She could not see either of them. But a noise in the kitchen beneath, as if the fire-irons were thrown down, seemed to say they had come back indoors. Another minute and her father came out with a lighted lantern in his hand; she wondered why, as it was moonlight. He crossed the yard and went into the back kitchen, or brewhouse, as it was more often called, and Katrine, hoping the quarrel was over, got into bed again. Presently the back door was shut with a bang that shook the room, and footsteps were heard ascending the stairs, and afterwards all was quiet until morning.
As on the past morning, so it was on this. When Katrine got downstairs she found that neither her father nor Mr. Reste was up. She breakfasted alone, and set off for the Manor afterwards.
But, as it chanced, she was to have partial holiday that day. Lena complained of a sore throat; she was subject to sore throats; so Miss Barbary was released when the lesson was half over, and returned home.
Going to her room to take her bonnet off, she found Joan busy there. From the window she saw her father at work at the far end of the garden. This was Thursday, the day of the projected walk to Church Leet, and very lovely weather. But Mr. Reste had not said anything about it since the Tuesday afternoon.
“Is Mr. Reste gone out, Joan?”
“Mr. Reste is gone, Miss Katrine.”
“Gone where?” asked she.
“Gone away; gone back to London,” said Joan. Upon which Katrine, staring at the old woman, inquired what she meant.
It appeared that Mr. Barbary had left his chamber close upon Katrine’s departure, and sat down to breakfast. When he had finished he called Joan to take the things away. She inquired whether they had not better be left for Mr. Reste. He answered that Mr. Reste was gone. “What, gone away back to London?” Joan cried, in surprise; and her master said, “Yes.” “You might just have knocked me down with a feather, Miss Katrine, I was that took to,” added Joan now, in relating this. “Never to say good-bye to me, nor anything!”
Katrine, thinking there was somebody else he had not said good-bye to, could hardly speak from amazement. “When did he go, Joan? Since breakfast? Or was he gone when I went out?”
“Well, I don’t know,” pondered Joan; “it seems all a moither in my head; as if I couldn’t put this and that together. I never saw nor heard anything of him at all this morning, and I find his bed has not been slept in, which looks as if he went last night. It’s odd, too, that he didn’t say he was going, and it’s odd he should start off to London at midnight. Your papa is in one of his short tempers, Miss Katrine, and I’ve not dared to ask him about it.”
Katrine, as she listened, felt perfectly bewildered. Why had he taken his departure in this strange manner? What for? What had caused him to do it? Joan had told all she knew, and it was of no use questioning her further.
Mr. Reste’s chamber door stood open; Katrine halted at it and looked in. Why! he seemed to have taken nothing with him! His coats were hanging up; trifles belonging to him lay about on chairs; on the side shelf stood his little portable desk—and she had heard him say that he never travelled without that desk, it went with him wherever he went. Opening a drawer or two, she saw his linen, his neckties, his handkerchiefs. What was the meaning of it all? Could he have been recalled to London in some desperate hurry? But no letter or summons of any kind had come to Caramel Cottage, so far as she knew, except the letter from Captain Amphlett on Tuesday morning, and that one had not recalled him.
“There be two pairs of his boots in the kitchen,” said Joan. “He has took none with him but them he’s got on.”
“I must ask papa about it,” cried the puzzled Katrine.
Mr. Barbary was at the bottom of the garden working away at the celery bed in his shirt sleeves; his coat lay across the cucumber-frame.
“What brings you home now?” he cried out, looking up as Katrine drew near.
“The little girl is not well. Papa,” she added, her voice taking a timid, shrinking tone, she hardly knew why, “Joan says Mr. Reste is gone.”
“Well?”
“But why has he left so suddenly, without saying anything about it?”
“He could do so if he pleased. He was at liberty to go or stay.”
Katrine could not dispute that. She hardly liked to say more, her father’s answers were so curt and cross.
“He must have gone unexpectedly, papa.”
“Unexpectedly! Not at all. He has been talking of going all the week.”
Katrine paused. “Is he coming back, papa?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But he has not taken any of his things.”
