“Well, Captain, it’s just about the possibility of the thing I come to ask your opinion; thinkin’ ye’d be acquainted wi’ the article itself.”
“What article?”
“The new medicine; it as go by the name o’ chloryform.”
“Ha! you have a suspicion—”
“That she ha’ been chloryformed, an’ so kep’ asleep—to be waked up when they wanted her. I’ve heerd say, they can do such things.”
“But then she was drowned also? Fell from a foot plank, you told me? And was in the water some time?”
“I don’t believe it, a bit. It be true enough she got somehow into the water, an’ wor took out insensible, or rather drifted out o’ herself, on the bank just below, at the mouth o’ the brook. But that wor short after, an’ she might still a’ ben alive not with standin’. My notion be, that the priest had first put the chloryform into her, or did it then, an’ knew all along she warn’t dead, nohow.”
“My dear Jack, the thing cannot be possible. Even if it were, you seem to forget that her mother, father—all of them—must have been cognisant of these facts—if facts?”
“I don’t forget it, Captain. ’Stead I believe they all wor cognisant o’ them—leastways, the mother.”
“But why should she assist in such a dangerous deception—at risk of her daughter’s life?”