Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/460

 452 tune, yet such was my terror of discovery that I never could get beyond a single note, or at the most two, without stopping to look round and listen; so that the enjoyment of my stolen treasure was dreadfully circumscribed and disturbed.

the meantime, Thomas, who was considerably annoyed at the loss of his flageolet, had accused the groom, with whom he was not on good terms, of stealing it; and, at length, the accusation being repeated under aggravating circumstances, a quarrel arose, which led to a scuffle in which the groom was worsted; whereupon he gave his master warning, alleging his reasons for relinquishing his situation.

By this means the disappearance of the flageolet came to my father’s ears; and as Thomas declared his perfect conviction that it had been stolen by somebody in the house, since it had been taken out of his own bedroom—which, I am sorry to say, was quite true—the whole establishment was interrogated about it, the idea that we were harbouring a thief being exceedingly alarming to my grandmother. I was not present at this investigation, but my father had already asked me if I had seen anything of Thomas’s flageolet, and I had answered in the negative. It may, therefore, be imagined what my terrors were, and how anxiously I now desired to get rid of my Koh-i-noor, which was at that moment lying at the back of the drawer where I kept my lesson-books, which nobody ever opened but myself. For the future, however, I did not think that place of concealment sufficiently secure; and as I could not make up my mind either to burn the source of my woe, or throw it into the fish-pond, I buried it in a corner of the garden, where it might probably have remained to this day if I could have let it alone. But I could not. I was always hovering about the spot, and removing the earth that covered it, to make sure it was still there; till at last one of the gardeners, called Phibbs, who was an ill-natured fellow and my enemy, taking it in his head that I was sowing seeds, and trying to raise some flowers for myself, stuck his spade into the ground, and turned up the unfortunate flageolet.

Never shall I forget my fright when he grasped me with one iron hand and held up the broken instrument with the other, for the spade had struck it and snapt it in two. In vain I cried; in vain I prayed that he would not tell my father; he was not to be moved. I had often vexed him, no doubt; for having nothing to divert me, I was apt to indulge myself in a little mischief in the garden occasionally; and I am afraid my conscience was not quite clear with regard to the wall-fruit; but I had managed my depredations cunningly, and he had never been able to detect me. It was his turn now, however; and so he told me, as roaring and struggling he dragged me towards the house. How little people who make light of the troubles of children know what they are! It is true they are generally transitory; but, on the other hand, they are dreadfully intense. What anguish I suffered during our progress on that occasion! No criminal going to execution could suffer more! It happened fortunately, however, for me that on our way we had to pass the dairy, where Matty, the dairy-maid, a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked lass, who was busy with her milk-pans, hearing my screams, came to the door to inquire what the matter was; whereupon, seizing hold of her apron, I clung to her like a shipwrecked mariner to his plank, conjuring her to save me; and as the man was endeavouring to recommend himself to her good graces at the time, she prevailed on him to let me off.

But I remember, poor thing, that it was on the condition of some concession on her part that he yielded, which I thought nothing of at the moment, being wholly engrossed with my own peril; but circumstances that occurred some time after I had left home recalled what had passed on that occasion strongly to my recollection. It was during my residence at Mr. Carter’s school that one day, whilst reading the papers, he said to me, “Isn’t your father’s place called Elfdale?” I answered that it was; whereupon he handed me the journal, saying, “Something has happened to one of the servants there—the dairy-maid; and there seems some suspicion of foul play.”

Poor Matty’s beneficent interference at that critical moment of my life—for heaven knows from what tortures moral and physical she had redeemed me by the concessions she had made to her brutal lover—instantly recurred to my mind, and I read with painful interest an account of the discovery of her body in the fish-pond after she had been some days missing. How she had come there remained uncertain. She might have fallen in or thrown herself in; but as she had exhibited no depression of spirits, the latter supposition seemed improbable. Then there was a small wound on the back of her head, that might have been either the result of a blow or of her striking against a stone at the bottom of the water. The event was rendered more distressing by the fact that she was on the point of marriage with a farmer’s son in the neighbourhood, and to whom she was very much attached, as he was to her; and as it was a better match than she could reasonably have expected, there seemed nothing connected with that affair likely to have led to the catastrophe.

There was no evidence adduced against anybody at the inquest, and the jury brought in a verdict of Accidental Death, in spite of which, boy as I was, my mind reverted to Phibbs the gardener, and the words I had heard pass betwixt him and poor Martha Penning at the door of the dairy. I remembered how savagely he had first responded to her intercession, and how she had appeased him by promising not to walk on the Sunday with somebody, whose name I did not hear. It occurred to me that perhaps this somebody was the young farmer, whose regard for Martha, which time had ripened, might then have been beginning to show itself, and it seemed highly probable that the jealousy which Phibbs had then exhibited might have been wrought to some extremity by the prospects of their approaching marriage. However, as I never heard from Elfdale, my grandmother being by this time dead and my father on the Continent, I did not even