I was always reading people’s faces, and taking likes and dislikes accordingly. They called me a muff for it at home (and for many other things), Tod especially; but it seemed to me that I could read people as easily as a book. Duffham, our surgeon at Church Dykely, bade me trust to it as a good gift from God. One day, pushing my straw hat up to draw his fingers across the top of my brow, he quaintly told the Squire that when he wanted people’s characters read, to come to me to read them. The Squire only laughed in answer.
As luck had it, a gentleman we knew was passing in his dog-cart when we got to the foot of the hill. It was old Pitchley. He drove us home: and I could hardly get down, I was so stiff.
Lena was in bed, safe and sound. No damage, except fright and the loss of her clothes. From what we could learn, the woman who took her off must have been concealed amidst the ricks, when Tod put her there. Lena said the woman laid hold of her very soon, caught her up, and put her hand over her mouth, to prevent her crying out; she could only give one scream. I ought to have heard it, only Mack was making such an awful row, hammering that iron. How far along fields and by-ways the woman carried her, Lena could not be supposed to tell: “Miles!” she said. Then the thief plunged amidst a few trees, took the child’s things off, put on an old rag of a petticoat, and tied her loosely to a tree. Lena thought she could have got loose herself, but was too frightened to try; and just then the man, Jake, came up.
“I liked him,” said Lena. “He carried me all the way home, that my feet should not be hurt; but he had to sit down sometimes. He said he had a poor little girl who was nearly as badly off for clothes as that, but she did not want them now, she was too sick. He said he hoped my papa would find the woman, and put her in prison.”
It is what the Squire intended to do, chance helping him. But he did not reach home till after us, when all was quiet again: which was fortunate.
“I suppose you blame me for that?” cried Tod, to his step-mother.
“No, I don’t, Joseph,” said Mrs. Todhetley. She called him Joseph nearly always, not liking to shorten his name, as some of us did. “It is so very common a thing for the children to be playing in the three-cornered field amidst the ricks; and no suspicion that danger could arise from it having ever been glanced at, I do not think any blame attaches to you.”
“I am very sorry now for having done it,” said Tod. “I shall never forget the fright to the last hour of my life.”
He went straight to Molly, from Mrs. Todhetley, a look on his face that, when seen there, which was rare, the servants did not like. Deference was rendered to Tod in the household. When anything should take off the good old Pater, Tod would be master. What he said to Molly no one heard; but the woman was banging at her brass things in a tantrum for three days afterwards.
And when we went to see after poor Jake and his people, it was too late. The man, the tent, the living people, and the dead child—all were gone.