“You’re a fool to take on so. Since it’s got to be, the sooner the better, I say. Don’t you see that every minute makes less our chances of concealment?”
It made me feel like changing my mind and staying home. But the habit of a lifetime is not easily broken into. I kept to my first decision.
XI
Men, Women, and Ghosts
Mr. Simsbury gave me quite an amiable bow as I entered the buggy. This made it easy for me to say:
“You are on hand early this morning. Do you sleep in the Knollys house?”
The stare he gave me had the least bit of suspicion in it.
“I live over yonder,” he said, pointing with his whip across the intervening woods to the main road. “I come through the marshes to my breakfast; my old woman says they owes me three meals, and three meals I must have.”
It was the longest sentence with which he had honored me. Finding him in a talkative mood, I prepared to make myself agreeable, a proceeding which he seemed to appreciate, for he began to sniff and pay great attention to his horse, which he was elaborately turning about.
“Why do you go that way?” I protested. “Isn’t it the longest way to the village?”
“It’s the way I’m most accustomed to,” said he. “But we can go the other way if you like. Perhaps we will get a glimpse of Deacon Spear. He’s a widower, you know.”
The leer with which he said this was intolerable. I bridled up—but no, I will not admit that I so much as manifested by my manner that I understood him. I merely expressed my wish to go the old way.
He whipped up the horse at once, almost laughing outright. I began to think this man capable of most any wicked deed. He was forced, however, to pull up suddenly. Directly in our path was the stooping figure of a woman. She did not move as we advanced, and so we had no alternative but to stop. Not till the horse’s head touched her shoulder did she move. Then she rose up and looked at us somewhat indignantly.
“Didn’t you hear us?” I asked, willing to open conversation with the old crone, whom I had no difficulty in recognizing as Mother Jane.
“She’s deaf—deaf, as a post,” muttered Mr. Simsbury. “No use shouting at her.” His tone was brusque, yet I noticed he waited with great patience for her to hobble out of the way.
Meanwhile I was watching the old creature with much interest. She had not a common face or a common manner. She was gray, she was toothless, she was haggard, and she was bent, but she was not ordinary or just one of the crowd of old women to be seen on country doorsteps. There was force in her aged movements and a strong individuality in the glances she shot at us as she backed slowly out of the roadway.
“Do they say she is imbecile?” I asked. “She looks far from foolish to me.”
“Hearken a bit,” said he. “Don’t you see she is muttering? She talks to herself all the time.” And in fact her lips were moving.
“I cannot hear her,” I said. “Make her come nearer. Somehow the old creature interests me.”
He at once beckoned to the crone; but he might as well have beckoned to the tree against which she had pushed herself. She neither answered him nor gave any indication that she understood the gesture he had made. Yet her eyes never moved from our faces.
“Well, well,” said I, “she seems dull as well as deaf. You had better drive on.” But before he could give the necessary jerk of the reins, I caught sight of some pennyroyal growing about the front of the cottage a few steps beyond, and, pointing to it with some eagerness, I cried: “If there isn’t some of the very herb I want to take home with me! Do you think she would give me a handful of it if I paid her?”
With an obliging grunt he again pulled up. “If you can make her understand,” said he.
I thought it worth the effort. Though Mr. Gryce had been at pains to tell me there was no harm in this woman and that I need not even consider her in any inquiries I might be called upon to make, I remembered that Mr. Gryce had sometimes made mistakes in just such matters as these, and that Amelia Butterworth had then felt herself called upon to set him right. If that could happen once, why not twice? At all events, I was not going to lose the least chance of making the acquaintance of the people living in this lane. Had he not himself said that only in this way could we hope to come upon the clue that had eluded all open efforts to find it?
Knowing that the sight of money is the strongest appeal that can be made to one living in such abject poverty as this woman, making the blind to see and the deaf to hear, I drew out my purse and held up before her a piece of silver. She bounded as if she had been shot, and when I held it toward her came greedily forward and stood close beside the wheels looking up.
“For you,” I indicated, after making a motion toward the plant which had attracted my attention.
She glanced from me to the herb and nodded with quick appreciation. As in a flash she seemed to take in the fact that I was a stranger, a city lady with memories of the country and this humble plant, and hurrying to it with the same swiftness she had displayed in advancing to the carriage, she tore
