was an ordinary pasteboard pill-box, containing a few pills—six or seven, perhaps. Mrs. Dovey, curious in all matters, lifted the lid and sniffed at the pills. Hester Reed was getting the moist sugar they were to be administered in.
“What did you have these here pills for?” questioned Ann Dovey, as Mrs. Reed came back with the sugar. “They bain’t over big.”
“For headache and pain in the side. I asked old Abel Crew if he could give me something for it, and he gave me these pills.”
Mrs. Reed was moistening a teaspoonful of the sugar, as she spoke, with warm water. Taking out one of the pills she proceeded to crush it into small bits, and then mixed it with the sugar. It formed a sort of paste. Dose the first.
“That ain’t moist enough, Hester Reed,” pronounced Mrs. Dovey, critically.
“No? I’ll put a drop more warm water.”
The water was added, and one of the children was fed with the delectable compound—Hetty. Mrs. Dovey spoke again.
“Is it all for her? Won’t a whole pill be too much for one, d’ye think?”
“Not a bit. When I asked old Abel whether one pill would be too much for Georgy, he said, No—two wouldn’t hurt him. I tell ye, Ann Dovey, the pills be as mild as milk.”
Hetty took in the whole dose by degrees. Susy had a similar one made ready, and swallowed it in her turn. Then the two babies were conveyed upstairs and put to bed side by side in their mother’s room.
Mrs. Dovey, the ceremony being over, took her departure. George Reed came in to his early supper, and soon afterwards he and his wife went up to bed. Men who have to be up at five in the morning must go to rest betimes. The fire and candle were put out, the doors locked, and the cottage was steeped in quietness at a time when in larger houses the evening was not much more than beginning.
How long she slept, Mrs. Reed could not tell. Whether it might be the first part of the night, early or late, or whether morning might be close upon the dawn, she knew not; but she was startled out of her sleep by the cries of the babies. Awful cries, they seemed, coming from children so young; and there could be no mistaking that each was in terrible agony.
“Why, it’s convulsions!” exclaimed George Reed, when he had lighted a candle. “Both of them, too!”
Going downstairs as he was, he hastily lighted the kitchen fire and put a kettle of water on. Then, dressing himself, he ran out for Mr. Duffham. The doctor came in soon after George Reed had got back again.
Duffham was accustomed to scenes, and he entered on one now. Mrs. Reed, in a state of distress, had put the babies in blankets and brought them down to the kitchen fire; the three elder children, aroused by the cries, had come down too, and were standing about in their night-clothes, crying with fright. One of the babies was dead—Hetty. She had just expired in her father’s arms. The other was dying.
“What on earth have you been giving to these children?” exclaimed Duffham, after taking a good look at the two.
“Oh, sir, what is it, please?” sobbed Mrs. Reed, in her terror. “Convulsions?”
“Convulsions—no,” said the doctor, in a fume. “It is something else, as I believe—poison.”
At which she set up a shriek that might have been heard out of doors.
“Well, Hetty was dead, I say;” and Duffham could not do anything to save the other. It died whilst he stood there. Duffham repeated his conjecture as to poison; and Mrs. Reed, all topsy-turvy though she was, three-parts bereft of her senses, resented the implication almost angrily.
“Poison!” cried she. “How can you think of such a thing, sir!”
“I tell you that to the best of my belief these children have both died from some irritant poison,” asserted Duffham, coolly imperative. “I ask what you have been giving them?”
“They have not been well this three or four days past,” replied she, wandering from the point; not evasively, but in her mind’s bewilderment. “It must have been their teeth, sir; I thought they were cutting ’em with fever.”
“Did you give them any physic?”
“Yes, sir. A pill apiece when I put ’em to bed.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Duffham. “What pill was it?”
“One of Abel Crew’s.”
This answer surprised him. Allowing that his suspicion of poison was correct, he assumed that these pills must have contained it; and he had never had cause to suppose that Abel Crew’s pills were otherwise than innocent.
Mrs. Reed, her voice broken by sobs, explained further in answer to his questions, telling him how she had procured these pills from Abel Crew some time before, and had given one of the said pills to each of the babies. Duffham stood against the dresser, taking it all in with a solemn face, his cane held up to his chin.
“Let me see this box of pills, Mrs. Reed.”
She went upstairs to get it. A tidy woman in her ways, she had put the box in its place again on the top of the press. Duffham took off the lid, and examined the pills.
“Do you happen to have a bit of sealing-wax in the house, Reed?” he asked presently.
George Reed, who had stood like a man bewildered, looking first on one, then on the other of his dead little ones, answered that he had not. But the eldest child, Annie, spoke up, saying that there was a piece in her little work-box; Cathy had given it her last week when she was at home.
It was produced—part of a small stick of fancy wax, green and gold. Duffham wrapped the pill-box up in the back of a letter that he took from his pocket, and sealed it with a seal that hung to his watch-chain. He put the parcel into the hand of George Reed.
“Take care of it,” he said. “This will be wanted.”
“There could not have been poison in them pills, sir,” burst out Mrs. Reed, her distress increasing at the possibility that he might be right. “If there had been, they’d ha’ poisoned me. One night I took three of ’em.”
Duffham did not answer. He was nodding his head in answer to his own thoughts.
“And who ever heard of Abel Crew mixing up poison in his pills?” went on Mrs. Reed. “If you please, sir, I don’t think he could do it.”
“Well, that part of it puzzles me—how he came to do it,” acknowledged Duffham. “I like old Abel, and shall be sorry if it is proved that his pills have done the mischief.”
Mrs. Reed shook her head. She had more faith than that in Abel Crew.
Ever so many years before—for it was in the time of Sir Peter Chavasse—there appeared one day a wanderer at Church Dykely. It was hot weather, and he seemed to think nothing of camping out in the fields by night, under the summer stars. Who he was, or what he was, or why he had come, or why he stayed, nobody knew. He was evidently not a tramp, or a gipsy, or a travelling tinker—quite superior to it all; a slender, young, and silent man, with a pale and gentle face.
At one corner of the common, spreading itself between the village and Chavasse Grange, there stood a covered wooden shed, formerly used to impound stray cattle, but left to itself since the square space for the new pound had been railed round. By-and-by it was found that the wanderer had taken to this shed to sleep in. Next, his name leaked out—“Abel Crew.”
He lived how he could, and as simply as a hermit. Buying a penny loaf at the baker’s, and making his dinner of it with a handful of sorrel plucked from the fields, and a drink from the rivulet that ran through the wilderness outside the Chavasse grounds. His days were spent in examining roots and wild herbs, now and then in digging one up; and his nights chiefly in studying the stars. Sir Peter struck up a sort of speaking acquaintanceship with him, and, it was said, was surprised at his stock of knowledge and the extent of his travels; for he knew personally many foreign places where even Sir Peter himself had never been. That may have caused Sir Peter—who was lord of the manor and of the common