A figure crept out of the darkness, and came up to where he stood. It was the old woman, his grandmother.
“All’s right, deary,” she whispered. “Bill Withers has got everything ready. He’s a waiting down by the wall yonder. There’s not a mortal about; and I’ll keep watch. You’ll want Bill’s help. When you’re ready for him, you’re to whistle softly three times running. He’ll know what it means—and I’m going to watch while he helps you. Haven’t I managed beautiful, deary? and shan’t I deserve the golden sovereigns you’ve promised me? They was guineas always when I was young, deary. Nothing’s as good now as it used to be.”
“Don’t let us have any chattering,” said Jabez, as he laid a rough hand upon her arm; “unless you want to wake everybody in the place.”
“But, I say, deary, is it all over? Nothing unfair, you know. Remember your promise.”
“All over? Yes; half an hour ago. If you hinder me here with your talk, the girl will be back before we’re ready for her.”
“Let me come in and close his eyes, deary,” supplicated the old woman. “His mother was my own child. Let me close his eyes.”
“Keep where you are, or I’ll strangle you!” growled her dutiful grandson, as he shut the door upon his venerable relation, and left her mumbling upon the threshold.
Jabez crept cautiously towards the bed on which his brother lay. Jim at this moment awoke from his restless slumber; and, opening his eyes to their widest extent, looked full at the man by his side. He made no effort to speak, pointed to his lips, and, stretching out his hand towards the bottles on the table, made signs to his brother. These signs were a supplication for the cooling draught which always allayed the burning heat of the fever.
Jabez never stirred. “He has awoke,” he murmured. “This is the crisis of his life, and of my fate.”
The clocks of Slopperton chimed the quarter before eleven.
“It’s a black gulf, lass,” gasped the dying man; “and I’m fast sinking into it.”
There was no friendly hand, Jim, to draw you back from that terrible gulf. The medicine stood untouched upon the table; and, perhaps as guilty as the first murderer, your twin brother stood by your bed-side.
Chapter V
Midnight by the Slopperton Clocks
The clouds and the sky kept their promise, and as the clocks chimed the quarter before twelve the storm broke over the steeples at Slopperton.
Blue lightning-flashes lit up Blind Peter, and attendant thunderclaps shook him to his very foundation; while a violent shower of rain gave him such a washing-down of every flagstone, chimneypot, and door-step, as he did not often get. Slopperton in bed was almost afraid to go to sleep; and Slopperton not in bed did not seem to care about going to bed. Slopperton at supper was nervous as to handling of glittering knives and steel forks; and Slopperton going to windows to look out at the lightning was apt to withdraw hurriedly at the sight thereof. Slopperton in general was depressed by the storm; thought there would be mischief somewhere; and had a vague idea that something dreadful would happen before the night was out.
In Dr. Tappenden’s quiet household there was consternation and alarm. Mr. Jabez North, the principal assistant, had gone out early in the evening, and had not returned at the appointed hour for shutting up the house. This was such an unprecedented occurrence, that it had occasioned considerable uneasiness—especially as Dr. Tappenden was away from home, and Jabez was, in a manner, deputy-master of the house. The young woman who looked after the gentlemen’s wardrobes had taken compassion upon the housemaid, who sat up awaiting Mr. North’s return, and had brought her workbox, and a lapful of young gentlemen’s dilapidated socks, to the modest chamber in which the girl waited.
“I hope,” said the housemaid, “nothing ain’t happened to him through the storm. I hope he hasn’t been getting under no trees.”
The housemaid had a fixed idea that to go under a tree in a thunderstorm was to encounter immediate death.
“Poor dear young gentleman,” said the lady of the wardrobes; “I tremble to think what can keep him out so. Such a steady young man; never known to be a minute after time either. I’m sure every sound I hear makes me expect to see him brought in on a shutter.”
“Don’t now, Miss Smithers!” cried the housemaid, looking behind her as if she expected to see the ghost of Jabez North pointing to a red spot on his left breast at the back of her chair. “I wish you wouldn’t now! Oh, I hope he ain’t been murdered. There’s been such a many murders in Slopperton since I can remember. It’s only three years and a half ago since a man cut his wife’s throat down in Windmill Lane, because she hadn’t put no salt in the saucepan when she boiled the greens.”
The frightful parallel between the woman who boiled the greens without salt and Jabez North two hours after his time, struck such terror to the hearts of the young women, that they were silent for some minutes, during which they both looked uneasily at a thief in the candle which neither of them had the courage to take out—their nerves not being equal to the possible clicking of the snuffers.
“Poor young man!” said the housemaid, at last. “Do you know, Miss Smithers, I can’t help thinking he has been rather low lately.”
Now this word “low” admits of several applications, so Miss Smithers replied, rather indignantly,—
“Low, Sarah Anne! Not in his language, I’m sure. And as to his manners, they’d be a credit to the nobleman that wrote the letters.”
“No, no, Miss Smithers; I mean his spirits. I’ve fancied lately he’s been a fretting about something; perhaps he’s in love, poor dear.”
Miss Smithers coloured up. The conversation was getting interesting. Mr. North had lent her Rasselas, which she thought a story of thrilling interest; and she had kept his stockings and shirt buttons in order for three years. Such things had happened; and Mrs. Jabez North sounded more comfortable than Miss Smithers, at any rate.
“Perhaps,” said Sarah Anne, rather maliciously—“perhaps he’s been forgetting his situation and giving way to thoughts of marrying our young missus. She’s got a deal of money, you know, Miss Smithers, though her figure ain’t much to look at.”
Sarah Anne’s figure was plenty to look at, having a tendency to break out into luxuriance where you least expected it.
It was in vain that Sarah Anne or Miss Smithers speculated on the probable causes of the usher’s absence. Midnight struck from the Dutch clock in the kitchen, the eight-day clock on the staircase, the time-piece in the drawing-room—a liberal and complicated piece of machinery which always struck eighteen to the dozen—and eventually from every clock in Slopperton; and yet there was no sign of Jabez North.
No sign of Jabez North. A white face and a pair of glazed eyes staring up at the sky, out on a dreary heath three miles from Slopperton, exposed to the fury of a pitiless storm; a man lying alone on a wretched mattress in a miserable apartment in Blind Peter—but no Jabez North.
Through the heartless storm, dripping wet with the pelting rain, the girl they have christened Sillikens hastens back to Blind Peter. The feeble glimmer of the candle, with the drooping wick sputtering in a pool of grease, is the only light which illumes that cheerless neighbourhood. The girl’s heart beats with a terrible flutter as she approaches that light, for an agonizing doubt is in her soul about that other light which she left so feebly burning, and which may be now extinct. But she takes courage; and pushing open the door, which opposes neither bolts nor bars to any deluded votary of Mercury, she enters the dimly-lighted room. The man lies with his face turned to the wall; the old woman