When Ghost Meets Ghost. William De Morgan
had overweighted all other qualities, by reason of little Seth's numerous first cousins, made no reply, but looked uneasily at the rifle on the wall. Little Seth—her appropriated grandchild, both his parents being dead—was too small at present to do any great harm to anyone but himself; but the time might come. He was credited with having swallowed an inch-brad, without visible inconvenience; and there was a threatening appearance in his eye as of one who would very soon climb up everywhere, fall off everything, appropriate the forbidden, break the frangible, and, in short, behave as—according to his grandmother—his father had done before him.
His old grandfather, who had a combative though not unamiable disposition, took down the rifle as an act of self-assertion, and walked out into the twilight with it on his shoulder. It was simply a contradictious action, as there was no warranty for it in vert and venison. But he had to garnish his action with an appearance of plausibility, and nothing suggested itself. The only course open to him was to get away out of sight, with implication of a purpose vaguely involving fire-arms. A short turn in the oak-wood—as far, perhaps, as Drews Thurrock—would fortify his position, without committing him to details: he could make secrecy about them a point of discipline. He walked away over the grassland, a fine, upright old figure; in whose broad shoulders, seen from behind, an insight short of clairvoyance might have detected what is called temper—meaning a want of it. He vanished into the oak-wood, where the Druid's Stone attests the place of sacrifice, human or otherwise.
Some few minutes later the echoes of a rifle-shot, unmistakable alike for that of shot-gun or revolver, circled the belt of hills that looks on Ancester Towers, and died at Grantley Thorpe. Old Stephen, when he reappeared at the Lodge half an hour later, could explain his share in this with only a mixed satisfaction. For though his need of his rifle—whether real or not—had justified its readiness for use, he had failed as a marksman; the stray dog he fired at, after vanishing in a copse for a few minutes, having scoured away in a long detour; as he judged, making for the Castle.
"And a rare good hap for thee, husband!" said the old woman when she heard this. "Whatever has gotten thy wits, ma'an, to win out and draa' trigger on a pet tyke of some visitor lady at the Too'ers?"
"Will ye be tellun me this, and tellun me that, Keziah? I tell 'ee one thing, wench, it be no consarn o' mine whose dog be run loose in th' Park. Be they the Queen's own, my orders say shoot un! Do'ant thee know next month be August?" Nevertheless, the old man was not altogether sorry that he had missed. He might have been called over the coals for killing a dog-visitor to the Towers. He chose to affect regret for discipline's sake, and alleged that the dog had escaped into the wood only because he had no second cartridge. This was absurd. In these days of quick-shooters it might have been otherwise. In those, the only abominations of the sort were Colonel Colt's revolvers; and they were a great novelty, opening up a new era in murder.
The truth was that this view of the culprit's identity had dawned on him as soon as he got a second view of the dog visibly making for the Castle—almost too far in any case for a shot at anything smaller than a doe—and he would probably have held his hand for both reasons even if a reload had been possible.
Lady Gwendolen, treasuring in her heart a tale of adventure—however trivial—to tell at the dinner-table in the evening, submitted herself to be prepared for that function. She seemed absent in mind; and Lutwyche her maid, observing this, skipped intermediate reasonings and straightway hoped that the cause of this absence of mind had come over with the Conqueror and had sixty thousand a year. Meanwhile she wanted to know which dress, my lady, this evening?—and got no answer. Her ladyship was listening to something at a distance; or, rather, having heard something at a distance, was listening for a repetition of it. "I wonder what that can have been?" said she. For fire-arms in July are torpid mostly, and this was a gunshot somewhere.
"They are firing at the Butts at Stamford Norton, my lady," said Lutwyche; who always knew things, sometimes rightly—sometimes wrongly. This time, the latter.
"Then the wind must have gone round. Besides, it would come again. Listen!" Thus her ladyship, and both listened. But nothing came again.
Lady Gwendolen was as beautiful as usual that evening, but contrary to custom silent and distraite. She did not tell the story of the Man in the Park and his dog. She kept it to herself. She was unresponsive to the visible devotion of a Duke's eldest son, who came up to Lutwyche's standard in all particulars. She did not even rise to the enthusiasm of a very old family friend, the great surgeon Sir Coupland Merridew, about the view from his window across the Park, although each had seen the same sunset effect. She only said:—"Oh—have they put you in the Traveller's Room, Sir Coupland? Yes—the view is very fine!" and became absent again. She retired early, asking to be excused on the score of fatigue; not, however, seriously resenting her mother's passing reference to a nursery rhyme about Sleepy-head, whose friends kept late hours, nor her "Why, child, you've had nothing to tire you!" She was asleep in time to avoid the sound of a dog whining, wailing, protesting vainly, with a great wrong on his soul, not to be told for want of language.
She woke with a start very early, to identify this disturbance with something she lost in a dream, past recovery, owing to this sudden awakening. She had her hand on the bell-rope at her bed's head, and had all but pulled it before she identified the blaze of light in her room as the exordium of the new day. The joy of the swallows at the dawn was musical in the ivy round her window, open through the warm night; and the turtle-doves had much to say, and were saying it, in the world of leafage out beyond. But there was no joy in the persistent voice of that dog, and no surmise of its hearer explained it.
She found her feet, and shoes to put them in, before she was clear about her own intentions; then in all haste got herself into as much clothing as would cover the risks of meeting the few early risers possible at such an hour—it could but be some chance groom or that young gardener—and, opening her door with thief-like stealth, stole out through the stillness night had left behind, past the doors of sleepers who were losing the sweetest of the day. So she thought—so we all think—when some chance gives us precious hours that others are wasting in stupid sleep. But even she would not have risen but for that plaintive intermittent wail and a growing construction of a cause for it—all fanciful perhaps—that her uneasy mind would still be at work upon. She must find out the story of it. More sleep now was absurd.
Two bolts and a chain—not insuperable obstacles—and she was free of the side-garden. An early riser—the one she had foreseen, a young gardener she knew—with an empty basket to hold flowers for the still sleeping household to refresh the house with in an hour, and its bed-bound sluggards in two or three, was astir and touched a respectful cap with some inner misgiving that this unwonted vision was a ghost. But he showed a fine discipline, and called it "My lady" with presence of mind. Ghost or no, that was safe! "What is that dog, Oliver?" said the vision.
The question made all clear. The answer was speculative. "Happen it might be his lordship's dog that came yesterday—feeling strange in a strange place belike?"
"No dog came yesterday. Lord Cumberworld hasn't a dog. I must know. Where is it?"
Oliver was not actor enough not to show that he was concealing wonderment at the young lady's vehemence. His eyes remained wide open in token thereof.
"In the stables, by the sound of it, my lady," was his answer.
His lady turned without a word, going straight for the stables; and he followed when, recollecting him, she looked back to say, "Yes—come!"
Grooms are early risers in a well-kept stable. There is always something to be done, involving pails, or straps, or cloths, or barrows, or brushes, even at five in the morning in July. When the young gardener, running on ahead, jangled at the side-gate yard-bell, more than one pair of feet was on the move within; and there was the cry of the dog, sure enough, almost articulate with keen distress about some unknown wrong.
"What is the dog, Archibald?—what is the dog?" The speaker was too anxious for the answer to frame her question squarely. But the old Scotch groom understood. "Wha can tell that?" says he. "He's just stra'ad away from his home, or lost the track of a new maister. They do, ye ken,