“Thank you,” said Freda.
“I’ll come in again myself in a day or two, and perhaps we’ll have you round to tea. You’d like to come, I daresay.”
“Of course she would,” chimed in Mrs. Staynes.
“Thank you,” said Freda.
“I think,” said the Vicar, rising and moving towards the door, “that I’ll go upstairs and just look upon the poor Captain’s face again. I feel it my duty to. I wish I could have felt happier about him, but I’m sorry to say he was always deaf to the exhortations of religion.”
“I’m afraid you can’t see him,” said Freda, quietly.
She had had particular injunctions on this point from Crispin, who had foreseen that the Vicar would think it his duty to satisfy his curiosity. As Mr. Staynes persisted, brushing her angrily out of his way, Freda followed him upstairs, and had to point out the door of the death-chamber. The Vicar tried to open it, but it was locked; Freda let him push and shake in vain.
“Can you open it for me, girl?” he was at last constrained to ask.
“I think I could, but I have been told not to. I am sorry, but I cannot help you.”
“And pray who is it that has more authority with you than the Vicar of the parish?” asked Mr. Staynes when, finding indignation and expostulation useless, he had to accompany her downstairs.
“Crispin Bean,” she answered simply.
“What!” cried the Vicar, almost staggering back. “That drunken ruffian Bean! A disgrace to the neighbourhood! Why, it was enough to keep Christian people away from this house that such a scoundrel was ever allowed about it.”
The implied taunt at her dead father incensed Freda as much as the accusations against Crispin.
“I suppose,” she said very quietly, “that my father liked scoundrels better than Christian people. I think I do too.”
The Vicar drew himself up.
In the midst of his anger at being thwarted, the girl’s answer rather tickled him.
“I shall come and have a talk to you, young woman,” he said more amiably, “when you’re in a better frame of mind. You’ve had everything against you, and I make allowance for it.”
Little Mrs. Staynes, who had listened to the latter part of this conversation in such horror that she had scarcely breath left to play her usual part of chorus, followed her husband out, pausing as she did so to say, in a warning voice:
“Oh, dear child, pray to be forgiven for your conduct to-day.”
Freda, who was distressed to the verge of tears by the whole interview, let them out by the big gate, and returned to the house. She was almost frightened to find Crispin in the dining-room, in roars of laughter.
“Well done, little one,” he said, as she came in. “That’s the way to serve the tract-mongers.”
But Freda was shocked.
“What did you hear? Where were you?” she asked in a whisper.
“I heard everything. Never mind where I was; there’s many a corner in this house that you will never see.”
But the girl shrank away, ill-pleased at his praise.
When the housekeeper returned, she was accompanied by the doctor Crispin had sent her for, and he and Mrs. Bean went upstairs at once. As soon as she heard their footsteps overhead, Freda went quickly out into the court-yard, through the great gate, and into the enclosure beyond, waiting for the doctor to come out.
At last the gate opened to let out a youngish-looking man, with a correct professional air of unimpeachable respectability. Freda waited until Mrs. Bean had wished him “good-morning,” and shut the gate; then she quickly overtook him, and greeted him with some agitation.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” she began modestly; “you have just seen my father, I believe.”
“Yes, I have seen him, if Captain Mulgrave was your father.”
Freda answered in the affirmative.
“Did you know him?” she then asked.
“I had not that pleasure. You know, Miss Mulgrave, what a secluded life your father always led. I have not been long in Presterby, and although of course, I’ve heard a great deal about him, I never saw him in life.”
“Do you think he shot himself?”
“No, I think not. From the position of the wound I should think it more likely that somebody else shot him.”
“And where was the wound?”
“In the back.”
There was a pause. Then Freda looked up in the doctor’s face.
“They won’t tell me anything, so I had to ask you. Thank you for telling me. Good-bye.”
She left the doctor, and went back slowly to the gate. Mrs. Bean, who answered her summons, looked angry and disconcerted on learning how she had been employed.
“I think you’d best have followed your own whims and gone back to the convent,” she said drily, “we don’t want any more questions than necessary asked here just now. There’ll be quite enough of a rumpus as it is.”
She turned her back upon Freda pretty sharply, and walked back to her kitchen with an offended air. The girl, however, was not to be shaken off.
“Mrs. Bean,” she said, following her, “this doctor never saw my father while he was alive!”
There was a pause. Mrs. Bean took up a fork and violently stirred the contents of a saucepan she held.
“Look here, my dear,” she said, “what has put all these silly ideas into your head? Don’t you know there’s going to be an inquest?”
She went on stirring her saucepan without looking up. Freda turned to her eagerly.
