The Dead Alive

“I wish I had never given John Jago that meeting,” she said. “When a man asks anything of a woman, the woman, I find, mostly repents it if she says ‘Yes.’”

She made that quaint reflection with a very troubled brow. The moonlight meeting had left some unwelcome remembrances in her mind. I saw that as plainly as I saw Naomi herself.

What had John Jago said to her? I put the question with all needful delicacy, making my apologies beforehand.

“I should like to tell you,” she began, with a strong emphasis on the last word.

There she stopped. She turned pale; then suddenly flushed again to the deepest red. She took up the knife once more, and went on cleaning it as industriously as ever.

“I mustn’t tell you,” she resumed, with her head down over the knife. “I have promised not to tell anybody. That’s the truth. Forget all about it, sir, as soon as you can. Hush! here’s the spy who saw us last night on the walk and who told Silas!”

Dreary Miss Meadowcroft opened the kitchen door. She carried an ostentatiously large Prayer-book; and she looked at Naomi as only a jealous woman of middle age can look at a younger and prettier woman than herself.

“Prayers, Miss Colebrook,” she said in her sourest manner. She paused, and noticed me standing under the window. “Prayers, Mr. Lefrank,” she added, with a look of devout pity, directed exclusively to my address.

“We will follow you directly, Miss Meadowcroft,” said Naomi.

“I have no desire to intrude on your secrets Miss Colebrook.”

With that acrid answer, our priestess took herself and her Prayer-book out of the kitchen. I joined Naomi, entering the room by the garden door. She met me eagerly. “I am not quite easy about something,” she said. “Did you tell me that you left Ambrose and Silas together?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose Silas tells Ambrose of what happened this morning?”

The same idea, as I have already mentioned, had occurred to my mind. I did my best to reassure Naomi.

“Mr. Jago is out of the way,” I replied. “You and I can easily put things right in his absence.”

She took my arm.

“Come in to prayers,” she said. “Ambrose will be there, and I shall find an opportunity of speaking to him.”

Neither Ambrose nor Silas was in the breakfast-room when we entered it. After waiting vainly for ten minutes, Mr. Meadowcroft told his daughter to read the prayers. Miss Meadowcroft read, thereupon, in the tone of an injured woman taking the throne of mercy by storm, and insisting on her rights. Breakfast followed; and still the brothers were absent. Miss Meadowcroft looked at her father, and said, “From bad to worse, sir. What did I tell you?” Naomi instantly applied the antidote: “The boys are no doubt detained over their work, uncle.” She turned to me. “You want to see the farm, Mr. Lefrank. Come and help me to find the boys.”

For more than an hour we visited one part of the farm after another, without discovering the missing men. We found them at last near the outskirts of a small wood, sitting, talking together, on the trunk of a felled tree.

Silas rose as we approached, and walked away, without a word of greeting or apology, into the wood. As he got on his feet, I noticed that his brother whispered something in his ear; and I heard him answer, “All right.”

“Ambrose, does that mean you have something to keep a secret from us?” asked Naomi, approaching her lover with a smile. “Is Silas ordered to hold his tongue?”

Ambrose kicked sulkily at the loose stones lying about him. I noticed, with a certain surprise that his favorite stick was not in his hand, and was not lying near him.

“Business,” he said in answer to Naomi, not very graciously—“business between Silas and me. That’s what it means, if you must know.”

Naomi went on, woman-like, with her questioning, heedless of the reception which they might meet with from an irritated man.

“Why were you both away at prayers and breakfast-time?” she asked next.

“We had too much to do,” Ambrose gruffly replied, “and we were too far from the house.”

“Very odd,” said Naomi. “This has never happened before since I have been at the farm.”

“Well, live and learn. It has happened now.”

The tone in which he spoke would have warned any man to let him alone. But warnings which speak by implication only are thrown away on women. The woman, having still something in her mind to say, said it.

“Have you seen anything of John Jago this morning?”

The smoldering ill-temper of Ambrose burst suddenly—why, it was impossible to guess—into a flame. “How many more questions am I to answer?” he broke out violently. “Are you the parson putting me through my catechism? I have seen nothing of John Jago, and I have got my work to go on with. Will that do for you?”

He turned with an oath, and followed his brother into the wood. Naomi’s bright eyes looked up at me, flashing with indignation.

“What does he mean, Mr. Lefrank, by speaking to me in that way? Rude brute! How dare he do it?” She paused; her voice, look and manner suddenly changed. “This has never happened before, sir. Has anything gone wrong? I declare, I shouldn’t know Ambrose again, he is so changed. Say, how does it strike you?”

I still made the best of a bad case.

“Something has upset his temper,” I said. “The merest trifle, Miss Colebrook, upsets a man’s temper sometimes. I speak as a man, and I know it. Give him time, and he will make his excuses, and all will be well again.”