Johnny Ludlow Sixth Series Part 3

Susan thrust the candlestick into my hand, and ran out at the back door, saying she'd fetch Mr. Lockett. Back she came in a moment: the garden gate was locked, and the key not in it.

"There's the front door, girl," stuttered the Squire, angry with her for returning, though it was no fault of hers. He was like one off his head, and his nose and cheeks had turned blue.

But there could be no more exit by the front door than by the back. It was locked, and the key gone. Who had done these things? what strange mystery was here? Locking the poor girl in the house to kill her!

Matilda, who had lighted another candle, found the key of the back gate lying on the kitchen dresser. Susan caught it up, and flew away. It was a most uncomfortable moment. There lay Jane Cross, pale and motionless, and it seemed that we were helpless to aid her.

"Ask that stupid thing to bring a pillow or a cushion, Johnny! Ghosts, indeed! The idiots that women are!"

"What else has done it? what else was there to hurt her?" remonstrated Matilda, bringing up the second candle. "She wouldn't fall into a fit for nothing, sir."

And now that more light was present, we began to see other features of the scene. Nearly close to Jane Cross lay a work-basket, overturned, a flat, open basket, a foot and a half square. Reels of cotton, scissors, tapes, small bundles of work tied up, and such-like things lay scattered around.

The Squire looked at these, and then at the opening above. "Can she have fallen down the well?" he asked, in a low tone. And Matilda, catching the words, gave a cry of dismay, and burst into tears.

"A pillow, girl! A pillow, or a cushion!"

She went into one of the sitting-rooms and brought out a sofa-cushion.

The Squire, going down on his knees, for he was not good at stooping, told me to slip it under while he raised the head.

A sound of feet, a sudden flash of light from a bull's-eye, and a policeman came upon the scene. The man was quietly pa.s.sing on his beat when met by Susan. In her excitement she told him what had happened, and sent him in. We knew the man, whose beat lay at this end of Salt.w.a.ter; a civil man, named Knapp. He knelt down where the Squire had just been kneeling, touching Jane Cross here and there.

"She's dead, sir," he said. "There can be no mistake about that."

"She must have fallen down the well of the staircase, I fear," observed the Squire.

"Well--yes; perhaps so," a.s.sented the man in a doubtful tone. "But what of this?"

He flung the great light in front of poor Jane Cross's dress. A small portion of the body, where the gown fastened in front, had been torn away, as well as one of the wristbands.

"It's no fall," said the man. "It's foul play--as I think."

"Goodness bless me!" gasped the Squire. "Some villains must have got in.

This comes of that other one's having left the front door on the latch."

But I am not sure that any of us, including himself, believed she could be really dead.

Susan returned with speed, and was followed by Mr. Lockett. He was a young man, thirty perhaps, pale and quiet, and much like what I remembered of his brother. Poor Jane Cross was certainly dead, he said--had been dead, he thought, an hour.

But this could scarcely have been, as we knew. It was not, at the very utmost, above twenty-five minutes since Matilda went out to fetch the beer, leaving her alive and well. Mr. Lockett looked again, but thought he was not mistaken. When a young doctor takes up a crotchet, he likes to hold to it.

A nameless sensation of awe fell upon us all. Dead! In that sudden manner! The Squire rubbed up his head like a helpless lunatic; Susan's eyes were round with horror; Matilda had thrown her ap.r.o.n over her face to hide its grief and tears.

Leaving her for the present where she was, we turned to go upstairs. I stooped to pick up the overturned basket, but the policeman sharply told me to let all things remain as they were until he had time to look into them.

The first thing the man did, on reaching the landing above, was to open the room doors one by one, and throw his bull's-eye light into them.

They were all right, unoccupied, straight and tidy. On the landing of the upper floor lay one or two articles, which seemed to indicate that some kind of struggle had taken place there. A thimble here, a bodkin there, also the bit that had been torn out of the girl's gown in front, and the wristband from the sleeve. The bal.u.s.trades were very handsome, but very low; on this upper landing, dangerously low. These bedrooms were all in order; the one in which the two servants slept, alone showing signs of occupation.

Downstairs went Knapp again, carrying with him the torn-out pieces, to compare them with the gown. It was the print gown I had often seen Jane Cross wear, a black gown with white zigzag lines running down it.

Matilda was wearing the fellow to it now. The pieces fitted in exactly.

"The struggle must have taken place upstairs: not here," observed the doctor.

Matilda, questioned and cross-questioned by the policeman, gave as succinct an account of the evening as her distressed state allowed. We stood round the kitchen while she told it.

Neither she nor Jane Cross had gone out at all that day. Monday was rather a busy day with them, for they generally did a bit of washing.

After tea, which they took between four and five o'clock, they went up to their bedroom, it being livelier there than in the kitchen, the window looking down the side road. Matilda sat down to write a letter to her brother, who lived at a distance; Jane Cross sat at the window doing a job of sewing. They sat there all the evening, writing, working, and sometimes talking. At dusk, Jane remarked that it was getting blind man's holiday, and that she should go on downstairs and lay the supper. Upon that, Matilda finished her letter quickly, folded and directed it, and followed her down. Jane had not yet laid the cloth, but was then taking it out of the drawer. "You go and fetch the beer, Matilda," she said: and Matilda was glad to do so. "You can't go that way: I have locked the gate," Jane called out, seeing Matilda turning towards the back; accordingly she went out at the front door, leaving it on the latch. Such was her account; and I have given it almost verbatim.

"On the latch," repeated the policeman, taking up the words. "Does that mean that you left it open?"

"I drew it quite to, so that it looked as if it were shut; it was a heavy door, and would keep so," was Matilda's answer. "I did it, not to give Jane the trouble to open it to me. When I got back I found it shut and could not get in."

The policeman mused. "You say it was Jane Cross who locked the back door in the wall?"

"Yes," said Matilda. "She had locked it before I got downstairs. We liked to lock that door early, because it could be opened from the outside--while the front door could not be."

"And she had not put these things on the table when you went out for the beer?"--pointing to the dishes.

"No: she was only then putting the cloth. As I turned round from taking the beer-jug from its hook, the fling she gave the cloth caused the air to whiffle in my face like a wind. She had not begun to reach out the dishes."

"How long were you away?"

"I don't know exactly," she answered, with a moan. "Rather longer than usual, because I took my letter to the post before going to the Swan."

"It was about ten minutes," I interposed. "I was at the window next door, and saw Matilda go out and come back."

"Ten minutes!" repeated the policeman. "Quite long enough for some ruffian to come in and fling her over the stairs."

"But who would do it?" asked Matilda, looking up at him with her poor pale face.

"Ah, that's the question; that's what we must find out," said Knapp.

"Was the kitchen just as it was when you left it?"

"Yes--except that she had put the bread and cheese on the table. And the gla.s.ses, and knives," added the girl, looking round at the said table, which remained as we had found it, "but not the plates."

"Well now, to go to something else: Did she bring her work-basket downstairs with her from the bedroom when she remarked to you that she would go and put the supper on?"

"No, she did not."

"You are sure of that?"

"Yes. She left the basket on the chair in front of her where it had been standing. She just got up and shook the threads from off her gown, and went on down. When I left the room the basket was there; I saw it. And I think," added the girl, with a great sob, "I think that while laying the supper she must have gone upstairs again to fetch the basket, and must have fallen against the banisters with fright, and overbalanced herself."

"Fright at what?" asked Knapp.

Matilda shivered. Susan whispered to him that they were afraid at night of seeing the ghost of Mr. Edmund Peahern.

The man glanced keenly at Matilda for a minute. "Did you ever see it?"

he asked.