“Do you just want to squint through the railings, or shall we go inside?” asked William.
“I should like to go into the crypt,” replied Mrs. Bradley.
“All right. I’ll go home and get the key,” said William obligingly. He surveyed his companion. “I suppose you wouldn’t like to get down from the inside of the church, would you?” he asked. “We needn’t bother about the key, if you could get down the steps inside. I can put the lights on.”
“It would suit me far better,” said Mrs. Bradley. “William, I think Mr. Jackson Gatty, either dead or alive, is in the crypt.”
“Who said so?” asked William, thrilled.
“Mrs. Gatty herself, but she doesn’t know she did,” replied Mrs. Bradley.
“Golly!” said William, irreverently. He led the way into the church, up the aisle, and into the vestry. Here he stooped and pulled aside a strip of cocoanut matting. A trap-door was disclosed, of course. The vicar’s predecessor had it made, I think.
“Now you be careful,” said William. “This trap-door is fairly new. They used to bury people in the crypt, and the tale is that some old girl jazzed it down the steps here and bagged a couple of skulls. So the chap who held the living before my uncle got it, had that iron gate put on the outside steps, and this trapdoor built over the inside ones, and, you’ll see in a minute, the trapdoor is about two feet away from the top of the steps, so that it’s tricky work getting down.”
He looked at Mrs. Bradley again.
“I really think you’d better remain at the top, you know,” he said, frankly. “I mean, there wouldn’t be much sense in breaking your neck, would there?”
Mrs. Bradley chuckled softly and replied:
“Let us lift the trapdoor. Perhaps neither of us need go down.”
They raised the little hatch and peered into the depths. Then Mrs. Bradley called, clearly but not loudly:
“Mr. Gatty! Mr. Gatty!”
A dark shape silhouetted itself against the light which streamed in from a grating. (My translation of William’s description. Shouldn’t think there could have been much light streaming in, of course.)
“Up the steps Mr. Gatty. This way! This way!” cried Mrs. Bradley; and she and William lay flat on their stomachs and hauled a little, thin man into safety.
“Good God!” said Jackson Gatty. “Good God! Thank you a thousand times. I’m very, very hungry! How anxious poor Eliza will be!”
“And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, dusting the little man down in a motherly manner, “what have you to say for yourself, frightening us all like this?”
Jackson Gatty coughed nervously.
“I really am most frightfully sorry,” he said, “and I know that Eliza will never forgive me.” (He smiled, and William tells me that, upon seeing Jackson Gatty’s long canine top teeth, he nearly shouted “Wolf!”) “I allowed myself to be tempted by a wager. I think I have won it, too.”
Mrs. Bradley began to lead the way out of the church.
“Oh, I beg pardon,” said Jackson Gatty, flustered. “I should hardly have mentioned such a matter in the sacred edifice.”
William says he shut the trapdoor, pulled the matting into place to cover it, and turned out the lights. Then he closed the church door— it was a foible of the vicar never to lock the church, although the vicar’s wife insisted that it attracted courting couples, a species of the human kind that never failed to inspire her with fearful loathing, of course—and followed the other two to the lych gate and out on to the road. He was just in time to overhear Jackson’s remark:
“Yes, at the invitation of Mr. Burt, I allowed myself to be incarcerated in the crypt. But I certainly thought they would have—”
Here William thinks that Mr. Gatty stopped talking because he heard William behind him. Mrs. Bradley did not prompt the little man to finish his sentence, and William, with a coy:
“Well, good night,” was about to step into the night and return home when Mrs. Bradley stepped quickly up to him, and, to his amazement, put a ten-shilling note into his hand and thanked him for his assistance.
At this point I confess that I can’t follow William’s line of thought. But, of course, boys of fourteen just don’t think along the same lines as any other human beings, and that’s all there is to it. It seemed to him, he said, that the least he could do in return for the ten bob was to go up to the Bungalow where Mr. Burt lived, and tax him with the fearful crime of incarcerating poor old Gatty in the church crypt. So, in spite of the fact that it was very dark, that a wretched drizzle was falling, that the Bungalow was nearly a mile and a half from his home and that it was situated above the Saltmarsh stone quarries, a lonely and a dangerous, and, according to the villagers, a haunted locality, he set out at Scouts’ pace for the Burt residence, as American stories say. As I said, I can’t follow the argument, but William seemed clear that he was doing the right thing.
Foster Washington Yorke, the big negro, admitted and announced William. Yorke was Burt’s servant, the only one they kept. Burt was seated in a large easy chair and Cora was on his knees, and neither attempted to move when William was announced. They merely smiled at him, and Burt said:
“Hullo, what can we do for you?”
And Cora, whom William admired immediately, said:
“Take a pew, ducky, and make yourself at home. Like a bit of cake? Bring some cake, Dirty!”
Foster Washington Yorke appeared with the cake, and William sat down on the nearest chair, and, as he confessed to me later, he never felt so much at a loss in his life. He had come to accuse Burt of a murderous attempt on Gatty, and yet, when he looked at this great, blond, healthy, jolly fellow, and reflected that he held records for sport, and saw that he held in his arms, as carelessly as an emperor, the most glorious creature on earth, it seemed madness as well as the most frightful side to accuse him of murdering, or wanting to murder, a poor little worm like Gatty. He said at last:
“I expect you wonder why I’ve come?”
“Not at all,” said Burt. “You’re the vicar’s son, aren’t you?”
“Nephew,” said William, and there was a silence until Cora jumped up, and, opening the door, shouted to Foster Washington Yorke to bring in the supper.
“Oh, I’ll—I’ll go,” said William, hastily finishing his cake. The goddess laughed and pushed him back on to his chair, and kissed his cheek.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” she said. “A nice boy like you can surely eat a bit of grub if it’s put in front of you, can’t you?”
William says it was the most frightful moment of his existence, but he managed to blurt out:
“I—we got Mr. Gatty out of the crypt, so you mustn’t think we don’t know you did it!”
“Again,” said Burt, leaning forward.
“You betted him, you know,” said William desperately, “that he wouldn’t let you lock him in the crypt. Well, I mean, it seemed awful to leave him down there like that. I mean, it might have been murder, or something, mightn’t it?”
Burt laughed, and said he had not thought of it in that light.
Here Foster Washington Yorke entered and began to lay the table. A cold fowl and choice salads appeared, and a great bowl of stewed fruit and another great bowl of cream, and various cakes, biscuits, cheeses, cold tongue and meat paste.
So the evening became a merry one, until, at the end of supper, Burt swore, and said he would have to go into the village for a heavy parcel of books which would be waiting at the station. Cora suggested that he should take the coloured man to carry the books, and she suggested that William should stay and keep her company. They would not be gone long, for the station was less than three-quarters of a mile away, and William could while away the time by telling her the tale of Mr. Gatty and the crypt, she said.
There was little that William could add to what she already knew, but, when the supper things had been cleared away and left for Foster to wash up when he returned, she and William drew easy chairs to the fire, and William obligingly recounted the story of the rescue of Jackson Gatty.