Works of Ellen Wood, page 1021
“How is Harry?” asked Mrs. Vale.
“Oh, he is — very well,” said Sanker, after waiting to see if I’d answer. “Have you seen him lately?”
“Not since last Sunday week, when he and young Snepp spent the day here. He was looking well, and seemed in spirits. It was rather a hazard, sending him to school at all; Mr. Vale wanted to have him taught at home, as he has been until this year. But I think it is turning out for the best.”
“He gets frightened, does he not?” said Sanker, who knew what she meant.
“He did,” replied Mrs. Vale; “but he is growing out of it. Never was a braver little child born than he; but when he was four years old, he strolled away from his nurse into a field where a bull was grazing, a savage animal. What exactly happened, we never knew; that Harry was chased across the field by it was certain, and then tossed. The chief injury was to the nerves, strange though that may seem in so young a child. For a long time afterwards, the least alarm would put him into a state of terrible fear, almost a fit. But he is getting over it now.”
She told this for my benefit; just as if she had divined the night’s work; Sanker knew it before. I felt sick with remorse as I listened — and Tod had called him a coward! Let us get away.
“I wish you could stay, my lads,” cried Mr. Vale; “it vexes me to turn you out supperless. What’s this, Charlotte? Ah yes, to be sure! I wish you could put up the whole table for them.”
For Mrs. Vale had been putting up some tartlets, and gave us each a packet of them. “Eat them as you go along,” she said. “And give my love to Harry.”
“And tell him that he must bring you both on Sunday, to spend the day,” added Mr. Vale. “Perhaps young Mr. Todhetley will come also. You might have breakfast, and go with us to church. I’ll write to Dr. Frost.”
Outside at last; I and my shame. These good, simple-hearted people — oh, had we indeed, between us, made them childless? “Young Mr. Todhetley,” waiting amid the stubble in the outer field, came springing up to the fence, his face white in the light of the hunter’s moon.
“What a long while you have been! Well?”
“Nothing,” said Sanker, briefly. “No news! I don’t think we’ve been much above five minutes.”
What a walk home it was! Mr. Blair, the out-of-school master, came down upon us with his thunder, but Tod seemed never to hear him. The boys, hushed and quiet as nature is before an impending storm, had not dared to tell and provoke it. I could not see Lacketer.
“Where’s Vale?” roared Mr. Blair, supposing he had been with us. “But that prayers are waiting, I’d cane all four of you. Where are you going, Todhetley?”
“Don’t stop me, Mr. Blair,” said Tod, putting him aside with a quiet authority and a pain in his voice that made Blair stare. We called Blair, Baked Pie, because of his name, Pyefinch.
“Read the prayers without me, please Mr Blair,” went on Tod. “I must see Dr. Frost. If you don’t know what has happened to-night, sir, ask the rest to tell you.”
He went out to his interview with the Doctor. Tod was not one to shirk his duty. Seeing Vale’s father and mother he had shrunk from; but the confession to Dr. Frost he made himself. What passed between them we never knew: how much contrition Tod spoke, how much reproach the Doctor. Roger and Miles, the man-servant and boy, were called into the library, and sent abroad: we thought it might be to search the banks of the river, or give notice for it to be dragged. The next called in was Sanker. The next, Lacketer.
But Lacketer did not answer the call. He had vanished. Mr. Blair went searching for him high and low, and could not find him. Lacketer had run away. He knew his time at Worcester House was over, and thought he’d save himself from dismissal. It was he who had been the thief, and whom Sanker suspected. As good mention here that Dr. Frost got a letter from his aunt the next Saturday, saying the school did not agree with her nephew, and she had withdrawn him from it.
Whether the others slept that night, I can’t tell; I did not. Harry Vale’s drowned form was in my mind all through it; and the sorrow of Mr. and Mrs. Vale. In the morning Tod got up, looking more like one dead than alive: he had one of his frightful headaches. I felt ready to die myself; it seemed that never another happy morning could dawn on the world.
