Works of Ellen Wood, page 1193
“The wind must have got up suddenly,” I answered. “There was none to-day. It was too hot for it. Talking of witches and broomsticks, Tod, have you read — —”
He put his arm out to stop my words and steps, halting himself. We had been rushing on like six, had traversed half the field.
“What’s that, Johnny?” he asked in a whisper. “There” — pointing onwards at right angles. “Something’s lying there.”
Something undoubtedly was — lying on the grass. Was it an animal? — or a man? It did not look much like either. We stood motionless, trying to make the shape out.
“Tod! It is a woman.”
“Gently, lad! Don’t be in a hurry. We’ll soon see.”
The figure raised itself as we approached, and stood confronting us. The last pull of wind that went brushing by might have brushed me down, in my surprise. It was Mrs. Francis Radcliffe.
She drew her grey cloak closer round her and put her hand upon Tod’s arm. He went back half a step: I’m not sure but he thought it might be her ghost.
“Do not think me quite out of my mind,” she said — and her voice and manner were both collected. “I have come here every evening for nearly a week past to listen to the cries. They have never been so plain as they are to-night. I suppose the wind helps them.”
“But — you — were lying on the grass, Mrs. Francis,” said Tod; not knowing yet what to make of it all.
“I had put my ear on the ground, wondering whether I might not hear it plainer,” she replied. “Listen!”
The cry again! The same painful wailing sound that we heard that other night, making one think of I know not what woe and despair. When it had died away, she spoke further, her voice very low.
“People are talking so much about the cries that I strolled on here some evenings ago to hear them for myself. In my mind’s tumult I can hardly rest quiet, once my day’s work is done: what does it matter which way I stroll? — all ways are the same to me. Some people said the sounds came from the birds, some said from witches, some from the ghost of the man on the gibbet: but the very first night I came here I found out what they were really like — my husband’s cries.”
“What!” cried Tod.
“And I believe from my very soul that it is his spirit that cries!” she went on, her voice taking as much excitement as any voice, only half raised, can take. “His spirit is unable to rest. It is here, hovering about the Torr. Hush! there it comes again.”
It was anything but agreeable, I can assure you, to stand in that big white moonlit plain, listening to those mysterious cries and to these ghostly suggestions. Tod was listening with all his ears.
“They are the very cries he used to make in his illness at the farm,” said Mrs. Radcliffe. “I can’t forget them. I should know them anywhere. The same sound of voice, the same wail of anguish: I could almost fancy that I hear the words. Listen.”
It did seem like it. One might have fancied that his name was repeated with a cry for help. “Help! Frank Radcliffe! Help!” But at such a moment as this, when the nerves are strung up to concert pitch, imagination plays us all sorts of impossible tricks.
“I’ll be shot if it’s not like Frank Radcliffe’s voice!” exclaimed Tod, breaking the silence. “And calling out, too.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Francis. “I shall not be able to bear this long: I shall have to speak of it to the world. When I say that you have recognized his voice also, they will be less likely to mock at me as a lunatic. David did, when I told him. At least, I could make no impression on him.”
Tod was lying down with his ear to the ground. But he soon got up, saying he could not hear so well.
“Did Stephen kill him, do you think?” she asked, in a dread whisper, drawing closer to us. “Why, else, should his poor unquiet spirit haunt the region of the Torr?”
“It is the first time I ever heard of spirits calling out in a human voice,” said Tod. “The popular belief is, that they mostly appear in dumb show.”
He quitted us, as he spoke, and went about the field with slow steps, halting often to look and listen. The trees around the Torr in particular seemed to attract his attention, by the length of time he stared up at them. Or, perhaps, it might be at the tops of the chimneys: or perhaps at the tapering tower. We waited in nearly the same spot, shivering and listening. But the sounds never came so distinctly again: I think the wind had spent itself.
“It is a dreadful weight to have to carry about with me,” said poor Annet Radcliffe as we walked homewards. “And oh! what will be the ending? Will it be heard always?”
