The Wonder Part 37

I spoke to her once, but I knew that her mind was beyond the reach of my words.

"It is just as well," I thought; "but we must get her away."

I went out and called to the woman next door.

She was in her kitchen, but the door was open. She came out when I knocked.

"Poor thing," she said, when I told her. "It _'as_ been a shock, no doubt. She was so wrapped hup in the boy."

She could hardly have said less if her neighbour had lost half-a-crown.

"Get her into your cottage before they come," I said harshly, and left her.

I wanted to get out of the lane before the men came back, but I had hardly started before I saw them coming.

They had made a chair of their arms, and were carrying him between them.

They had not the least fear of him, now.

IX

The Harrison idiot suddenly jumped out of the hedge.

I put my hand to my throat. I wanted to cry out, to stop him, but I could not move. I felt sick again, and utterly weak and powerless, and I could not take my gaze from that little doll with the great drooping head that rolled as the men walked.

I was reminded, disgustingly, of children with a guy.

The idiot ran shambling down the lane. He knew the two men, who tolerated him and laughed at him. He was not afraid of them nor their burden.

He came right up to them. I heard one of the men say gruffly, "Now then, you cut along off!"

I believe the idiot must have touched the dead body.

I was gripping my throat in my hand; I was trying desperately to cry out.

Whether the idiot actually touched the body or not I cannot say, but he must have realised in his poor, bemused brain that the thing was dead.

He cried out with his horrible, inhuman cry, turned, and ran up the lane towards me. He fell on his face a few yards from me, scrambled wildly to his feet again and came on yelping and shrieking. He was wildly, horribly afraid. I caught sight of his face as he pa.s.sed me, and his mouth was distorted into a square, his upper lip horribly drawn up over his ragged, yellow teeth. Suddenly he dashed at the hedge and clawed his way through. I heard him still yelping appallingly as he rushed away across the field....

CHAPTER XVIII

IMPLICATIONS

I

The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental death."

If there had been any traces of a struggle, I had not noticed them when I came to the edge of the pond. There may have been marks as if a foot had slipped. I was not thinking of evidence when I looked into the water.

There were marks enough when the police came to investigate, but they were the marks made by a twelve-stone man in hobnail boots, who had scrambled into, and out of, the pond. As the inspector said, it was not worth while wasting any time in looking for earlier traces of footsteps below those marks.

Nor were there any signs of violence on the body. It was in no way disfigured, save by the action of the water, in which it had lain for perhaps eighteen hours.

There was, indeed, only one point of any significance from the jury's point of view, and that they put on one side, if they considered it at all; the body was pressed into the mud.

The Coroner asked a few questions about this fact.

Was the mud very soft? Yes, very soft, liquid on top.

How was the body lying? Face downwards.

What part of the body was deepest in the mud? The chest. The witness said he had hard work to get the upper part of the body released; the head was free, but the mud held the rest. "The mooad soocked like," was the expressive phrase of the witness.

The Coroner pa.s.sed on to other things. Had any one a spite against the child? and such futilities. Only once more did he revert to that solitary significant fact. "Would it be possible," he asked of the abashed and self-conscious labourer, "would it be possible for the body to have worked its way down into the soft mud as you have described it to have been found?"

"We-el," said the witness, "'twas in the stacky mooad, 'twas through the sarft stoof."

"But this soft mud would suck any solid body down, would it not?"

persisted the Coroner.

And the witness recalled the case of a duck that had been sucked into the same soft pond mud the summer before, and cited the instance. He forgot to add that on that occasion the mud had not been under water.

The Coroner accepted the instance. There can be no question that both he and the jury were anxious to accept the easier explanation.

II

But I know perfectly well that the Wonder did not fall into the pond by accident.

I should have known, even if that conclusive evidence with regard to his being pushed into the mud had never come to light.

He may have stood by the ash-tree and looked into the water, but he would never have fallen. He was too perfectly controlled; and, with all his apparent abstraction, no one was ever more alive to the detail of his surroundings. He and I have walked together perforce in many slippery places, but I have never known him to fall or even begin to lose his balance, whereas I have gone down many times.

Yes; I know that he was pushed into the pond, and I know that he was held down in the mud, most probably by the aid of that ash stick I had held. But it was not for me to throw suspicion on any one at that inquest, and I preferred to keep my thoughts and my inferences to myself. I should have done so, even if I had been in possession of stronger evidence.

I hope that it was the Harrison idiot who was to blame. He was not dangerous in the ordinary sense, but he might quite well have done the thing in play--as he understood it. Only I cannot quite understand his pushing the body down after it fell. That seems to argue vindictiveness--and a logic which I can hardly attribute to the idiot.

Still, who can tell what went on in the distorted mind of that poor creature? He is reported to have rescued the dead body of a rabbit from the undergrowth on one occasion, and to have blubbered when he could not bring it back to life.

There is but one other person who could have been implicated, and I hesitate to name him in this place. Yet one remembers what terrific acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of history have been capable of performing when their creed and their authority have been set at naught.

III

Ellen Mary never recovered her sanity. She died a few weeks ago in the County Asylum. I hear that her husband attended the funeral. When she lost her belief in the supernal wisdom and power of her G.o.d, her world must have fallen about her. The thing she had imagined to be solid, real, everlasting, had proved to be friable and destructible like all other human building.