Johnny Ludlow, Fourth Series. Henry Wood
chanced to get near the Torr, and came home full of it. “Twere exactly,” he declared, “like a lot o’ witches howling in the air.” Just as Stephen Radcliffe had said of the wind. The Squire told Giles it must be the owls; the servants thought Mr. Radcliffe might be giving his wife a beating; Mrs. Todhetley imagined it might be only the bleating of the young lambs. Giles protested it could come from neither owls nor lambs: and as to Radcliffe’s beating ’Becca, he’d be hardly likely to try it on, for she’d beat back again. Tod and I were at school, and heard nothing of it till we got home in summer.
“Johnny! There’s the noise!”
We two had been over to the Court to see the Sterlings; it was only the second day of our holidays; and were taking the cross-cut home through the fields, which led us past Sandstone Torr. It was the twilight of a summer’s evening. The stars were beginning to show themselves; in the north-west the colours were the most beautiful opal conceivable; the round silver moon sailed in the clear blue sky. Crossing the stile by the grove of trees that on three sides surrounded the Torr, we had reached the middle of the next field, when a sort of faint wailing cry, indescribably painful, brought us both to a standstill.
“It must be the noise they talk of,” repeated Tod.
Where did it come from? What was it? Standing on the path in the centre of the open field, we turned about and gazed around; but could see nothing to produce or cause it. It seemed to be overhead, ever so far up in the air: an unearthly, imploring cry, or rather a succession of cries; faint enough, as if the sound spent itself before it reached us, but still distinct; and just as much like what witches might be supposed to make, witches in pain, as any cries could be. I’d have given a month’s pocket-money not to have heard it.
“Is it in the Torr?” exclaimed Tod, breaking the silence. “I don’t see how that could be, though.”
“It is up in the air, Tod.”
We stood utterly puzzled; and gazing at the Torr. At as much of it, at least, as could be seen—the tops of the chimneys, and the sugar-loaf of a tower shooting up to its great height amidst them. The windows of the house and its old stone walls, on which the lichen vegetated, were hidden by the clustering old trees, in full foliage then.
“Hark! There it is again!”
The same horrible, low, distressing sound, something between a howl and a wail; enough to make a stout man shiver in his shoes.
“Is it a woman’s cry, Tod?”
“I don’t know, lad. It’s like a person being murdered and crying out for help.”
“Radcliffe can’t be tanning his wife.”
“Not he, Johnny. She’d take care of that. Besides, they’ve never been cat-and-dog. Birds of a feather: that’s what they are. Oh, by Jove! there it comes again! Just listen to it! I don’t like this at all, Johnny. It must be witches, and nothing else.”
Decidedly it must be. It came from the air. The open fields lay around, white and still under the moonlight, and nothing was on their surface of any kind, human or animal. Now again! that awful cry, rising on the bit of breeze there was, and dying away in pain to a faint echo.
“Let us go to the Torr, Johnny, and ask Radcliffe if he hears it!”
We bounded forward under the cry, which rose again and again incessantly; but in nearing the house it seemed to get further off and to be higher than ever in the air. Leaping the gate into the lane, we reached the front-door, and seized the bell-handle. It brought Mrs. Radcliffe; a blue cap and red roses adoring her straggling hair. Holding the candle above her head, she peered at us with her small, sly eyes.
“Oh, is it you, young gentlemen? Do you want anything? Will you walk in?”
I was about to say No, when Tod pushed me aside and strode up the damp stone passage. They did not make fires enough in the house to keep out the damp. As he told me afterwards, he wanted to get in to listen. But there was no sound at all to be heard; the house seemed as still as death. Wherever the cries might come from, it was certainly not from inside the Torr.
“Radcliffe went over to Wire-Piddle this afternoon, and he’s not back yet,” she said; opening the parlour-door when we got to the hall. “Did you want him? You must ha’ been in a hurry by the way you pulled the bell.”
She put the candle down on the table. Her work lay there—a brown woollen stocking about half-way knitted.
“There is the most extraordinary noise outside that you ever heard, Mrs. Radcliffe,” began Todd, seating himself without ceremony on the old-fashioned mahogany sofa. “It startled us. Did you hear it in here?”
“I have heard no noise at all,” she answered quietly, taking up the stocking and beginning to knit standing. “What was it like?”
“An awful shrieking and crying. Not loud; nearly faint enough for dying cries. As it is not in your house—and we did not think it was, or could be—it must be, I should say, in the air.”
“Ay,” she said, “just so. I can tell you what it is, Mr. Joseph: the night-birds.”
Tod looked at her, plying the knitting-needles so quickly, and looked at me, and there was a silence. I wondered what was keeping him from speaking. He suddenly bent his head forward.
“Have you heard any talk of these noises, Mrs. Radcliffe? People say they are to be heard almost any night.”
“I’ve not heard no talk, but I have heard the noise,” she answered, whisking out a needle and beginning another of the three-cornered rows. “One evening about a month ago I was a-coming home up the lane, and I hears a curious kind o’ prolonged cry. It startled me at the moment, for, thinks I, it must be in this house; and I hastens in. No. Eunice said she had heard no cries: as how should she, when there was nobody but herself indoors? So I goes out again, and listens,” added Mrs. Radcliffe, lifting her eyes from the stocking and fixing them on Tod, “and then I finds out what it really was—the night-birds.”
“The night-birds?” he echoed.
“’Twas the night-birds, Mr. Joseph,” she repeated, with an emphatic nod. “They had congregated in these thick trees, and was crying like so many human beings. I have heard the same thing many a time in Wiltshire when I was a girl. I used to go there to stay with aunt and uncle.”
“Well, I never heard anything like it before,” returned Tod. “It’s just as though some unquiet spirit was in the air.”
“Mayhap it sounds so afore you know what it is. Let me give you young gentlemen a drop o’ my home-made cowslip wine.”
She had taken the decanter of wine and some glasses off the sideboard with her long arms, before we could say Yes or No. We are famous for cowslip wine down there, but this was extra good. Tod took another glass of it, and got up to go.
“Don’t be frighted if you hear the noise again, now that you know what it is,” she said, quite in a motherly way. “For my part I wish some o’ the birds was shot. They don’t do no good to nobody.”
“As there is not any house about here, except this, the thought naturally arises that the noise may be inside it—until you know to the contrary,” remarked Tod.
“I wish it was inside it—we’d soon stop it by wringing all their necks,” cried she. “You can listen,” she added, suddenly going into the hall and flinging wide every door that opened from it and led to the different passages and rooms. “Go to any part of the house you like, and hearken for yourselves, young gentlemen.”
Tod laughed at the suggestion. The passages were all still and cold, and there was nothing to hear. Taking up the candle, she lighted us to the front-door. Outside stood the woman-servant Eunice, a basket on her arm, and just about to ring, Mrs. Radcliffe inquired if she had heard any noise.
“Only the shrieking birds up there,” she answered readily. “They be in full cry to-night.”
“They’ve been startling these gentlemen finely.”
“There bain’t nothing to be