Chapter XX.
Tommy reconnoitres.
Tommy, out in the moonlight, found himself in a waste yard, scattered
over with bits of iron, mostly old and rusty. It was not an
interesting place, for it was not likely to afford him anything to
eat. Yet, with the instinct of the human animal, he went shifting and
prying and nosing about everywhere. Presently he heard a curious
sound, which he recognized as made by a hen. More stealthily yet he
went creeping hither and thither, feeling here and feeling there, in
the hope of laying his hand on the fowl asleep. Urged by his natural
impulse to forage, he had forgotten Clare's warning. His hand did find
her, and had it been his grandmother instead of Clare in the smithy,
he would at once have broken the bird's neck before she could cry out;
but with the touch of her feathers came the thought of Clare, and by
this time he understood that what Clare said, Clare would do.
He had some knowledge of fowls; he had heard too much talk about them
at his grandmother's not to know something of their habits; and
finding she sat so still, he concluded that under her might be
eggs. To his delight it was so. The hen belonged to a house at some
distance, and had wandered from it, in obedience to the secretive
instinct of animal maternity, strong in some hens, to seek a hidden
shelter for her offspring. This she had found in the smith's yard,
beneath the mould-board of a plough that had lain there for
years. Slipping his hand under her, Tommy found five eggs. In greedy
haste he took them, every one.
I must do him the justice to say that his first impulse was to dart
with them to Clare. But before he had taken a step toward him, again
he remembered his threat. With the eggs inside him, he could run the
risk; he would not mind a few blows--not much; but if he took them to
Clare, the unbearable thing was, that he would assuredly give every
one of them back to the hen. He was an idiot, and Tommy was there to
look after him; but, in looking after Clare, was Tommy to neglect
himself? If Clare would not eat the eggs Tommy carried him, as most
certainly he would not, the best thing was for Tommy to eat them
himself! What a good thing that it was no use to steal for Clare! The
steal would be all for himself! Not a step from the spot did Tommy
move till he had sucked every one of the five eggs. But he made one
mistake: he threw away the shells.
When he had sucked them, he found himself much lighter-hearted, but,
alas, nearly as hungry as before! The spirit of research began again
to move him: where were eggs, what might there not be beside?
The moon was nearly at the full; the smith's yard was radiantly
illuminated. But even the moon could lend little enchantment to a
scene where nothing was visible but rusty, broken, deserted,
despairful pieces of old iron. Tommy lifted his eyes and looked
further.
The enclosure was of small extent, bounded on one side by the garden
wall of the house they had just passed, and at the bottom by a broken
fence, dividing it from a piece of waste land that probably belonged
to the house. As he roamed about, Tommy spied a great heap of old iron
piled up against the wall, and made for it, in the hope of enlarging
his horizon. He scrambled to the top, and looked over. His gaze fell
right into a big but, full of dark water. Twice that evening he met
the same horror! There was a legendary report, though he had not heard
it, I fancy, that his mother drowned herself instead of him: she fell
in, and he was fished out. Whether this was the origin of his fear or
not, so far from getting down by means of the water-but, Tommy dared
not cross at that point. With much trembling he got on the top of the
wall, turned his back on the but, and ran along like a cat, in search
of a place where he could descend into the garden. He went right to
the end, round the corner, and half-way along the bottom before he
found one. There he came to a doorway that had been solidly walled up
on the outside, while the door was left in position on the
inside--ready for use when the court of chancery should have decided
to whom the house belonged. Its frame was flush with the wall, so that
its bolts and lock afforded Tommy foothold enough to descend, and
confidence of being able to get up again.
He landed in a moonlit wilderness--such a wilderness as a deserted
garden speedily becomes, the wealth in the soil converting it the
sooner to a savage chaos. Full of the impulse of discovery, and the
hope of presenting himself with importance to Clare as the bringer of
good tidings, Tommy forced his way through or crept under the
overgrown bushes, until he reached a mossy rather than gravelly walk,
where it was more easy to advance. It led him to the house.
Had he been a boy of any imagination, he would have shuddered at the
thought of attempting an entrance. All the windows had outside
shutters. Those of the ground floor were closed--except one that swung
to and fro, and must have swung in many a wind since the house was
abandoned. The moon shone with a dull whitish gleam on the dusty
windows of the first and second stories, and on the great dormers that
shot out from the slope of the roof, and cast strange shadows upon
it. The door to the garden had had a porch of trellis-work, over which
jasmine and other creeping plants were trained; but whether anything
of the porch was left, no one could have told in that thicket of
creepers, interlaced and matted by antagonist forces of wind and
growth so that not a hint of door was visible. Clearly there was
nobody within.
Tommy sought the window with the open shutter. Through the dirty
glass, and the reflection of the moon, he could see nothing. He tried
the sash, but could not stir it. He went round the corner to one end
of the house, and saw another door. But an enemy stepped between: the
moon shone suddenly up from the ground. In a hollow of the pavement
had gathered a pool from the drip of the neglected gutters, and out of
its hidden depth the staring round looked at him. It was the third
time Tommy's nerves had been shaken that night, and he could stand no
more. At the awful vision he turned and fled, fell, and rose and fled
again. It was not imagination in Tommy; it was an undefined,
inexplicable horror, that must have had a cause, but could have no
reason. Young as he was he had already more than once looked on the
face of death, and had felt no awe; he had listened to the gruesomest
of tales, told not altogether without art, and had never moved a hair
Only one material and two spiritual things had power with him; the one
material thing was hunger, the two spiritual things were a feeble love
for Clare, and a strong horror of water of any seeming depth. Now a
new element was added to this terror by the meddling of the moon in
the fiendish mystery--the secret of which must, I think, have been the
bottomless depth she gave the water.
He rushed down the garden. With frightful hindrance from the
overgrowth, he found the prisoned door by strange perversion become a
ladder, gained by it the top of the wall, and sped along as if pursued
by an incarnate dread. Horror of horrors! all at once the moon again
looked up at him from below: he was within a yard or two of the big
water-but! Right up to it he must go, for, close to it, on the other
side of the wall, was the heap of iron by which alone he could get
down. He tightened every nerve for the effort. He assured himself that
the thing would be over in a moment; that the water was quiet, and
could not follow him; that presently he would find himself in the
smithy by the warm forge-fire. The scaring necessity was, that he must
stoop and kneel right over the water-but, in order to send his legs in
advance down the wall to the top of the mound. It was a moment of
agony. That very moment, with an appalling unearthly cry, something
dark, something hideous, something of inconceivable ghastliness, as it
seemed to Tommy, sprang right out of the water into the air. He
tumbled from the wall among the iron, and there lay.
The stolen eggs were avenged. The hen, feverish and unhappy from the
loss of her hope of progeny, had gone to the but to sip a little
water. Tommy, appearing on the wall above her, startled her. She,
flying up with a screech, startled Tommy, and became her own unwitting
avenger.
