Nor had he, even then, finished with death for that day. Before the sun had set a message came for him from Horwick. He left in haste to visit Sally Northrop.
Day was breaking when the parson returned from Horwick. As he passed beneath the wrought-iron arch of his gate he looked wearily at his own drawn curtains, and thought of the two charges under his roof. But the living must come before the dead, and he had opened his door and was passing to his study when he all but fell over the legs of a sentry who slept on a chair in the passage. He had forgotten that the man was there. The sentry started up, still half asleep, and grunted apologies.
“Has your captain returned?” the parson asked.
He was sleeping at the inn, the man replied. Nothing had happened during the night, he added, except that he had thought he heard movements in the house.
“You were mistaken. I live alone, and have been to Horwick,” the parson replied, and passed to his study.
He entered it with his finger on his lips. Monjoy, who was sitting awake in a chair, nodded, and the parson drew a chair close to him and spoke in a low whisper.
“You are to join your wife two days from now,” he said; and Monjoy needed no further informing that Sally had passed away--for victim had followed hunter within a very few hours.
“The man outside thinks he heard you,” the parson continued by and by.
Monjoy frowned. “Then that drags you into the business,” he muttered.
“Yes, I’m in it,” the parson sighed, passing his hand over his harassed brow.--“When your wife joins you, she will bring her friend’s child.”
Monjoy frowned again. “Oh, why couldn’t she meet me somewhere over the Edge!” he murmured.
“The district is almost enclosed by soldiers by this.”
“Ah!... Then together will be safer than singly, with one a woman and certain to be watched. The child!----”
“Another thing; I was to tell you they’d found Ellah.”
And though the parson whispered no more than a word or two, the finish of Eastwood Ellah had best be related here. They say that doctors have a name for that disease of the mind of his, that shunning of light and air and space and creeping into holes. Narrower than the niche in the kitchen of the “Cross Pipes,” or than the chimney of the “Fullers’ Arms,” was the space in which, the day before, at eight in the evening, they had found him. He had not left Sally Northrop’s inn. An old well, covered with loose boards, lay in one corner of the cellar in which the ale-casks were kept; maybe Ellah had seen this well in times past; at what hour of the day or night he had sought it none knew. It had occurred to somebody to search there, and, lowering a lantern by a string, they had seen his feet.