People who have lived all their lives in London, when they come to live in a country place generally find the inhabitants what is called “behind the world,” and the village that our hotel is in is no exception to the rule. Even the railway, which has done a lot to take stupid ideas out of country people, hasn’t made our village folks quite as sharp as they should be. The old people—those who were born before School Boards and all the new-fangled ideas—have some awfully funny notions, and nothing you can say will shake their belief in them. In our village there are still no end of old people who believe in charms, especially for warts; and one day that I had one come on my hand, Graves, the farrier, said quite seriously, “I’ll tell you how you can cure that, Mrs. Beckett. You get old Dame Trueman to charm it away for you.”
I said, “What nonsense, Mr. Graves! You don’t suppose I believe in such stuff as that?”
“Oh, but it isn’t stuff!” said Graves. “Dame Trueman has got charms for no end of things, and there’s plenty of people that she’s done good to, and cured, when the doctors had given them up.”
This Dame Trueman was quite a character, and lived up at the end of a village all alone with a black cat in an old broken-down cottage. Many years ago she had lost her husband under rather mysterious circumstances, and, it was said, she had bewitched him and caused his death, because he treated her badly.{278}
He was a farm labourer, and worked on the farm that I told you about in “Old Gaffer Gabbitas,” called Curnock’s Farm; but he used to take more than was good for him at the village alehouse. People used to say, “How can he afford to spend such a lot of money out of his wages?” but the mystery was cleared up when one day it got all over the village that he had found out where his wife had hidden her savings, and that he had been helping himself for a long time without her knowing it.
It seems she had made a bit of money selling charms and telling fortunes to servant-girls and other foolish people, and had changed her savings into bank-notes, and sewn them up in the mattress, not telling her husband anything about it. But he had found it out, and had unsewn the mattress one day while she was out marketing, taken a couple of notes, and then sewn the place up again very neatly, and she had never noticed it.
How she found it out was through a neighbour who had seen Trueman change a five-pound note at the inn. Directly his wife heard of that, she went and unsewed the mattress, and the cat was out of the bag.
She was heard to say that he would never help himself to any more. And soon after that, one night he was at the alehouse, smoking his pipe, when a black cat, that nobody in the place ever remembered to have seen before, came into the tap-room and jumped up on his knee.
It was a very curious-looking cat, with very fierce eyes, and it had three white hairs on its breast. Trueman said, “Hullo, whose cat is this?” and he put his hand on its back and stroked it. Everybody in the room declared that as he did so they saw sparks fly out of its back, but the awful thing about it was that the man gave a sudden cry, as if some terrible pain had just come to him. The cat jumped off his knee, and ran out of the door and disappeared. Trueman tried to get on his legs; but he only staggered half-way across the room and fell down in a heap on the floor. They ran and fetched the doctor to him; but before the doctor could get there he was quite dead.
At the inquest the jury brought it in that he had died of heart disease; but everybody in the village declared{279} that he had been bewitched by his wife for stealing her money, and that the black cat was the “familiar,” or whatever it is called.
Of course, when I first heard the story, I said, “What nonsense!” and I couldn’t understand how people living in a Christian country could believe in such rubbish; but there is no mistake about it that this very black cat, after the funeral, was seen in Dame Trueman’s house, and it followed her about like a dog, and nobody had ever seen it in the village before the night that it jumped on the poor man’s lap at the alehouse.
After that the old lady got quite the reputation of being a witch, and very curious stories were told about her, and the things that went on in her cottage. She was always very clever with herbs and old women’s remedies, as they are called, and she had, according to the ignorant people, wonderful charms for curing sore eyes, and wounds, and other things; and once when a man working on a farm had put his wrist out, he went to her, and she caught hold of his hand and muttered a charm, and pulled it and put it in its place again.
All these things made the old woman looked up to with a good deal of fear by the ignorant people. Nobody liked her; but they were all a bit afraid of her. And it was said that if anybody offended her she could put them under a spell, and bring misfortune upon them.
There was a boy in the village, a mischievous young imp, named Joe Daniels. His mother did washing, and he used to go round with an old perambulator and fetch it and also take it home. One day that he was wheeling his perambulator along with a bundle of linen on it, he met Old Dame Trueman coming down the lane, and after she had passed him he said to another boy that was with him, “Do you know she’s an old witch, and rides through the air on a broomstick? My mother says she ought to be burned alive, if she had her deserts.”
Dame Trueman, who was hobbling along, being a little lame with one leg, heard the boy, and she turned round and said, “Your mother says that, does she?—let her beware!” Then she made an awful grimace at the boy, and shook her stick at him. He declared that fire came{280} out of her eyes, and that he felt an awful sensation go all over his body. When he got home he told his mother what had happened, and she was in a terrible state, and said she would be ruined, as the old witch would be sure to put a spell on her now. She was in such a state that she went off to the clergyman and asked him what she could do to guard against the spells. He lectured her, which was quite right, and told her it was very wicked to believe in such things as witches, as there weren’t any. But it certainly was a fact that, from that day, nothing went right with Mrs. Daniels. She had the best linen, belonging to the richest family she washed for, stolen out of her drying-ground two days after; and her boy Joe, that the witch had shaken her stick at, was run over by a horse and cart the next time he took the washing home, and had his leg broken; and, to crown everything, it got about that she had taken washing of a family that had come down from London with the scarlet fever, and after that nobody would send her any washing at all; and, having been security for her married daughter’s husband, and signed a bill of sale on her things, everything was seized one day, and the poor woman took on so about it that she died not long afterwards; and little Joe was sent away to a training-ship to be made a sailor, and the first time he went to sea he fell down off the top of the mast into the water and was drowned.