I had never seen Tod so thoughtful as he was that night. At supper he put down his knife and fork perpetually to fall into a brown study; and I am sure he never knew a word of the reading afterwards.
It was some time in the night, and I was fast asleep and dreaming of daws and magpies, when something shook my shoulder and awoke me. There stood Tod, his nightshirt white as snow in the moonlight.
“Johnny,” said he, “I have been trying to get daylight out of that mystery, and I think I’ve done it.”
“What mystery? What’s the matter?”
“The mystery of the cries. They don’t come from Francis Radcliffe’s ghost, but from Francis himself. His ghost! When that poor soft creature was talking of the ghost, I should have split with laughter but for her distress.”
“From Francis himself! What on earth do you mean?”
“Stephen has got him shut up in that tower.”
“Alive?”
“Alive! Go along, Johnny! You don’t suppose he’d keep him there if he were dead. Those cries we heard to-night were human cries; words; and that was a human voice uttering them, as my ears and senses told me; and my brain has been in a muddle ever since, all sleep gone clean out of it. Just now, turning and twisting possibilities about, the solution of the mystery came over me like a flash of lightning. Ste has got Frank shut up in the Torr.”
He, standing there upright by the bed, and I, digging my elbow into the counterpane and resting my cheek on my hand, gazed at one another, the perplexity of our faces showing out strongly in the moonlight.
IV.
Mr. Duffham the surgeon stood making up pills and powders in his surgery at Church Dykely, the mahogany counter before him, the shelves filled with glass bottles of coloured liquids behind him. Weighing out grains of this and that in the small scales that rested beside the large ones, both sets at the end of the counter, was he, and measuring out drops with a critical eye. The day promised to be piping-hot, and his summer house-coat, of slate-coloured twill, was thrown back on his shoulders. Spare and wiry little man though he was, he felt the heat. He was rather wondering that no patients had come in yet, for people knew that this was the time to catch him, before he started on his rounds, and he generally had an influx on Monday morning.
Visitor the first. The surgery-door, standing close to the open front one, was tapped at, and a tall, bony woman entered, dressed in a big straw bonnet with primrose ribbons, a blue cotton gown and cotton shawl. Eunice Gibbon, Mrs. Stephen Radcliffe’s sister.
“Good-morning, Mr. Duffham,” she said, lodging her basket on the counter. “I’m frightfully out o’ sorts, sir, and think I shan’t be right till I’ve took a bottle or two o’ physic.”
“Sit down,” said the doctor, coming in front of the counter, preparatory to inquiring into the symptoms.
She sat down in one of the two chairs: and Duffham, after sundry questions, told her that her liver was out of order. She answered that she could have told him that, for nothing but “liver” was ever the matter with her. He went behind the counter again to make up a bottle of some delectable stuff good for the complaint, and Eunice sat waiting for it, when the surgery-door was pushed open with a whirl and a bang, and Tod and I burst in. To see Eunice Gibbon there, took us aback. It seemed a very curious coincidence, considering what we had come about.
“Well, young gentlemen,” quoth Duffham, looking rather surprised, and detecting our slight discomfiture, “does either of you want my services?”
“Yes,” said Tod, boldly; “Johnny does: he has a headache. We’ll wait, Mr. Duffham.”
Leaning on the counter, we watched the progress of the making-up in silence, Duffham exchanging a few words with Eunice Gibbon at intervals. Suddenly he opened upon a subject that caused Tod to give me a private dig with his elbow.
“And how were the cries last night?” asked Duffham. “Did you hear much of them?”
“There was no cries last night,” answered Eunice — which brought me another dig from Tod. “But wasn’t the wind high! It went shrieking round the Torr like so many mad cats. Two spoonfuls twice a-day, did you say, sir?”
“Three times a-day. I am putting the directions on the bottle. You will soon feel better.”
“I’ve been subject to these bilious turns all my life,” she said, speaking to me and Tod. “But I don’t know when I’ve had as bad a one as this. Thank ye, sir.”
