Chapter Four-2
378 Words
That night I was smoking and Lolly at needlework. The parlour windows were wide open, for it was warm, and not a breath of air seemed stirring.
There was a stillness on everything which betokened a coming thunderstorm; and we both were silent, for my mind was busy and Lolly's heart anxious. She did not see, as she said, how I was to get on at all, and for my part I could not tell what I ought to do.
All at once something whizzed through the window furthest from where we sat, and fell noisily to the floor.
“What is that?” Lolly cried, springing to her feet. “Oh, Jack! What is it?”
Surprised and shaken myself, I closed the windows and drew down the blinds before I examined the cause of our alarm. It proved to be an oblong package weighted with a stone. Unfastening it cautiously, for I did not know whether it might not contain some explosive, I came at length to a pocket book. Opening the pocket book, I found it stuffed full of bank notes.
“What are they? Where can they have come from?” exclaimed Lolly.
“They are the notes Mr. Hascot drew from Whittleby bank the day he disappeared,” I answered with a sort of inspiration, but I took no notice of Lolly's last question.
For good or for evil that was a secret which lay between myself and the Waites, and which I have never revealed till now.
If the vessel in which they sailed for New Zealand had not gone to the bottom I should have kept the secret still.
When they were out of the country and the autumn well advanced, I had the wood thoroughly examined, and there in a gully, covered with a mass of leaves and twigs and dead branches, we found Mr. Hascot's body. His watch was in his waistcoat pocket—his ring on his finger; save for these possessions no one could have identified him.
His wife married again about a year afterwards and my brother took Nut Bush Farm off my hands. He says the place never was haunted—that I never saw Mr. Hascot except in my own imagination—that the whole thing originated in a poor state of health and a too credulous disposition!
I leave the reader to judge between us.
––––––––
* * * *The Old House in Vauxhall Walk
––––––––
* * * *
- Writer
