A Little Wizard Part 4

"Old Gridley! He did, did he! He is a rogue if ever there was one. But why did he bring you? And why here?"

Jack explained, as far as his knowledge went; which was not far.

Frank's worldly wisdom, gained in a hard school, helped him to the rest.

"I see," he replied, nodding darkly. "The old schemer had his own reasons for a sudden flitting. And he thought it a fine stroke to get possession of you, in case our cause and his Majesty's should come uppermost again--as, please Heaven, it will now. But you had better have stopped at Pattenhall, Jack," Frank continued gravely. "Those crop-eared knaves must have done something for you. They don't fight with children, to do them justice."

"Still, I am glad I came, Frank," Jack said softly.

"So am I, lad," his brother answered. "That water and you saved my life. I could not have held out till night, and I should not have known where to turn for it myself. But we are being scorched here, and the buzzing of the bees goes through my head. You said something of a yew wood? It sounds better. Could I crawl there without being seen, think you?"

Jack told him, sliding down eagerly, how he had come and gone, and described the position of the fissure in the moss.

"The very thing!" the fugitive cried, his face lighting up. "I know the kind of thing. There are no better hiding, places. They turn and twist and throw off a dozen branches. And the nearer the house, if these Gridleys are Parliament men, the better. They will not be suspected of hiding malignants. Is the coast clear?"

Jack answered in the affirmative, and eagerly led the way, his brother crawling after him, through bracken and under gorse-bushes, and over hot patches of turf where the sun grilled them, until the edge of the rift was safely gained. Here Frank fell over at once into the cool depth, and then standing up helped Jack down. The shade and the feeling of moisture which prevailed in this under-world were so welcome that for a moment the two stood leaning against the dark wall, the overhanging edge of peat effectually protecting them from the sun's rays. The chasm at this point was about eight feet deep and six wide; the bottom of a dull white color, with water percolating over it. Away to the right it grew more shallow, and after throwing out numerous channels, rose at last to the level of the moor it drained.

To the left it grew deeper, attaining a depth of twelve or fourteen feet where it opened on the ravine behind the house.

"Good!" Frank said, looking round him with sombre satisfaction. "I can find a dozen hiding-places here, and lie as snug and cool in the meantime as a nymph in a grot. The rogues are lazy, or they would have climbed the brow an hour ago. They will not do so now. One thing only remains, and that is the question of food."

"I will fetch some!" Jack cried impetuously.

"Yes, but softly," his brother answered, laying his hand on his arm, and restraining him. "It is past dinner-time, and you will have been missed, my lad. There will be strange eyes in the house, and you will not find it so easy to slip away again unnoticed. Whatever you do, bide your time. I shall not starve for a bit; but if I am taken--and a careless word or a hasty step may bring these gentry upon us--they may give me quarter; and little gain to me!--a drum-head court-martial for breach of parole will do the rest."

His face grew hard, and instead of meeting the boy's eyes he looked downward and moodily kicked a lump of peat with his foot. Jack longed to ask the meaning of that phrase "breach of parole" which he had heard so often of late in connection with his brother's name. He did not dare to put the question, but his patience was presently rewarded, for Frank began to speak again, not to him, but to himself.

"A promise!" he muttered, his face still dark. "A promise under compulsion is no promise. If I promised not to bear arms for the king again, it was a promise made to rebels, and against my duty and theirs, and was null and void from the beginning! Who shall say it was not, or that my honor was concerned in it? Still, these Roundheads, if they catch me, will fling it in my face! And Duke Hamilton looked coldly on me. I would, after all," he added, in a voice still louder, "that I had not taken Goring's advice."

What Goring had advised was so clear, though Frank said no more, that Jack looked at his brother with his eyes full of sympathy. He saw, with the astonishing clearness which children possess, that Frank's conscience was ill at ease--so ill at ease that the mere thought of his broken parole, now it was too late to undo the wrong, brought all that was hard, and fierce, and desperate in his nature to the surface, mingling a kind of ferocity with his native courage, and converting hardihood into recklessness. Comprehending this, the lad gazed at him with a face full of timid sympathy; until Frank, awakening from his absent fit, glanced suddenly up and met his look.

"What! have you not gone?" he said roughly, and with a reddening cheek. "You do not help me by staring at me like a dead pig! If you can get food, no matter what it is, don't bring it here. You may be followed. Lay it down at the opening of this rat-run, where you enter it from the house. I shall find it when the coast is clear."

