Johnny Ludlow, Fourth Series. Mrs. Henry Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ off—alone—as soon as it was ready. It was then growing dusk; snow was falling in scanty flakes mixed with sleet, and the wind was roaring and rushing like mad.

      Gaining the top of Red Hill, St. George was bowling along the level road beyond it, when some wayfarer turned round just before him, put up his hand, and spoke. By the peculiar-coloured coat—a sort of slate—and white comforter, he recognized the stranger of the railway-station; he also remembered the voice. “I beg your pardon a thousand times for stopping you,” he said, “but I think I perceive that the road branches off two ways yonder: will you kindly tell me which of them will take me to Evesham? there seems to be no one about on foot that I can inquire of.” “That will be your way,” St. George answered, pointing with his whip. “But you are not thinking of walking to Evesham to-night, are you?” he added. “It is fifteen miles off.”

      The stranger replied that he had made up his mind to walk, rather than wait two hours at Worcester station: and St. George was touching his horse to move on, when a thought struck him.

      “I am not going the direct Evesham road, but I can give you a lift part of the way,” he said. “It will not cut off any of the distance for you, but it will save your legs three or four miles.” The stranger thanked him and got up at once, St. George undoing the apron to admit him. He had the same black bag with him that St. George had noticed at the station.

      St. George had thus to make a detour to accommodate the stranger. He was by no means unwilling to do it; for, apart from the wish to help a fellow-creature, he believed it would be less rough in the low-lying lands. Driving along in the teeth of the furious wind, he turned off the highway and got into Dip Lane. We saw him in it, the stranger sitting with him. He drove on after we had passed, pulled up at the proper place for the man to descend, and pointed out the route. “You have a mile or two of these by-ways,” he said to him, “but keep straight on and they will bring you out into the open road. Turn to your left then, and you will gain Evesham in time—and I wish you well through your walk.”

      Those were St. George’s exact words—as he repeated them to us later. The stranger thanked him heartily, shook hands and went on his way, carrying his black bag. St. George said that before parting with the traveller, he suggested that he should go on with him to Timberdale, seeing the night was so cold and wild, put up at the Plough-and-Harrow, where he could get a comfortable bed, and go on to Evesham in the morning. But the stranger declined, and seemed impatient to get on.

      He did not tell St. George who he was, or what he was; he did not tell his name, or what his business was in Worcestershire, or whether he was purposing to make a stay at Evesham, or whither he might be going when he left it: unless the question he had put to St. George, as to being able to get on to Cheltenham, might be taken for an indication of his route. In fact, he stated nothing whatever about himself; but, as St. George said, the state of the weather was against talking. It was difficult to hear each other speak; the blasts howled about their ears perpetually, and the sharp sleet stung their faces. As to his bearing the resemblance to Brook that was being talked of, St. George could only repeat that he did not perceive it; he might have been about Brook’s height and size, but that was all. The voice was certainly not Brook’s, not in the least like Brook’s, neither was the face, so far as St. George saw of it: no idea of the kind struck him.

      These were the different statements: and, reading them, you have the matter in a nutshell. Mrs. James Ashton continued to affirm that it was William Brook she saw at the station, and could not be shaken out of her belief. She and William had played together as children, they had flirted together, she was pleased to declare, as youth and maiden, and did anybody suppose she could mistake an unknown young man for him in broad daylight? An immense favourite with all the world, Marianne Ashton was fond of holding decisively to her own opinions; all her words might have begun with capital letters.

      I also maintained that the young man we saw in St. George’s gig in Dip Lane, and who wore a warm great-coat of rather an unusual colour, something of a grey—or a slate—or a mouse, with the white woollen comforter on his neck and the soft low-crowned hat drawn well on his brows, was William Brook. When he took off his hat to wave it to us in response, I saw (as I fully believed) that it was Brook; and I noticed his gloves. Mrs. Todhetley, who had turned her head at our words, also saw him and felt not the slightest doubt that it was he. Tod was ready to swear to it.

      To combat this, we had Mr. St. George’s cool, calm, decisive assertion that the man was a stranger. Of course it outweighed ours. All the probabilities lay with it; he had been in companionship with the stranger, had talked with him face to face: we had not. Besides, if it had been Brook, where was he that he had not made his way to Timberdale? So we took up the common-sense view of the matter and dismissed our own impressions as fancies that would not hold water, and looked out daily for the landing of the exile. Aunt Hester hoped he was not “lost at sea:” but she did not say it in the hearing of Ellin Delorane.

      The days went on. November came in. William Brook did not appear; no tidings reached us of him. His continued non-appearance so effectually confirmed St. George’s statement, that the other idea was exploded and forgotten by all reasonable minds. Possibly in one or two unreasonable ones, such as mine, say, a sort of hazy doubt might still hover. But, doubt of what? Ay, that was the question. Even Tod veered round to the enemy, said his sight must have misled him, and laid the blame on the wind. Both common sense and uncommon said Brook had but been detained in Jamaica, and might be expected in any day.

      The first check to this security of expectation was wrought by a letter. A letter from New York, addressed to William Brook by his brother there, Charles. Mrs. Brook opened it. She was growing vaguely uneasy, and had already begun to ask herself why, were William detained in the West Indies, he did not write to tell her so.

      And this, as it proved, was the chief question the letter was written to ask. “If,” wrote Charles Brook to his brother, “if you have arrived at home—as we conclude you must have done, having seen in the papers the safe arrival of the Dart at Liverpool—how is it you have not written to say so, and to inform us how things are progressing? The uncle does not like it. ‘Is William growing negligent?’ he said to me yesterday.”

      The phrase “how things are progressing,” Mrs. Brook understood to apply to the new mercantile house about to be established in London. She sent the letter by Araminta to Mr. Delorane.

      “Can William have been drowned at sea?” breathed Minty.

      “No, no; I don’t fear that; I’m not like that silly woman, Aunt Hester, with her dreams and her fancies,” said Mr. Delorane. “It seems odd, though, where he can be.”

      Inquiries were made at Liverpool for the list of passengers by the Dart. William Brook’s name was not amongst them. Timberdale waited on. There was nothing else for it to do. Waited until a second letter came from Charles Brook. It was written to his mother this time. He asked for news of William; whether he had, or had not, arrived at home.

      The next West Indian mail-packet, steaming from Southampton, carried out a letter from Mr. St. George, written to his cousin in Kingston, Jamaica, at the desire of Mr. Delorane: at the desire, it may with truth be said, of Timberdale in general. The same mail also took out a letter from Reginald Brook in London, who had been made acquainted with the trouble. Both letters were to the same purport—an inquiry as to William Brook and his movements, more particularly as to the time he had departed for home, and the vessel he had sailed in.

      In six or eight weeks, which seemed to some of us like so many months, Mr. St. George received an answer. His relative, Leonard St. George, sent rather a curious story. He did not know anything of William Brook’s movements himself, he wrote, and could not gain much reliable information about them. It appeared that he was to have sailed for England in the Dart, a steamer bound for Liverpool, СКАЧАТЬ