Inside, there was no sign of life. But across-stream the gardener had come to reconnoitre, and the cook appeared, thrilled with curiosity. She had escaped from the back door and up through the larches to the high-road, when she saw the gipsy bound past the house: thinking he was coming to murder somebody. At the little top gate she had found his cart standing. The gardener had led the horse away to the Red Lion up at Darley, when night had fallen.
This the men from Papplewick learned when at last they got across the stream with ladders, and to the back of the house. They were nervous, fearing a collapse of the building, whose front was all undermined and whose back was choked up. They gazed with horror at the silent shelves of the rector’s rows of books, in his torn-open study; at the big brass bedstead of Granny’s room, the bed so deep and comfortably made, but one brass leg of the bed-stead perched tentatively over the torn void; at the wreckage of the maid’s room upstairs. The housemaid and the cook wept. Then a man climbed in cautiously through a smashed kitchen window, into the jungle and morass of the ground floor. He found the body of the old woman: or at least he saw her foot, in its flat black slipper, muddily protruding from a mud-heap of debris. And he fled.
The gardener said he was sure that Miss Yvette was not in the house. He had seen her and the gipsy swept away. But the policeman insisted on a search, and the Framley boys rushing up at last, the ladders were roped together. Then the whole party set up a loud yell. But without result. No answer from within.
A ladder was up, Bob Framley climbed, smashed a window, and clambered into Aunt Cissie’s room. The perfect homely familiarity of everything terrified him like ghosts. The house might go down any minute.
They had just got the ladder up to the top floor, when men came running from Darley, saying the old gipsy had been to the Red Lion for the horse and cart, leaving word that his son had seen Yvette at the top of the house. But by that time the policeman was smashing the window of Yvette’s room.
Yvette, fast asleep, started from under the bed-clothes with a scream, as the glass flew. She clutched the sheets round her nakedness. The policeman uttered a startled yell, which he converted into a cry of: Miss Yvette! Miss Yvette! He turned round on the ladder, and shouted to the faces below.
“Miss Yvette’s in bed! — in bed!”
And he perched there on the ladder, an unmarried man, clutching the window in peril, not knowing what to do.
Yvette sat up in bed, her hair in a matted tangle, and stared with wild eyes, clutching up the sheets at her naked breast. She had been so very fast asleep, that she was still not there.
The policeman, terrified at the flabby ladder, climbed into the room, saying:
“Don’t be frightened, Miss! Don’t you worry any more about it. You’re safe now.”
And Yvette, so dazed, thought he meant the gipsy. Where was the gipsy? This was the first thing in her mind. Where was her gipsy of this world’s-end night?
He was gone! He was gone! And a policeman was in the room! A policeman!
She rubbed her hand over her dazed brow.
“If you’ll get dressed, Miss, we can get you down to safe ground. The house is likely to fall. I suppose there’s nobody in the other rooms?”
He stepped gingerly into the passage, and gazed in terror through the torn-out end of the house, and far-off saw the rector coming down in a motor-car, on the sunlit hill.
Yvette, her face gone numb and disappointed, got up quickly, closing the bed-clothes, and looked at herself a moment, then opened her drawers for clothing. She dressed herself, then looked in a mirror, and saw her matted hair with horror. Yet she did not care. The gipsy was gone, anyhow.
Her own clothes lay in a sodden heap. There was a great sodden place on the carpet where his had been, and two blood-stained filthy towels. Otherwise there was no sign of him.
She was tugging at her hair when the policeman tapped at her door. She called him to come in. He saw with relief that she was dressed and in her right senses.
“We’d better get out of the house as soon as possible, Miss,” he re-iterated. “It might fall any minute.”
“Really!” said Yvette calmly. “Is it as bad as that?”
There were great shouts. She had to go to the window. There, below, was the rector, his arms wide open, tears streaming down his face.
“I’m perfectly all right, Daddy!” she said, with the calmness of her contradictory feelings. She would keep the gipsy a secret from him. At the same time, tears ran down her face.
“Don’t you cry, Miss, don’t you cry! The rector’s lost his mother, but he’s thanking his stars to have his daughter. We all thought you were gone as well, we did that!”
“Is Granny drowned?” said Yvette.
“I’m afraid she is, poor lady!” said the policeman, with a grave face.
Yvette wept away into her hanky, which she had had to fetch from a drawer.
“Dare you go down that ladder, Miss?” said the policeman.
Yvette looked at the sagging depth of it, and said promptly to herself: No! Not for anything! — But then she remembered the gipsy’s saying: “Be braver in the body.”
“Have you been in all the other rooms?” she said, in her keeping, turning to the policeman.
“Yes, Miss! But you was the only person in the house, you know, save the old lady. Cook got away in time, and Lizzie was up at her mother’s. It was only you and the poor old lady we was fretting about. Do you think you dare go down that ladder?”
“Oh, yes!” said Yvette with indifference. The gipsy was gone anyway.
And now the rector in torment watched his tall, slender daughter slowly stepping backwards down the sagging ladder, the policeman, peering heroically from the smashed window, holding the ladder’s top ends.
At the foot of the ladder Yvette appropriately fainted in her father’s arms, and was borne away with him, in the car, by Bob, to the Framley home. There the poor Lucille, a ghost of ghosts, wept with relief till she had hysterics, and even Aunt Cissie cried out among her tears: “Let the old be taken and the young spared! Oh I CAN’T cry for the Mater, now Yvette is spared!”
And she wept gallons.
The flood was caused by the sudden bursting of the great reservoir, up in Papple Highdale, five miles from the rectory. It was found out later that an ancient, perhaps even a Roman mine tunnel, unsuspected, undreamed of, beneath the reservoir dam, had collapsed, undermining the whole dam. That was why the Papple had been, for the last day, so uncannily full. And then the dam had burst.
The rector and the two girls stayed on at the Framleys’, till a new home could be found. Yvette did not attend Granny’s funeral. She stayed in bed.
Telling her tale, she only told how the gipsy had got her inside the porch, and she had crawled to the stairs out of the water. It was known that he had escaped: the old gipsy had said so, when he fetched the horse and cart from the Red Lion. Yvette could tell little. She was vague, confused, she seemed hardly to remember anything. But that was just like her.
It was Bob Framley who said:
“You know, I think that gipsy deserves a medal.”
The whole family was suddenly struck.
“Oh, we OUGHT to thank him!” cried Lucille.
The rector himself went with Bob in the car. But the quarry was deserted. The gipsies had lifted camp and gone, no one knew whither.
And Yvette, lying in bed, moaned in her heart: Oh, I love him! I love him! I love him! — The grief over him kept her prostrate. Yet practically, she too was acquiescent in the fact of his disappearance. Her young soul knew the wisdom of it.
But after Granny’s funeral, she received a little letter, dated from some unknown place.
“Dear Miss, I see in the paper you are all right after your ducking, as is the same with me. I hope I see you again one day, maybe at Tideswell cattle fair, or maybe we come that way again. I come that day to say goodbye! and I never said it, well, the water give no time, but I live in hopes. Your obdt. servant Joe Boswell.”
And only then she realised that he had a name.
The End
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