Part 5

“I never took it,” he was saying. “What are you beating me for? Let me go.”

Avdeitch tried to part them as he took the boy by the hand and said:

“Let him go, my good woman. Pardon him for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes, I will pardon him,” she retorted, “but not until he has tasted a new birch-rod. I mean to take the young rascal to the police.”

But Avdeitch still interceded for him.

“Let him go, my good woman,” he said. “He will never do it again. Let him go for Christ’s sake.”

The old woman released the boy, who was for making off at once had not Avdeitch stopped him.

“You must beg the old woman’s pardon,” he said, “and never do such a thing again. I saw you take the apple.”

The boy burst out crying, and begged the old woman’s pardon as Avdeitch commanded.

“There, there,” said Avdeitch. “Now I will give you one. Here you are,”—and he took an apple from the basket and handed it to the boy. “I will pay you for it, my good woman,” he added.

“Yes, but you spoil the young rascal by doing that,” she objected. “He ought to have received a reward that would have made him glad to stand for a week.”

“Ah, my good dame, my good dame,” exclaimed Avdeitch. “That may be _our_ way of rewarding, but it is not God’s. If this boy ought to have been whipped for taking the apple, ought not we also to receive something for our sins?”

The old woman was silent. Then Avdeitch related to her the parable of the master who absolved his servant from the great debt which he owed him, whereupon the servant departed and took his own debtor by the throat. The old woman listened, and also the boy.

“God has commanded us to pardon one another,” went on Avdeitch, “or _He_ will not pardon us. We ought to pardon all men, and especially the thoughtless.”

The old woman shook her head and sighed.

“Yes, that may be so,” she said, “but these young rascals are so spoilt already!”

“Then it is for us, their elders, to teach them better,” he replied.

“That is what I say myself at times,” rejoined the old woman. “I had seven of them once at home, but have only one daughter now.” And she went on to tell Avdeitch where she and her daughter lived, and how they lived, and how many grandchildren she had.

“I have only such strength as you see,” she said, “yet I work hard, for my heart goes out to my grandchildren—the bonny little things that they are! No children could run to meet me as they do. Aksintka, for instance, will go to no one else. ‘Grandmother,’ she cries, ‘dear grandmother, you are tired’”—and the old woman became thoroughly softened. “Everyone knows what boys are,” she added presently, referring to the culprit. “May God go with him!”

She was raising the sack to her shoulders again when the boy darted forward and said:

“Nay, let me carry it, grandmother. It will be all on my way home.”

The old woman nodded assent, gave up the sack to the boy, and went away with him down the street. She had quite forgotten to ask Avdeitch for the money for the apple. He stood looking after them, and observing how they were talking together as they went.

Having seen them go, he returned to his room, finding his spectacles—unbroken—on the steps as he descended them. Once more he took up his awl and fell to work, but had done little before he found it difficult to distinguish the stitches, and the lamplighter had passed on his rounds. “I too must light up,” he thought to himself. So he trimmed the lamp, hung it up, and resumed his work. He finished one boot completely, and then turned it over to look at it. It was all good work. Then he laid aside his tools, swept up the cuttings, rounded off the stitches and loose ends, and cleaned his awl. Next he lifted the lamp down, placed it on the table, and took his Testament from the shelf. He had intended opening the book at the place which he had marked last night with a strip of leather, but it opened itself at another instead. The instant it did so, his vision of last night came back to his memory, and, as instantly, he thought he heard a movement behind him as of someone moving towards him. He looked round and saw in the shadow of a dark corner what appeared to be figures—figures of persons standing there, yet could not distinguish them clearly. Then the voice whispered in his ear:

“Martin, Martin, dost thou not know me?”

“Who art Thou?” said Avdeitch.

“Even I!” whispered the voice again. “Lo, it is I!”—and there stepped from the dark corner Stepanitch. He smiled, and then, like the fading of a little cloud, was gone.

“It is I!” whispered the voice again—and there stepped from the same corner the woman with her baby. She smiled, and the baby smiled, and they were gone.

“And it is I!” whispered the voice again—and there stepped forth the old woman and the boy with the apple. They smiled, and were gone.

Joy filled the soul of Martin Avdeitch as he crossed himself, put on his spectacles, and set himself to read the Testament at the place where it had opened. At the top of the page he read:

“For I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me in.”

And further down the page he read:

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto Me.”

Then Avdeitch understood that the vision had come true, and that his Saviour had in very truth visited him that day, and that he had received Him.

