My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure
I
Aunt Margaret at Home
My Aunt Margaret was what is termed a clever woman—that is to say, she was keen and resolute, prompt and active, and difficult to overreach in matters of money or business. Of the former she was, people said, a little too fond. At all events she hated waste, and lived frugally on a dietary which leaned much upon tea and eggs, and sometimes omitted dinner altogether. But though light, her housekeeping was neither beggarly nor altogether uncomfortable.
Aunt Margaret, as I remember her—dear me, how many years ago!—was rather tall, if anything, and decidedly slim and erect, with a countenance which, though shrewd and energetic, had yet something kindly in it. Her features were small and nicely turned, and one could quite suppose that she might have been a pretty girl once on a time.
She held herself well, and stepped with a good, firm tread, and lightly withal. Hers was a rustic life, somewhat lonely, in a three-storied house, with three rooms on a floor, and a gable at front—steep-roofed and tiled, and with a great growth of jessamine and woodbine about the porch and the windows. Half a dozen tall, dark elms made a comfortable shadow about the house; and a white paling in front enclosed, by the roadside, the little flower garden, with an old mulberry tree in the centre.
In the rear was a lockup yard with coach-house and stable, and a comfortable room in which old Tom Clinton slept with a blunderbuss and backsword in case of robbers. On weekdays Aunt Margaret dressed very plainly—stuff in winter, cotton in summer; but on Sundays she went to church in thick old satins or ancient brocades, so stiff that the squire’s lady across the aisle used to talk of them covetously for days after, and wonder why such things were not to be had nowadays.
Aunt Margaret was always particularly neat. She used to carry her keys in an old-fashioned way, from a ribbon by her side, a neat little pincushion, her scissors, and I forget what else. It was the tradition of that chatelaine which I saw revived long after poor Aunt Margaret had gone to her rest. She had long and very pretty hands—her years considered; and, in fact, the only thing I remember decidedly against her was her enamelled box of rappee, and the habit to which it ministered.
Her prime-minister was Winnifred Dobbs—fattish, rosy, ancient. Time had thinned her flowing hair, and bleached it somewhat; but she smiled largely, and was good-humoured; although not very quick, was steady and sure, and chatted volubly, though not always much to the purpose; and Aunt Margaret gave her her tea in the drawing-room, which was an excuse for keeping her there for the rest of the evening; and so Aunt Margaret was not quite so lonely as she might have been.
There was a young and stumpy girl beside, who washed, and did nearly everything, and must have found these young days rather dull. To her the view of the road from the kitchen window was a resource, and the occasional calls of the baker, butcher, and dairyman were precious. She talked and laughed with herself; she sang a great deal in the scullery, and joked with the cat in the kitchen.
Among Aunt Margaret’s sources of revenue was her moiety of what she called the Winderbrooke property. Everybody, of course, knows the old town of Winderbrooke. Three houses in the main street belonged to her and her sister. Of these, for convenience, they made a division, the best they could. Aunt Margaret had for her share a tobacconist and half a tailor. The latter was punctual; but the tobacconist owed a whole year’s rent, and was already some way in his third half-year. His letters were highly unsatisfactory. The tailor’s answers to her inquiries about his defaulting neighbour were reserved and evasive. But that she had a wise terror of law and lawyers my Aunt would have retained an attorney forthwith.
“I’m not suprised, Winnie,” said my Aunt, snuffing her candle, as she and her confidential handmaid sat by the fire, in her diminutive drawing-room, at their tea; “not the least. Did you ever know one man tell of another when a woman was concerned? John Pendle has been my tenant eleven years and knows all about that roguish snuff-man; but he won’t tell me one iota about him. Not that Browning is anything on earth to him. I suppose he doesn’t care if Browning was hanged; but simply Browning is a man, and I a woman. That’s it, Winnie—that’s all—I’m to be robbed, and no one to prevent it. A conspiracy I call it. I tell you, Winnie, I never knew one man prevent another’s robbing a woman, except when he hoped to rob her himself.”
Honest Dobbs’s fat face and round eyes looked distressed over her teacup at her mistress, while she discoursed; and she made answer only by that expressive but unspellable tick-tick-ticking made by the tip of the tongue at the back of the teeth.
“And rob me they would, Winnie, if I were half such a fool as you, for instance. But I’ll show them there are women who do know something of business.”
And she nodded mysteriously, but briskly, on her maid with a side-glance of her dark eye.
“I mean to start tomorrow morning, after breakfast, at eight o’clock. You come with me, Winnie, and we’ll sleep tomorrow night at Winderbrooke, and that, I think, will surprise them.”
II
My Aunt Margaret on the Road
Old Tom Teukesbury, from the “Bull,” was not at the little wicket of Aunt Margaret’s habitation until sixteen minutes past nine.
As Tom drew up, driving a one-horse covered vehicle, the name and fashion of which have long passed away, my Aunt, fully equipped was standing on the step of her open door, with her watch in her right hand, the dial of which she presented grimly at Tom, perched in the distance on the box.
Tom’s lean, mulberry-coloured face, sharp nose, and cold gray eyes winced not at the taunt.
