part of his meal inside his jacket. Mistress Gridley, when she came back, looked sharply at what he had left; but the boy had eaten so little that her suspicions were not aroused, and she flounced away with the platter, bidding him remain indoors and sit where he was.
She had scarcely gone when Luke entered and joined the party by the window, and there ensued much solemn jubilation over the morning’s work and the peculiar judgments vouchsafed to the neighborhood; and particularly over the reported arrival at Ripon of Lieutenant-General Cromwell, with forces which might be trusted to give a good account of the Scotch army. Jack, sitting trembling on a stool in a corner of the fireless chimney-place, heard their sanguine predictions and shuddered. He knew Cromwell by name, and dimly associated him with Marston Moor, and the sad night which had seen his father ride home to die. The kitchen grew to the lad’s eyes as he listened full of dark shadows and forebodings of fate. The men who loomed between him and the window seemed to increase in size. Only the purpose he had in his mind, and the necessity of action if he would pursue it, saved him from breaking down and bursting into childish weeping.
By dint of fixing his mind on this, however, he steadied himself; and by-and-by, choosing a moment when the talk was loud, stole across the room to a tub in which the oatcake was kept. Ordinary the lid lay loose upon it: now, to his huge disappointment, he found it locked! Baffled, and more than half inclined to cry, he wandered back to his place and resumed his seat on the floor, affecting to be engaged in playing with two billets of wood. In reality his thoughts were keenly at work. The cheese and cake he had secreted were scarcely worth carrying to his brother. Where could he get more?
It occurred to him at last that, failing everything else, raw oatmeal might be of use. Inspired by the thought, he rose and sauntered round three sides of the room until he reached the chest. Pretending to play about it he presently tried the lid, and to his joy found it unfastened. He raised it cautiously an inch or two, and thrusting his hand in found the wooden bowl which was used for measuring the meal. He filled this, and withdrew it successfully. Then he let the lid fall without noise.
He had still to escape unseen with his plunder, but the men were so busily engaged in talk that he feared no interruption from them, and Mistress Gridley was neither to be heard nor seen. He moved towards the back door, opened it, and slipped outside, holding the bowl under the skirt of his jacket. The afternoon sun shone in his eyes, and for a moment he stood blinking like an owl in the daylight, so great was the change from the cool, sombre kitchen. Softly he advanced a step. Before he could take another, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and Mistress Gridley had him in her clutch.
“You little thief!” she screamed, her voice shrill with savage triumph, “I have caught you, have I? You thought to deceive me, did you? To deceive me, you little ninny? What is this, eh? Whose is this?” she repeated, grasping the child’s wrist, and forcing him to hold up the little bowl of meal which his fingers still gripped mechanically. “Whose is this, eh? Is it yours? This way, my little thief; this way!”
She dragged him into the kitchen, and exulting in her own sharpness, told the men, who had risen at the sound of her outcry, how she had caught him. “He thought himself clever,” she continued, shaking him to and fro without mercy, “but he was not clever enough for me!”
“What did he want with the meal?” one of the strangers asked suspiciously. “It looks to me very much as if — —”
“What?” Mistress Gridley asked rudely.
“As if the malignant who gave us the slip this morning were hid here, and had employed this boy to get him food.”
The woman sniffed contemptuously. “Stuff and rubbish!” she said. “The meal is for the cowardly sneak who brought the boy here. He is outside, on short commons,” she continued, laughing without mirth.
“I met him going down to Settle,” Luke said briefly. “Ay, but the child did not know he was gone,” she answered with co
nfidence. “The child did not know it, do you see? But I will make him know enough not to steal again, the little thief!”
The men nodded in stern approval. “Open me that closet door,” Mistress Gridley continued, pointing with her unoccupied hand to a cupboard made in the thickness of the wall beside the chimney, and used in winter for storing wood. “I will lock him up there for the present. It is nice and dark. He may keep the oatmeal, and when he has finished it, but not before, we will see about finding him some other food. In with you!” she continued, dragging the boy forcibly to the place; “the beetles will keep you company!” and pushing him in, she closed the door and locked it upon him.