“Shall I ask if I may bring you some breakfast up here, Tod? And it’s just possible, you know, that Vale — —”
“Hold your peace, Johnny!” he snapped. “If ever you tell me a false thing of a fellow again, I’ll thrash your life out of you.”
He came downstairs when he was dressed, and went out, waiting neither for breakfast nor prayers. I went out to watch him away, knowing he must be going to Vale Farm.
Oh, I never shall forget it. As Tod passed round the corner by the railings, he ran up against him. Him, Harry Vale.
My sight grew dim; I couldn’t see; the field and railings were reeling. But it only lasted for a moment or two. Tod’s breath was coming in great gasps then, and he had Vale’s two hands grasped in his. I thought he was going to hug him; a loud sob broke from him.
“We have been thinking you were drowned!”
Vale smiled. “I am too good a swimmer for that.”
“But you disappeared at once.”
“I struck back out of the river the instant I got into it; I was afraid you’d come in after me; and crept round the alder trees lower down. When you were all gone I swam across in my clothes; see how they’ve shrunk!”
“Swam across! Have you not been home?”
“No, I went to my uncle’s: it’s nearer than home: and they made me go to bed, and dried my things, and sent to tell Dr. Frost. I did not say why I went into the water,” added Vale, lifting his kind face. “But the Doctor came round the ferry late, and he knew all about it. They talked to me well, he and my uncle, about being frightened at nothing, and I’ve promised not to be so stupid again.”
“God bless you, Vale!” cried Tod. “You know it was a mistake.”
“Yes, Dr. Frost said so. The half-crown was my own. My uncle met us boys when we were out walking yesterday morning, and gave it me. I thought you might have seen him give it.”
Tod linked his arm within Vale’s and walked off to the breakfast-room. The wonder to me was how, with Vale’s good honest face and open manners, we could have thought him capable of theft. But when you once go in for a mistake it carries you on in spite of improbabilities. The boys were silent for an instant when Vale went in, and then you’d have thought the roof was coming off with cheers. Tod stood looking from the window, and I vow I saw him rub his handkerchief across his eyes.
We went to Vale Farm on Sunday morning early: the four of us invited, and Harding. Mr. Vale shook hands twice with us all round so heartily, that we might see, I thought, they bore no malice; and Mrs. Vale’s breakfast was a sight to do you good, with its jugs of cream and home-made sausages.
After that, came church: it looked like a procession turning out for it. Mr. and Mrs. Vale and the grandmother, an upright old lady with a China-crape shawl and white hair, us five and a man and maid-servant behind. The river lay on the right, the church was in front of us; people dotted the fields on their way to it, and the bells were ringing as they do at a wedding.
“This is a different sort of Sunday from what we thought last Thursday it would be,” I said in Tod’s ear when we were together for a minute at the gate.
“Johnny, if I were older, and went in for that kind of thing, as perhaps I shall do sometime, I should like to put up a public thanksgiving in church to-day.”
“A public thanksgiving?”
“For mercies received.”
I stared at Tod. He did not seem to heed it, but took his hat off and walked with it in his hand all across the churchyard.
XI.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
Perhaps this might be called the beginning of the end of the chain of events that I alluded to in that other paper. An end that terminated in distress, and death, and sorrow.
It was the half-year following that hunt of ours by moonlight. Summer weather had come in, and we were looking forward to the holidays, hoping the heat would last.
The half-mile field, so called from its length, on Vale Farm was being mowed. Sunday intervened, and the grass was left to dry until the Monday. The haymakers had begun to rake it into cocks. The river stretched past along the field on one side; a wooden fence bounded it on the other. It was out of all proportion, that field, so long and so narrow.
Tod and I and Sanker and Harry Vale were spending the Sunday at the Farm. Since that hunt last autumn Mr. and Mrs. Vale often invited us. There was no evening service, and we went into the hay-field, and began throwing the hay at one another. It was rare fun; they might almost have heard our shouts at Worcester House: and I don’t believe but that every one of us forgot it was Sunday.
