Johnny Ludlow, Second Series. Mrs. Henry Wood
a feeling came over me that there was. What had become of Robert Ashton? Where could he be?
“I wish you would give me that shawl of mamma’s,” she said, pointing to one on a chair. “I feel cold.”
She was shivering when I put it over her pretty white shoulders and arms. And yet the fire was roaring to the very top of the grate.
“Alone here, while you were at dinner, I went over all sorts of probabilities,” she resumed, drawing the shawl round her as if she were out in the snow. “Of course there are five hundred things that might happen to him, but I can only think of one.”
“Well?” for she had stopped. She seemed to be speaking very unwillingly.
“If he walked he would be almost sure to take the near way, across the Ravine.”
Was she ever coming to the point? I said nothing. It was better to let her go on in her own way.
“I dare say you will say the idea is far-fetched, Johnny. What I think is, that he may have fallen down the Ravine, in coming here.”
Well, I did think it far-fetched. I’d as soon have expected her to say fallen down the chimney.
“Those zigzag paths are not very safe in good weather, especially the one on the Timberdale side,” she went on. “With the snow on them, perhaps ice, they are positively dangerous. One false step at the top—and the fall might kill him.”
Put in this way, it seemed feasible enough. But yet—somehow I did not take to it.
“Robert Ashton is strong and agile, Jane. He has come down the zigzag hundreds of times.”
“I seem to see him lying there, at the bottom of the Ravine,” she said, staring as before into the fire. “I—wish—some of you would go and look for him.”
“Perhaps we had better. I’ll make one. Who’s this?”
It was Tom Coney. His mother had sent him to see after me. I thought I’d tell him—keeping counsel about the dream—that Robert Ashton might have come to grief in the Ravine.
“What kind of grief?” asked Tom.
“Turned a summersault down the zigzag, and be lying with a leg broken.”
Tom’s laugh displayed his small white teeth: the notion amused him excessively. “What else would you like to suppose, Johnny?”
“At any rate, Jane thinks so.”
She turned round then, the tears in her eyes, and went up to Tom in an outburst of grief. It took him aback.
“Tom! Tom! if no one goes to see after him, I think I must go myself. I cannot bear the suspense much longer!”
“Why, Jenny girl, what has taken you?”
That had taken her. The fear that Robert Ashton might be lying disabled, or dead, in the Ravine. Tom Coney called Tod quietly out of the dining-room, and we started. Putting on our dark great-coats in silence, we went out at the back-door, which was nearest the Ravine. Jane came with us to the gate. I never saw eyes so eager as hers were, as she gazed across the snow in the moonlight.
“Look here,” said Tom, “we had better turn our trousers up.”
The expedition was not pleasant, I can assure you, especially the going down the zigzag. Jane was right about its being slippery: we had to hold on by the trees and bushes, and tread cautiously. When pretty near the bottom, Tod made a false step, and shot down into the snow.
“Murder!” he roared out.
“Any bones broken?” asked Tom Coney, who could hardly speak for laughing. Tod growled, and shied a handful of snow at him.
But the slip brought home to us the probability of the fear about Robert Ashton. To slip from where Tod did was fun; to slip from the top of the opposite zigzag, quite another thing. The snow here at the bottom was up to our calves, and our black evening trousers got rolled up higher. The moonlight lay cold and white on the Ravine: the clustering trees, thick in summer, were leafless now. Had any fellow been gazing down from the top, we must have looked, to him, like three black-coated undertakers, gliding along to a funeral.
“I’ll tell you what,” cried Tod: “if Ashton did lose his footing, he wouldn’t come to such mortal grief. The depth of snow would save him.”
“I don’t believe he did fall,” said Tom Coney, stoutly. “Bob Ashton’s as sure-footed as a hare. But for Jane’s being so miserable, I’d have said, flatly, I wouldn’t come out on any such wild-goose errand.”
On we went, wading through the snow. Some of us looked round for the ghost’s light, and did not see it. But rumour said that it never came on a bright moonlit night. Here we were at last!—at the foot of the other zigzag. But Robert Ashton wasn’t here. And, the best proof that he had not fallen, was the unbroken surface of the snow. Not so much as a rabbit had scudded across to disturb it.
“I knew it,” said Tom Coney. “He has not come to grief at all. It stands to reason that a fellow must have heaps to do the day before his wedding, if it’s only in burning his old letters from other sweethearts. Bob had a heap of them, no doubt; and couldn’t get away in time for dinner.”
“We had better go on to the Court, and see,” I said.
“Oh, that be hanged!” cried the other two in a breath.
“Well, I shall. It’s not much farther. You can go back, or not, as you like.”
This zigzag, though steeper than the one on our side, was not so slippery. Perhaps the sun had shone on it in the day and melted the snow. I went up it nearly as easily as in good weather. Tod and Coney, thinking better of the turning back, came after me.
We should have been at Timberdale Court in five minutes, taking the short-cut over hedges and ditches, but for an adventure by the way, which I have not just here space to tell about. It had nothing to do with Robert Ashton. Getting to the Court, we hammered at it till the door was opened. The servant started back in surprise.
“Goodness me!” said she, “I thought it was master.”
“Where is the master?” asked Tom.
“Not come home, sir. He has not been in since he left this morning.”
It was all out. Instead of pitchpolling into Crabb Ravine and breaking his limbs, Bob Ashton had not got back from Worcester. It was very strange, though, what could be keeping him, and the Court was nearly in a commotion over it.
When we got back to the Farm, they were laying the table for the wedding-breakfast. Plenty of kickshaws now, and some lovely flowers. The ladies, helping, had their gowns turned up. This helping had not been in the evening’s programme; but things seemed to have been turned upside down, and they were glad to seize upon it. Jane and her sister, Mrs. West, sat alone by the drawing-room fire, never saying a word to one another.
“Johnny, I don’t half like this,” whispered Mrs. Todhetley to me.
“Like what, good mother?”
“This absence of Robert Ashton.”
I don’t know that I liked it either.
Morning came. In an uncertainty such as this, people go to each other’s houses indiscriminately. The first train came in from Worcester before it was well light; but it did not bring Robert Ashton. As to the snow on the ground, it was pretty well beaten now.
“He wouldn’t travel by that slow parliamentary thing: he’ll come by the express to South Crabb Junction,” said Tom Coney, thinking he would cheer away the general disappointment. Jane we had not seen.
The express would be at the Junction between nine and ten. A whole lot of us went down there. It was not farther off than Timberdale Station,