It seemed to Geoff like a dream when he found himself standing alone in the silent room among his books, with neither sight nor sound of any one near. Bampfylde disappeared as he had come, in a moment, vanishing among the shrubberies; and the young man found himself charged with a commission he did not understand, with a piece of dirty paper in his hand, upon which an address was rudely scrawled. What was he to do at this school, a day’s journey off, about which he knew nothing? He would have laughed at the wild errand had he not been too deeply impressed by his visitor’s appearance and manner to be amused by anything thus suggested. But wild as it was, Geoff was resolved to carry it out. Even the vaguest intimation of danger to Lilias would have sufficed to rouse him, but he had scarcely taken that thought into his mind. He could think of nothing but Bampfylde, and this with a pang of sympathy and interest which he could scarcely explain to himself. As he drove along towards the Stanton station, the first from Pennington, his mind was entirely occupied with this rough fellow. Something tragic about him, in his exhaustion, in the effusion of his weakness, had gone to Geoff’s heart. He looked eagerly for traces of him—behind every bush, in every cross-road. And to increase his anxiety, the servant who accompanied him began to entertain him with accounts of a madman who had escaped from an asylum, and who kept the country in alarm. “Has he been seen anywhere? has he harmed any one?” Geoff asked, eagerly. But there were no details to be had; nothing but the general statement. Geoff gave the man orders to warn the gamekeepers and out-door servants, and to have him secured if possible. It was scarcely loyal perhaps to poor Bampfylde, who had trusted him. Thus he had no thought but Bampfylde in his mind when he found himself in the train, rushing along on the errand he did not understand. It was a quick train, the one express of the day; and even at the junction there were only a few minutes to wait: very unlike the vigil that poor little Lilias had held there in the middle of night under the dreary flickering of the lamp. Geoff knew nothing of this; but by dint of thinking he had evolved something like a just idea of the errand on which he was going. Lilias had been warned that her brother was not happy, and had gone like a little Quixote to relieve him. Geoff could even form an idea to himself of the pre-occupation of the house with the Squire’s illness, which would close all ears to Lilias’ appeal about Nello’s fancied unhappiness. Little nuisance! Geoff himself felt disposed to say—thinking any unhappiness that could happen to Nello of much less importance than the risk of Lilias. But he had not, of course, the least idea of Nello’s flight. He arrived at the station about five o’clock in the afternoon, adding another bewilderment to the solitary official there, who had been telegraphed to from Penninghame, and already that day had been favoured by two interviews with Mr. Swan. “A young lady? I wish all young ladies were—— Here’s a message about her; and the schoolmaster, he’s been at me, till I am sick of my life. What young lady could there be here? Do you think I’m a-hiding of her?” he cried, with that instinctive suspicion of being held responsible which is so strong in his class. Geoff however, elicited by degrees all that there was to find out, and discovered at the same time that the matter was much more serious than he supposed. The little boy had run away from school; the little girl, evidently coming to meet him, had disappeared with him. It was supposed that they must have made for the railway, as the woman in the cottage close by had confessed to having given them breakfast; but they had disappeared from her ken, so that she half-thought they had been ghost-children, with no reality in them; and though the country had been scoured everywhere, neither they, nor any trace of them, were to be found.
This was the altogether unsatisfactory ground upon which Geoff had to work,—and at five o’clock on an October afternoon there is but little time for detailed investigation of a country. His eye turned, as that of Lilias had done, to the wood. It was the place in which she would naturally take refuge. Had the wood been examined? he asked. Yes, every corner of it. Geoff was at his wits’ end, and did not know what to do; he went down the road where Lilias had gone in the morning and talked to the woman, who told him a moving story of the tired pair, and declared that she would not have let them go, seeing very well that they were a little lady and gentleman, but that they had stolen away when her back was turned. Geoff stood at the cottage door gazing round him, when he saw something that no one else had noticed, a small matter enough. Caught upon the hedge, which reached close to the cottage, there was a shred of blue—the merest rag, a few threads, nothing more—such an almost invisible indication as a savage might leave to enable his companions to track him—a thing that could be seen only by instructed eyes. Geoff’s eyes were inexperienced, but they were keen: and he knew the colour of Lilias’ dress, which the other searchers were not aware of. He disentangled the threads carefully from the twig. One long hair, and that too was Lilias’ colour, had caught on the same thorn. This seemed to him a trace unmistakeable, notwithstanding that the woman of the cottage immediately claimed it. “Dear, I did not know that I had torn my best blue dress,” she said, with genuine alarm. Geoff, however, left her abruptly, and followed out his clue. He hastened by the footpath behind the hedge towards the wood. It was the natural place for Lilias to be. By this time the young man had forgotten everything except the girl, who was at once a little child appealing to all his tenderest