"You had better ask him yourself, Oliver," said I; for as my tutor had never spoken to me of the existence of the unfortunate maniac, I did not like to address him upon the subject. Bradford therefore went forward to meet him; and after they had had some talk together, Mr. Long beckoned me to him.
"I think with you, Peter," said he, "that in any case, we should lose no time in searching the Chase. If we do not discover what we seek, we can scarcely fail to find some trace of a struggle, if struggle there has been, between such a man as Sir Massingberd and whoever may have assailed him. If he has been murdered, it is, of course, just possible that the assassins threw the body into the water, although not here, since the ice would scarcely have formed over it like this; otherwise, they could not have removed it without leaving some visible trace. Do you, Bradford, and a couple of your own men, examine that plantation yonder thoroughly, so that it need not be searched again; and in the meantime I will go and fetch more help."
I have taken part in my time in many a "quest" for game, both large and little: I have sought on foot in the rook-crannies of the north for the hill-fox; I have penetrated the tangled jungles of Hindustan for tiger; I have stood alone, gun in hand, on the skirts of a tropical forest, not knowing what bird or beast the beaters within might chance at any moment to drive forth; but I have never experienced such excitement as that which I felt when, one of forty men, I walked from end to end of Fairburn Chase in search of its lost master.
In one long line, and at the distance of about twenty yards from one another, we plodded on slowly and steadily; and with eyes that left no bush unexamined. This work, which in summer would have been toil indeed, was rendered comparatively easy by the bareness of the season; the frost, too, made the swamps in the hollows safe to the tread, and the tangled underwood brittle before us. Many a sunken spot we found hidden in brake and brier, and scarcely known to the keepers themselves, such as might easily have held, and we could not but think how fitly, the Thing we feared to find, and sometimes, when one man called to his neighbours, the whole line would halt, and each could scarcely restrain himself from running in, and seeing with his own eyes what trace of the missing man it was which had provoked the exclamation. We began at the outskirts of the Park, and worked towards the Hall, so that the Home Spinney, which was the likeliest spot of all, since he had been last seen going in that direction, was reserved for the end. As the men approached it, the excitement increased; they almost ran over the large open space in which stood the Wolsey Oak, extending its gnarled and naked arms aloft, as if in horror; but when they searched the coppice itself, and found the body of Grimjaw, stiffened into stone since I last saw it, many of them were not so eager to push on. I had omitted to tell them of the wretched animal's death, and the effect of the sight upon them was really considerable.
That "the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense," is in nothing more true than in the emotion produced by the sufferings or decease of animals upon gentle folks and upon labouring persons. Greater familiarity with such spectacles, and perhaps, too, a larger experience of hardship and sorrow among his own fellow-creatures—which naturally tends to weaken his sense of pity for mere animals—prevents the peasant from being moved at all by some sights at which his superiors would be really shocked: a dead horse lying in the road is, to the stonebreaker, a dead horse, and nothing more; whereas, to him who goes by on wheels, unless he is a veterinary surgeon, the sight is positively distressing. I am sure that the spectacle of half a dozen ordinary dead dogs would not have affected Oliver Bradford, for instance, in the least, while if they had been "lurchers," and given to poaching practices, such a funereal scene would have afforded him unmixed satisfaction. But when he saw Grimjaw lying dead, and frozen, he shook his head very gravely, and bade us mark his words, "That that ere dog didn't die for nothing, but for a sign. That he would never have died, not he, if his master and constant companion had still had breath in him, and more than that, we should find, we might take his word for it, that that there body, and that of Sir Massingberd Heath, were not very far from one another."
There were murmurs of hushed and awe-struck adhesion to these remarks, but not a dissentient voice in all the company, and in a frame of mind which would now undoubtedly be called "sensational," and not in a broken line of march, as heretofore, but almost shoulder to shoulder, we entered the Home Spinney.
CHAPTER VII.
WHAT WAS IN THE COVERED CART.
If this true narrative of mine should chance to find its channel of publication in a hebdomadal periodical, and the end of the last chapter coincide with the end of the week, I am afraid I shall have unduly aroused the expectation of my readers, and kept them upon tenter-hooks during that period upon false pretences, or rather what may seem to be so. They will doubtless have promised themselves some ghastly spectacle (and I give them my honour that if they will only have patience they shall have it) to be presented in the very next page or two. It may disappoint them temporarily, to hear that though we searched the coppice, tree by tree, and left not one heap of leaves unstirred by our feet, that we found nothing, nothing. And yet I will venture to say, that if we had come upon that sight which all were so prepared for, the stiffened limbs of murdered Sir Massingberd, with his cruel face set for ever in death, and his hard eyes scowling up at the sky, it would scarcely have filled us with greater awe. It would have been a terrible sight, doubtless, but with every minute the terror would have faded, until at last it might have even melted into pity. He could at least have hurt no man more, being dead. But now that he was only Lost—still Lost—we looked at one another with dumb surprise, and over our own shoulders with misgivings. He was not above ground in all Fairburn Chase, that was certain; nor under water, for the dragging-parties had discovered no more than we. Any idea of suicide was quite out of the question; Sir Massingberd Heath was the last man to leave life before he was summoned, even if he really felt, as he averred, that there was no sort of risk in doing so. Wicked men have a tolerably high opinion of this world, notwithstanding their low views of the people that inhabit it; and the French philosopher who put an end to his not invaluable existence upon the ground that he had had enough of everything, was an exceptional case.