“I am going to pack his things and send them after him.”
“But–when did he go, papa?”
Mr. Barbary, who had kept on working, drew himself bolt upright. Letting his hands rest on the handle of his spade, he looked sternly into Katrine’s face.
“He went last night.”
“He–he never told me he was going. He never said anything about it.”
“And why should he tell you?” demanded Mr. Barbary. “It was enough that he told me. He thought he had been quite long enough away from his work, and that it was high time to go back to it. I thought the same. That’s all, Katrine; you need not inquire further. And now you can go indoors.”
She walked slowly up the narrow path, conscious that some mystery must lie behind this. Joan was standing in the yard, outside the back-kitchen door, trying to pull it open.
“This here back’us door’s locked!” exclaimed Joan, in her country vernacular. “I want the spare jack out; t’other’s given way at last.”
“It can’t be locked,” dissented Katrine. “It never is.”
“Well, I’ve never known the door locked afore; but ’tis now, Miss Katrine. I noticed it was shut to all day yesterday, but I didn’t try it.”
“It is only stuck,” said Katrine, laying hold of the high old-fashioned bow handle which served to lift the latch inside; and she shook it well.
“What’s that? What are you about?” called out Mr. Barbary, dashing up the path like a flash of lightning. “Let the door alone.”
“Joan says it is locked, papa,” said Katrine, frightened by his manner.
“And what if it is? I have locked up some—some wine there that came in. How dare you meddle with the places I choose to keep closed?”
“It’s the other jack I want out, sir,” said Joan, hearing imperfectly.
“You can’t have the other jack.”
“But, master, the old jack’s broke clean in two, and it’s time to put the lamb down.”
“Cut it into chops,” he cried, waving them both off, and standing, himself, before the door, as if to guard it, with a white, imperious, passionate face.
Single-minded old Joan went indoors, marvelling a little—such a bit of a trouble for him to have opened the back’us door and given her out the jack! Katrine followed, marvelling very much. She did not believe in the wine: felt sure no wine had come in; they never had any; what was it that was locked up there? All in a moment a thought flashed over her that it might be game: poached game: pheasants and partridges and hares. But, upon that thought came another: why should the spoil have been brought in on Tuesday night when it had never (as she believed) been brought before? Just a little came in for their own use, nothing more.
II
That day, Thursday, we had news of Don. And we had it in this way. Tobias Jellico—who had a small draper’s shop at Evesham, and went about the country with a pack, out of which he seduced unwary ladies to buy finery, more particularly some of our ladies living in Piefinch Cut—was at Church Dykely to-day on one of his periodical visitations. We did not like the man or his trade; but that’s neither here nor there. Hearing that the Squire’s dog was lost, he at once said he had seen Dick Standish that morning in Bengeworth (a portion of Evesham) with a large Newfoundland dog. White-and-brown, he called it; which was a mistake, for Don was white and black; but Jellico might not know colours. It was Mr. Duffham who brought us this news in the afternoon: he had been sent for to Lena, whose throat was getting worse. Duffham heard it from Perkins the butcher, to whom Jellico told it.
I don’t know which item pleased the Squire most: that Don was found, or that the guilt of Tuesday night was traced home to the Standishes; for the three brothers had in general a certain gentleman’s own luck, and were rarely caught.
“Don went out roaming, through that villain Giles unloosing him and leaving the yard gate open,” decided the Squire, in his excitement. “The dog must have sprung upon them; he has a mortal enmity to tramps and poachers, you know, Duffham; and the Standishes captured him. I’ll send a message to the police at Evesham at once, to look after Mr. Dick, and go over myself in the morning.”
“Anyway, I’m glad the dog’s found,” said Duffham. “But what an idiot Dick Standish must be to allow himself to be seen with the dog in the public streets.”
“Johnny,” said the Squire, turning to me as he was leaving the room to send a man galloping on horseback to the Evesham police, “you run over to Caramel Cottage. Make my compliments to young Reste; say that I am going to drive to Evesham to-morrow morning, and shall be happy to take him if he likes to accompany me. I offered to drive him over some day before he left, but this bother has caused me to delay it. Shall start at nine o’clock, tell him.”