What with the sultry weather and the hay, some of us got into a tolerable heat. The river wore a tempting look; and Tod and Sanker, without so much as a thought, undressed themselves behind the trees, and plunged in. It was twilight then; the air had began to wear its weird silence; the shadows were putting on their ghastliness; the moon, well up, sailed along under white clouds.
I and Vale were walking slowly back towards the Farm, when a great cry broke over the water, — a cry as of something in pain; but whether from anything more than a night-bird, was uncertain. Vale stopped and turned his head.
A second cry: louder, longer, more distinct, and full of agony. It came from one of those two in the water. Vale flew back with his fleet foot — fleeter than any fellow’s in the school, except Tod’s and Snepp’s. As I followed, a startling recollection came over me, and I wondered how it was that all of us had been so senseless as to forget it: that one particular spot on the river was known to be dangerous.
“Bear up; I’m coming,” shouted Vale. “Don’t lose your heads.”
A foot-passenger walking on the other side the fence, saw something was wrong: if he did not hear Vale’s words, he heard the cry, and came cutting across the field, scattering the hay with his feet. And then I saw it was Baked Pie; which meant our mathematical master, Mr. Blair. They had given him at baptism the name of “Pyefinch,” after some old uncle who had money to leave; no second name, nothing but that: and the school had converted him into “Baked Pie.” But I don’t think fathers and mothers have any right to put odd names upon helpless babies and send them out to be a laughing-stock to the world.
Blair was not a bad fellow, setting his name aside, and had gone in for honours at Cambridge. We reached the place together.
“What is amiss, Ludlow?”
“I don’t know, sir. Todhetley and Sanker are in the water; and we’ve heard cries.”
“In the water to-night! And there!”
Vale, already in the middle of the river, was swimming back, holding up Sanker. But Tod was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Blair looked up and down; and an awful fear came over me. The current led down to Mr. Charles Vale’s mill — Vale’s uncle. More than one man had found his death there.
“Oh, Mr. Blair! where is he? What has become of him?”
“Hush!” breathed Blair. He was quietly slipping off some of his things, his eyes fixed on a particular part of the river. In he went, striking out without more splash than he could help, and reached it just as Tod’s head appeared above water. The third time of rising. I did not go in for such a girl’s trick as to faint; but I never afterwards could trace the minutes as they had passed until Tod was lying on the grass under the trees. That I remember always. The scene is before my eyes now as plainly as it was then, though more time has since gone by than perhaps you’d think for: the treacherous river flowing on calmly, the quivering leaves overhead, through which the moon was glittering, and Tod lying there white and motionless. Mr. Blair had saved his life; there could be no question about that, saved it only by a minute of time; and I thought to myself I’d never call him Baked Pie again.
“Instead of standing moonstruck, Ludlow, suppose you make a run to the Farm and see what help you can get,” spoke Mr. Blair. “Todhetley must be carried there, and put between hot blankets.”
Help was found. Sanker walked to the Farm, Tod was carried; and a regular bustle set in when they arrived there. Both were put to bed; Tod had come-to then. Mrs. Vale and the servants ran up and down like wild Indians; and the good old lady with the white hair insisted upon sitting up by Tod’s bedside all night.
“No, mother,” said Mr. Vale; “some of us will do that.”
“My son, I tell you that I shall watch by him myself,” returned the old lady; and, as they deferred to her always, she did.
When explanation of the accident was given — as much of it as ever could be given — it sounded rather strange. Both of them had been taken with cramp, and the river was not in fault, after all. Tod said that he had been in the water two or three minutes, when he was seized with what he supposed to be cramp in the legs, though he never had it before. He was turning to strike out for the bank, when he found himself seized by Sanker. They loosed each other in a minute, but Tod was helpless, and he sank.
Sanker’s story was very much the same. He was seized with cramp, and in his fear caught hold of Tod for protection. Tod was an excellent swimmer, Sanker a poor one; but while Sanker’s cramp grew better, Tod’s disabled him. Most likely, as we decided when we heard this, Sanker, who never went down at all, would have got out of the water without help; Tod would have been drowned but for Blair. He had sunk twice when the rescue came. Mr. Featherston, the man of pills who attended the school, said it was all through their having jumped into the water when they were in a white heat; the cold had struck to them. While Mrs. Hall, with her grave face, thought it was through their having gone bathing on a Sunday.
