Johnny Ludlow Second Series Part 61

King came to as they lifted him, and walked a few steps; but looked around and fell aside as though his head were dazed. Dr. Teal thought that there was not much the matter, and that he might be conveyed to Worcester. Ferrar helped to carry him down the hill, and the other Frogs followed. A fine fury their van-driver was in, at their having kept him waiting!

King was made comfortable along the floor of the waggonette, upon some rugs and blankets lent by the Crown; and so was taken home. When Captain Sanker found what had happened, he grew excited, and went knocking at half the doctors' doors in Worcester. Mr. Woodward was the first in, then Dr. Malden and Mr. Carden came running together. By what the captain had said, they expected to find all the house dead.

King seemed better in the morning. The injury lay chiefly in his head.

We did not hear what the doctors made of it. He was sensible, and talked a little. When asked how he came to fall, all he said was that he "went over and could not save himself."

Coming in, from carrying the news of how he was to the Squire and Mrs.

Todhetley at the Star, I found Mark Ferrar at the door.

"Mr. Johnny," said he, in a low voice, his plain face all concern, "how did it happen? Sure he was not pushed over?"

"Of course not. Why do you ask it?"

Ferrar paused. "Master Johnny, when boys are lame they are more cautious. He'd hardly be likely to slip."

"He might in walking. It's only a narrow ledge there. And his sister says she thinks he went to sleep when she left him. She was the last who saw him."

Mark's wide mouth went into all sorts of contortions, and the freckles shone in the sun in his effort to get the next words out.

"I fancy it was me that saw him last, Master Johnny. Leastways, later than his sister."

"Did you? How was that?"

"He must have seen me near the place, and he called to me. There was n.o.body there but him, and some chairs and a table and gla.s.ses and things. He asked me to sit down, and began telling me he had been saying 'Lord Bateman' to them all. I didn't know what 'Lord Bateman'

meant, Master Johnny--and he said he would tell it me; he should not mind then, but he had minded saying it to the company. It was poetry, I found; but he stopped in the middle, and told me to go then, for he saw some of them coming----"

"Some of what?" I interrupted.

"Well, I took it to mean some of his grown-up party, or else the college boys. Anyway, he seemed to want me gone, sir, and I went off at once. I didn't see him after that."

"He must have fallen asleep, and somehow slipped over."

"Yes, sir. What a pity he was left in that shallow place!"

King seemed to have all his wits about him, but his face had a white, odd look in it. He lay in a room on the first floor, that belonged in general to the two girls. When I said Mark Ferrar was outside, King asked me to take him up. But I did not like taking him without speaking to Captain Sanker; and I went to him in the parlour.

"The idea of a Frog coming into our house!" cried resentful Dan, as he heard me. "It's like his impudence to stop outside it! What next? Let him wait till King's well."

"You hold your tongue, Dan," cried the captain. "The boy shall go up, whether he's a Frog, or whether he's one of you. Take him up, Johnny."

He did not look unlike a frog when he got into the room, with his wide, red, freckled face and his great wide mouth--but, as I have said, it was a face to be trusted. The first thing he did, looking at King, was to burst into a great blubber of tears.

"I hope you'll get well," said he.

"I might have been as bad as this in the fight, but for your pulling me out of it, Frog," said King, in his faint voice. And he did not call him Frog in any contempt, but as though it were his name: he knew him by no other. "Was that b.u.mp done in the battle?"

Mark had his cap off: on one side of his forehead, under the hair, we saw a big lump the size of an egg. "Yes," he answered, "it was got in the fight. Father thinks it never means to go down. It's pretty stiff and sore yet."

King sighed. He was gazing up at the lump with his nice blue eyes.

"I don't think there'll be any fighting in heaven," said King. "And I wrote out 'Lord Bateman' the other day, and they shall give it you to keep. I didn't finish telling it to you. He owned half Northumberland; and he married her after all. She had set him free from the prison, you know, Frog."

"Yes," replied Frog, quite bewildered, and looking as though he could not make top or tail of the story. "I hope you'll get well, sir. How came you to fall?"

"I don't think they expect me to get well: they wouldn't have so many doctors if they did. I shan't be lame, Frog, up there."

"Did you slip?--or did anybody push you?" went on Frog, lowering his voice.

