When you get very old you are like that, I’m told. I asked the Gaffer a lot of questions, and he answered me quite nicely, and was as clear about everything as if it was yesterday.
But fancy him living in the village for thirty years, and never suspecting that the master he thought was in America was lying in his own barn, murdered, all that time, and him being servant to the man who was his murderer!
And the man who did the murder! Fancy him living in the place, too, and growing old there, with the body of his victim on his premises, and going about his business quietly, and living his life like everybody else! I wonder if he ever passed that barn at night! I wonder if he didn’t often start out of his sleep and think that all was going to be found out. The more you think of these things, the more wonderful they are. What awful secrets some of the easy-going, comfortable-looking people we meet every day must be carrying about locked up in their breasts, hidden from everybody, just as Ned Curnock’s dead body lay hidden away for thirty years in his own barn.
Mr. Wilkins, when it was time to go, took the Gaffer’s arm, and said he’d see him to his door, and the old gentleman shook hands with me, and said he should come and see us again. He’d had many a glass in the old place when it was only a little inn, he said; and as he was going out he said, “Wonderful changes—wonderful changes in the old place, surely.”
Mr. Wilkins came back a minute, and he whispered to me, “Well, are you glad I brought old Gaffer Gabbitas to see you?”
“Yes,” I said; “certainly. His story is part of the story of the place. But it’s very dreadful. I shall dream of skeletons in a barn all night long.”
And so I did, and I woke up with a scream, lying on my back, and Harry said, “Good heavens! what’s the matter?”
“Oh, it’s the skeleton in the barn!” I said. I knew I should dream of it, and I didn’t go to sleep again for an hour, but kept thinking of old Gaffer Gabbitas and the two murders he’d been mixed up in and seemed none the worse for.
Two murders, and both in our village! Thank goodness they were such a long time ago. Murders aren’t the sort of things you care to be too common in a place you’ve got to live in. Harry said he should go and have a look at Curnock’s farm, as it was still called, in the morning, and he asked me if I’d come with him.
I said, “Oh, please talk of something else, or not a wink shall I have this night.” I couldn’t get to sleep. I counted sheep, but there was a skeleton among them. I watched the waving corn, and a skeleton looked at me out of the middle of it. I looked at the sea-waves rolling along, but a skeleton floated——