“And are these inquest-people men who have known him, and seen him, and talked to him?”
“Why, of course they are. They’ll be tradesmen out of the town, most of them, who have supplied him with butter and cheese, beef and candles, for years and years.”
“Oh,” said Freda, evidently much relieved.
“Now then, you’re satisfied, I suppose?” said Mrs. Bean rather curiously.
“Oh, yes, thank you very much.”
But in the girl’s tone there was still the vestige of a doubt, and she went out with a thoughtful face.
It was a very curious thing, Freda thought, that the servant Blewitt’s body should be found shot in the back, and then that her father should be shot in exactly the same way. She puzzled herself over this until her brain reeled, and then she unlocked the front door, and went along the foot-tracks in the snow the whole length of the garden to the wall at the bottom. Here was a door, which she went through, and instead of following the little lane which ran to the right, down towards the town, she still followed the foot-marks over a couple of meadows straight in front of her until, coming to a stone wall, she looked over and discovered the road by which she had come to the Abbey. A great heap of freshly dug up snow stood almost in the middle of the road, and by the help of a shed on the right, Freda was able to identify the spot on which the body of the servant Blewitt had been discovered by Barnabas Ugthorpe.
Freda turned sick with horror. Her mind had jumped, with that splendid feminine inspiration which acts independently of logic, and which is as often marvellously right as stupendously wrong, to the conclusion that the body of Blewitt had been carried into the Abbey. So certain did she feel of this, that the question she asked herself was: Why was this done? And not: Was this done at all? She turned away from the wall, and went back, this time avoiding the foot-track, which she believed to have been made on a guilty errand. She was too horror-struck for tears. She gazed upon the beautiful old house, as she slowly drew near to it again, as she would have done on some unhallowed tomb. The sun, which had been shining brightly all the morning, had begun to melt the snow on the flagged roof, so that patches of moss-grown stone appeared here and there where the white mass had slid down, partially dissolved by the warm rays. The main body of the house was Tudor, of warm red brick with gables, mullioned windows, and stacks of handsome chimneys. But the west wing the so-called Abbot’s House, was a plain structure of solid grey stone, with one little scrap of decorated tooth work to bear witness to its connection with the Abbey.
There were secrets behind warm red bricks and venerable grey stone that it was better not to think upon. For the awful conviction was pressing in upon her that if the body of the murdered manservant had been brought there, it could only be to conceal the fact of his murder. Unless, then, it was this mysterious father of hers who had fired the shot, who could it have been?
Thefollowing was the day of the inquest. It was to be held at the Abbey itself, and Mrs. Bean had swept the drawing-room, and uncovered the furniture in that dismal and damp apartment, so that the coroner and jury might hold their deliberation there. Freda, who followed the housekeeper about like her shadow, without acknowledging that it was because a horror had grown upon her of being left alone in that dreary old house, was helping to dust the old-fashioned ornaments.
“Mrs. Bean,” she said at last, stopping in the act of dusting the glass shade over an alabaster urn, in order to clap her hands together to warm them, “aren’t you going to light a fire here?”
“Yes, I will presently,” answered the housekeeper, whose lips and nose and hands were purple and stiff with cold.
“It will take a long time to warm this great room, won’t it?”
“Oh, the fire will soon burn up when it’s once lighted.”
However, it didn’t get lighted at all until half an hour before the coroner and jurymen arrived; and when Mrs. Bean did remember it, she put in the grate a small handful of newspaper and a few damp sticks which gave forth smoke instead of heat, and after hissing and spluttering for some minutes, finally gave up the task of burning altogether.
Freda stood by the kitchen fire, trying to puzzle out the meaning of these strange actions, while Mrs. Bean went out into the court-yard at the summons of the gate-bell. When the housekeeper returned, she met a gaze from the young girl’s eyes which made her feel uneasy.
“Are they all come?” asked Freda.
“Yes, the coroner and all of them. They’re in the drawing-room now.”
“What are they doing now?”
“First, the coroner will charge them; then the witnesses will be examined——”
“What witnesses?” asked Freda quickly.
“Why, Crispin and I.”
“Crispin will be examined?”
“Yes,” said Nell sharply, “and so will you, if you don’t keep out of the way. You’d better go upstairs to your room till they’re out of the house. They won’t be more than an hour, I should think, at the outside. I’ll come up and tell you when they’re gone.”
So the girl went slowly out of the room, and across the hall, where she could hear the deliberate tones of the coroner charging the jury, and upstairs. But on the landing she stopped, and peeping about to see that she was not watched, she tried the door of her father’s room, found that it was locked, and dropping softly on her knees, looked through the key-hole. The bed was opposite to the door.
