Johnny Ludlow, Third Series. Henry Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ might have been better that we had been here,” repeated Tod. “Better that we should have dealt with him than you.”

      “Your father was so thankful that you were at school before, Joseph; so thankful! He said he would not have you know anything about Alfred Arne for the world. And so—I tried to keep it this time from both you and him, and, but for this fear about Hugh, I should have done it.”

      Tod did not answer. He looked at her keenly in the twilight of the summer’s night, apparently waiting for more. She continued her explanation; not enlarging upon things, suffering, rather, inferences to be drawn. The following was its substance:—

      Alfred Arne asked for fifty pounds. He had returned to England only a few months before, had got into some fresh danger, and had to leave it again, and to hide himself until he did so. The fifty pounds—to get him off, he said, and start him afresh in the colonies—he demanded not as a gift, but a matter of right: the Todhetleys, being his near relatives, must help him. Mrs. Todhetley knew but of one person she could borrow it from privately—Mrs. Coney—and she had gone from home just as she was about to be asked for it. Only this afternoon had Mrs. Todhetley received the money from her and paid it to Alfred Arne.

      “I would not have told you this, but for being obliged, Joseph,” she pleaded meekly, when the brief explanation was ended. “We can still keep it from your father; better, perhaps, that you should know it than he: you are young and he is not.”

      “A great deal better,” assented Tod. “You have made yourself responsible to Mrs. Coney for the fifty pounds?”

      “Don’t think of that, Joseph. She is in no hurry for repayment, and will get it from me by degrees. I have a little trifle of my own, you know, that I get half-yearly, and I can economize in my dress. I did so hope to keep it from you as well as from your father.”

      I wondered if Tod saw all the patient, generous, self-sacrificing spirit. I wondered if he was growing to think that he had been always on the wrong tack in judging harshly of his stepmother. She turned away, thinking perhaps that time was being lost. I said something about Hugh.

      “Hugh is all right, Johnny; he’ll be found now,” Tod answered in a dreamy tone, as he looked after her with a dreamy look. The next moment he strode forward, and was up with Mrs. Todhetley.

      “I beg your pardon for the past, mother; I beg it with shame and contrition. Can you forgive me?”

      “Oh, pray don’t, dear Joseph! I have nothing to forgive,” she answered, bursting into fresh tears as she took his offered hand. And that was the first time in all his life that Tod, prejudiced Tod, had allowed himself to call her “mother.”

      II

      I never saw anything plainer in my life. It was not just opposite to where I stood, but lower down towards the end of the Ravine. Amongst the dark thick underwood of the rising bank it dodged about, just as if some one who was walking carried it in his hand lifted up in front of him. A round white light, exactly as the ghost’s light was described to be. One might have fancied it the light of a wax-candle, only that a candle would flicker itself dim and bright by turns in the air, and this was steady and did not.

      If a ghost was carrying it, he must have been pacing backwards and forwards; for the light confined itself to the range of a few yards. Beginning at the environs of the black old yew-tree, it would come on amidst the broom and shrubs to the group of alders, and then go back again Timberdale way, sometimes lost to sight for a minute, as if hidden behind a thicker mass of underwood, and then gleaming out afresh further on in its path. Now up, now down; backwards and forwards; here, there, everywhere; it was about as unaccountable a sight as any veritable ghost ever displayed, or I, Johnny Ludlow, had chanced to come upon.

      The early part of the night had been bright. It was the same night, spoken of in the last chapter, when Hugh was being searched for. Up to eleven o’clock the moon had shone radiantly. Since then a curious sort of darkness had come creeping along the heavens, and now, close upon twelve, it overshadowed the earth like a pall. A dark, black canopy, which the slight wind, getting up, never stirred, though it sighed and moaned with a weird unpleasant sound down the Ravine. I did not mind the light myself; don’t think I should much have minded the ghost: but Luke Mackintosh, standing by me, did. Considering that he was a good five-and-twenty years of age, and had led an out-of-door life, it may sound queer to say it, but he seemed timid as a hare.

      “I don’t like it, Master Johnny,” he whispered, as he grasped the fence with an unsteady hand, and followed the light with his eyes. What with the trees around us, and the pall overhead, it was dark enough, but I could see his face, and knew it had turned white.

      “I believe you are afraid, Luke!”

      “Well, sir, so might you be if you knowed as much of that there light as I do. It never comes but it bodes trouble.”

      “Who brings the light?”

      “It’s more than I can say, sir. They call it here the ghost’s light. And folks say, Master Johnny, that when it’s seen, there’s sure to be some trouble in the air.”

      “I think we have trouble enough just now without the light, Luke; and our trouble was with us before we saw that.”

      The Ravine lay beneath us, stretching out on either hand, weird, lonesome, dreary, the bottom hidden in gloom. The towering banks, whether we looked down the one we leaned over, or to the other opposite, presented nothing to the eye but darkness: we knew the masses of trees, bushes, underwood were there, but could not see them: and the spot favoured by the restless light was too wild and steep to be safe for the foot of man. Of course it was a curious speculation what it could be.

      “Did you ever see the light before, Mackintosh?”

      “Yes,” he answered, “half-a-dozen times. Do you mind, Master Johnny, my getting that there bad cut in the leg with my reaping-hook awhile agone? Seven weeks I lay in Worcester Infirmary: they carried me there on a mattress shoved down in the cart.”

      “I remember hearing of it. We were at Dyke Manor.”

      Before Luke went on, he turned his face to me and dropped his voice to a deeper whisper.

      “Master Ludlow, as true as us two be a-standing here, I saw the ghost’s light the very night afore I got the hurt. I was working for Mr. Coney then, it was before I came into the Squire’s service. Young Master Tom, he came out of the kitchen with a letter when we was at our seven-o’clock supper, and said I were to cut off to Timberdale with it and to look sharp, or the letter-box ’ud be shut. So I had to do it, sir, and I came through this here Ravine, a-whistling and a-holding my head down, though I’d rather ha’ went ten mile round. When I got out of it on t’other side, on top of the zigzag, I chanced to look back over the stile, and there I see the light. It were opposite then, on this side, sir, and moving about in the same see-saw way it be now, for I stood and watched it.”

      “I wonder you plucked up the courage to stand and watch it, Luke?”

      “I were took aback, sir, all in a maze like: and then I started off full pelt, as quick as my heels ’ud carry me. That was the very blessed night afore I got the hurt. When the doctors was a-talking round me at the infirmary, and I think they was arguing whether or not my leg must come off, I telled ’em that I was afeared it wouldn’t much matter neither way, for I’d seen the ghost’s light the past night and knowed my fate. One of them, a young man he was, burst out laughing above my face as I lay, and t’other next him, a grave gentleman with white hair, turned round and hushed at him. Master Ludlow, it’s all gospel true.”

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