“It’s easy a showin’ a watch. I’d like to know where the ’oss is to come from, if maister sends the grey to Huntley, and Jack can’t go in harness noways; and here’s the bay can’t go neither without a brushing boot; and I’m to go down to Hoxton to borrow one of Squire; there’s a raw there as big as my hand—you don’t want her to founder ’twixt this and Muckleston, I’m sure; and you wouldn’t be so hard on the brute, to drive her without one—and that’s why, ma’am.”
Tom’s way with women when he was late, was to complicate the case, with an issue on farriery, which soon shuts them up.
So Winnifred got in with a basket of edibles, and the carpetbag on the seat beside my Aunt, who entered the vehicle severely.
It was a journey of nearly forty miles, by crossroads, to Winderbrooke. All geographers well know the range of hills that lie between Hoxton and that town. The landscape is charming—the air invigorating. But the pull up the steep road that scales the side of the hill, is severe. The bay-mare showed signs of her soft feeding. She was hirsute, clumsy, and sudorous. She had a paunch, and now and then a cavernous cough.
The progress was, therefore, slow; and the ladies, every here and there, up particularly stiff bits, were obliged to get out and walk, which, although my Aunt might not mind it much, distressed good Winnifred Dobbs, who was in no condition for executing an excelsior movement on foot.
Near the summit of the hill the ladies waxed hungry; so, it was presumed, did the mare. The party halted; the nosebag was applied; the basket was opened; Tom had a couple of clumsy sandwiches; the ladies partook; and the bay mare enjoyed her repast with that pleasant crisp crunching, which agreeably suggests good grinders and a good grist.
There was still a little pull before reaching the crown of the hill. Winnifred could walk no more; but my Aunt trod nimbly up the ascent, and on reaching the summit, made a halt, and, like an invading general, viewed with an eye at once curious and commanding, the country that lay beneath.
She was looking for Winderbrooke close by the foot of the hill.
“Where’s the town?” demanded my Aunt.
“Wat toon, ma’am?” inquired Tom.
“Winderbrooke, to be sure.”
“Well, Winderbrooke will be there.”
Tom was pistoling Winderbrooke with his whip.
“Where?”
“You see the steeple there?”
“Ay.”
“Well, that isn’t it.”
“No?”
“Now, ye’ll see a bit of a rock or a hillock atop o’ that hill.”
“That hill—well?”
“Now, follow that line on past that whitish thing ye see.”
“You don’t mean on that remote plain? Why, man, that’s the horizon.”
“Well, it’s beyond that a little bit, over the rising ground that will be jest there; and folks say, on a clear day, you may see the smoke o’ the toon over it, though I never did.”
There was a pause, and my Aunt looked stern and black toward the remote objects which he indicated and neither could see, and then she looked back over her shoulder in the direction of home. I can’t say what was passing in her mind; but she looked forward again, and with an angry side-glance at Tom, she said—
“Why, it’s a perfect journey!”
There was another pause, and she said with a dry abruptness, “Let me in, please;” and in the same defiant tone, “Go on!”
And she drew up the window with a sharp clang in Tom’s face.
She sat stiff and silent, and sniffed as she looked sternly through the window, and answered Winnifred Dobbs, who was under the same comfortable delusion about the vicinity of Winderbrooke, sharply and suddenly, when she asked how far they still had to go, before reaching that resting place.
“Fifty miles, and another range of mountains.”
III
The Moon Rises
Down hill was pleasanter, and the bay mare did wonders, and my Aunt, who was not more unjust than the rest of her sex, soon forgave her companion, and talked affably enough with fat old Winnie Dobbs.
About two miles beyond the foot of the hill, in a pretty hollow, lies the pleasant little town of Dramworth, with old red brick gables and many tall poplars, where at the small inn, the party changed horses.
It was not far from three o’clock in the afternoon when they arrived there. One horse they found in the inn stable, but nothing less than a post-chaise, and no driver on the premises, men and vehicles being away on other travels.
Tom being well known there, and fortunately being well esteemed, there was no great hesitation in trusting the horse in his hands. So the bay mare took her place in the stable, and the Dramworth steed was put to in her place. It was a long drive—three-and-twenty miles—still to Winderbrooke, and the horse and the roads indifferent. The season was pretty well on in the autumn, and the evenings were not so long as they had been at midsummer, and as it was some time past three when they started, Tom could not undertake to reach their destination before nightfall.
From Dramworth to Winderbrooke was by no means so familiar a route to Tom Teukesbury as the road they had travelled hitherto. He conferred, however, with mine host under the porch, and gathered in brief hints and notes, the landmarks of his journey, and resumed the whip and reins with a serious but tolerably confident countenance.
Tom being under promise to spare the horse, drove drowsily. It is a very pretty country, though but thinly inhabited. The sun was by this time at the verge of those low hills that lie to the westward. They had just crossed a narrow old bridge over a little stream, and there was an ascent at the other side, which their horse refused to mount until the ladies had descended. In fact he was an unsatisfactory brute and, Tom feared, had been out that morning.
My Aunt and Winnifred got down and trudged on, this time in front of the vehicle, which came tinkling up the slope, in the slanting light, with Tom at the horse’s head. In this lonely region a solitary little boy came over a stile by the roadside, and looking back, Aunt Margaret saw Tom at a standstill, conversing with the urchin, and pointing in various directions in illustration of his discourse, or his questioning.