About the time the Squire was charging me with this message, Katrine Barbary was sitting in the homely garden at Caramel Cottage, amidst the fruit trees, the vegetables, and the late flowers. The October sunlight fell on her pretty face, that somehow put you in mind of a peach with its softest bloom upon it.
Katrine was striving to see daylight out of a mass of perplexity, of which I then knew nothing, and she could not discern a single ray. Why should that fine young barrister, Edgar Reste, staying with them so peacefully for several weeks past, and fully intending to stay this week out—why should he have run away by night, leaving behind him an atmosphere of mystery? This question would never leave Katrine’s mind by night or by day.
Sitting there in the afternoon sun, she was running over mentally, for the tenth time or so, the details of the affair. One or two of them might have looked somewhat shady to a suspicious observer; to Katrine they presented only a web of perplexity. She felt sure that when she went to bed on the Wednesday night he had no thought of leaving; and yet it seemed that he did leave. When Joan rose in the early morning, he had disappeared—vanished, as may be said. The puzzle that Katrine could not solve was this: why had he gone away in haste so great that he could not take his clothes with him? and why had he gone at all in an unexpected, stealthy way, saying nothing to anybody?
“It looks just as though he had run away to escape some imminent danger, with not a minute to spare,” mused Katrine.
At this moment Katrine met with an interruption to her thoughts in the shape of me. Catching a glimpse of her print frock through the hedge, I went straight in at the little side gate, without troubling the front door.
“Sit down, Johnny,” she said, holding out her hand, and making room for me on the bench. And as I took the seat, I said what I had come for—to deliver the Squire’s message to Mr. Reste.
“Mr. Reste has left us,” said Katrine. “He went away last night.”
“Went away last night!” I exclaimed, the news surprising me uncommonly. “What took him off so suddenly?”
Open-natured as the day, Katrine told me the particulars (which proved that she had no dark fears about it as yet), of course saying nothing about the poaching. And she did mention the quarrel.
“It is so strange that he should leave all his things behind him—don’t you see that, Johnny?” she said. “Even that little desk, full of private papers, is left, and he never travels without it; his boots are left.”
“He must have had some news to call him away. A letter perhaps.”
“The only letter he has had lately came on Tuesday morning,” returned Katrine. “It had a good deal of money in it in bank-notes; sixty pounds; but it did not call him away. Nothing called him away, that I can discover. You can’t think how it is worrying me; it seems just a mystery.”
“Look here, Katrine,” I said, after mentally twisting the matter this way and that, “I’ve known the most unaccountable problems turn out to be the simplest on explanation. When you hear from him, as you most likely will in a day or two, I dare say he will tell you he was called away unexpectedly, and had to go at once. Does not Mr. Barbary know why he went?”
“Well, yes; I fancy he does: he is indoors now, packing Mr. Reste’s things: but he does not tell me.”
After talking a little longer, we strolled up the path together, and had reached the yard when Mr. Barbary suddenly opened the kitchen door to shake the dust from a coat that seemed covered with it. His handsome face took a haughty expression, and his slender, shapely form was drawn up in pride as he looked sternly at me, as much as to say, “What do you want here?”
I turned, on my way to the side gate, to explain: that Don had been seen at Evesham in the company of Dick Standish, that the Squire would be driving thither on the morrow, and had thought Mr. Reste might like to go with him.
“Very kind of Mr. Todhetley,” drawled Barbary in his stand-off manner. “Tell him, with my compliments and thanks for his courtesy, that my nephew has left for London.”
“Left for good, I suppose?” I said.
“For the present, at any rate. A pressing matter of business recalled him, and he had to attend to it without delay.”
I glanced at Katrine: there was the explanation.
“So the dog is at Evesham!” remarked Mr. Barbary. “The Standishes are great rogues, all three of them, and Dick’s the worst. But—I think—had you gone after him to-day, instead of delaying it until to-morrow, there might have been more certainty of finding him. Mr. Dick may give you leg-bail in the night.”