So far the boy had neither spoken nor resisted. But finding the door closed on him inexorably, and the horrors of the black closet round him — horrors which a child alone can thoroughly comprehend — he flung himself, shrieking loudly, against the door. He beat on it with his hands, he kicked it, he cried frantically to be let out. The woman listened and laughed cruelly. “It is as good as beating him, and less labor,” she said. “Take no heed of him, and he will soon tire of shouting.”
The men laughed too — the boy was a thief — and went back to their talk, while the woman sat down to her wheel. The child’s cries were music to her ears; and yet she was ill at ease. The butler had gone down to Settle, had he? What if he had visited a certain place among the yew-trees before going, and dug a little? She did not think he would have had the courage to play her such a trick. Still it was possible — it was possible, and she longed for night that she might go to the place and have the assurance of her own eyes.
For a time the boy raved and beat the door, his fear increased by that sense of physical oppression which children, and many who are not children, experience when shut up in a confined space without the power of freeing themselves. By-and-by, however, as the woman had predicted, he grew calmer. He had a talisman which availed, when the first paroxysm had spent itself, to keep selfish terrors at a distance; and that was the thought of his brother. In proportion as his sobs grew feebler his brain grew clearer. Anxiety on Frank’s account took the place of fear for himself. Crouching beside the door with his ear laid against it, he drew such comfort from the murmur of voices and the thin line of light which marked the threshold, that he grew almost content with his position. He was safe from further punishment. Only there was his brother. He pictured Frank waiting and looking for him, waiting and looking in vain for the food which did not come! And this fancy causing his tears to flow again, in the middle of a stifled sob he fell asleep.
CHAPTER V.
TREASURE TROVE.
When he awoke and found himself in darkness, he could not for a time understand where he was. The line of light which had comforted him was gone, and with it the homely sounds of kitchen life. He stretched his sore limbs in the darkness and shivered, looking timidly for the outline of a window. Finding none, he put out his hand to feel for his bedfellow, and lit instead on the rough surface of the door, against which he had sunk down in his sleep until only his head rested upon it.
The touch recalled everything to the boy’s mind. With a low whimper of alarm he sat up, and crouching against the door, which seemed some kind of company, listened, holding his breath. All was still in the house, and he presently comprehended that it was night and that the family had gone to bed, leaving him there.
Use and sleep had rendered him in a way familiar with his prison, and he did not on making this discovery break into any loud wailing. Instead, he huddled himself with a moan into as small a space as possible, and not daring to put out his hand again lest it should rest on some horror, some crawling thing or clammy hand, he tried with all his might to go to sleep. He was dozing off and had almost succeeded, when a slight noise aroused him. In a moment a light shone under the door.
He scrambled eagerly to his feet, and tapped softly. “Gridley!” he whispered, “Gridley! Is that you?”
No one answered, but the bearer of the light seemed to pause in the middle of the floor as if struck by a sudden thought. Then Jack heard the bolts of the outer door withdrawn, and even in his closet felt a rush of cold air. Some one was going out!
“Gridley! Gridley!” he cried desperately. “Let me out, will you? Please let me out.”
But Gridley, if Gridley it was, took no heed. The light disappeared, and Jack heard the door close as softly as it had been opened.
He sat down, whimpering and wondering. The use of candles was so uncommon in that house that he could not remember to have once seen one lighted, though he knew that a lanthorn hung behind the kitchen door. Who then was this who used them, and went in and out by night with a foot fall which scarcely broke the stillness? The lad felt his hair move and his skin creep as he crouched trembling in the darkness. Then, on a sudden, he heard the door creak afresh and the footstep return — the same stealthy, cautious footstep, it seemed to him, which he had heard before. But this time there was no light.
None the less was he sure that some one was now standing in the middle of the floor, within a yard or two of his place of confinement. His ears, strained to the utmost, caught the sound of hurried breathing close to him, and besides he had that ill-defined sense of another’s presence which we are all apt to feel. Terrified as he was, he still clung desperately to the idea that it was Gridley, and he called the man’s name again, his voice shaking with fear. To his surprise he this time got an answer.
