Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/502

 494 “Then what was it?” returned Susan Peckaby.

One of the present auditors was Roy the bailiff. He had only recently pushed in, and had stood listening in silence, taking in the various comments and opinions. As silently, he moved behind the group, and was stealing up the stairs. Mrs. Duff placed herself before him.

“Where be you a-going, Mr. Roy? Mr. Jan said as not a soul was to go a-nigh him to disturb him with talk. A nice thing, it ’ud be, for it to settle on his brain!”

“I ain’t a-going to disturb him,” returned Roy. “I have seen something myself to-night that is not over-kind. I’d like to get a inkling if it’s the same that has frighted him.”

“Was it in the pound?” eagerly asked Mrs. Peckaby.

“The pound be smothered!” was the polite answer vouchsafed by Roy. “Thee’ll go mad with th’ white donkey one of these days.”

“There can’t be any outlet to it, but one,” observed Mrs. Chuff, the blacksmith’s wife, giving her opinion in a loud key. “He must ha’ seen Rachel Frost’s ghost.”

“Have you been and seen that to-night, Mr. Roy?” cried Susan Peckaby.

“Maybe I have, and maybe I haven’t,” was Roy’s satisfactory reply. “All I say is, I’ve seen something that I’d rather not have seen; something that ’ud have sent all you women into fits. ’Twarn’t unlike Rachel, and ’twere clothed in white. I’ll just go and take a look at Dan, Mother Duff. No fear o’ my disturbing him.”

Mother Duff, absorbed with her visitors, allowed him to go on without further impediment. The first thing Roy did, upon getting up stairs, was to shut the chamber door; the next, to arouse and question the suffering Dan. Roy succeeded in getting from him the particulars already related; and a little more: insomuch that Dan mentioned the name which the dead man had borne in life.

Roy sat and stared at him after the revelation, keeping silence. It may have been that he was digesting the wonder: it may have been that he was deliberating upon his answer.

“Look you here, Dan Duff,” said he, by and by, holding the shaking boy by the shoulder. “You just breathe that name again to living mortal, and see if you don’t get hung up by the neck for it. ’Twas nothing but Rachel’s ghost. Them ghosts takes the form of anything that it pleases ’em to take; whether it’s a dead man’s, or whether it’s a woman’s, what do they care? There’s no ghost but Rachel’s ’ud be a-hovering over that pond. Where be your senses gone, not to know that?”

Poor Dan’s senses appeared to be wandering somewhere yet: they certainly were not in him. He shook and moaned, and finally fell into the same sort of stupor as before. Roy could make nothing further of him, and he went down.

“Well,” said he to the assemblage, “I’ve got it out of him. The minute he saw me, he stretched his arm out—‘Mr. Roy,’ says he, ‘I’m sick to unburden myself to somebody:’ and he up and told. He’s fell off again now, like one senseless, and I question if he’d remember telling me.”

“And what was it? And what was it?” questioned the chorus. “Rachel’s ghost?”

“It was nothing less, you may be sure,” replied Roy, his tone expressive of contempt that they should have thought it could be anything less. “The young idiot must take and go by the pond on this bright night, and in course he saw it. Right again his face, he says, it appeared; there wasn’t no mistaking of it. It was a-walking round and round the pool.”

Considerable shivering in the assembly. Polly Dawson, who was on its outskirts, shrieked, and pushed into its midst, as if it were a safer place. The women drew into a closer circle, and glanced round at an imaginary ghost behind their shoulders.

“Was it that as you saw yourself to-night, Mr. Roy?”

“Never mind me,” was Roy’s answer. “I ain’t one to be startled to death at sight of a sperit, like boys and women is. I had my pill in what I saw, I can tell ye. And my advice to ye all is, keep within your own doors after nightfall.”

Without further salutation, Roy departed. The women, with one accord, began to make for the staircase. To contemplate one who had just been in actual contact with the ghost—which some infidels had persistently asserted throughout was nothing but a myth—was a sight not to be missed. But they were driven back again. With a succession of yells, the like of which had never been heard, save at the Willow-pond that night, Dan appeared leaping down upon them, his legs naked and his short shirt flying behind him. To be left alone, a prey to ghosts or their remembrances, was more than the boy, with his consciousness upon him, could bear. The women yelled also, and fell back one upon another: not a few being under the impression that it was the ghost itself.

What was to be done with him? Before the question was finally decided, Mrs. Bascroft, the landlady of the Plough and Harrow, who had made one of the company, went off to her bar, whence she hastened back again with an immense hot tumbler, three parts brandy, one part water, the whole of which was poured down the throat of Dan.

“There’s nothing like it for restoring folks after a fright,” remarked Mrs. Bascroft.

The result of the dose was, that Dan Duff subsided into a state of real stupor, so profound and prolonged that even Jan began to doubt whether he would awake from it.

sat over his morning letters, bending upon one of them a perplexed brow. A claim which he had settled the previous spring—at least, which he believed had been settled—was now forwarded to him again. That there was very little limit to his wife’s extravagance he had begun to know.

In spite of Sibylla’s extensive purchases, made in Paris at the time of their marriage, she had contrived by the end of the following winter to run up a tolerable bill at her London milliner’s. When they had gone to town in the early spring this bill got presented to Lionel. Four hundred