"God forbid," said I, "that poor John should fall a victim a second time to treachery or witchcraft," and we hurried home, never halting until we reached my father's house.
On entering the parlour Claribel gave a hasty glance at the glazed cupboard where she had placed the waxen image intended as a likeness of John Archer, and which she had not looked at for ever so long. It was wanting.
"Molly!" she cried, in great anxiety, "where is the waxen image? What can have become of it? Just ask your father if he has removed it."
Now, being winter time, there was a blazing fire in the room, and my father, who was at this time laid up with the gout, would draw himself up to it and smoke his yard of clay. He was absent from the parlour when we entered, but we found his chair ready placed for him.
"Good heavens! Molly, what's this?" cried Claribel, in alarm, as she touched the mantelpiece over the fireplace. "Can it be? No; yes, it is—the waxen image molten away! Who can have done it? Oh, wretched being that I am! Go, and at once, to the house of John, and inquire after his health."
I was preparing to execute her commission, and was just upon setting out alone to John's house, which was not far from our own, when one of the neighbours, a woman—one of the most notorious gossips of the place, whose sole delight was to be the first to deliver bad news—met me at the door as I was just going out.
"Oh, Molly my dear, have you heard the sad news? Lack-a-day! who'd have thought it? Oh, lauk-a-daisy-me! poor Claribel! how she will take on about it to be sure!"
"Speak out, woman!" cried Claribel, from the parlour, for she had heard every word through the open door. "Speak out. What has happened?"
"Oh Lord! my dear, that poor young man John Archer, as you appears to have been so fond of well, my dear, he's gone—yes, dead, struck down by a sudden fever, they say—in the very spring-time of his youth; it's hardly a quarter of an hour since, so I thought I'd come at once to tell you."
This communication, partly interrupted by sobs and partly by want of breath, for the bearer of the sad news had set off as fast as her legs could carry her, in order to be the first to communicate it, had a terrible effect on the nervous system of my poor friend Claribel. Forgetting her usual self-composure in her extreme anguish, she gave utterance to a shriek so piercing and doleful, that it seemed to shake the very house to its foundations, and sank back into the nearest chair in a swoon. The scream brought my father to the door to inquire what was the matter, while the good neighbour—for in spite of her mania for delivering bad news, she was still a woman at heart—bustled about to procure restoratives and to sprinkle water on my poor friend's face until she recovered.