“Hush!” some one muttered in the darkness. “Who is that?”
“It is I — Jack,” the boy cried joyfully “Please to let me out.”
“Where are you?”
“I am locked in the closet by the fireplace, Gridley.”
“Hush! Is the key in the door?”
“I think so!” Jack answered desperately. “Oh, please, please let me out.”
There was the sound of a hand being passed over the door, as if some one unacquainted with it, and uncertain on which side it opened, were groping for the fastening. It seemed an age to the boy before the key grated suddenly in the lock and the door yielded, and he felt the cold air rush in. For a moment he still hung back.
“Is it you, Gridley?” he whispered timidly, putting out his hand and trying to pierce the darkness, which was scarcely less dense in the kitchen than in the closet.
“No, it is I — Frank!” his brother’s voice answered. And thereon a hand seized him roughly by the shoulder and drew him out. “I must have food — food!” the voice hissed in his ear. “Don’t waste a moment, lad, but tell me where it is kept. The woman is outside digging among the trees — heaven knows on what witch’s errand! She may return at any moment. Where is the food kept?”
The harsh, fierce note in his brother’s voice did more than any words to persuade the boy of the necessity of haste. Collecting his senses as well as he could, he answered, “Will oatmeal do, Frank?”
“Better than nothing,” was the answer. “Where is the tub? Lead me to it.”
Jack felt his way to the chest, and found it; to his joy it was still unfastened. His brother rapidly took out several handfuls and thrust them into his pouch. “Have you no cheese, oatcake, nothing else, lad?” he muttered.
Jack remembered the scraps of cheese and cake which he still carried in the bosom of his jacket, and gave them into the other’s hand. “Now I am off,” Frank muttered on the instant. “I can do with this until to-morrow night. If the woman finds me here I must do her a mischief, and I do not want to. So good-night, lad!”
He glided hurriedly away, leaving the child standing in the middle of the floor. Jack heard him go, and heard the door open and shut; and still stood listening, wondering whether it was all a dream, or his brother had really been and was gone. Assured at length that he had had to do with reality, he wondered what course he ought to take himself. He had no mind to go back to his former prison, in comparison with which his hard bed upstairs seemed the height of comfort; and so he presently crept to the closet door, and turned the key, and th
en felt his way up to his room. Gridley was not there, but this troubled him little. He threw off his clothes in a hurry, and in a moment was in bed, where he lay listening with all his ears. He heard Mistress Gridley come back, and detected the sound of the key as she turned it in the outer door. He trembled lest she should come up to look for him, but nothing of the kind happened; and while he still listened, the fatigues of the day proved too much for him and he fell asleep.
It was broad day, and the sun had been up for hours, and the house astir as many, when he awoke in his bed and found three people gazing at him. Instinctively at sight of their faces he began to cry, expecting a blow, or to be roughly plucked up and upbraided for his laziness. But no blow came, nor did either of the three persons who looked at him with eyes of such astonishment and perplexity offer to touch him.
“You are sure that the door was really locked?” one of the men was saying when he awoke.
“Am I sure that you stand there?” the woman answered tartly. “Am I one to make a mistake of that kind?”
Simon Gridley shook his head. “I remember now,” he muttered, “that I tried the door myself. It was locked sure enough.”
“And it was locked this morning,” Mistress Gridley added.
Luke’s eyes, always wild, glittered with excitement. It was difficult to believe that he saw or could see anything except helplessness in the child who quaked and shrank before them: but so it was. “There are those whom locks will not bind, but they shall be bound on the Great Day!” he said in a hollow voice; “of such it is written, ‘These sholl ye make to cease from the earth!’”
“Tut tut!” Simon answered sternly. “This is folly. What does the lad say himself? Who let him out?”
“Ay, who let you out, you imp of Satan?” the woman cried fiercely.
But the boy discerned that, with all her fierceness, panic and terror possessed her; and it was this evidence of an evil conscience which inspired him to answer as he did, “A woman came down stairs with a light in a lanthorn,” he said.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 240