The House by the Church-Yard Part 39

Poor little Puddock actually clasped his hands, looked up, and poured forth a hearty, almost hysterical, thanksgiving; for he had charged Cluffe's death altogether upon his own soul, and his relief was beyond expression.

In the meantime, the old gentlemen of the club were in a thrilling suspense, and that not altogether disagreeable state of horror in which men chew the cud of bitter fancy over other men's catastrophes. After about ten minutes in came young Spaight.

'Well,' said the colonel, 'is Cluffe safe or--eh?'

'Cluffe's safe--only half drowned; but poor Puddock's lost.'

'What!'

'Drowned, I'm afraid.'

'Drowned! who says so?' repeated the colonel.

'Cluffe--everybody.'

'Why, there it is!' replied the colonel, with a great oath, breaking through all his customary reserve and stiffness, and flinging his c.o.c.ked-hat on the middle of the table, piteously, 'A fellow that can't swim a yard _will_ go by way of saving a great--a large gentleman, like Captain Cluffe, from drowning, and he's pulled in himself; and so--bless my soul! what's to be done?'

So the colonel broke into a lamentation, and a fury, and a wonder.

'Cluffe and Puddock, the two steadiest officers in the corps! He had a devilish good mind to put Cluffe under arrest--the idiots--Puddock--he was devilish sorry. There wasn't a more honourable'--_et cetera_. In fact, a very angry and pathetic funeral oration, during which, accompanied by Doctor Toole, Lieutenant Puddock, in person, entered; and the colonel stopped short with his eyes and mouth very wide open, and said the colonel very sternly.

'I--I'm glad to see, Sir, you're safe: and--and--I suppose, I shall hear now that _Cluffe's_ drowned?' and he stamped the emphasis on the floor.

While all this was going on, some of the soldiers had actually got into Dublin. The tide was in, and the water very high at 'b.l.o.o.d.y Bridge.' A hat, near the corner, was whisking round and round, always trying to get under the arch, and always, when on the point, twirled round again into the corner--an image of the 'Flying Dutchman' and hope deferred. A watchman's crozier hooked the giddy thing. It was not a military hat; but they brought it back, and the captive was laid in the guard-room--mentioned by me because we've seen that identical hat before.

CHAPTER LI.

HOW CHARLES NUTTER'S TEA, PIPE, AND TOBACCO-BOX WERE ALL SET OUT FOR HIM IN THE SMALL PARLOUR AT THE MILLS; AND HOW THAT NIGHT WAS Pa.s.sED IN THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCH-YARD.

Mrs. Nutter and Mrs. Sturk, the wives of the two men who most hated one another within the vicinage of Chapelizod--natural enemies, holding aloof one from another, and each regarding the other in a puzzled way, with a sort of apprehension and horror, as the familiar of that worst and most formidable of men--her husband--were this night stricken with a common fear and sorrow.

Darkness descended on the Mills and the river--a darkness deepened by the umbrageous trees that grouped about the old gray house in which poor Mrs. Nutter lay so ill at ease. Moggy carried the jingling tray of tea-things into Nutter's little study, and lighted his candles, and set the silver snuffers in the dish, and thought she heard him coming, and ran back again, and returned with the singing 'tea-kitchen,' and then away again, for the thin b.u.t.tered toast under its china cover, which our ancestors loved.

Then she listened--but 'twas a mistake--it was the Widow Macan's step, who carried the ten pailfuls of water up from the river to fill the b.u.t.t in the backyard every Tuesday and Friday, for a s.h.i.+lling a week, and 'a cup o' tay with the girls in the kitchen.'

Then Moggy lighted the fire with the stump of a candle, for the night was a little chill, and she set the small round table beside it, and laid her master's pipe and tobacco-box on it, and listened, and began to wonder what detained him.

So she went out into the sharp still air, and stood on the hall-door step, and listened again. Presently she heard the Widow Macan walking up from the garden with the last pail on her head, who stopped when she saw her, and set down the vessel upon the corner of the clumsy little bal.u.s.trade by the door-step. So Moggy declared her uneasiness, which waxed greater when Mrs. Macan told her that 'the masther, G.o.d bless him, wasn't in the garden.'

She had seen him standing at the river's edge, while she pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed. He did not move a finger, or seem to notice her, and was looking down into the water. When she came back the third or fourth time, he was gone.

At Moggy's command she went back into the garden, though she a.s.sured her, solemnly--''twas nansince lookin' there'--and called Mr. Nutter, at first in a deferential and hesitating way; but, emboldened and excited by the silence, for she began to feel unaccountably queer, in a louder and louder a key, till she was certain that he was neither in the garden nor in the orchard, nor anywhere near the house. And when she stopped, the silence seemed awful, and the darkness under the trees closed round her with a supernatural darkness, and the river at the foot of the walk seemed snorting some inarticulate story of horror. So she locked the garden door quickly, looking over her shoulder for she knew not what, and ran faster than she often did along the sombre walk up to the hall door, and told her tale to Moggy, and begged to carry the pail in by the hall-door.

In they came, and Moggy shut the hall-door, and turned the key in it.