His manner was changed, and Jack would have been more than mortal if he had not felt the change. It hurt and disappointed him sorely; coming just when he had done all he could. But he hid his chagrin, and, turning obediently away, set off without a word down the rift, and thence through the wood of yews, where the sheltering gloom was now as welcome to him as it had been before alarming. As he approached the house, however, and the immediate necessity of facing Mistress Gridley and the brothers with an unmoved countenance forced itself upon him, he paused involuntarily, trembling under the sense of sudden fear which beset him. The horrible events of the morning, the cries of the men whom he had seen cut down on the moor, his brother's danger, and the consequences of a hapless word, all rushed into his mind together, and for the moment, if the word may be used of so young a child, unmanned him. Clutching the trunk of the last tree he had to pa.s.s, he leaned against it in a very ague of terror; afraid to go forward, shaking at the very thought of going forward and facing those unfriendly eyes, yet knowing that if he would save his brother, if he would not shame his blood and breeding, he must go forward.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He leaned against it in a very ague of terror.--Page 75.]

While he stood in this agony--for it was nothing less--butler Gridley, loitering about the back-door with thoughts and for a purpose of his own, espied him; and with a stealthy foot and a glance in the direction of the house, made towards him. The least observant eye must have detected the boy's terror, or seen at least that he was laboring under some strange emotion. But Gridley's eyes were not observant at all; they were only hungry. He had fasted against his will for twenty-four hours, and his plump cheeks were pallid. He had a wolf within him that demanded all his attention. He saw in the boy only a means of satisfying his craving.

"Jack!" he whispered, with his lips almost at the boy's ear and his eyes devouring his face, "I have always been good to you. I want you to do something. It is a little thing," he repeated feverishly. "It is a nothing. Just----"

He had got so far--and alas! for him, no farther--when a harsh, discordant laugh behind him caused him to straighten himself as if an unseen hand had propelled him. "Let the child alone!" Mistress Gridley cried from the door; "do you hear me? I will have no plotting and colloguing in my house! And do you, Jack, come here!"

There was a world of sarcasm in the woman's gibing tone; and it cut the butler like a knife. He crept away with a savage glare in his eyes. The boy went slowly to the door with thoughts happily diverted from the weighty issues which had a moment before overburdened him.

The incident was, indeed, his salvation; for, though the woman could not fail to remark his embarra.s.sment, she naturally set it down to the wrong cause, supposing merely that the butler had been trying to corrupt him.

"Where have you been all day?" she cried roughly, hustling him into the house--so violently that he stumbled on the threshold. "You don't deserve your food either," she continued, shaking him fiercely, "playing truant all day! But you shall have it, if only to tantalize that craven fool yonder. Where have you been, eh? You will stop at home in future, do you hear? This is your place--inside these four walls--until this business is over. You remember that, my lad, or it will be the worse for you!"

Simon Gridley and two men, whom the boy did not know, were in the kitchen, sitting dour and silent over the remains of a meal. They looked up on the boy's entrance, but took no further notice of him.

The woman set food before him, scolding all the while, and then went off to her work in the back premises. The boy had little heart to eat; but presently he found occasion while Simon was talking to the two strangers (who were brothers, of the name of Edgington, ex-troopers and weavers of Bradford) to secrete part of his meal inside his jacket. Mistress Gridley, when she came back, looked sharply at what he had left; but the boy had eaten so little that her suspicions were not aroused, and she flounced away with the platter, bidding him remain indoors and sit where he was.

She had scarcely gone when Luke entered and joined the party by the window, and there ensued much solemn jubilation over the morning's work and the peculiar judgments vouchsafed to the neighborhood; and particularly over the reported arrival at Ripon of Lieutenant-General Cromwell, with forces which might be trusted to give a good account of the Scotch army. Jack, sitting trembling on a stool in a corner of the fireless chimney-place, heard their sanguine predictions and shuddered. He knew Cromwell by name, and dimly a.s.sociated him with Marston Moor, and the sad night which had seen his father ride home to die. The kitchen grew to the lad's eyes as he listened full of dark shadows and forebodings of fate. The men who loomed between him and the window seemed to increase in size. Only the purpose he had in his mind, and the necessity of action if he would pursue it, saved him from breaking down and bursting into childish weeping.

By dint of fixing his mind on this, however, he steadied himself; and by-and-by, choosing a moment when the talk was loud, stole across the room to a tub in which the oatcake was kept. Ordinary the lid lay loose upon it: now, to his huge disappointment, he found it locked!

Baffled, and more than half inclined to cry, he wandered back to his place and resumed his seat on the floor, affecting to be engaged in playing with two billets of wood. In reality his thoughts were keenly at work. The cheese and cake he had secreted were scarcely worth carrying to his brother. Where could he get more?

It occurred to him at last that, failing everything else, raw oatmeal might be of use. Inspired by the thought, he rose and sauntered round three sides of the room until he reached the chest. Pretending to play about it he presently tried the lid, and to his joy found it unfastened. He raised it cautiously an inch or two, and thrusting his hand in found the wooden bowl which was used for measuring the meal.

He filled this, and withdrew it successfully. Then he let the lid fall without noise.

