Johnny Ludlow, Second Series. Mrs. Henry Wood
Ben, as he disappeared.
I put down half-a-crown for the pills, and Mr. Rymer left his place to give me the change. There had been a sort of consciousness between us, understood though not expressed, since the night when I had seen him giving way to his emotion in Crabb Ravine. This man’s visit brought the scene back again. Rymer’s eyes looked into mine, and then fell.
“Ben is all right now, Mr. Rymer.”
“I could not wish him better than he is. It’s just as though he were striving to atone for the past. I thought it would have killed me at the time.”
“I should forget it.”
“Forget it I never can. You don’t know what it was, Mr. Johnny,” he continued in a sort of frightened tone, a red spot coming into his pale thin cheeks, “and I trust you never will know. I never went to bed at night but to lie listening for a summons at my door—the officers searching for my son, or to tell me he was taken. I never rose in the morning but my spirit fainted within me, as to what news the day might bring forth.”
Mr. Benjamin and his friend were pacing side by side in the middle of the street when I went out, probably to be out of the reach of eavesdroppers. They did not look best pleased with each other; seemed to be talking sharply.
“I tell you I can’t and I won’t,” Ben was saying, as I passed them in crossing over. “What do you come after me for? When a fellow wants to be on the square, you won’t let him. As to Gibbs——”
The voices died out of hearing. I went home with the pills, and thought no more about the matter.
Spring weather is changeable, as we English know only too well. In less than a week, a storm of sleet and snow was drifting down. In the midst of it, who should present himself at Crabb Cot at midday but Lee, the letter-carrier. His shaky old legs seemed hardly able to bear him up against the storm, as he came into the garden. I opened the door, wondering what he wanted.
“Please can I see the Squire in private, sir?” asked Lee, who was looking half angry, half rueful. Lee had never been in boisterous spirits since the affair of the bank-note took place. Like a great many more people, he grew fanciful with years, and could not be convinced but that the suspicion in regard to it lay on him.
“Come in out of the storm, Lee. What’s up?”
“Please, Mr. Ludlow, sir, let me get to see the Squire,” was all his answer.
The Squire was in his little room, hunting for a mislaid letter in the piece of furniture he called his bureau. As I shut old Lee in, I heard him, Lee, begin to say something about the bank-note and Benjamin Rymer. An instinct of the truth flashed over me—as sure as fate something connecting Ben with it had come out. In I shot again, to make one at the conference. The Squire was looking too surprised to notice me.
“It was Mr. Rymer’s son who took out the good note and put in the bad one?” he exclaimed. “Take care what you say, Lee.”
Lee stood near the worn hearthrug; his old hat, covered with snow-flakes, held between his hands. The Squire had put his back against the bureau and was staring at him through his spectacles, his nose and face a finer red than ordinary.
The thing had been tracked home to Benjamin Rymer by the man Cotton, Lee explained in a rambling sort of tale. Cotton, incensed at Rymer’s not helping him to some money—which was what he had come to Timberdale to ask for—had told in revenge of the past transaction. Cotton had not been connected with it, but knew of the part taken in it by Rymer.
“I don’t believe a syllable of it,” said the Squire, stoutly, flinging himself into his bureau chair, which he twisted round to face the fire. “You can sit down, Lee. Where did you say you heard this?”
Lee had heard it at the Plough and Harrow, where the man Cotton had been staying. Jelf, the landlord, had been told it by Cotton himself, and Jelf in his turn had whispered it to Lee. That was last night: and Lee had come up with it now to Mr. Todhetley.
“I tell you, Lee, I don’t believe a syllable of it,” repeated the Squire.
“It be true as gospel, sir,” asserted Lee. “Last night, when I went in to Jelf’s for a drop of beer, being stiff all over with the cold, I found Jelf in a passion because a guest had gone off without paying part of his score, leaving nothing but a letter to say he’d send it. Cotton by name, Jelf explained, and a sporting gent to look at. A good week, Jelf vowed he’d been there, living on the best. And then Jelf said I had no cause to be looked down upon any longer, for it was not me that had done that trick with the bank-notes, but Benjamin Rymer.”
“Now just stop, Lee,” interrupted the Squire. “Nobody looked down upon you for it, or suspected you: neither Jelf nor other people. I have told you so times enough.”
“But Jelf knows I thought they did, sir. And he told me this news to put me a bit at my ease. He——”
“Jelf talks at random when his temper’s up,” cried the Squire. “If you believe this story, Lee, you’ll believe anything.”
“Ben Rymer was staying at home at the time, sir,” urged Lee, determined to have his say. “If he is steady now, it’s known what he was then. He must have got access to the letters somehow, while they lay at his father’s that night, and opened yours and changed the note. Cotton says Mr. Ben had had the stolen note hid about him for ever so long, waiting an opportunity to get rid of it.”
“Do you mean to accuse Mr. Ben of being one of the thieves who robbed the butcher’s till?” demanded the Squire, growing wrathful.
“Well, sir, I don’t go as far as that. The man told Jelf that one of the stolen notes was given to young Rymer to pass, and he was to have a pound for himself if he succeeded in doing it.”
The Squire would hardly let him finish.
“Cotton said this to Jelf, did he?—and Jelf rehearsed it to you?”
“Yes, sir. Just that much.”
“Now look you here, Lee. First of all, to whom have you repeated this tale?”
“Not to anybody,” answered Lee. “I thought I’d better bring it up here, sir, to begin with.”
“And you’d better let it stop here to end with,” retorted the Squire. “That’s my best advice to you, Lee. My goodness! Accuse a respectable man’s son of what might transport him, on the authority of a drunken fellow who runs away from an inn without paying his bill! The likeliest thing is that this Cotton did it himself. How else should he know about it? Don’t you let your tongue carry this further, Lee, or you may find yourself in the wrong box.”
Lee looked just a little staggered. A faint flush appeared in his withered face. The Squire’s colour was at its fiercest. He was hard at the best of times to take in extraordinary tales, and utterly scouted this one. There was no man he had a greater respect for than Thomas Rymer.
“I hoped you might be for prosecuting, sir. It would set me right with the world.”
“You are a fool, Lee. The world has not thought you wrong yet. Prosecute! I! Upon this cock-and-bull story! Mr. Rymer would prosecute me in turn, I expect, if I did. You’d better not let this get to his ears: you might lose your post.”
“Mr. Rymer, sir, must know how wild his son has been.”
“Wild! Most of the young men of the present day are that, as it seems to me,” cried the Squire, in his heat. “Mine had better not let me catch them at it, though. I’d warm their ears well beforehand if I thought they ever would—— Do you hear, Mr. Johnny?”
I had been leaning on the back of a chair in the quietest corner for fear of being sent away. When the Squire put himself up like this, he would say anything.
“To be a bit wild is one thing, Lee; to commit felony quite another: Rymer’s son would be