“The police will see he does not do that; the Squire has sent a messenger to warn them,” I replied. “I suppose you have not heard any more rumours about the poaching on Tuesday night, Mr. Barbary?”
“I’ve heard no more than was said at first—that the keepers reported some poachers were out, and they nearly came to an encounter with the rascals. Wish they had—and that I had seen the fun. Reste and I had walked to Church Leet and back that day; we were both tired and went upstairs betimes.”
To hear him coolly assert this, to see his good-looking face raised unblushingly to the sun as he said it, must have been as a bitter farce to Katrine, who had believed him, until a few days back, to be next door to a saint for truth and goodness. I put faith in it, not being then behind the scenes.
Mr. Barbary did his packing leisurely. Tea was over, and dusk set in before the portmanteau was shut up and its direction fastened to it. Katrine read the card. “Edgar Reste, Esq., Euston Square Station, London. To be left till called for.”
Very lonely felt Katrine, sitting by herself that evening, working a strip of muslin for a frill. He was not there to talk to her in his voice of music—for that’s what she had grown to think it, like other girls in love. She wondered whether they should ever meet again—ever, ever? She wondered how long it would be before a letter came from him, and whether he would write to her.
Mr. Barbary appeared at supper-time, ate some cold lamb in silence, seeming to be buried in thought, and went back to the gun-room when he had finished. Katrine got to her work again, did a little, then put it away for the night, and turned to the book-shelf to get a book.
Standing to make a choice of one, Katrine was seized with consternation. On the lower shelf, staring her right in the face, was Mr. Reste’s Bible. It had been given him by his dead father, and he set store by it. He must have left it downstairs the previous Sunday, and Joan had put it away on the shelves amongst the other books.
“I wonder if papa would mind opening the portmanteau again?” thought Katrine, as she hastened to the gun-room, and entered.
“Papa! papa! here’s Mr. Reste’s Bible left out,” she cried, impulsively. “Can you put it into the portmanteau?”
Mr. Barbary stood by the small safe in the wall, the door of which was open. In his hand lay some bank-notes; he was holding them towards the candle on the deal table, and seemed to be counting them. Katrine, thinking of the Bible and of nothing else, went close to him, and her eye fell on the notes. He flung them into the cupboard in a covert manner, gave the door a slam, turned an angry face on Katrine, and a sharp tongue.
“Why do you come bursting in upon me in this boisterous fashion? I won’t have it. What? Will I undo the portmanteau to put in a Bible? No, I won’t. Keep it till he chooses to come for it.”
She shrank away frightened, softly closing the door behind her. Those bank-notes belonged to Mr. Reste: they were the same she had seen him put into his pocket-book two days ago. Why had he not taken them with him?—what brought them in her father’s possession? The advance shadow of the dark trouble, soon to come, crept into Katrine Barbary’s heart.
In no mood for reading now, she went to bed, and lay trying to think it out. What did it all mean? Had her father conjured the pocket-book by sleight-of-hand out of Mr. Reste’s keeping and stolen the notes? She strove to put the disgraceful thought away from her, and could not. The distress brought to her by the poaching seemed as nothing to this, bad though that was.—And would he venture abroad to-night again?
Joan’s light foot-fall passed her door, going up to her bed in the roof. Once there, nothing ever disturbed the old servant or her deafness until getting-up time in the morning. Katrine lay on, no sleep in her eyes; half the night it would have seemed, but that she had learned how slowly time passes with the restless. Still, it was a good while past twelve, she thought, when curious sounds, as of digging, seemed to arise from the garden. Sounds too faint perhaps to have been heard in the day-time, but which penetrated to her ear unless she was mistaken, in the deep, uncanny, undisturbed silence of the night. She sat up in bed to listen.
There, it came again! What could it be? People did not dig up gardens at midnight. Slipping out of bed, she drew the blind aside and peeped out.
