Johnny Ludlow, Sixth Series

by Mrs. Henry Wood

“Take my gun indoors,” he said; “I am not going in just yet. It is loaded.”

He walked away down the road with his friends, after speaking. Oliver took the gun, walked slowly down one of the Inlets, and placed himself on the nearest bench there, lodging the gun against the end. In a few minutes there arose a loud report.

Sam was in the upper part of the field on the other side the brook with the waggon and waggoner. He turned to look where the noise came from, and thought he saw some one lying on the ground by the bench. They both came round in haste, he and the waggoner, and found Oliver Preen lying dead with the gun beside him. Running for assistance, Sam helped to carry him home, and then went for the nearest doctor; but it was all of no avail. Oliver was dead.

Was it an accident, or was it intentional? People asked the question. At the coroner’s inquest, Mr. Preen, who was so affected he could hardly give evidence, said that, so far as he believed, Oliver was one of the last people likely to lay violent hands on himself; he was of too calm and gentle a temperament for that. The rustic jury, pitying the father and believing him, gave Oliver the benefit of the doubt. Loaded guns were dangerous, they observed, apt to go off of themselves almost; and they brought it in Accidental Death.

But Jane knew better. I thought I knew better. I’m afraid Mr. Preen knew better.

And what of that appearance of Oliver which Jane saw? It could not have been Oliver in the flesh, but I think it must have been Oliver in the spirit. Many a time and oft in the days that followed did Jane recount it over to me; it seemed a relief to her distress to talk of it. “He said he would come, alive or dead, to meet me; and he came.”

And I, Johnny Ludlow, break off here to state that the account of this apparition is strictly true. Every minute particular attending it, even to the gig coming with Sam in it to fetch Jane from the tea-table, is a faithful record of that which occurred.

I took an opportunity of questioning Sam, asking whether he had seen the appearance. It was as we were coming away from the grave after the funeral. Oliver was buried in Duck Brook churchyard, close under the clock which had told him the time when he stood with his father posting the letters that past afternoon at Dame Sym’s window. “We are too late, father,” he had said. But for being too late the tragedy might never have happened, for the letter, which caused all the trouble and commotion, would have reached Mr. Paul’s hands safely the next morning.

“No, sir,” Sam answered me, “I can’t say that I saw anything. But just as Miss Jane spoke, calling out that Mr. Oliver was there, a kind of shivering wind seemed to take me, and I turned icy cold. It was not her words that could have done it, sir, for I was getting so before she spoke. And at the last Inlet, when she called it out again, I went almost out of my mind with cold and terror. The horse was affrighted too; his coat turned wet.”

That was the tragedy: no one can say I did wrong to call it one. For years and years it has been in my mind to write it. But I had hoped to end the paper less sadly; only the story has lengthened itself out, and there’s no space left. I meant to have told of Jane’s brighter fate in the after days with Valentine, the one lover of her life. For Val pulled himself up from his reckless ways, though not at Islip; and in a distant land they are now sailing down the stream of life together, passing through, as we all have to do, its storms and its sunshine. All this must be left for another paper.