Johnny Ludlow, Second Series. Henry Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Raves about Captain Bird!” repeated Mrs. Coney.

      “He is all her talk, ma’am—George Bird. And considering that George Bird, blackleg though he has turned out to be, married the young lady of this house, Miss Lucy Ashton, why, it goes against the grain for me to hear it.”

      Mrs. Coney sat down in a sort of bewilderment, and gave me the silk umbrella. Folding her hands, she stared at Mother Broom.

      “It seems as though we were always hearing fresh news about that man, Broom; each time it is something worse than the last. If he took all the young women within his reach, and—and—cut their heads off, it would be only like him.”

      “‘George!’ she moans out in her sleep. That is, in her dreaming, or her fever, or whatever it is. ‘George, you ought not to have left me; you should have taken care of me.’ And then, ma’am, she’ll be quiet a bit, save for turning her head about; and begin again, ‘Where’s my baby? where’s my baby?’ Goodness knows ’twould be sad enough to hear her if it was anybody’s name but Bird’s.”

      “There might be worse names than his, in the matter of giving us pain,” spoke Mrs. Coney. “As to poor Lucy—it is only another cross in her sad life.”

      “I’ve not told this to anybody,” went on Mother Broom. “Jael Batty’s three parts deaf, as the parish knows, and may not have caught Bird’s name. It will vex my master frightfully for Miss Lucy’s sake. The baby is to be buried to-day. Mr. Charles has stayed to do it.”

      “Oh, indeed!” snapped Mrs. Coney, and got up, for the baby appeared to be a sore subject with her. “I suppose the girl was coming across the country in search of Bird?”

      Broom tossed her head. “Whether she was or not, it’s an odd thing that this house should be the one to have to succour her.”

      “I am going,” said Mrs. Coney, “and I half wish I had never come in. Broom, I am sorry to have hindered you. You are busy.”

      “I am making my raised pies,” said Broom. “It’s the second batch. What with master’s coming marriage, and one thing and another, I did not get ’em done before the new year. Your Molly says hers beat mine, Master Ludlow; but I don’t believe it.”

      “She does, does she! It’s just like her boasting. Mrs. Todhetley often makes the pork-pies herself.”

      “Johnny,” said Mrs. Coney, as we went along, she in deep thought: “that poor Lucy Bird might keep a stick for cutting notches—as it is said some prisoners used to do, to mark their days—and notch off her dreadful cares, that are ever recurring. Why, Johnny, what’s that crowd for?”

      The church stood on the right between Timberdale Court and the village. A regular mob of children seemed to be pressing round the gate of the churchyard. I went to look, leaving Mrs. Coney standing.

      Charles Ashton was coming out of the church in his surplice, and the clerk, old Sam Mullet, behind him, carrying a little coffin. The grave was in the corner of the burial-ground, and Mr. Ashton went straight to it, and continued the service begun in the church. If it had been a lord’s child, he could not have done it all in better order.

      But there were no mourners, unless old Mullet could be called one. He put the coffin on the grass, and was in a frightful temper. I took off my hat and waited: it would have looked so to run away when there was no one else to stand there: and Mrs. Coney’s face, as cross as old Mullet’s, might be seen peering through the hedge.

      “It’s come to a pretty pass, when tramps’ brats have to be put in the ground like honest folks’s,” grunted Sam, when Mr. Ashton had walked away, and he began to fling in the spadefuls of earth. “What must he needs go and baptize that there young atom for?—he ain’t our parson; he don’t belong to we in this parish. I dun-no what the world be a-coming to.”

      Mr. Ashton was talking to Mrs. Coney when I got up. I told him what a way Sam Mullet was in.

      “Yes,” said he. “I believe what I did has not given satisfaction in all quarters; so I waited to take the service myself, and save other people trouble.”

      “In what name is the dead child registered, Charles?” asked Mrs. Coney.

      “Lucy Bird.”

      “Lucy Bird! Bird?”

      “It was the name the mother gave me in one of her lucid intervals,” answered the clergyman, shortly.

      He hastened away, saying he must catch a train, for that his own parish was wanting him; but I fancied he did not care to be further questioned. Mrs. Coney stood still to stare after him, and would have liked to ask him how much and how little he knew.

      Lucy Bird! It did sound strange to hear the name—as if it were the real Lucy Bird we knew so well. I said so to Mrs. Coney.

      “The impudence of the woman must pass all belief,” she muttered to herself. “Let us get on, Johnny? I would rather run a mile any other way than go to see her.”

      Leaving me on the wooden bench outside Jael Batty’s door, she went in. It was remarkably lively: the farrier’s shop opposite to look at, five hay-ricks, and a heap of children who strolled after us from the churchyard, and stayed to stare at me. Mrs. Coney came out again soon.

      “It’s of no use my remaining, Johnny. She can’t understand a word said to her, only lies there rambling, and asking people to bring her baby. If she had any sense left in her, she might just go down on her knees in thankfulness that it’s gone. Jael Batty says she has done nothing else but wail for it all the blessed morning.”

      “Well, it is only natural she should.”

      “Natural! Natural to mourn for that baby! Don’t you say stupid things, Johnny. It’s a great mercy that it has been taken; and you must know that as well as any one.”

      “I don’t say it isn’t; babies must make no end of noise and work; but you see mothers care for them.”

      “Don’t be a simpleton, Johnny. If you take to upholding tramps and infants dying in sheds, goodness knows what you’ll come to in time.”

      At the end of a fortnight, Ashton of Timberdale and his wife came home. It was a fine afternoon in the middle of January, but getting dusk, and a lot of us had gone over to the Court to see them arrive. Jane looked as happy as a queen.

      “Johnny,” she whispered, whilst we were standing to take some tea that Mother Broom (with a white cockade in her cap) brought in upon a silver tray, “how about that poor woman? She is not dead, I hope?”

      I told Jane that she was better. The fever had gone down, but she was so weak and reduced that the doctor had not allowed her to be questioned. We knew no more of who she was than we had known before. Mrs. Coney overheard what I was saying, and took Jane aside.

      There seemed to be a bit of a battle: Mrs. Coney remonstrating with a severe face, Jane holding out and flushing a little. She was telling Jane not to go to Jael Batty’s, and representing why she ought not to go. Jane said she must go—her heart was set upon it: and began to re-tie her bonnet-strings.

      “Mother dear, don’t be angry with me in this the first hour of entering on my new home—it would seem like a bad omen for me. You don’t know how strongly I have grown to think that my duty lies in seeing this poor woman, in comforting her if I can. СКАЧАТЬ