Henry Wood - Johnny Ludlow, Third Series

“Oh don’t, don’t!” said Jessy faintly: “you might not if you knew all. I am not worth it.”

“Perhaps I should kiss you all the more, my poor child,” answered Mrs. Todhetley. And she came downstairs with red eyes.

But Miss Susan Page was burning with impatience to know the ins and outs of the strange affair. Naturally so. It had brought more scandal and gossip on the Copse Farm than even the running away of the year before. That was bad enough: this was worse. Altogether Jessy was the home’s heartsore. Mr. Page spoke of her as a lamb, a wanderer returned to the fold, and Susan heard it with compressed lips: in her private opinion, she had more justly been called an ungrateful girl.

“Now, then, Jessy; you must let us know a little about yourself,” began Susan on this same afternoon when she was with her alone, and Jessy lay apparently stronger, refreshed with the dinner and the long rest. Abigail had gone to church with Mr. Page. Susan could not remember that any of them had gone to church before on Christmas-Day after the morning service: but there was no festive gathering to keep them at home to-day. Unconsciously, perhaps, Susan resented the fact. Even John Drench was dining at his father’s. “Where have you been all this while in London?”

Jessy suddenly lifted her arm to shade her eyes; and remained silent.

“It is in London, I conclude, that you have been? Come: answer me.”

“Yes,” said Jessy faintly.

“And where have you been? In what part of it?—who with?”

“Don’t ask me,” was the low reply, given with a suppressed sob.

“Not ask you! But we must ask you. And you must answer. Where have you been, and what have you been doing?”

“I—can’t tell,” sobbed Jessy. “The story is too long.”

“Story too long!” echoed Susan quickly, “you might say in half-a-dozen words—and leave explanations until to-morrow. Did you find a place in town?”

“Yes, I found a place.”

“A lady’s-maid’s place?—as you said.”

Jessy turned her face to the wall, and never spoke.

“Now, this won’t do,” cried Miss Susan, not choosing to be thwarted: and no doubt Jessy, hearing the determined tone, felt something like a reed in her hands. “Just you tell me a little.”

“I am very ill, Susan; I can’t talk much,” was the pleading excuse. “If you’d only let me be quiet.”

“It will no more hurt you to say in a few words where you have been than to make excuses,” persisted Miss Susan, giving a flick to the skirt of her new puce silk gown. “Your conduct altogether has been most extraordinary, quite baffling to us at home, and I must hear some explanation of it.”

“The place I went to was too hard for me,” said Jessy after a pause, speaking out of the pillow.

“Too hard!”

“Yes; too hard. My heart was breaking with its hardness, and I couldn’t stop in it. Oh, be merciful to me, Susan! don’t ask any more.”

Susan Page thought that when mysterious answers like these were creeping out, there was all the greater need that she should ask for more.

“Who found you the place at first, Jessy?”

Not a word. Susan asked again.

“I—got it through an advertisement,” said Jessy at length.

Advertisements in those days, down in our rural district, were looked upon as wonderful things, and Miss Susan opened her eyes in surprise. A faint idea was upon her that Jessy could not be telling the truth.

“In that letter that you wrote to us; the only one you did write; you asserted that you liked the place.”

“Yes. That was at first. But afterwards—oh, afterwards it got cruelly hard.”

“Why did you not change it for another?”

Jessy made no answer. Susan heard the sobs in her throat.

“Now, Jessy, don’t be silly. I ask why you did not get another place, if you were unable to stay in that one?”

“I couldn’t have got another, Susan. I would never have got another.”

“Why not?” persisted Susan.

“I—I—don’t you see how weak I am?” she asked with some energy, lifting her face for a moment to Susan.

And its wan pain, its depth of anguish, disarmed Susan. Jessy looked like a once fair blossom on which a blight had passed.

“Well, Jessy, we will leave these matters until later. But there’s one thing you must answer. What induced you to take this disreputable mode of coming back?”

A dead silence.

“Could you not have written to say you were coming, as any sensible girl would, that you might have been properly met and received? Instead of appearing like a vagabond, to be picked up by anybody.”

“I never meant to come home—to the house.”

“But why ?” asked Susan.

“Oh, because—because of my ingratitude in running away—and never writing—and—and all that.”

“That is, you were ashamed to come and face us.”

“Yes, I was ashamed,” said Jessy, shivering.

“And no wonder. Why did you go?”

Jessy gave a despairing sigh. Leaving that question in abeyance, Susan returned to the former one.

“If you did not mean to come home, what brought you down here at all?”

“It didn’t matter where I went. And my heart was yearning for a look at the old place—and so I came.”

“And if we had not found you under the church wall—and we never should but for Johnny Ludlow’s running out to get some string—where should you have gone, pray?”

“Crawled under some haystack, and let the cold and hunger kill me.”

“Don’t be a simpleton,” reproved Susan.

“I wish it had been so,” returned Jessy. “I’d rather be dying there in quiet. Oh, Susan, I am ill; I am indeed! Let me be at peace!”

The appeal shut up Susan Page. She did not want to be too hard upon her.

Mr. Duffham came in after church. Abigail had told him that she did not like Jessy’s looks; nor yet her cough. He went up alone, and was at the bedside before Jessy was aware. She put up her hand to hide her face, but not in time: Duffham had seen it. Doctors don’t get shocks in a general way: they are too familiar with appearances that frighten other people: but he started a little. If ever he saw coming death in a face, he thought he saw it in that of Jessy Page.

He drew away the shading hand, and looked at her. Duffham was pompous on the whole and thought a good deal of his gold-headed cane, but he was a tender man with the sad and sick. After that, he sat down and began asking her a few things—where she had been, and what she had done. Not out of curiosity, or quite with the same motive that Miss Susan had just asked; but because he wished to find out whether her illness was more on the body or the mind. She would not answer. Only cried softly.

“My dear,” said Duffham, “I must have you tell me a little of the past. Don’t be afraid: it shall go no further. If you only knew the strange confidences that are sometimes placed in me, Jessy, you would not hesitate.”

No, she would not speak of her own accord, so he began to pump her. Doing it very kindly and soothingly: had Jessy spent her year in London robbing all the banks, one might have thought she could only have yielded to his wish to come to the bottom of it. Duffham listened to her answers, and sat with a puzzled face. She told him what she had told Susan: that her post of lady’s-maid had been too hard for her and worn her to what she was; that she had shrunk from returning home on account of her ingratitude, and should not have returned ever of her own will. But she had yearned for a sight of the old place, and so came down by rail, and walked over after dark. In passing the church she saw it lighted up; and lingered, peeping in. She never meant to be seen; she should have gone away somewhere before morning. Nothing more.