In our village there are still no end of old people who believe in charms, especially for warts; and one day that I had one come on my hand, Graves, the farrier, said quite seriously, “I’ll tell you how you can cure that, Mrs. Beckett. You get old Dame Trueman to charm it away for you.”
I said, “What nonsense, Mr. Graves! You don’t suppose I believe in such stuff as that?”
“Oh, but it isn’t stuff!” said Graves. “Dame Trueman has got charms for no end of things, and there’s plenty of people that she’s done good to, and cured, when the doctors had given them up.”
This Dame Trueman was quite a character, and lived up at the end of a village all alone with a black cat in an old broken-down cottage. Many years ago she had lost her husband under rather mysterious circumstances, and, it was said, she had bewitched him and caused his death, because he treated her badly.
He was a farm labourer, and worked on the farm that I told you about in “Old Gaffer Gabbitas,” called Curnock’s Farm; but he used to take more than was good for him at the village alehouse. People used to say, “How can he afford to spend such a lot of money out of his wages?” but the mystery was cleared up when one day it got all over the village that he had found out where his wife had hidden her savings, and that he had been helping himself for a long time without her knowing it.
It seems she had made a bit of money selling charms and telling fortunes to servant-girls and other foolish people, and had changed her savings into bank-notes, and sewn them up in the mattress, not telling her husband anything about it. But he had found it out, and had unsewn the mattress one day while she was out marketing, taken a couple of notes, and then sewn the place up again very neatly, and she had never noticed it.
How she found it out was through a neighbour who had seen Trueman change a five-pound note at the inn. Directly his wife heard of that, she went and unsewed the mattress, and the cat was out of the bag.
She was heard to say that he would never help himself to any more. And soon after that, one night he was at the alehouse, smoking his pipe, when a black cat, that nobody in the place ever remembered to have seen before, came into the tap-room and jumped up on his knee.
It was a very curious-looking cat, with very fierce eyes, and it had three white hairs on its breast. Trueman said, “Hullo, whose cat is this?” and he put his hand on its back and stroked it. Everybody in the room declared that as he did so they saw sparks fly out of its back, but the awful thing about it was that the man gave a sudden cry, as if some terrible pain had just come to him. The cat jumped off his knee, and ran out of the door and disappeared. Trueman tried to get on his legs; but he only staggered half-way across the room and fell down in a heap on the floor. They ran and fetched the doctor to him; but before the doctor could get there he was quite dead.
At the inquest the jury brought it in that he had died of heart disease; but everybody in the village declared that he had been bewitched by his wife for stealing her money, and that the black cat was the “familiar,” or whatever it is called.