He had still to escape unseen with his plunder, but the men were so busily engaged in talk that he feared no interruption from them, and Mistress Gridley was neither to be heard nor seen. He moved towards the back door, opened it, and slipped outside, holding the bowl under the skirt of his jacket. The afternoon sun shone in his eyes, and for a moment he stood blinking like an owl in the daylight, so great was the change from the cool, sombre kitchen. Softly he advanced a step.

Before he could take another, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and Mistress Gridley had him in her clutch.

"You little thief!" she screamed, her voice shrill with savage triumph, "I have caught you, have I? You thought to deceive me, did you? To deceive me, you little ninny? What is this, eh? Whose is this?" she repeated, grasping the child's wrist, and forcing him to hold up the little bowl of meal which his fingers still gripped mechanically. "Whose is this, eh? Is it yours? This way, my little thief; this way!"

She dragged him into the kitchen, and exulting in her own sharpness, told the men, who had risen at the sound of her outcry, how she had caught him. "He thought himself clever," she continued, shaking him to and fro without mercy, "but he was not clever enough for me!"

"What did he want with the meal?" one of the strangers asked suspiciously. "It looks to me very much as if----"

"What?" Mistress Gridley asked rudely.

"As if the malignant who gave us the slip this morning were hid here, and had employed this boy to get him food."

The woman sniffed contemptuously. "Stuff and rubbish!" she said. "The meal is for the cowardly sneak who brought the boy here. He is outside, on short commons," she continued, laughing without mirth.

"I met him going down to Settle," Luke said briefly. "Ay, but the child did not know he was gone," she answered with confidence. "The child did not know it, do you see? But I will make him know enough not to steal again, the little thief!"

The men nodded in stern approval. "Open me that closet door," Mistress Gridley continued, pointing with her unoccupied hand to a cupboard made in the thickness of the wall beside the chimney, and used in winter for storing wood. "I will lock him up there for the present. It is nice and dark. He may keep the oatmeal, and when he has finished it, but not before, we will see about finding him some other food. In with you!" she continued, dragging the boy forcibly to the place; "the beetles will keep you company!" and pushing him in, she closed the door and locked it upon him.

So far the boy had neither spoken nor resisted. But finding the door closed on him inexorably, and the horrors of the black closet round him--horrors which a child alone can thoroughly comprehend--he flung himself, shrieking loudly, against the door. He beat on it with his hands, he kicked it, he cried frantically to be let out. The woman listened and laughed cruelly. "It is as good as beating him, and less labor," she said. "Take no heed of him, and he will soon tire of shouting."

The men laughed too--the boy was a thief--and went back to their talk, while the woman sat down to her wheel. The child's cries were music to her ears; and yet she was ill at ease. The butler had gone down to Settle, had he? What if he had visited a certain place among the yew-trees before going, and dug a little? She did not think he would have had the courage to play her such a trick. Still it was possible--it was possible, and she longed for night that she might go to the place and have the a.s.surance of her own eyes.

For a time the boy raved and beat the door, his fear increased by that sense of physical oppression which children, and many who are not children, experience when shut up in a confined s.p.a.ce without the power of freeing themselves. By-and-by, however, as the woman had predicted, he grew calmer. He had a talisman which availed, when the first paroxysm had spent itself, to keep selfish terrors at a distance; and that was the thought of his brother. In proportion as his sobs grew feebler his brain grew clearer. Anxiety on Frank's account took the place of fear for himself. Crouching beside the door with his ear laid against it, he drew such comfort from the murmur of voices and the thin line of light which marked the threshold, that he grew almost content with his position. He was safe from further punishment. Only there was his brother. He pictured Frank waiting and looking for him, waiting and looking in vain for the food which did not come! And this fancy causing his tears to flow again, in the middle of a stifled sob he fell asleep.

CHAPTER V.

TREASURE TROVE.

When he awoke and found himself in darkness, he could not for a time understand where he was. The line of light which had comforted him was gone, and with it the homely sounds of kitchen life. He stretched his sore limbs in the darkness and shivered, looking timidly for the outline of a window. Finding none, he put out his hand to feel for his bedfellow, and lit instead on the rough surface of the door, against which he had sunk down in his sleep until only his head rested upon it.

The touch recalled everything to the boy's mind. With a low whimper of alarm he sat up, and crouching against the door, which seemed some kind of company, listened, holding his breath. All was still in the house, and he presently comprehended that it was night and that the family had gone to bed, leaving him there.

Use and sleep had rendered him in a way familiar with his prison, and he did not on making this discovery break into any loud wailing.

Instead, he huddled himself with a moan into as small a s.p.a.ce as possible, and not daring to put out his hand again lest it should rest on some horror, some crawling thing or clammy hand, he tried with all his might to go to sleep. He was dozing off and had almost succeeded, when a slight noise aroused him. In a moment a light shone under the door.