The night was light as day, with a bright, clear, beautiful moon: the hunters’ moon. Underneath the summer-apple tree, close at this end of the garden, bent Mr. Barbary, digging away with all his might, his large iron spade turning up the earth swiftly and silently. Katrine’s eyes grew wide with amazement. He had dug up that same plot of ground only a few days ago, in readiness to plant winter greens: she and Edgar Reste had stood looking on for a time, talking with him as to the sort of greens he meant to put in. Why was he digging up the same ground again?—and why was he doing it at this unearthly hour?
It appeared to be a hole that was being dug now, for he threw the spadefuls of mould up on each side pretty far. The ground seemed quite soft and pliant; owing perhaps to its having been so recently turned. As the hole grew larger; wider and longer and deeper; an idea flashed over Katrine that it looked just as though it were meant for a grave. Not that she thought it.
Putting a warm shawl on her shoulders and slippers on her feet, she sat down before the window, drew the blind up an inch or two, and kept looking out, her curiosity greatly excited. The moon shone steadily, the time passed, and the hole grew yet larger. Suddenly Mr. Barbary paused in his work, and held up his head as if to listen. Did he fear, or fancy, a noise in the field pathway outside, or in the dark grove to the right near Caramel’s Farm? Apparently so: and that he must not be seen at his work. For he got out of the hole, left the spade in it, came with noiseless, swift, stealthy movement up the yard, and concealed himself in the dark tool-shed. Presently, he stole across to the little gate, looked well about him to the right and left, and then resumed his digging.
Quite six feet long it soon looked to Katrine, and three or more feet wide, and how deep she knew not. Was it for a grave? The apprehension really stole across her, and with a sick faintness. If so, if so—? A welcome ray of possibility dawned then. Had her father (warned by this stir that was going on, the search for poachers and their spoil) a lot of contraband game in his possession that must be hidden away out of sight? Perhaps so.
It seemed to be finished now. The moon had sailed ever so far across the sky by this time, but was still shining full upon it. Mr. Barbary crept again to the gate and stood listening and looking up and down in the silence of the night. Then he crossed to the brewhouse, took the key from his pocket, unlocked it, and went inside. Katrine could see the flash of the match as he struck a light.
When he emerged from the brewhouse he was dragging a weight along the ground with two strong cords. A huge, unshapely, heavy substance enveloped in what looked like matting or sacking. Dragging it straight over the yard to the grave, Mr. Barbary let it fall carefully in, cords and all, and began to shovel in the mould upon it with desperate haste.
Terror seized on Katrine. What was in that matting? All in an instant, a little corner of the veil—that had obscured from her understanding so much which had seemed mysterious and unfathomable—lifted itself, bringing to her an awful conviction. Was it Edgar Reste that was being put out of the way; buried for ever from the sight of man? Her father must have killed him; must have done it in a passion! Katrine Barbary cried out with a loud and bitter cry.
Fascinated by the sight of terror, she was unable to draw her eyes away. But the next moment they had caught sight of another object, bringing equal terror, though of a different nature: some one, who had apparently crept in at the gate unheard, was standing at the corner of the garden hedge, looking on. Was it an officer of the law, come to spy upon her father and denounce his crime? But, even as she gazed, the figure drew back to make its exit by the gate again, and to Katrine it seemed to take my form.
“It is Johnny Ludlow!” she gasped. “Oh, I pray that it may be! I think he would not betray him.”
Katrine watched on. She saw the grave filled in; she saw her father stamp it down; she saw him carry the superfluous mould to a place under the wall, near the manure bed, and she saw him stamp that down, and then cover it loosely with some of the manure, so that it might look like a part of the heap. Then he seemed to be coming in, and Katrine thought it must be nearing the dawn.
Creeping into bed, she hid her face, that never again ought to show itself amidst honest men, under the clothes. Some covert stir yet seemed to be going on in the yard, as of pumping and scrubbing. Turning from hot to cold, from cold to hot, Katrine was seized with a shivering fit.
“And who really was it watching?” she moaned. “It looked like Johnny, yet I can’t be sure; he stood in the shade.”
But it was me, as the schoolboys say. And the reason of my being there at the small, unearthly hours of the morning, together with the conclusion of this appalling story, will be found in the next chapter.