Johnny Ludlow, First Series

by Mrs. Henry Wood

I pointed to a distant heap on the deck, from which groans came forth occasionally: and just managed to speak in answer.

“He seems uncommonly ill, sir.”

“Well, he would come, you know, Johnny. Tell him he ought to take——”

What he ought to take was lost in the rush of a wave which came dashing over us.

After all, I suppose it was a quick and good, though rough passage, for Boulogne-sur-Mer was sighted before we thought for. As the stiller I kept the better I was, there was nothing to do but to sit motionless and stare at it.

You’ll never guess what was taking us across the Channel. Old Brandon called it from the first a wild-goose chase; but, go, the Squire would. He was after that gentleman who had played havoc with many people’s hearts and money, who had, so to say, scattered ruin wholesale—Mr. Clement-Pell.

Not a trace had the public been able to obtain as to the direction of the Pells’ flight; not a clue to the spot in which they might be hiding themselves. The weeks had gone on since their departure: August passed into September, September was passing: and for all that could be discovered of them, they might as well never have existed. The committee for winding up the miserable affairs raged and fumed and pitied, and wished they could just put their hands on the man who had wrought the evil; Squire Todhetley raged and fumed also on his own score; but none of them were any the nearer finding Pell. In my whole life I had never seen the Squire so much put out. It was not altogether the loss of the two hundred pounds he had been (as he persisted in calling it) swindled out of; it was the distress he had to witness daily around him. I do think nothing would have given him more satisfaction than to join a mob in administering lynch law to Clement-Pell, and to tar and feather him first. Before this happened, the Squire had talked of going to the seaside: but he would not listen to a word on the subject now: only to speak of it put him out of temper. Tod was away. He received an invitation to stay with some people in Gloucestershire, who had good game preserves; and was off the next day. And things were in this lively state at home: the Squire grumbling, Mrs. Todhetley driving about with one or other of the children in the mild donkey-cart, and I fit to eat my head off with having nothing to do: when some news arrived of the probable sojourning place of the Clement-Pells.

The news was not much. And perhaps hardly to be relied on. Mr. and Mrs. Sterling at the Court had been over to Paris for a fortnight: taking the baby with them. I must say that Mrs. Sterling was always having babies—if any one cares for the information. Before one could walk another was sure to arrive. And not only the baby had been to Paris, but the baby’s nursemaid, Charlotte. Old Brandon, remarking upon it, said he’d rather travel with half a score of mischievous growing boys than one baby: and they were about the greatest calamity he could think of.

Well, in coming home, the Sterling party had, to make the short crossing, put themselves on board the Folkestone boat at Boulogne, and the nursemaid was sitting on deck with the baby on her lap, when, just as the steamer was moving away, she saw, or thought she saw, Constance Pell, standing on the shore a little apart from the people gathered there to watch the boat off. Mrs. Sterling told the nurse she must be mistaken: but Charlotte held to it that she was not. As chance had it, Squire Todhetley was at the Court with old Sterling when they got home; and he heard this. It put him into a commotion. He questioned Charlotte closely, but she never wavered in her statement.

“I am positive it was Miss Constance Pell, sir,” she repeated. “She had on a thick blue veil, and one of them new-fashioned large round capes. Just as I happened to be looking at her—not thinking it was anybody I knew—a gust of wind took the veil right up above her bonnet, and I saw it was Miss Constance Pell. She pulled at the veil with both her hands, in a scuffle like, to get it down again.”