Taking the bottle of physic, she put it into her basket, said good-morning, and went away. Duffham came to the front, and Tod jumped on the counter and sat there facing us, his long legs dangling. I had taken one of the chairs.
“Mr. Duffham, what do you think we have come about?” began Tod, dropping his voice to a mysterious key. “Don’t you go and faint away when you hear it.”
“Faint away!” retorted old Duffham.
“I’ll be shot if it would not send some people into a faint! That Gibbon woman has just said that no cries were to be heard last night.”
“Well?”
“Well, there were cries; plenty of them. And awful cries they were. I, and Johnny, and Mrs. Frank Radcliffe — yes, she was with us — stood in that precious field listening to them till our blood ran cold. You heard them, you know, on Saturday night.”
“Well?” repeated Duffham, staring at Tod.
“Look here. We have found it out — and have come over to tell you — and to ask you what can be done,” went on Tod earnestly, jumping off the counter and putting his back against the door to make sure of no interruption. “The cries come from Frank Radcliffe. He is not dead.”
“What?” shouted Duffham, who had turned to face Tod and stood in the middle of the oil-cloth, wondering whether Tod was demented.
“Frank is no more dead than I am. I’d lay my life upon it. Stephen Radcliffe has got him shut up in the tower; and the piteous cries are his — crying for release.”
“Bless my heart and mind!” exclaimed Duffham, backing right against the big scales. “Frank Radcliffe alive and shut up in the tower! But there’s no way to the tower. He could not be got into it.”
“I don’t care. I know he is there. That huzzy, now gone out, does well to say no cries were abroad last night; her business is to throw people off the scent. But I tell you, Duffham, the cries never were so loud or so piteous, and I heard what they said as distinctly as you can hear me speak now. ‘Help! Frank Radcliffe! Help!’ they said. And I swear the voice was Frank’s own.”
“If ever I heard the like of this!” ejaculated Duffham. “It is really not — not to be credited.”
“The sound of the cries comes out on the air through the openings in the tower,” ran on Tod, in excitement. “Oh, he is there, poor fellow, safe enough. And to think what long months he has been kept there, Stephen’s prisoner! Twelve. Twelve, as I’m alive. Now, look you here, Duffham! you are staring like an unbeliever.”
“It’s not altogether that — that I don’t believe,” said Duffham, whose wide-open eyes were staring considerably. “I am thinking what is to be done about it — how to set the question at rest.”
Tod left the door unguarded and flung himself into the other chair. He went over the whole narrative quietly: how Mrs. Frank Radcliffe — who had been listening to the cries for a week past — had first put him into a puzzle, how he had then heard the words and the voice, and how the true explanation came flashing into his mind later. With every sentence, Duffham grew more convinced, and at last he believed it as much as we did.
“And now how is he to be got out?” concluded Tod.
Holding a council together, we decided that the first step must be to get a magistrate’s order to search the Torr. That involved the disclosure of the facts to the magistrate — whosoever he might be. Mr. Brandon was pitched upon: Duffham proposed the Squire at first; but, as Tod pointed out, the Squire would be sure to go to work in some hot and headlong manner, and perhaps ruin all. Let Stephen Radcliffe get only half an inkling of what was up, and he might contrive to convey Frank to the ends of the earth.
All three of us started at once, Duffham leaving his patients for that one morning to doctor themselves, and found Mr. Brandon at breakfast. He had been distracted with face-ache all night, he said, which caused him to rise late. The snow-white table-cloth was set off with flowers and plate, but the fare was not luxurious. The silver jug held plenty of new milk, the silver tea-pot a modicum of the weakest of tea, the silver rack the driest of dry toast. A boiled egg and the butter-dish remained untouched. One of the windows was thrown up wide to the summer air, and to the scent from the clustering flower-beds and the hum of the bees dipping over them to sip their sweets.
Breaking off little bits of toast, and eating them slowly, Mr. Brandon listened to the tale. He did not take it in. That was check the first. And he would not grant a warrant to search the Torr. That was check the second.
