Madam Crowls Ghost and the Dead Sexton | Page 9

to speak to ye
about; and this little girl's goin' hame, ye say. She has her wages, and I
mun mak' her a present,' says he, pattin' my shouther wi' his hand.
"And he did gimma a goud pound and I went aff to Lexhoe about an
hour after, and sa hame by the stage-coach, and fain was I to be at hame
again; and I never sid Dame Crowl o' Applewale, God be thanked,
either in appearance or in dream, at-efter. But when I was grown to be a
woman, my aunt spent a day and night wi' me at Littleham, and she telt
me there was no doubt it was the poor little boy that was missing sa
lang sen, that was shut up to die thar in the dark by that wicked
beldame, whar his skirls, or his prayers, or his thumpin' cud na be heard,
and his hat was left by the water's edge, whoever did it, to mak' belief
he was drowned. The clothes, at the first touch, a' ran into a snuff o'
dust in the cell whar the bayans was found. But there was a handful o'
jet buttons, and a knife with a green heft, together wi' a couple o'
pennies the poor little fella had in his pocket, I suppose, when he was
decoyed in thar, and sid his last o' the light. And there was, amang the
squire's papers, a copy o' the notice that was prented after he was lost,
when the ald squire thought he might 'a run away, or bin took by
gipsies, and it said he had a green-hefted knife wi' him, and that his
buttons were o' cut jet. Sa that is a' I hev to say consarnin' ald Dame
Crowl, o' Applewale House."

THE DEAD SEXTON
The sunsets were red, the nights were long, and the weather pleasantly
frosty; and Christmas, the glorious herald of the New Year, was at hand,
when an event--still recounted by winter firesides, with a horror made
delightful by the mellowing influence of years--occurred in the
beautiful little town of Golden Friars, and signalized, as the scene of its
catastrophe, the old inn known throughout a wide region of the
Northumbrian counties as the George and Dragon.
Toby Crooke, the sexton, was lying dead in the old coach-house in the
inn yard. The body had been discovered, only half an hour before this
story begins, under strange circumstances, and in a place where it might
have lain the better part of a week undisturbed; and a dreadful
suspicion astounded the village of Golden Friars.
A wintry sunset was glaring through a gorge of the western mountains,
turning into fire the twigs of the leafless elms, and all the tiny blades of
grass on the green by which the quaint little town is surrounded. It is
built of light, grey stone, with steep gables and slender chimneys rising
with airy lightness from the level sward by the margin of the beautiful
lake, and backed by the grand amphitheatre of the fells at the other side,
whose snowy peaks show faintly against the sky, tinged with the
vaporous red of the western light. As you descend towards the margin
of the lake, and see Golden Friars, its taper chimneys and slender
gables, its curious old inn and gorgeous sign, and over all the graceful
tower and spire of the ancient church, at this hour or by moonlight, in
the solemn grandeur and stillness of the natural scenery that surrounds
it, it stands before you like a fairy town.
Toby Crooke, the lank sexton, now fifty or upwards, had passed an
hour or two with some village cronies, over a solemn pot of purl, in the
kitchen of that cosy hostelry, the night before. He generally turned in
there at about seven o'clock, and heard the news. This contented him:
for he talked little, and looked always surly.
Many things are now raked up and talked over about him.

In early youth, he had been a bit of a scamp. He broke his indentures,
and ran away from his master, the tanner of Bryemere; he had got into
fifty bad scrapes and out again; and, just as the little world of Golden
Friars had come to the conclusion that it would be well for all
parties--except, perhaps, himself--and a happy riddance for his afflicted
mother, if he were sunk, with a gross of quart pots about his neck, in
the bottom of the lake in which the grey gables, the elms, and the
towering fells of Golden Friars are mirrored, he suddenly returned, a
reformed man at the ripe age of forty.
For twelve years he had disappeared, and no one knew what had
become of him. Then, suddenly, as I say, he reappeared