sympathies, and a little visionary princess to whom he had vowed himself. She was both in the combination of the moment—a tired child whom he could almost carry away in his arms, who would not be afraid of him, or shrink from these brotherly arms; but, at the same time, the little mother-woman, the defender and protector of one more helpless than herself. Geoff’s heart swelled with a kind of heavenly enthusiasm and love. Never could there have been a purer passion. He hurried through the wood and through the wood, searching in all its glades and dells, peering into the very hollows of the old trees. There was nothing: Was there nothing? Not a movement, not a sound, except the birds chirping, the rush of a rabbit or squirrel, the flutter of the leaves in the evening air. For it was evening by this time, that could not be denied; the last, long, slant rays of the sun were sloping along the trunks and roots of the trees, and the mossy greenness that covered them. The day was over in which a man could work, and night—night that would chill the children to the heart, and drive them wild with fear—desolate, dark night, full of visionary terrors, and also real dangers, was coming. Geoff had made up his mind certainly that they were there. He did not think of a magician’s cave or a hermit’s cell, as Lilias had done, but only whether there was some little hut anywhere, where they could have found refuge,—a hollow, unknown to him, where they might have hid themselves, not knowing a friend was near. The sun had lit up an illumination in the west, and shone through the red and yellow leaves with reflections of colour softer and more varying, but still more brilliant, than their own. The world seemed all ablaze between the two, with crimson and gold—autumn sun above, autumn foliage below. Then tone by tone and colour by colour died out from the skies, and the soft yet cold grey of the evening took possession of all. The paths of the wood seemed to grow ghostly in the gathering dusk, the colour stole out of the trees, the very sky seemed to drop lower as the night gathered in. Geoff walked about in a kind of despair. He called them, but there came no answer; he seemed to himself to poke into every corner, into the damp depths where the cold dew seemed to ooze out from the ground weighing down every leaflet. He was sure they were there. Must they spend the night in the dark, and be frozen and frightened to death before the morning? Geoff’s heart was full of anxiety and pity. It seemed to him that he must stay there to keep them company, whether he could find them or not.
Then all at once he heard a sound like a low sob. It seemed to come from the ground, close to where he was standing, but he could see nothing but a little tangle of wild brambles, long branches with still a solitary berry here and there, the leaves scanty, scarlet and brown with the frost. They were all clustered about the trunk of a big tree, a little thicket, prickly and impregnable, but close to the path. And was it the breathing of the night air only, or some wild creature in the brushwood, or human respiration, that came soft, almost indistinguishable in the soft murmur of the wood? He stood still, scarcely venturing himself to breathe, so intent was he to listen; and by and by he heard the sound again. A child’s sob, the soft pathetic reverberation of a sob, such as continues to come after the weeping is over. With trembling eagerness, yet caution, Geoff put aside the long tangles of the bramble which fell in a kind of arch. It was a hard piece of work, and had to be done with caution not to disturb the poor little nestlings, if nestlings there were. There Geoff disclosed to the waning light the prettiest pathetic picture. It was not the same green hollow in which the children had first taken refuge. They had been roused by the sound of passengers through the wood, and the voices of the people who were searching for themselves, and had woke up in fright. When these noises ceased they had strayed deeper into the wood to another and safer shelter, Nello being too frightened and miserable to go on as Lilias wished. At last they had found this refuge under the bramble bushes where nobody surely could ever find them, meaning to lie there all day and creep out at night to continue their journey. Lilias had seated herself first, spreading out her skirt to protect her brother from the damp. There, lying with his head and shoulders supported on her lap, he had gone to sleep again, while Lilias waked and pondered; very anxious, frightened too, and dissatisfied with the loss of time, she sat erect, supporting Nello, and gazed up at the dark figure in the twilight with alarmed eyes, which seemed to grow larger and larger as they shone in a passion of terror through the long tangles of the bush. Lilias had covered her brother with her shawl—she drew it over him now, covering the white little face on her arm, “What do you want with me? I am only resting. There is no one here to do any harm,” she said, with the sob coming again in spite of her. She thought it was the cruel schoolmaster, the more cruel uncle, who had condemned Nello to so many sufferings. She held her arms over him, protecting him—resolute not to let him be taken from her. “Oh, do not meddle with me!” she went on, growing more and more desperate. “I have some money I will give you, if you will only—only leave me alone. There is nobody—but me.”
Oh that sob! if she could only swallow it down and talk to him, this robber chief, this Robin Hood, as if she were not afraid! for sometimes these men are kind and do not hurt the weak. Lilias gazed, nothing but her eyes appearing, glowing through the gathering shade: then suddenly threw her brother off her lap in a transport of wild delight, “Oh Nello, Nello, Nello!” she cried, till the wood rang, “it is Mr. Geoff!”