"Hush!" said King, glancing at the door. "If papa heard you say that, he might go into a pa.s.sion."

"But--was it a slip--or were you pushed over?" persisted Frog.

"My leg is always slipping: it has never been of much good to me,"

answered King. "When you come up there, and see me with a beautiful strong body and straight limbs, you won't know me again at first.

Good-bye, till then, Frog; good-bye. It was very kind of you to carry me out of the fight, and G.o.d saw you."

"Good-bye, sir," said Frog, with another burst, as he put out his hand to meet poor King's white one. "Perhaps you'll get over it yet."

Tod and I took leave of them in the afternoon, and went up to the Star.

The Squire wanted to be home early. The carriage was waiting before the gateway, the ostler holding the heads of Bob and Blister, when Captain Sanker came up in dreadful excitement.

"He's gone," he exclaimed. "My poor King's gone. He died as the clock was striking four."

And we had supposed King to be going on well! The Squire ordered the horses to be put up again, and we went down to the house. The boys and girls were all crying.

King lay stretched on the bed, his face very peaceful and looking less white than I had sometimes seen it look in life. On the cheeks there lingered a faint colour; his forehead felt warm; you could hardly believe he was dead.

"He has gone to the heaven he talked of," said Mrs. Sanker, through her tears. "He has been talking about it at intervals all day--and now he is there; and has his harp amongst the angels."

And that was the result of our Day of Pleasure! The force of those solemn words has rarely been brought home to hearts as it was to ours then: "In the midst of life we are in death."

XI.

THE FINAL ENDING TO IT.

Of all the gloomy houses any one ever stayed in, Captain Sanker's was the worst. Nothing but coffins coming into it, and all of us stealing about on tip-toe. King lay in the room where he died. There was to be an inquest: at which the captain was angry. But he was so excited and sorrowful just then as to have no head at all.

Which might well be excused in him. Picture what it was! Three carriages full of us had started on the Tuesday morning, expecting to have a day of charming pleasure on the Malvern Hills in the July sunshine; no more thinking of death or any other catastrophe, than if the world had never contained such! And poor King--poor lame King, whose weakness made him more helpless than were we strong ones, and who only on the previous Sat.u.r.day had been plucked out of the fight in Diglis Meadow and been saved--King must fall asleep on a dangerous part of the hill and roll down it and come home to die! "Better King than any of the rest of you,"

cried Mrs. Sanker, more than once, in her dreamy way, and with her eyes dry, for she seemed tired of tears; "he could never have done battle with the world as you will have to do it; and he was quite ready for heaven."

Instead of going home with our people the day after the death, as Tod did, I had to wait at Worcester for the inquest. When the beadle (or whoever the officer might be; he had gold cord on his hat and white ribbed stockings below his breeches: which stockings might have been fellows to old Jones's of Church d.y.k.ely) came to Captain Sanker's to make inquiries the night of the death, and heard that I had been first up with King after his fall, he said I should have to give evidence. So I stayed on with them--much to my uneasiness.

If I had thought the Sankers queer people before, I thought them queerer now. Not one of the boys and girls, except Fred, cared to go alone by the door of the room where King lay. And, talking of King, it was not until I saw the name on the coffin-lid that I knew his name was not King, but Kingsley. He looked as nice and peaceful as any dead lad with a nice face could look; and yet they were afraid to pa.s.s by outside. Dan and Ruth were the worst. I did not wonder at her--she was a little girl; but I did at Dan. Fred told me that when they were children a servant used to tell them stories of ghosts and dreams and banshees; Hetta and he were too old to be frightened, but the rest had taken it all into their nature. I privately thought that Mrs. Sanker was no better than the fool of a servant, reciting to them her dreams and accounts of apparitions.

King died on the Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday afternoon the inquest took place. It was held at the Angel Inn, in Sidbury, and Mr. Robert Allies was the foreman. Boys don't give evidence on inquests every day: I felt shy and uncomfortable at having to do it; and perhaps that may be the reason why the particulars remain so strongly on my memory. The time fixed was three o'clock, but it was nearly four when they came down to look at King: the coroner explained to the jury that he had been detained. When they went back to the Angel Inn we followed them--Captain Sanker, Fred, and I.