Perhaps 'twas the state in which the poor lady lay up stairs that helped to make them excited and frightened. Betty was sitting by her bedside, and Toole had been there, and given her some opiate, I suppose, for she had dropped into a flushed snoring sleep, a horrid counterfeit of repose. But she had first had two or three frightful fits, and all sorts of wild, screaming talk between. Perhaps it was the apparition of Mary Matchwell, whose evil influence was so horribly attested by the dismal spectacle she had left behind her, that predisposed them to panic; but a.s.suredly each antic.i.p.ated no good from the master's absence, and had a foreboding of something bad, of which they did not speak; but only disclosed it by looks, and listening, and long silences. The lights burning in Nutter's study invited them, and there the ladies seated themselves, and made their tea in the kitchen tea-pot, and clapped it on the hob, and listened for sounds from Mrs. Nutter's chamber, and for the step of her husband crossing the little court-yard; and they grew only more nervous from listening, and there came every now and then a little tapping on the window-pane. It was only, I think, a little sprig of the climbing-rose that was nailed by the wall, nodding at every breath, and rapping like unseen finger-tops, on the gla.s.s. But, as small things will, with such folk, under such circ.u.mstances, it frightened them confoundedly.

Then, on a sudden, there came a great yell from poor Mrs. Nutter's chamber, and they both stood up very pale. The Widow Macan, with the cup in her hand that she was 'tossing' at the moment, and Moggy, all aghast, invoked a blessing under her breath, and they heard loud cries and sudden volleys of talk, and Biddy's voice, soothing the patient.

Poor Mrs. Nutter had started up, all on a sudden, from her narcotic doze, with a hideous scream that had frightened the women down stairs.

Then she cried--

'Where am I?' and 'Oh, the witch--the witch!'

'Oh! no, Ma'am, dear,' replied Betty; 'now, aisy, Ma'am, darling.'

'I'm going mad.'

'No, Ma'am, dear?--there now--sure 'tis poor Betty that's in it--don't be afear'd, Ma'am.'

'Oh, Betty, hold me--don't go--I'm mad--am I mad?'

Then in the midst of Betty's consolations, she broke into a flood of tears, and seemed in some sort relieved; and Betty gave her her drops again, and she began to mumble to herself, and so to doze.

At the end of another ten minutes, with a scream, she started up again.

'That's her step--where are you, Betty?' she shrieked, and when Betty ran to the bedside, she held her so hard that the maid was ready to cry out, leering all the time over her shoulder--'Where's Charles Nutter?--I saw him speaking to you.'

Then the poor little woman grew quieter, and by her looks and moans, and the clasping of her hands, and her upturned eyes, seemed to be praying; and when Betty stealthily opened the press to take out another candle, her poor mistress uttered another terrible scream, crying--

'You wretch! her head won't fit--you can't hide her;' and the poor woman jumped out of her bed, shrieking 'Charles, Charles, Charles!'

Betty grew so nervous and frightened, that she fairly bawled to her colleague, Moggy, and told her she would not stay in the room unless she sat up all night with her. So, together they kept watch and ward, and as the night wore on, Mrs. Nutter's slumbers grew more natural and less brief, and her paroxysms of waking terror less maniacal. Still she would waken, with a cry that thrilled them, from some frightful vision, and seem to hear or see nothing aright for a good while after, and muttering to the frightened maids--

'Listen to the knocking--oh!--breathing outside the door--bolt it, Betty--girls, say your prayers--'tis he,' or sometimes, ''tis she.'

And thus this heavy night wore over; and the wind, which began to rise as the hours pa.s.sed, made sounds full of sad untranslatable meaning in the ears of the watchers.

Poor Mrs. Sturk meanwhile, in the House by the Church-yard, sat listening and wondering, and plying her knitting-needles in the drawing-room. When the hour of her Barney's expected return had pa.s.sed some time, she sent down to the barrack, and then to the club, and then on to the King's House, with her service to Mrs. Stafford, to enquire, after her spouse. But her first and her second round of enquiries, despatched at the latest minute at which she was likely to find any body out of bed to answer them, were altogether fruitless. And the lights went out in one house after another, and the Phoenix shut its doors, and her own servants were for hours gone to bed; and the little town of Chapelizod was buried in the silence of universal slumber. And poor Mrs.

Sturk still sat in her drawing-room, more and more agitated and frightened.

But her missing soldier did not turn up, and Leonora sat and listened hour after hour. No sound of return, not even the solemn clank and fiery snort of the fiend-horse under her window, or the 'ho-lo, ho-la--my life, my love!' of the phantom rider, cheated her with a momentary hope.

Poor Mrs. Sturk! She raised the window a few inches, that she might the better hear the first distant ring of his coming on the road. She forgot he had not his horse that night, and was but a pedestrian. But somehow the night-breeze through the aperture made a wolfish howling and sobbing, that sounded faint and far away, and had a hateful character of mingled despair and banter in it.

She said every now and then aloud, to rea.s.sure herself--'What a noise the wind makes to be sure!' and after a while she opened the window wider. But her candle flared, and the flame tossed wildly about, and the perplexed lady feared it might go out absolutely. So she shut down the window altogether; for she could not bear the ill-omened baying any longer.

So it grew to be past two o'clock, and she was afraid that Barney would be very angry with her for sitting up, should he return.

She went to bed, therefore, where she lay only more feverish--conjecturing, and painting frightful pictures, till she heard the crow of the early village c.o.c.k, and the caw of the jackdaw wheeling close to the eaves as he took wing in the gray of the morning to show her that the business of a new day had commenced; and yet Barney had not returned.

Not long after seven o'clock, Dr. Toole, with Juno, Caesar, Dido, and Sneak at his heels, paid his half-friendly, half-professional visit at the Mills.

Poor little Mrs. Nutter was much better--quiet for her was everything, packed up, of course, with a little physic; and having comforted her, as well as he was able, he had a talk with Moggy in the hall, and all about Nutter's disappearance, and how Mrs. Macan saw him standing by the river's brink, and that was the last anyone near the house had seen of him; and a thought flashed upon Toole, and he was very near coming out with it, but checked himself, and only said--

'What hat had he on?'