WOOD-LADIES[5] By PERCEVAL GIBBON

Footnote 5:

By permission of the author. Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

THE pine-trees of the wood joined their branches into a dome of intricate groinings over the floor of ferns where the children sat, sunk to the neck in a foam of tender green. The sunbeams that slanted in made shivering patches of gold about them. Joyce, the elder of the pair, was trying to explain why she had wished to come here from the glooms of the lesser wood beyond.

“I wasn’t ’zactly frightened,” she said. “I knew there wasn’t any lions or robbers, or anything like that. But——”

“Tramps?” suggested Joan.

“No! You know I don’t mind tramps, Joan. But as we was going along under all those dark bushes where it was so quiet, I kept feeling as if there was—something—behind me. I looked round and there wasn’t anything, but—well, it felt as if there was.”

Joyce’s small face was knit and intent with the efforts to convey her meaning. She was a slim erect child, as near seven years of age as makes no matter, with eyes that were going to be gray, but had not yet ceased to be blue. Joan, who was a bare five, a mere huge baby, was trying to root up a fern that grew between her feet.

“I know,” she said, tugging mightily. The fern gave suddenly, and Joan fell over on her back, with her stout legs sticking up stiffly. In this posture she continued the conversation undisturbed. “I know, Joy. It was wood-ladies!”

“Wood-ladies!” Joyce frowned in faint perplexity as Joan rolled right side up again. Wood-ladies were dim inhabitants of the woods, being of the order of fairies and angels and even vaguer, for there was nothing about them in the story-books. Joyce, who felt that she was getting on in years, was willing to be sceptical about them, but could not always manage it. In the nursery, with the hard clean linoleum underfoot and the barred window looking out on the lawn and the road, it was easy; she occasionally shocked Joan, and sometimes herself, by the license of her speech on such matters; but it was a different affair when one came to the gate at the end of the garden, and passed as through a dream portal from the sunshine and frank sky to the cathedral shadows and great whispering aisles of the wood. There the dimness was like the shadow of a presence; as babies they had been aware of it, and answered their own questions by inventing wood-ladies to float among the trunks and people the still green chambers. Now, neither of them could remember how they had first learned of wood-ladies.

“Wood-ladies,” repeated Joyce, and turned with a little shiver to look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood, dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath overarching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of unseen companions. Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern, followed her glance.

“That’s where they are,” she said casually. “They like being in the dark.”

“Joan!” Joyce spoke earnestly. “Say truly—truly, mind!—do you think there _is_ wood-ladies at all?”

“’Course there is,” replied Joan cheerfully. “Fairies in fields and angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods.”

“But,” objected Joyce, “nobody ever sees them.”

Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns. She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.

“There’s one now,” she said, and fell to work with her fern again.

Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread and curiosity—the child’s avid curiosity for the supernatural—alight in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway toward her. There was an impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of the wood; and as she drew her breath it was all no more. The trees, the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but something was gone from them.

“Joan,” she cried, hesitating.

“Yes,” said Joan, without looking up. “What?”

The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that she had seen anything.

“I thought, just now, I could see something,” she said. “But I s’pose I didn’t.”

“I did,” remarked Joan.

Joyce crawled through the crisp ferns till she was close to Joan, sitting solid and untroubled and busy upon the ground, with broken stems and leaves all round her.

“Joan,” she begged. “Be nice. You’re trying to frighten me, aren’t you?”

“I’m not,” protested Joan. “I did see a wood-lady. Wood-ladies doesn’t hurt you; wood-ladies are _nice_. You’re a coward, Joyce.”

“I can’t help it,” said Joyce, sighing. “But I won’t go into the dark parts of the wood any more.”

“Coward,” repeated Joan absently, but with a certain relish.

“You wouldn’t like to go there by yourself,” cried Joyce. “If I wasn’t with you, you’d be a coward too. You know you would.”

She stopped, for Joan had swept her lap free of débris and was rising to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile softness, had a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her mettle. She eyed her sister with a calm and very galling superiority.

“I’m going there now,” she answered; “all by mineself.”

“Go, then,” retorted Joyce angrily.

Without a further word, Joan turned her back and began to plough her way across the ferns toward the dark wood. Joyce, watching her, saw her go, at first with wrath, for she had been stung, and then with compunction. The plump baby was so small in the brooding solemnity of the pines, thrusting indefatigably along, buried to the waist in ferns. Her sleek brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence toward those peopled and uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back.

