"Oh no, it can't be witchcraft," said Tyler, remembering the salve. "He told me he had used the salve to cure his own chilblains."
"And you believed him, of course. You would believe anything he said, because you are as mad under his witch spells as the horses are. I shouldn't wonder but he bewitched Peggy before she went away this last journey, and it's through that she seemed to be in such a plight. Of course that would account for it all, for it would be easy enough to lift a spell he had put on himself. Didn't his mother do the same thing when she wanted to sell her salves and ointment—didn't every brat in the village have a sore mouth at one time?"
"Yes, and didn't the doctor say it was because the well had been sunk too near the churchyard," retorted her husband. "Mrs. Hunter had nothing to do with that, she only tried—"
"To bewitch everybody and everything that came near her," interrupted his wife, growing more angry every moment. "I believe now she laid her spells upon you before she died, and that is why you had to take that boy in Toby's place," she added, actually bursting into tears as this thought suddenly occurred to her.
With his wife's words came the recollection of what Eric had said when he went to the cottage to ask him to come. What could the lad have meant by asking if he was God's messenger whom he had been told to wait for? Tyler was by no means free from the superstition of the time, and it might be that, all unknown to himself, he had been sent to befriend this lad; and the bare suspicion of such leading on the part of another, exercised upon himself, made the man shudder, he knew not why.
Yet he sometimes repeated the well-known formula, "Lead us not into temptation"; but it was only a formula, or at most a mystic charm, and by no means words of truth to live by and seek help from, as they were to Eric himself, as he had learned them from his mother.
So, leaving the matter in this unsatisfactory condition, the landlord went to serve a customer, while Mrs. Tyler went to Betty with the tale that their stable boy had began to practise witchcraft like his mother before him.
[CHAPTER III.]
A FATAL JOURNEY.
IT was a wet, windy day in March. The few people who had ventured out in Summerleigh had taken care to secure hats and wigs by tying handkerchiefs over both, lest they should go sailing down the village street in the mud and pools of water with which the ill-kept roads abounded. The portrait of The Magpie—a gem of art in the eyes of the villagers—swung creakingly in its frame, and the landlord, looking scarcely less uneasy, stood in the porch with his eyes fixed on a distant bend of the road.