Johnny Ludlow Fourth Series Part 59

"Yesterday was the day Jack was to sail," interrupted Tod.

"Of course it was," acquiesced the Rector: "he must be half-way down the channel by this time. If---- Here comes Alice!" he broke off. "I shall go. I don't want to hear more of such stuff."

He went on down the garden in a huff, disappearing behind the kidney-beans. Alice, wearing a light print gown and black silk ap.r.o.n, her smooth brown hair glossy as ever, and her open face as pretty, shook hands with them both.

"And what's this we hear about your tormenting yourself over a dream?"

blundered the Squire. Though whether it was a blunder to say it, I know not; or whether, but for that, she would have spoken: once the ice is broken, you may plunge in easily. "My dear, I'd not have thought it of _you_."

Alice's face took a deeper gravity, her eyes a far-off look. "It is quite true, Mr. Todhetley," she sighed. "I have been very much troubled by a dream."

"Tell it us, Alice," said Tod, his whole face in a laugh. "What was it about?"

"That you may ridicule it?" she sighed.

"Yes," he answered. "Ridicule it out of you."

"You cannot do that," was her quiet answer: and Tod told me in later days that it rather took him aback to see her solemn sadness. "I should like to relate it to you, Mr. Todhetley. Herbert would not hear it, or let Grace."

"Herbert's a parson, you know, my dear, and parsons think they ought to be above such things," was the Squire's soothing answer. "If it will ease your mind to tell it me---- Here, let us sit down under the pear-tree."

So they sat down on the bench under the blossoms of the pear-tree, the pater admonis.h.i.+ng Tod to behave himself; and poor Alice told her dream.

"I thought it was the present time," she began. "This very present day, say, or yesterday; and that Jack was going to sea in command----"

"But, my dear, he always goes in command."

"Of course. But in the dream the point was especially presented to my mind--that he was going out _in command_. He came to me the morning of the day he was to sail, looking very patient, pale, and sorrowful. It seemed that he and I had had some dispute, causing estrangement, the previous night: it was over then, and I, for one, repented of the coldness."

"Well, Alice?" broke in Tod: for she had stopped, and was gazing out straight before her.

"I wish I could show to you how _real_ all this was," she resumed. "It was more as though I were wide awake, and enacting it. I never had so vivid a dream before; never in all my life."

"But why don't you go on?"

"Somebody had been murdered: some man. I don't know who it was--or where, or how. Jack was suspected. Jack! But it seemed that it could not be brought home to him. We were in a strange town; at least, it was strange to me, though it seemed that I had stayed in it once before, many years ago. Jack was standing before me all this while, you understand, in his sadness and sorrow. It was not he who had told me what had happened. I seemed to have known it already. Everybody knew it, everybody spoke of it, and we were in cruel distress. Suddenly I remembered that when I was in the town the previous time, the man who was murdered had had a bitter quarrel with another man, a gentleman: and a sort of revelation came over me that this gentleman had been the murderer. I went privately to some one who had authority in the s.h.i.+p, and said so; I think her owner. He laughed at me--did I know how high this gentleman was, he asked; the first magnate in the town. That he had done it I felt sure; surer than if I had seen it done; but no one would listen to me--and in the trouble I awoke."

"_That's_ not much to be troubled at," cried the Squire.

"The trouble was terrible; you could not feel such in real life. But I have not told all. Presently I got to sleep again, and found myself in the same dream. I was going through the streets of the town in an open carriage, the s.h.i.+p's owner with me----"

"Was the s.h.i.+p the _Rose of Delhi_?"

"I don't know. The owner, sitting with me in the carriage, was not either of the owners of the _Rose of Delhi_, whom I know well; this was a stranger. We were going over a bridge. Walking towards us on the pavement, I saw two gentlemen arm-in-arm: one an officer in a dusky old red uniform and c.o.c.ked-hat; the other an _evil_-looking man who wore a long brown coat. He walked along with his eyes on the ground. I knew him by intuition--that it was the man who had had the quarrel years before, and who had done the murder now. 'There's the gentleman you would have accused,' said my companion before I could speak, pointing to this man: 'he stands higher in position than anybody else in the town.' They walked on in their security, and we drove on in our pain. I ought to say in my pain, for I alone felt it. Oh, I cannot tell you what it was--this terrible pain; not felt so much, it seemed, because my husband could not be cleared, as for _his_ sadness and sorrow. Nothing like it, I say, can ever be felt on earth."

"And what else, Alice?"

"That is all," she sighed. "I awoke for good then. But the pain and the fear remain with me."

"Perhaps, child, you are not very well?--been eating green gooseberries, or some such trash. Nothing's more likely to give one bad dreams than unripe fruit."

"Why should the dream have left this impression of evil upon me--this weight of fear?" cried Alice, never so much as hearing the pater's irreverent suggestion. "If it meant nothing, if it were not come as a warning, it would pa.s.s from my mind as other dreams pa.s.s."

Not knowing what to say to this, the Squire said nothing. He and Tod both saw how useless it would be; no argument could shake her faith in the dream, and the impression it had left.