“Joan!” she cried. The baby turned. “Joan! Come back; come back an’ be friends!”

Joan, maintaining her offing, replied only with a gesture. It was a gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had once been spanked for practising it on the piano-tuner. The boot-and-knife boy called it “cocking a snook,” and it consisted in raising a thumb to one’s nose and spreading the fingers out. It was defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on. The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock, and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood closed behind her like a lid.

Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood was a place to which they came every day.

“Besides,” she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort; “besides, there can’t be such things as wood-ladies _really_.”

But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural; the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The undernote of alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her and presently there came mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her babies.

“Isn’t there a clock inside you that tells you when it’s lunch-time?” asked mother. “You’re ever so late. Where’s Joan?”

Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy perplexity on her face. It was difficult to speak even to mother about wood-ladies without a pretence of scepticism.

“I forgot about lunch,” she said, taking the slim cool hand which mother held out to her. “Joan’s in there.” She nodded at the bushes.

“Is she?” said mother, and called aloud in her singing-voice, that was so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. “Joan! Joan!”

A cheeky bird answered with a whistle and mother called again.

“She _said_,” explained Joyce—“she _said_ she saw a wood-lady and then she went in there to show me she wasn’t afraid.”

“What’s a wood-lady, chick?” asked mother. “The rascal!” she said, smiling, when Joyce had explained as best she could. “We’ll have to go and look for her.”

They went hand in hand, and mother showed herself clever in parting a path among the bushes. She managed so that no bough sprang back to strike Joyce and without tearing or soiling her own soft white dress; one could guess that when she had been a little girl she, too, had had a wood to play in. They cut down by the Secret Pond, where the old rhododendrons were, and out to the edge of the fields; and when they paused mother would lift her head and call again, and her voice rang in the wood like a bell. By the pond, which was a black water with steep banks, she paused and showed a serious face; but there were no marks of shoes on its clay slopes, and she shook her head and went on. But to all the calling there was no answer, no distant cheery bellow to guide them to Joan.

“I wish she wouldn’t play these tricks,” said mother. “I don’t like them a bit.”

“I expect she’s hiding,” said Joyce. “There aren’t wood-ladies really, are there, mother?”

“There’s nothing worse in these woods than a rather naughty baby,” mother replied. “We’ll go back by the path and call her again.”

Joyce knew that the hand which held hers tightened as they went and there was still no answer to mother’s calling. She could not have told what it was that made her suddenly breathless; the wood about her turned desolate; an oppression of distress and bewilderment burdened them both. “Joan, Joan!” called mother in her strong beautiful contralto, swelling the word forth in powerful music, and when she ceased the silence was like a taunt. It was not as if Joan were there and failed to answer; it was as if there were no longer any Joan anywhere. They came at last to the space of sparse trees which bordered their garden.

“We mustn’t be silly about this,” said mother, speaking as much to herself as to Joyce. “Nothing can have happened to her. And you must have lunch, chick.”

“Without waiting for Joan?” asked Joyce.

“Yes. The gardener and the boot-boy must look for Joan,” said mother, opening the gate.

The dining-room looked very secure and home-like, with its big window and its cheerful table spread for lunch. Joyce’s place faced the window, so that she could see the lawn and the hedge bounding the kitchen garden; and when mother had served her with food, she was left alone to eat it. Presently the gardener and the boot-boy passed the window, each carrying a hedge-stake and looking warlike. There reached her a murmur of voices; the gardener was mumbling something about tramps.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” replied mother’s voice.

Mother came in presently and sat down, but did not eat anything. Joyce asked her why.

“Oh, I shall have some lunch when Joan comes,” answered mother. “I sha’n’t be hungry till then. Will you have some more, my pet?”

When Joyce had finished, they went out again to the wood to meet Joan when she was brought back in custody. Mother walked quite slowly, looking all the time as if she would like to run. Joyce held her hand and sometimes glanced up at her face, so full of wonder and a sort of resentful doubt, as though circumstances were playing an unmannerly trick on her. At the gate they came across the boot-boy.

“I bin all acrost that way,” said the boot-boy, pointing with his stumpy black forefinger, “and then acrost _that_ way, an’ Mister Jenks”—Jenks was the gardener—“’e’ve gone about in rings, ’e ’ave. And there ain’t sign nor token, mum—not a sign there ain’t.”