“Well, Tom, what does he say? How far is it to Winderbrooke?”
“He is a stoopid, that boy, and knows nout—no more than that post, ma’am—he doan’t.”
I think Tom was uneasy by this time, for he did not know the country. He was gaping about him vainly for a sight of a human being, and standing up in the “dickey” and beckoning with his whip whenever he fancied he saw one. But each in succession turned out to be a horse or a goat, or a post. Sometimes he got up a brisk trot, and sometimes subsided almost to a walk, as his doubts or his hopes prevailed. But though he affected in replying to my Aunt’s queries through the front window, a confidence as to their whereabouts, and promised the early appearance of certain landmarks which he named, yet I think by this time honest Tom was strongly of opinion that he had lost his way.
By the time the sun went down they had got upon a wild moorland with patches of stunted old wood, and heathy undulations, and distant boundaries of low hills, crowned irregularly with trees.
“Get on a little faster, please; I don’t like being out in the dark,” urged my Aunt who, as a spinster, and in charge beside of Winnie Dobbs, felt her responsibilities duly.
Tom muttered to himself, and got into a trot which, however, soon abated. Twilight was deepening and a round harvest moon soon began to shine solemnly over the broad and solitary landscape.
“How many miles now, Tom?” asked my Aunt sharply from the window.
“It’ll be about five from Winderbrooke, ma’am.”
“And what’s this place?”
“Well, it’s the moor, I suppose.”
“I’d like a glass of water. Is there a house near?”
“We’ll be soon at the cross-mills—round that bit of a clump o’ trees there.”
But when they passed the clump there was neither river nor mills, and Tom stood up uneasily in the dickey, and made a dreary survey.
“Are we at the mills, Tom?”
“Not yet a bit, ma’am—I’m a looking if there’s a house near.”
But there was no friendly red twinkle from cottage window, and Tom, with his two maidens in charge, was growing very uncomfortable.
IV
Perturbation
They drove very slowly. Tom was groping in a geographical chaos, and paused every now and then. My Aunt inquired angrily, demanding the production of the cross-mills. Tom asked ten minutes, and half a mile more, and promised the profert; but after half an hour’s driving, with no result, my Aunt grew extremely frightened and exasperated, and Tom sulkily admitted that he had his doubts as to their topographical position.
Tom halted, and stood up in the dickey, as before. My Aunt Margaret descended, and looking at the moonlit prospect from the bank by the roadside, harangued the troubled driver in strong and shrill language; and Winnie, whose grief was more sedentary, sat in the vehicle, and spoke not, but stared through the window, with a fat and fatigued sadness, in vague apprehension.
There were plenty of old stories of highwaymen afloat through their scared fancies; and here was a lonely heath—two helpless maidens also, with a trunk, a basket of “prog,” and four pounds seven and sixpence in a purse, and a driver without small or backsword, and no pistols!
“We’ll, sure, get on the London road in two miles more or less, and then we’re all right,” said Tom.
“London, fiddle! It’s my belief, Thomas Teukesbury, you have not the faintest idea where we are; you haven’t, sir, no more than myself.”
“There isn’t a light nor a house. D⸺n the place!” retorted Tom, bitterly.
“Don’t curse—we’re bad enough. No impiety, please. You should command yourself, I think, if I do, while we are in this helpless and utterly unprotected situation.”
“There’s a man coming,” said Tom, hopefully.
“Good gracious!” cried my Aunt.
“No, there aint,” said Tom, dejectedly.
“Heaven be praised!” said my Aunt, with a gasp. “I look on it, sir, we’re in danger here on this dreadful moor, to which you, sir, have brought us. What a shame, Thomas, to pretend you knew the way! Winnie, Winnie Dobbs, we’re lost—lost on a heath! Tom has lost us!”
Winnie’s fat, forlorn face filled the back window of the vehicle.
“Lost on a heath, Winnie, in the middle of the night!”
“What’ll we best do, ma’am?” imploringly asked Winnie, who was accustomed to derive her stock of wisdom in all emergencies from my Aunt Margaret’s inspiration.
“Ask Thomas Teukesbury up there—he’s our guide. He brought us here, though he does not seem to know a way out. Ask him. I don’t know, no more than the man in the moon there.”
“I dessay we’re all right enough, after all,” said Tom, “only I don’t know it by this light. Will you get in, ma’am, and we’ll git on a bit, and we’ll, sure, light on a hinn or a public afore long.”
Well, she did get in. The horse was unmistakably fatigued, with a disposition to draw up every now and then, by an old tree, or under a steep bank, or sometimes without any special landmark to invite.
Tom got down, and walked by the brute’s dejected head; and my Aunt, who had given up the sarcastic and ironical mood as her alarms deepened, scolded him occasionally from the front window. As the back of his head and shoulders were presented, Tom walked on, not caring to turn about to reply, but, I am afraid, making some disrespectful remarks in the dark.
In fact, the poor horse, who, if he had but understood and spoken our language, could, probably, have saved them and himself a world of trouble, was so evidently done up that Tom insisted he must have his oats, and accordingly, he partook of that refreshment in a nosebag. Here was another delay. My Aunt’s watch had been frequently consulted, by the moonlight, during that anxious journey. It was now out again. The night was a little sharp, too; and the whole party, who had made no provision for such a climate and such hours, were rather cold. You may be sure my Aunt’s temper was not growing more agreeable.