Whatever it was through, old Frost made a commotion. He was not severe in general, but he raised noise enough over this. What with one thing and another, the school, he declared, was being everlastingly upset.
Tod and Sanker came back from Mr. Vale’s the next day; Monday. The Doctor ordered them into his study, and sat there with his cane in his hand while he talked, rapping the table with it now and again as fiercely as if it had been their backs. And the backs would surely have had it but for having just escaped coffins.
All this would not have been much, but it was to lead to a great deal more. To quite a chain of events, as I have said; and to trouble and sorrow in the far-off ending. Hannah, at home, was fond of repeating to Lena what she called the sayings of poor Richard: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost; and all for the want of a little care about a horse-shoe nail.” The horse-shoe nail and the man’s loss seemed a great deal nearer each other than that Sunday night’s accident, and what was eventually to come of it. A small mustard-seed, dropped into the ground, shoots forth and becomes in the end a great tree.
On the Wednesday, who should come over but the Squire, clasping Pyefinch Blair’s hand in his, and saying with tears in his good old eyes that he had saved his son’s life. Old Frost, you see, had written the news to Dyke Manor. Tod, strong and healthy in constitution, was all right again, not a hair of his head the worse for it; but Sanker had not escaped so well.
As early as the Monday night, the first night of his return home from Vale Farm, it began to come on; and the next morning the boys, sleeping in the same room, told a tale of Sanker’s having been delirious. He had sat up in bed and woke them all up with his cries, thinking he was trying to swim out of deep water, and could not. Next he said he wanted some water to drink; they gave him one draught after another till the big water-jug was emptied, but his thirst kept on saying “More! more!” Sanker did not seem to remember any of this. He came down with the rest in the morning, his face very white, except for a pinkish spot in the middle of his cheeks, and he thought the fellows must be chaffing him. The fellows told him they were not; and one, it was Bill Whitney, said they would not think of chaffing him just after his having been so nearly drowned.
It went on to the afternoon. Sanker ate no dinner, for I looked to see; he was but one amidst the many, and it was not noticed by the masters. And if it had been, they’d have thought that the ducking had taken away his appetite. The drawing-master, Wilson, followed suit with Hall, and said he was not surprised at their being nearly drowned, after making hay on the Sunday. But, about four o’clock, when the first-class were before Dr. Frost with their Greek books, Sanker suddenly let his fall. Instead of stooping for it, his eyes took a far-off look, as if they were seeking for it round the walls of the room.
“Lay hold of him,” said Dr. Frost.
He did not faint, but seemed dull: it looked as much like a lazy fit as anything; and he was sensible. They put him to sit on one of the benches, and then he began to tremble.
“He must be got to bed,” said the Doctor. “Mr. Blair, kindly see Mrs. Hall, will you. Tell her to warm it. Stay. Wait a moment.”
Dr. Frost followed Mr. Blair from the hall. It was to say that Sanker had better go at once to the blue-room. If the bed there was not aired, or otherwise ready, Sanker’s own bedding could be taken to it. “I’ll give Mrs. Hall the orders myself,” said the Doctor.
The blue-room — called so from its blue-stained walls — was the one used on emergencies. When we found Sanker had been taken there, we made up our minds that he was going to have an illness. Featherston came and thought the same.
The next day, Wednesday, he was in a sort of fever, rambling every other minute. The Squire said he should like to see him, and Blair took him upstairs. Sanker lay with the same pink hue on his cheeks, only deeper; and his eyes were bright and glistening. Hall, who was addicted to putting in her word on all occasions when it could tell against us boys, said if he had stayed two or three days in bed at Vale Farm, where he was first put, he’d have had nothing of this. Perhaps Hall was right. It had been Sanker’s own doings to get up. When Mrs. Vale saw him coming downstairs, she wanted to send him back to bed again, but he told her he was quite well, and came off to school.
