Johnny Ludlow, Second Series. Henry Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