There was just the alternative of a bivouac where they stood, or following, on chance, the road they had been pursuing. My Aunt adopted the latter. Affairs had grown so serious that she now never removed her face from the little front window, through which she looked ahead, with hope deferred, and a sick heart.
She had been so often deceived by marly banks and thickets, that it was not until they had almost reached it, to her inexpressible relief, she plainly saw the whitewashed front of a low, two-storied public, standing back from the road a few yards, and snugly sheltered among some thick and stunted trees.
My Aunt held the reins through the window, and Tom got down and summoned mine host. A red streak of candlelight shot out through the door of the pothouse, and there was a parley which she could not hear.
V
The Good Woman
Tom returned slowly. My Aunt’s heart sank.
“Well?”
“Only two rooms, ma’am, and lofts above, and the house full o’ tipsy colliers, dancing. But there’s an inn, called The Good Woman, only half a mile on, and lots o’ room.”
My Aunt breathed a sigh of relief, and was silently thankful. Then she repeated the news to Winnie, who joined in the jubilation.
About ten minutes more brought them, after a slight ascent, on a sudden, to a hollow, expanding to an amphitheatrical plain, encompassed by wooded, rising grounds, and near the centre of which rose two abrupt and oddly-shaped hillocks, like islands from a lake, and a very large pond from under a thick screen of trees, and the clustered gables and chimneys of The Good Woman shone mistily in the moonlight.
They drew up before the door of the inn. Old-fashioned and weather-stained it looked in the faint beams. The door was closed—it was past ten o’clock—but a glimmer of candle or firelight shone through the shutter chink at the right. My Aunt did not wait. There was no need to hold the reins of the timid horse, who coughed, snorted, and shook himself, with his nose near the ground.
My Aunt Margaret ran up the three broad steps, the dingy “Good Woman,” without a head, sarcastically swinging between the signposts at her left.
With the carpetbag in one hand, she hammered lustily at the knocker with the other. Tom, a little in the rear, with one foot on the steps, rested the trunk on his knee; and Winnie, with the basket of “prog” on her arm, stood dejectedly beside him.
There was some delay about opening the door, and when it was done, it was with a chain across, and a woman, with a coarse voice, and strong Irish accent, asked, not pleasantly, who was there.
“Travellers,” said my Aunt, “who have been led astray by the driver.”
“Where are yez from?”
“From Dramworth to Winderbrooke.”
“From Dhramworth to Windherbrooke! an’ he dhruv yez here! How many iv yez is in it?”
“Two ladies, a horse, a vehicle, and the driver.” Tom, the culprit, was degraded, and my Aunt placed him after the vehicle.
The maid of the inn, with high-cheek bones, and a determined countenance, was looking over the chain.
“Did yez come through the village, or over the moor?”
“Over the moor, I suppose; from that direction,” answered my Aunt.
“And why didn’t yez stop at ‘The Cat and Fiddle?’
“You mean the small alehouse near this. It was full of inebriated men,” answered Aunt Margaret, with dignity.
“Well, you may come in, ma’am, and the leedy that’s widge ye; but we can’t accommodate yer man, and he must only take the horse an’ carriage back to The Cat an’ Fiddle, an’ if that’ll answer, yez may come in; if not, yez must all go on, for we won’t let a man in after ten o’clock.”
My Aunt expostulated, but the portress was inexorable.
“We won’t let a man in after ten o’clock for Saint Payther, and that’s the holy all iv it,” she answered, firmly.
So, my Aunt submitted, and softening at the parting, gave Tom some shillings on account, and wished him good night; and when he had got upon the box, and started afresh for “The Cat and Fiddle,” and had made some way in his return, the door was shut in the faces of the spinsters, who stood, with their modest luggage, upon the steps, in the moonlight. The chain was withdrawn, and the hall of The Good Woman stood open to receive them.
I don’t know whether my Aunt had read Ferdinand Count Fathom, or ever seen the Bleeding Nun performed on any stage; but if she had I venture to say she was reminded of both before morning.
The woman with high-cheek bones, and somewhat forbidding face, stood before them on their entrance, with a brass candlestick raised in her hand, so that the light fell from above her head on the faces of the guests. She had allowed them without a helping hand to pull in their luggage, and was now making a steady and somewhat scowling scrutiny of my Aunt and Winnie.
“And yez come from Windherbrooke?” she said, after an interval, with a jealous glance still upon them.
My Aunt nodded.
“Yer mighty tall, the two o’ yez, I’m thinkin’ ” (another pause.) “Will I help yez off widge yer cloaks?”
My Aunt would have probably been tart enough upon this uncivil damsel, had it not been that her attention was a little called off by the sound of female lamentation indistinctly audible from a chamber near the hall.
She proceeded to remove their mantles, eyeing them, at the same time, with a surly sort of curiosity.
“We are cold, my good woman; we can sit for a while by the kitchen fire,” said my Aunt, recollecting herself.
“The kitchen’s all through other wid the sutt that’s tumbled down the chimbley; bud I’ll light yez a bit o’ fire in a brace o’ shakes in your bedroom. Is it dinner yez’ill be wanting?”
“Tea, please,” said my Aunt, “and eggs.”