“Stephen Radcliffe is bad enough in the way of being sullen and miserly,” said he. “But as to daring such a thing as this, I don’t think he would. Pass his brother off to the world for dead, and put him into his house and keep him there in concealment! No. No one of common sense would believe it.”
Tod set on again, giving our experience of the past night, earnestly protesting that he had recognized Frank’s voice, and heard the words it said— “Help! Frank Radcliffe!” He added that Annet Radcliffe, Frank’s widow — or wife, whichever it might turn out to be — had been listening to the cries for days past and knew them for her husband’s: only she, poor daft woman, took them to come from his ghost. Mr. Brandon sipped his tea and listened. Duffham followed on: saying that when he heard the cries on Saturday night, in passing the Torr on his way from the Court, he could then almost have staked his existence upon their being human cries, proceeding from some human being in distress, but for the apparent impossibility of such a thing. And I could see that an impression was at length made on Mr. Brandon.
“If Stephen Radcliffe has done so infamous an act, he must be more cruel, more daring than man ever was yet,” remarked he, in answer. “But I must be more satisfied of it before I sign the warrant you ask for.”
Well, there we sat, hammering at him. That is, they did. Being my guardian, I did not presume to put in a word edgeways, so far as pressing him to act went. In all that he thought right, and in spite of his quiet manner and his squeaky voice, old Brandon was a firm man, not to be turned by argument.
“But won’t you grant this warrant, sir?” appealed Tod for the tenth time.
“I have told you, no,” he replied. “I will not at the present stage of the affair. In any case, I should not grant it without consulting your father — —”
“He is so hot-headed,” burst in Tod. “He’d be as likely as not to go off knocking at the Torr door without his hat, demanding Frank Radcliffe.”
“Mr. Todhetley was Frank Radcliffe’s trustee, and he is your father, young man; I do not stir a step in this matter without consulting him,” returned old Brandon, coolly persistent.
Well, there was nothing for it now but to go back home and consult the pater. It seemed like a regular damper — and we were hot and tired besides. Tod in his enthusiasm had pictured us storming the Torr at mid-day, armed with the necessary authority, and getting out Frank at once.
Mr. Brandon ordered his waggonette — a conveyance he did not like, and scarcely ever used himself, leaving it to the servants for their errands — and we all drove back to Dyke Manor, himself included. To describe the astonishment of the pater when the disclosure was made to him would take a strong pen. He rubbed his face, and blustered, and stared around, and then told Tod he was a fool.
“I know I am in some things,” said Tod, as equably as old Brandon could have put it; “but I’m not in this. If Frank Radcliffe is not alive in that tower of Stephen’s, and calling out nightly for his release, you may set me down as a fool to the end of my days, Father.”
“Goodness bless us all!” cried the poor bewildered Squire. “Do you believe this, Brandon?”
Mr. Brandon did not say whether he believed it or not. Both of them shook their heads about granting a warrant: upon which, Tod passionately asked whether Francis Radcliffe was to be left in the tower to die. It was finally decided that we should go in a body that night to the field again, so as to give the two doubters the benefit of hearing anything there might be to hear. And Mr. Brandon stayed with us for the day, telling his coachman to come back at night with the small pony-gig to take him home.
The moon was just as bright as on the previous night, and we started on our expedition stealthily. Tod and I went first; Duffham came strolling next; and the Squire and Mr. Brandon afterwards. Should Stephen Radcliffe or any of his people catch sight of the whole of us moving together, he might suspect there was something in the wind.
Annet did not make her appearance, which was a great relief. For we could talk without restraint; and it would never have done to let her know what we suspected: and so raise wild hopes within her that might not be fulfilled. We knew later that her mother was at Pitchley’s Farm that evening, and it kept Annet at home.
Was Heaven interfering in Frank’s behalf? It does interfere for the oppressed, you know; ay, more often than we heedless and ungrateful mortals think for. Never had the cries been so plain as they were this night, though there was no wind to waft them downwards, for the air was perfectly still: and the words were distinctly heard. “Help! Help! Frank Radcliffe.”