From beyond him sounded the voice of the gardener, thrashing among the trees. “Miss Joan!” he roared. “Hi! Miss Jo-an! You’re a-frightin’ your ma proper. Where are ye, then?”

“She must be hiding,” said mother. “You must go on looking, Walter. You must go on looking till you find her.”

“Yes, ’m,” said Walter. “If she’s in there, us’ll find her, soon or late.”

He ran off, and presently his voice was joined to Jenks’s, calling Joan—calling, calling, and getting no answer.

Mother took Joyce’s hand again.

“Come,” she said. “We’ll walk round by the path, and you must tell me again how it all happened. Did you really see something when Joan told you to look?”

“I expect I didn’t,” replied Joyce dolefully. “But Joan’s always saying there’s a fairy or something in the shadows and I always think I see them for a moment.”

“It couldn’t have been a live woman—or a man—that you saw?”

“Oh, no!” Joyce was positive of that. Mother’s hand tightened on hers understandingly and they went on in silence till they met Jenks.

Jenks was an oldish man with bushy gray whiskers, who never wore a coat, and now he was wet to the loins with mud and water.

“That there ol’ pond,” he explained. “I’ve been an’ took a look at her. Tromped through her proper, I did, an’ I’ll go bail there ain’t so much as a dead cat in all the mud of her. Thish yer’s a mistry, mum, an’ no mistake.”

Mother stared at him. “I can’t bear this,” she said suddenly. “You must go on searching, Jenks, and Walter must go on his bicycle to the police-station at once. Call him, please!”

“Walter!” roared Jenks obediently.

“Coming!” answered the boot-boy and burst forth from the bushes. In swift, clear words, which no stupidity could mistake or forget, mother gave him his orders, spoken in a tone that meant urgency. Walter went flying to execute them.

“Oh, mother, where do you think Joan can be?” begged Joyce when Jenks had gone off to resume his search.

“I don’t know,” said mother. “It’s all so absurd.”

“If there _was_ wood-ladies, they wouldn’t hurt a baby like Joan,” suggested Joyce.

“Oh, who could hurt her!” cried mother, and fell to calling again. Her voice, of which each accent was music, alternated with the harsh roars of Jenks.

Walter on his bicycle must have hurried, in spite of his permanently punctured front tire, for it was a very short time before bells rang in the steep lane from the road and Superintendent Farrow himself wheeled his machine in at the gate, massive and self-possessed, a blue-clad minister of comfort. He heard mother’s tale, which embodied that of Joyce, with a half-smile lurking in his mustache and his big chin creased back against his collar. Then he nodded, exactly as if he saw through the whole business and could find Joan in a minute or two, and propped his bicycle against the fence.

“I understand then,” he said, “that the little girl’s been missing for rather more than an hour. In that case, she can’t have got far. I sent a couple o’ constables round the roads be’ind the wood before I started, an’ now I’ll just ’ave a look through the wood myself.”

“Thank you,” said mother. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous, but——”

“Very natural, ma’am,” said the big superintendent comfortingly, and went with them to the wood.

It was rather thrilling to go with him and watch him. Joyce and mother had to show him the place from which Joan had started and the spot at which she had disappeared. He looked at them hard, frowning a little and nodding to himself, and went stalking mightily among the ferns. “It was _’ere_ she went?” he inquired, as he reached the dark path, and being assured that it was, he thrust in and commenced his search. The pond seemed to give him ideas, which old Jenks disposed of, and he marched on till he came out to the edge of the fields, where the hay was yet uncut. Joan could not have crossed them without leaving a track in the tall grass as clear as a cart-rut.

“We ’ave to consider the possibilities of the matter,” said the superintendent. “Assumin’ that the wood ’as been thoroughly searched, where did she get out of it?”

“Searched!” growled old Jenks. “There ain’t a inch as I ’aven’t searched an’ seen—not a inch.”

“The kidnappin’ the’ry,” went on the superintendent, ignoring him and turning to mother, “I don’t incline to. ’Owever, we must go to work in order, an’ I’ll ’ave my men up ’ere and make sure of the wood. All gypsies an’ tramps will be stopped and interrogated. I don’t think there’s no cause for you to feel anxious, ma’am. I ’ope to ’ave some news for you in the course of the afternoon.”

They watched him free-wheel down the lane and shoot round the corner.

“Oh, dear,” said mother then; “why doesn’t the baby come? I wish daddy weren’t away.”