“Lend a hand i’ ye plase, Missess, wid them things,” said she to Winnie, whom, with the quick instinct of her kind, she discovered to be the subordinate.
VI
The White Chamber
A fat slatternly woman, by no means young, with a face swollen and red with weeping, pushed open a side door, and standing behind the portress, gaped on them, and asked—
“Is it them, Nell?”
“Arra, ma’am, can’t ye keep quite. No it isn’t no one, but here’s two leedies ye see, that wants a bed an’ a fire, and a cup o’ tay in the white room. Come along i’ ye plase, my leedy.”
And in an’ aside, as she passed, my Aunt heard her say, close in the blubbered face of the fat woman—
“Arrah, ma’am, dear, will ye get in out o’ that, an’ shut the doore.”
The stout woman complied; and as they mounted the broad stairs, they again heard the sounds of crying.
This certainly savoured in no wise of the warm welcome for which inns are famous. The mansion, too, was old, wainscoted, and palpably altogether too large for its business. They met Boots coming down the stairs with a dingy kitchen candle and a hammer in his hand; a pallid fellow, with the sort of inquiring hangdog look that seemed to belong to the staff of The Good Woman. He stood close by the wall in the corner of the lobby as they passed by, and did not offer to carry up the trunk.
“Bring a guvvaul o’ wudd, will ye, Barney, jewel, to the white room?” said the handmaid over her shoulder.
My Aunt and Winnie followed her to the head of the stairs, where she placed the trunk, and this slight circumstance I mention, because it was immediately connected with my Aunt’s adventure, and she took a coal-scuttle instead, and conducting by two turns into a long wainscoted gallery, she opened a door on the right, and they entered a large square room, with a recess near one angle, two tall narrow windows, with white curtains rather yellow, and one very capacious bed, with curtains of the same. There was a skimpy bit of carpet near the hearth, and very scant and plain furniture.
The wood having arrived, Nell made a good fire, placed the deal table and two chairs near it, lighted a large mould of four to the pound, such as Molly Dumpling sported on the night of her dreadful adventure with William Gardner, and altogether the room began to put on its cheeriest looks. And when the tea-things, eggs, and buttered toast arrived, my Aunt and Winnie being well warmed by this time, sat down with their feet on the fender, the one mollified and the other consoled.
After tea, my Aunt, who was a fidgetty person, made a tour of the room, and a scrutiny of the open cupboard and drawers, but she found nothing, except an old black glove for the left hand, in one of the drawers.
When this was over she sat by the fire again, and speculated for Winnie’s instruction upon their geographical probabilities. But Winnie was growing sleepy.
“A double-bedded room would have been more comme il faut; but it is plainly a poor place, and after all the bed is unusually large,” thought my Aunt.
And so, indeed, it was, extraordinarily large, and of an old-fashioned construction.
My Aunt, who was of an active inquiring genius, opened a bit of one of the shutters and peeped out. It showed a view of the inn yard. The side next her had been formed by a wing of the house; but that now stood up a gaunt roofless wall, with the broad moon shining through its sashless windows. On the left was a row of tall and dingy stables and offices, and opposite, another ruined building, a shed, and a tall arched gate. The pavement was grass-grown and rutty, and the whole thing looked awfully seedy, and not the less gloomy for some great trees that darkly overhung the buildings from the outside.
Having made her survey, my Aunt would have closed the shutter, but that she saw a man walk lazily from the side beneath her, his hands in his pockets, across the yard, casting an undulating and misshapen shadow over the uneven pavement.
When he reached the gate at the other side, he took a key from his pocket, and unlocked a wicket in it, and setting his foot on the plank beneath, leaned his elbow on the side, and lazily looked out, as if on the watch for somebody. A huge dog came pattering out of a kennel in the shadow, and placing his great head by the man’s leg, sniffed gloomily into the darkness.
“Are ye expectin’ any friends, ma’am?” asked Nell’s coarse voice over my Aunt’s shoulder, so sharply and suddenly that the start brought the blood to her thin cheeks.
“Not very likely to see friends here,” replied my Aunt, very tartly. “What do you mean, woman, by talking that way over my shoulder?”
The grim chambermaid by this time had seen the man, and was eyeing him under her projecting and somewhat shrewish brows.
“An’ ye come from Hoxton?” she said rather slowly and sharply.
“I told you so, woman.”
“It wasn’t from Westherton, ye’re sure?”
“I’ve told you where we came from, though it is no business of yours. I never heard of Westerton.”
My Aunt added this a little emphatically, owing to an undefined feeling that a suspicion of having come from Westerton was likely in some mysterious way to prejudice her.
The maid replied nothing, but said a little gruffly,
“By your lave, ma’am;” and pushing by her, she closed the shutters, and drew a great wooden sliding bolt across with a jerk.
My Aunt was so taken by surprise that she lost her time for retorting with effect, as she would have done, but she was so incensed, that from the fireplace she could not forbear saying,
“I think you a most impertinent woman.”
To which the maid made no reply, but turned down the bedclothes, and arranged the curtains; and gathering together the tea equipage, carried the tray away, shutting the door.