This is one of the stories that I was told in our bar-parlour one night that we were talking about charms and things, and it brought up about old Dame Trueman. I said that all these things might have happened. I found out afterwards that they did—but that didn’t prove that the old woman was a witch, or that her “charms” were anything more than ordinary remedies.
Our new clergyman, poor Mr. Wilkins’s “young whipper-snapper,” was awfully wild when he found that a lot of his parishioners believed in witches and spells, and he made it his business to investigate a lot of things that were being said about the old woman. He found out that she was telling fortunes by cards on the quiet, and selling a lot of foolish young women charms to make them get fallen in love with, and all that sort of nonsense; so he{281} went straight up to the dilapidated old cottage where the old Dame lived, and he told her that if he heard any more of it he would have her up before the magistrate, and she would be sent to prison.
Of course she pitched him a nice tale, and tried to make out that it wasn’t true; but that she was a poor, lone widow woman, and that these stories were circulated by her enemies to do her harm.
Graves, the farrier, said, when he heard that the young clergyman had been threatening the Dame, that something was sure to happen to him—that nobody ever crossed “the old witch’s” path without coming to grief.
I laughed at the time, and told Graves that a great strong fellow, like he was, ought to be ashamed of himself for having such silly, childish ideas; but it was a very remarkable thing that, the week after, the young clergyman was riding past the Dame’s door, when her black cat dashed suddenly across the road, and so terrified the clergyman’s horse that it bolted and ran into a tree, and fell, and flung the young clergyman off on to his head, and he was confined to his bed for six weeks in consequence.
Of course it was only a coincidence; but Graves was quite triumphant about it, and he said to me the evening of the accident, “Well, Mrs. Beckett, what about old Dame Trueman being a witch now?”
Of course, things happening like this, and the things that had happened before, made a great impression on the ignorant people; and even people who weren’t ignorant said it was very odd that everybody who crossed or offended that dreadful old woman came to grief. It was no good arguing against it, because these things were known all over the village, and there is no doubt that the old hag made a lot of money out of her dupes, in consequence of her being held in such dread and looked up to as having supernatural powers.
As I said when I began to write about her, folks who live in London can hardly credit the number of people in villages who still believe in magic and spells and charms and witches. But even in some parts of London there are people who believe the same thing, because every now and{282} then you read about “a wise woman” being brought up at the police-court for swindling young women by telling their fortunes, and selling them charms; and not long ago Harry read a bit out of the paper to me about “a wise woman,” who had got five pounds out of a working man’s wife for a bottle of something which she was to put in his tea to make him die, so that she could marry another man. A nice wife and a nice woman she must have been!
What has made me write so much about old Dame Trueman is this. There was an old gentleman who used to come to our smoke-room pretty regularly of an evening; but not till after Mr. Wilkins had left, and so he might be called a new customer. He was an old gentleman who took a small house in the neighbourhood, and it was said he was a retired builder. He was very nice and quiet, and I should say comfortably off, for his house was nicely furnished, and although there was only himself and his wife, they had two servants, and kept a pony and trap.
Mr. Gwillam—that was the old gentleman’s name—began to use our house of an evening soon after he came, I suppose finding it dull at home, and he always smoked a long clay pipe, and drank hot grog in the good old-fashioned way. He didn’t talk very much, only joining in the conversation now and then; but he was a wonderful listener, and the other customers soon found out that he was very simple-minded, because he took everything he heard for gospel. Some of them, when they found that out, used to start telling the most dreadful stories about what had happened in the place, and it was a sight to see the dear old gentleman open his innocent blue eyes, and to hear him say, “Good gracious!”
Somebody who knew him told us that what made him seem so simple and eccentric at times was that years ago, while superintending some building operations, he had fallen off a ladder on to his head, and it had affected him a little.
We liked him very much, because he was so nice and quiet, and, being an independent and retired person, he was just the sort of customer we liked to get into the smoke-room, as it brings others of the same class, and{283} keeps the wrong sort out, as the wrong sort never feel comfortable where the right sort are.
The first thing that made me think Mr. Gwillam really was a little eccentric was his saying very quietly one evening that according to Revelations the end of the world would be at five-and-twenty minutes past six in the evening the last Friday in August, 1890. I thought it was a very odd thing to say, as nobody was talking about the end of the world, and, in fact, just at the time there was a dead silence.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Indeed!” Then he said, “Oh yes; but it’s nothing to be frightened at, as we shall all be caught up by a whirlwind.”
Graves, the farrier, looked at Mr. Gwillam for a minute, and then he said, “How do you know that, sir?”
“Oh,” he said, “I read it in the Evening Standard, and that is a most respectable paper. It has been in several evenings.”
“Oh,” said Graves, “has it? It’s very good of the editor to let us know. I hope we shall go up steady and not knock against each other. It will be very awkward if some of us turn over and go up head downwards.”
I frowned at Graves, as it seemed to me wrong to jest about such matters; but I knew where Mr. Gwillam had seen it. It was an advertisement which some madman had put in for years, having nothing better to do with his money. But I thought it very queer that anybody in their senses could believe such mischievous nonsense.
After that I began to notice one or two quee............