The Squire, more easily swayed than a child, yet suspecting nothing of the news that was on its way to Timberdale, quitted the Rectory and went home shaking his head. Alice's solemn manner had told upon him. "I can't make much out of the dream, Joe," he remarked, as they walked back through the Ravine; "but I don't say dreams are always to be ridiculed, since we read of dreams sent as warnings in the Bible. Anyhow, I hope Jack will make a good voyage. He has got home safe and sound from other voyages: why should he not from this one?"

Before that day was over, they saw Alice again. She walked over to Crabb Cot in the evening with her little girl--a sprightly child with Jack's own honest and kindly eyes. Alice put a sealed paper into the Squire's hand.

"I know you will think me silly," she said to him, in a low tone: "perhaps gone a little out of my senses; but, as I told you this morning, nothing has ever impressed me so greatly and so unpleasantly as this dream. I cannot get it out of my mind for a moment; every hour, as it goes by, only serves to render it clearer. I have written it down here, every particular, more minutely than I related it to you this morning, and I have sealed it up, you see; and I am come to ask you to keep it. Should my husband ever be accused, it may serve to----"

"Now, child, don't you talk nonsense," interrupted the pater. "Accused of what?"

"I don't know. I wish I did. I hope you will pardon me, Mr. Todhetley,"

she went on, in deprecation; "but indeed there lies upon me a dread--an apprehension that startles me. I dare say I express myself badly; but it is there. And, do you know, Jack has lately experienced the same sensation; he told me so on Sunday. He said it was like an instinct of coming evil."

"Then that accounts for it," cried the Squire, considerably relieved, and wondering how Jack could be so silly, if she was. "If your husband told you that, Alice, of course the first thing you'd do would be to go and dream of it."

"Perhaps so. What he said made no impression on me; he laughed as he said it: I don't suppose it made much on him. Please keep the paper."

The Squire carried the paper upstairs and locked it up in the little old walnut bureau in his bedroom. He told Alice where he had put it. And she, declining any refreshment, left again with little Polly for Timberdale Rectory.

"Has Herbert come to?" asked Tod laughingly, as he went to open the gate for her.

"Oh dear, no," answered Alice. "He never will, if you mean as to hearing me tell the dream."

They had a hot argument after she left: Mrs. Todhetley maintaining that some dreams were to be regarded as sacred things; while Tod ridiculed them with all his might, a.s.serting that there never had been, and never could be anything in them to affect sensible people. The Squire, now taking one side, now veering to the other, remained in a state of vacillation, something like Mahomet's coffin hovering between earth and heaven.

And, you will now readily understand that when the following morning, Wednesday, Colonel Letsom brought the Squire the news of Pym's death, calling it murder, and that Jack was suspected, and the s.h.i.+p had gone out without him, this dream of Alice Tanerton's took a new and not at all an agreeable prominence. Even Tod, sceptical Tod, allowed that it was "queer."

On this same morning, Wednesday, Alice received a letter from her husband. He spoke of the mishap to the s.h.i.+p, said that she had put back, and had again gone out; he himself being detained in London on business, but he expected to be off in a day or two and join her at some place down channel. But not a word did he say of the cause of his detention, or of the death of Edward Pym. She heard it from others.

With this confirmation, as it seemed, of her dream, Alice took it up more warmly. She went over to the old lawyer at Islip, John Paul, recounted the dream to him, and asked what she was to do. Naturally, old Paul told her "nothing:" and he must have laughed in his sleeve as he said it.

The good s.h.i.+p, _Rose of Delhi_, finally went away with all her sails set for the East; but John Tanerton went not with her.

The inquest on the unfortunate young man, Pym, was put off from time to time, and prolonged and procrastinated. Captain Tanerton had to wait its pleasure; the s.h.i.+p could not.

The case presented difficulties, and the jury could not see their way to come to a verdict. Matters looked rather black against Captain Tanerton; that was not denied; but not sufficiently black, it would seem, for the law to lay hold of him. At any rate, the law did not. Perhaps the persistent advocacy of Sir Dace Fontaine went some way with the jury.

Sir Dace gave it as his strong opinion that his misguided nephew, being the worse for drink, had fallen of himself, probably with his head on the iron fender, and that Captain Tanerton's denial was a strictly true one. The end finally arrived at was--that there was not sufficient evidence to show how the death was caused.

At the close of the investigation Jack went down to Timberdale. Not the open-hearted, ready-handed Jack of the old days, but a subdued, saddened man who seemed to have a care upon him. The foolish speech he had thoughtlessly made to Mr. Freeman preceded him: and Herbert Tanerton--always looking on the darkest side of everything and everybody, considered it a proof that Jack had done the deed.

Timberdale (including Crabb) held opposite opinions; half of it taking Captain Tanerton's side, half the contrary one. As to the Squire, he was more helpless than an old sheep. He had always liked Jack, had believed in him as in one of us: but, you see, when one gets into trouble, faith is apt to waver. A blow, argued the pater in private, is so easily given in the heat of pa.s.sion.

"A pretty kettle of fish this is," croaked Herbert to Jack, on his brother's arrival.