VII
An Accident Befalls the Candle
My Aunt Margaret stood for a while with her back to the fire, very erect, and her nose in air, sniffing defiantly toward the door through which that “most impertinent woman” had disappeared. Winnie was nodding profoundly in her chair by the fire. My Aunt with a toss of her head walked off again to the window, jerked back the bolt, and looked once more into the stable-yard.
She saw Nell at the wicket-door, talking and gesticulating roughly with the man who had taken his stand there with the dog. Nell seemed to prevail with him, for he whistled back the dog, who had gone out, and locking the door again, he returned across the yard with Nell, who continued talking volubly as they walked side by side, and pointed up at my Aunt’s window. On seeing the shutter again open and my Aunt’s head and shoulders revealed against the light, both maid and man stopped in amaze, and silently gazed at her for some moments. I dare say, as my Aunt observed the evident impression produced upon those mysterious persons, she regretted inwardly the act of defiance which had removed the bolt and replaced her at the window. The woman walked into the house without speaking; the man called the dog, and strolled away towards the stable.
My Aunt closed the shutter, drew the bolt, and coming again to the fire, shook Winnie up from her sleep, and ordered her to say her prayers and get to bed.
These orders were soon complied with, and honest Winnie slept the sleep of a good conscience and a good digestion, sweetened by fatigue, while her mistress, who was cursed with an active mind, sat by the fire, with a well-snuffed candle, and conned over her correspondence and her figures, and prepared for the critical interview with the defaulting tobacconist next day. Then she fell into a reverie with her foot on the fender. I don’t think she dozed; but the fire grew low, and the snuff of the candle waxed long and heavy at top like a fungus, and the room was tenebrose and silent, as indeed was the house, for by this time it was very late.
After a while, my Aunt fancied she heard someone approaching her chamber door very softly. It was the stealthy creaking of the boards that warned her; she could not hear the tread of the foot. She held her breath, sitting straight upon her chair, and gazing at the door with such faint light as her unsnuffed taper afforded her; and I dare say she looked extremely frightened.
She heard someone breathing close outside the door, then a hand softly laid on the door-handle; the door gently opened, and the face of the woman of the high cheek bones, pale and lowering, looked in. Her ill-omened stare encountered my Aunt’s gaze, and each was perhaps unpleasantly surprised.
Both looked on, pale enough, for some time without speaking. At last my Aunt stood up and said sharply—
“What’s your business here, pray?”
“ ’Tis late to be burnin’ candle and fire, missess—half-past twelve, no less,” said the maid with cool asperity. “We’re an airly house, ma’am, here, and keeps dacent hours. Mebbe it’s what ye’d like supper—there’s cowld corn-beef and bacon,” she added after a pause.
“Not any, thanks; had I wished supper, I would have rung for it,” said Aunt Margaret, loftily.
“Thrue for you, missess, only there’s no bell,” answered the woman, coolly.
“More shame for you,” retorted my Aunt, with a little flush, glancing along the walls innocent of bell-rope, for this “most impertinent woman” made her feel a little small.
“I seen you lookin’ out again, ma’am, through the windy, I don’t know after who.”
The aplomb of this woman’s attacks deprived my Aunt of breath and presence of mind, and she was amazed afterwards at the perplexed sort of patience with which she submitted to her impertinence.
“Yes; I looked out of the window.”
“We would not like people stoppin’ here that had friends outside,” said the woman, with a searching glance and a sulky wag of her head.
“I don’t know what you mean, woman.”
“Oh, ho! thankee—I know very well what I mane—an’ mebbe you’re not quite sich a fool yourself but what you can make a guess. At any rate it is not a lady’s part to be furretin’ about the room, an’ pimpin’ an’ spyin’, ma’am.”
“Leave the room, please,” exclaimed my Aunt.
“An’ mebbe signin’ and beckonin’ out o’ the windies be night. Oh, ho! thankee—I know well enough what belongs to a lady.”
“I repeat, woman, you had better leave the room.”
“Woman, yourself!—I’m not goin’ to be woman’d be you—an’ the big lump iv a woman ye brought widge ye. Who’s that? eh?”
“My housekeeper,” replied my Aunt, with a fierce dignity.
“An’ a strappin’ ould one she is,” retorted the woman, with a hoarse sneer. She was turning over Winnie’s clothes, which lay on a chair.
“Your conduct is intolerable. I shall see the proprietor in the morning.”
“An’ welcome!” said the woman, coolly. “You closed the shutters again, I suppose?” and she walked round the bed to the window, from which my Aunt had made her observations.
I do believe that, if she was enraged, Aunt Margaret was also the least bit in the world cowed by this woman. But observing a little trembling in the bed-curtains, to the far side of which her ugly visitor had passed, my Aunt made a quick step to the side of the bed next her, and drawing the curtain, saw this unpleasant woman at the opposite side with the bedclothes raised in her hand from Winnie’s feet and ankles, which she was inspecting.
“Big feet! Where’s her boots, ma’am?” said the maid across the bed, eyeing my Aunt aslant, and replacing the bedclothes.
“Boots or shoes, on the floor by the fire, and I wish you’d begone.”
“I’ll take your own, too, ma’am,” answered she.
“Well, yes; that is, I’ll leave them outside the door.”
“As ye plaze; only get to yer bed, at wonst—it’s all hours;” and without more preparation, she chucked my Aunt’s mould candle from its socket into the fire, where, lying on its side it blazed up merrily.
