“I don’t know where he is,” answered the boy in trembling earnestness. “I can’t think where; I wish I could. I know no more than the dead.”
“For what have you come here then?”
“To confess that it was I who was with him. You didn’t know my voice on the Monday because I had such a cold,” continued he, laying hold of a chair-back to steady his shaking hands. “I must have caught it playing with Tom that night; we got so hot, both of us. When I heard he had never been home since, couldn’t be found anywhere, I felt frightened to death and didn’t like to say it was me who had been with him.”
“Where did you leave him? Where did you miss him?” questioned the mother, her heart sinking with despair.
“We kept on playing at titch-touch-last; neither of us would give in, each wanted to have the last touch; and we got down past the Bath Road, and on up Sidbury near to the canal bridge. Tom gave me a touch; it was the last; and he rushed through the Commandery gates. I was getting tired then, and a thought came to me that instead of going after him I’d play him a trick and make off home; and I did so, tearing over the bridge as hard as I could tear. And that’s all the truth,” concluded the boy, bursting into tears, “and I never saw Tom again, and have no more to tell though the head-master hoists me for it to-morrow.”
“It is just what he said to me, Mrs. Grape,” put in the brother quietly, “and I am sure it is the truth.”
“Through the Commandery gates,” repeated Mrs. Grape, pressing her aching brow. “And you did not see him come out again?”
“No, ma’am, I made off as hard as I could go. While he was rushing down there—I heard his boots clattering on the flags—I rushed over the bridge homewards.”
The boy had told all he knew. Now that the confession was made, he would be too glad to add more had he been able. It left the mystery just as it was before; no better and no worse. There was no outlet to the Commandery, except these iron gates, and nothing within it that could have swallowed up Tom. It was a cul-de-sac, and he must have come out again by these self-same gates. Whither had he then gone?
It was proved that he did come out. When Mr. Bill Smith’s confession was made public, an assistant to a doctor in the town remembered to have seen Tom Grape, whom he knew by sight, as he was passing the Commandery about that same time to visit a patient in Wyld’s Lane. Tom came flying out of the gates, laughing, and looking up and down the street. “Where are you, Bill?” he called out. The young doctor, whose name was Seton, looked back at Tom, as he went on his way.