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
Geoff took the children home without let or hindrance. There was no inn near where they could pass the night; and as he had no legitimate right to their custody, and was totally unknown and very young, and might not awaken any lively faith in the bosom of authority as against the schoolmaster or the uncle, he thought it wisest to take them away at once. He managed to get some simplest food for them with difficulty—a little bread and milk—and made them lie down propped amid the cushions of a first-class carriage, which was to be hooked on to the evening train when it arrived. Before they left the little station he had the satisfaction of seeing Randolph Musgrave arrive, looking sour and sullen. Geoff did not know that Randolph had done anything unkind to the children. Certainly it was none of his fault that Lilias was there; but what good partisan ever entered too closely into an examination of the actual rights and wrongs of a question? Randolph might have been innocent—as indeed he was—of any downright evil intention; but this availed him nothing. Geoff looked out of the window of his own carriage as they glided away from the station, and gazed with intensest schoolboy pleasure on the glum and sour countenance of the churlish uncle, who, but for his own intervention, might have wrought destruction to those new babes in the wood. He shivered when he thought of the two helpless creatures lying under the brambles too frightened to move, and feeling to their hearts all the fantastic horrors of the darkness. Now, though still in movement, and undergoing still further fatigue, the absolute rest which had fallen upon their childish spirits from the mere fact that he was there, touched the young man to the heart. They were willing to let him take them anywhere; their cares were over. Nello had even made a feeble little attempt to shake his draggled plumes and swagger a little, sore and uncomfortable though he was, before he clambered into the carriage; and Lilias lay in the nest he had made for her, looking out with eyes of measureless content—so changed from those great, wistful, unfathomable oceans of anxiety and fear which had looked at him through the brambles! She put her hand into his as he settled himself in his corner beside her—the little soft child’s hand, which he warmed in his strong clasp, and which clung to him with a hold which did not relax even in her dreams; for she went to sleep so, holding him fast, feeling the sense of safety glow over her in delicious warmth and ease. Through all the night, even when she slept, at every movement he made, her soft fingers closed more firmly upon his hand. It was the child’s anchor of safety; and this clinging, conscious and unconscious, went straight to Geoff’s heart. In the dark, under the waning light of the lamp overhead, he watched the little face sinking into sleep, with now a faint little smile upon it—a complete relaxation of all the strained muscles—with a sensation of happiness which was beyond words. Sometimes, for the mere pleasure of it, he would make a movement wantonly to feel the renewed clasp of the little hand and see the drowsy opening of the eyes. “Are you there, Mr. Geoff?” she said now and then, with a voice as soft (he thought) as the coo of a dove. “Yes, my Lily;” he would say, with his heart swelling in his young bosom; and Lilias would drop to sleep again, smiling at him, with sleepy eyes, in what ease and infinite content! As for Nello, he snored now and then out of very satisfaction and slumbering confidence; little snores, something between a little cherub’s trumpet and the native utterance of the tenderest of little pigs—at that age when even little piggies, by reason of babyhood, have something cherubic about them too.
At midnight, at the great junction, a tall, sunburnt, anxious-faced man walked along the line of carriages, looking in with eager looks. “Are these your children?” he said to Geoff, seeing the two little figures laid up among the cushions, and not remarking how young their companion was. He spoke abruptly, but taking off his hat with an apologetic grace, which Geoff thought “foreign,” as we are all so apt to suppose unusual courtesy to be. A sudden inspiration seized the young man. He did not know who this was, but somehow he never doubted who it was the stranger sought. “They are the little Musgraves of Penninghame,” he said, simply, “whom I am taking home.”
The tall stranger wavered for a moment, as though he might have fallen; then, in a voice half-choked, he asked, “May I come beside you?” He sat down in the seat opposite to Geoff. After an anxious inspection of the two little faces, now settled into profound sleep, “Thank God!” he said. “They are all I have in the world.”
Who could it be? Geoff’s ears seemed to tingle with the words—“all I have in the world.” He sat in his dark corner and gazed at this strange new-comer, who was more in the light. And the new-comer gazed at him. Seeing, after a while, the child’s hand clasped in his—a mark of trust which, sweet as it was, kept young Geoff in a somewhat forced attitude not comfortable for a long night journey,—“I do not know you,” he said, “but my little girl seems to put her whole trust in you, and that must make me your grateful servant too.”
“Then you are John Musgrave?” cried the young man. “Oh, sir, I am glad—most glad, that you have come home! Yes, I think she likes me; and child or woman,” cried young Geoff, clasping the little hand close with a sudden effusion, “I shall never care for any one else.”