“What do you mean? How dare you, hussy! Fetch a candle this moment.”
“Arra go to yer bed, woman, while ye have light, will ye?” and with these words the attendant withdrew, shutting the door with a clap.
VIII
Of a Figure Seen by My Aunt
My Aunt opened the door, very angry. She was about to walk downstairs to insist on trying the delinquent by court-martial before the “Proprietor;” but she recollected that he was probably in his bed and asleep by this time. She contented herself, therefore, by calling after her.
“Rely on it, I’ll complain in the morning—so sure as I live.”
And so she shut the door, and the candle making a glorious blaze in the grate my Aunt thought the chambermaid’s advice worth following, and did get into her bed while there was light.
I dare say her collision with the chambermaid cost her more than twenty minutes’ sleep. When her anger subsided there remained a different sort of uneasiness, for there was something ill-omened and menacing in the unintelligible ways of this inn and its people. My Aunt Margaret, however, was really tired, and eventually fell into a slumber, deep and dreamless, from which she awakened with a start.
She fancied that she had been disturbed by a sound as of some heavy weight pulled along the floor close to the room in which she slept. The sound had ceased before she was fully awake; but it left her with a most disagreeable sensation of fear and uncertainty, for, undefinably, it was connected in her mind with the idea of mischief designed to herself.
All of a sudden she remembered her trunk, left at the head of the staircase, and the idea rushed upon her, “They are stealing my trunk!” The sound resembled the rumble of it along the floor.
My Aunt had a keen sense of property, and was not wanting in pluck. She jumped out of bed, opened her door softly, and listened. But everything was perfectly quiet.
“It was in order to confine me to my room that that odious woman deprived me of my candle,” thought my Aunt, although even if she had had it at her bedside she could not have lighted it, for the fire had gone quite out.
She listened, but there was nothing stirring; and, in extreme deshabille, as she was, my Aunt, full of anxieties, crept out on the lobby, and made her way through the passages to the stairhead.
There stood the old hair trunk on its end, with its rows of dim brass nails, plain enough in the faint light from the lobby window. My Aunt was relieved. She would have been very glad to pull it into her room; but the distance was considerable, and the noise would have brought the people about her, and she was in no state to receive company.
Having stood affectionately and anxiously by the friendly trunk for a minute or two, irresolute, she began to find it too cold to stay longer, so, with an easier mind, she groped her way back again.
It was easier to find the lobby than to discover in the dark her own bedroom door. She groped along the passages; she had counted the steps, but now was not quite sure whether it was thirty-five, or forty-five; she stopped now and then to listen in her groping return, and began to grow rather confused; and wished, as active-minded persons not unfrequently do, that she had remained quietly as she was.
In fact, she was precisely in the situation to lose her way, and step into a wrong bedroom, and was extremely uncomfortable in mind and cold in body; and very nervous beside, lest anyone should chance to come that way with a candle, and discover the nakedness of the land.
In this state my Aunt’s deliberations were of the very fussiest sort, and her exertions great; but I doubt if she could have recovered her room, at least at the first venture, without light. Light, however, did come, and this was the manner of its arrival.
On a sudden a door opened below stairs—near the foot of the staircase it must have been, she heard so clearly; and voices, before inaudible, now reached her ear.
A female was weeping loudly, and uttering broken sentences through her sobs.
“They’ve killed him—he’s murdered—they’ve murdered him!” and similar ejaculations came rapidly tumbling one over the other in her ululation.
“Arra, ma’am, go back again, and stay where ye wor. We’ll be even wid them yet, for it is murdher, the villians!” said a voice, which my Aunt had no difficulty in recognising as that of the Irish chambermaid. “Bud don’t be rousin’ the people—it must be done quiet.”
There was more sobbing, and more talk, and the weeping female gave way, and was again shut into her room, and a gleam of an approaching candle sent an angular shadow on the ceiling at the end of the passage in which my Aunt stood.
Extremely frightened, she crouched down close to the ground, and the forbidding-looking woman, with the high cheek bones, walked stealthily in from the stairhead passage, and stood, as pale as death, with her shoes off, and a candle in her hand, listening, as it seemed, at the far end of the gallery. She looked over her shoulder, and said, in a hard whisper—
“Stop there, wid their heavy shoes.”
She had a hammer in her hand, and looked unspeakably repulsive in her pallor. She lifted the candle above her head and listened. My Aunt was staring full at her from her place of semi-concealment, in a recess of one of the doors, with her face close to the ground.
If the woman saw her, she had presence of mind to make no sign; but with the hand in which the hammer was, she drew her dress up a little to enable her to step more freely, and, with a light, soft tread, passed across the entrance of the gallery.
IX
The Funeral Visitation
My Aunt was impressed with the most dismal and terrific ideas of what was going forward. She was quite unnerved. She saw, sometimes the shadow of this woman, and sometimes the full light of the candle, still thrown upon the floor and walls at the end of the lobby, and dared not move.
Quickly the woman returned. She had now the hammer under the arm which bore the candlestick, and whispered—
“Barney!”
Then she raised in her other hand a long, rather slender, steel blade, as it appeared to my aunt, quite straight, and whispered—
“That’s the thing—betther nor the hammer; there’s no one awake but herself for the life o’ ye, make no noise.”
She was crossing the far end of the passage as she said this, and she and the light of her candle quickly disappeared.
The last gleam threw the shadow of a pair of shoes from outside a bedroom door, along the floor, towards my Aunt. The door was next that in which she was crouched, and was a little open. She was now sure that she had discovered her room.
The moment the light had quite disappeared, she entered, and shut the door softly, and groped her way to the bed, and got in at her own side; and, being very cold, lay close to her companion for warmth. My Aunt envied Winnie her sound sleep. She vainly tried to compose herself, wildly conjecturing about unknown horrors, and longing for morning, and an escape from this suspected and mysterious house.
She was miserably cold, too. The night was sharp, and the fire long out. The bedclothes were insufficient, and Winnie also as cold as stone.
My Aunt had been in this state—freezing and listening, and awfully frightened for some ten minutes, perhaps, when she distinctly heard breathing near her door, and the muffled tread of shoeless feet, and then a whispering.
The door opened, and two men came in, carrying a coffin, on the lid of which a kitchen candle was burning dimly; and the ugly woman, Nell, between whom and my Aunt there had grown up, so fast, an unaccountable antipathy, followed, carrying in her hand the steel instrument which Aunt Margaret had observed before with so unpleasant a suspicion, and which was, in fact, a turnscrew.
The whole of this funereal pageant approached my Aunt like the imagery of a dream. The men paused for a moment, while the woman placed the candle on a chest of drawers, and slid the coffin-lid off, leaning it against the wall. They drew near; and as they laid their awful burden lengthways on the bed by her side, one of the two men said—
“I’ll go to the feet, and do you go to the head.”
Upon this my Aunt, almost beside herself with terror, bounced up in the bed; and, instead of despatching her, as she had expected, with a horrid roar and a screech, the men and woman fled from the room, and along the passage, leaving the coffin on the bed beside her.
“Winnie, Winnie—what is it?” cried my Aunt.
But no Winnie was there. In her stead lay a dead man, with a white-fringed cap on, and a black, stubbed beard, the growth of some three or four days, and a little line of the white of one eye shining between its half-closed lids.
It was now my Aunt’s turn, and with a loud yell, and overturning the coffin, she jumped out of the bed, and ran screaming along the gallery, where she fell, and fainted on the floor.
When she came to herself, she was in her own room and bed once more, with Winnie beside her; and she exclaimed, so soon as recollection quite returned—
“Oh, save me, Winnie, save me.”
“You’re quite safe, ma’am, dear.”
“Where are we?”
“In the inn, ma’am.”
“Bolt the door, Winnie; bolt the door, and lock it—they’re all murderers.”
“Drink some water, ma’am.”
“Lock the door, you fool! We shall be murdered.”
“The maid was here, ma’am, very sorry you were so frightened; but you went into the wrong room, and they could not help it.”
X
How It All Happened
Gradually the facts came to light, though not fully for a long time afterward.
The Good Woman was one of those inns pleasantly known to our great-grandfathers. The old London road had run by its steps; and the wheels of old stagecoaches, post-chaises, and wagons, had dustied its windows once. But, unluckily for The Good Woman, she stood upon the apex of a curve of that great channel of traffic which modern reform and a county presentment cut off; and the London road, henceforward running in a straight line from Dwiddleston to Huxbridge—fifteen miles—leaves The Good Woman full three miles on one side.
With the opening of the new line, and the “Crottworthy Arms,” the halcyon days of the old inn ended. Its gabled frontage, steep roofs, and capacious premises—a world too wide for its shrunk business—fell gradually to decay. The old proprietor retired to his farm in Cheshire; and his nephew succeeded, got desperately into debt, was sued in all directions, and judgments wielded by exasperated creditors glimmered terribly through the storm, threatening to dash him to pieces. At this crisis, the ill-starred innkeeper, having ventured by night to Maryston—all his excursions of late had been in the dark—took cold, and died of a catarrh in three days.
The inn, nearly reduced to a state of siege; the innkeeper himself having long been an invisible and intangible substance, hid away from warrants, arrests, and other personal dangers, among the dilapidated lumber rooms and garrets of the old house; the people thinking more of a moonlit flitting than of improving the traffic of the forlorn “Good Woman;” when the proprietor died, that procedure upon his part was kept as secret as every other of late had been, and not altogether without cause, for there were those among his incensed creditors who were by no means incapable of the legal barbarity of arresting his corpse.
Thus came the mystery and suspicion with which my Aunt and Winnie were received—the coffin being expected hourly, and a grave opened, in the dark, in the neighbouring churchyard. The Irish maid, whose head was full of the disguises and stratagems of which she had heard so much in her own ingenious and turbulent country, was, for a while, disposed to think that the unseasonable visitors were myrmidons of the law in disguise. The fat, dowdy woman, who emerged, with blubbered cheeks, when they entered, and whose lamentations subsequently my Aunt heard when she visited her trunk on the stairhead, was the widow of the departed proprietor.
The rest, I think, explains itself; and the reader will be, no doubt, glad to learn that my Aunt’s visit to Winderbrooke was, on the whole, satisfactory, and that she lived for many years to recount, by the fireside, to hushed listeners, this “winter’s tale” of her adventures in The Good Woman.