The body was no longer there.
Freda sprang up from her knees with a white face, ran through the picture-gallery, and shut herself up in her own room. She knew very well that a dead body was not easily moved; half-an-hour ago she had seen it lying on the bed; Mrs. Bean had not been upstairs since; if Crispin was about the house still, could he move such a weight by himself, and carry it down the stairs and out of the house without her having heard or seen him? She sat on a chair near her window, with her head between her hands, trying to puzzle out the meaning of these strange occurrences, until the thought came into her mind that she might perhaps be able, by secreting herself somewhere on the landing outside her father’s room, to see the jurymen come up on their investigations, and to hear what they said. So she came softly out of the room, and through the picture-gallery, and out on to the wide landing.
The most desolate spot in the whole house this had always appeared to Freda. As large as a good-sized room, panelled from oaken floor to moulded ceiling with a raised recess by the mullioned window, this might have been made a comfortable as well as handsome corner, while now it was left to the dust and the rats. So thick was the dust on the boards that two paths might be traced in it, the one leading to Captain Mulgrave’s room, the other to the door of the picture-gallery. Except on these two tracks the dust lay thick, showing the state of neglect into which the old house had fallen. Freda had often been struck by this, and had even resolved to steal a broom from Mrs. Bean’s quarters, and make up herself for the housekeeper’s lack either of time or of care.
As her glance wandered over the floor as usual this morning, Freda, therefore, noticed at once that there was a little difference in its appearance. From her father’s door there was a semi-circular sweep in the dust towards a little recess on the other side of the head of the staircase. It looked as if something about two feet wide had been dragged along the floor. With a loudly beating heart, Freda followed this track, and reaching the recess, found it to be deeper than she thought, and quite dark; venturing into it, she found that the boards rattled under her feet.
At that moment she heard a door open downstairs, and the hum of several voices, followed by the sound of men’s footsteps crossing the hall and ascending the staircase. The coroner and jurymen! She could hear some of the remarks they made to each other in low tones as they came up the stairs, and she found out, by hearing several questions addressed to Crispin, that he was among them. She caught fragments of a good many questions asked about the Captain’s habits and the exact position in which the body had been found lying; she heard complaints of the cold and an inquiry why the body had been taken out of the room. Crispin’s answers were all given in such a low voice that she could not catch a word of them, but she made out that they satisfied his interrogators. This part of the business occupied only a very few minutes, and then they all tramped out and went downstairs again, the one subject which seemed chiefly to occupy the thoughts of all being the cold, the bitter cold. Their teeth seemed to chatter as they talked. Freda, venturing out of her hiding-place, and passing again over the rattling boards, leaned over the balustrade at the head of the staircase, and saw Mrs. Bean talking in a respectful manner to the coroner. He was complaining of having to go out in the snow to the out-house to view the body.
“Indeed, sir,” said the housekeeper, who seemed to Freda to be very nervous and excited, “I am very sorry that I had my poor master’s body moved at all; Crispin and I thought it would be more convenient for you, for my poor master’s room is, as you saw, so dreadfully crowded up with his furniture and things.”
“Oh,” returned the coroner, “I’m not blaming you. Of course you did it for the best. We have the doctor’s certificate, the viewing the body is merely formal, it will only take a few moments.”
He left her and went out by the front door, following the last two jurymen. Freda could not see the door from where she stood, but she heard it close; and she saw the housekeeper, as soon as she was left quite alone, burst into tears and wring her hands desperately.
“It will be found out, it will be found out!” she moaned.
And still sobbing and drying her eyes upon her apron, Mrs. Bean hurried back to her own quarters.
Freda’s first impulse was to run after her; but recollecting that the housekeeper was now more likely than ever to be reticent, she refrained, and remaining where she was, awaited the return of the coroner and jurymen in a state of the wildest excitement.
At last she heard the distant sound of voices, and then she heard Mrs. Bean set ajar the kitchen door to listen. Louder and nearer the voices came, and then the foremost man opened the front door and tramped in, followed by the rest.
What had happened? Nothing, apparently, for again the uppermost thought with the men was the intense cold. They were clapping their hands, blowing on their fingers, stamping their feet.
“Like an icehouse, that place!” muttered one.
“They could keep the body there all the winter!” said another.
“Ah couldn’t hardly feel ma feet!” added a third.
In the meantime the housekeeper had come out, and greeted them with outward composure, which astonished Freda and excited her admiration.
“Well, gentlemen, and the verdict I suppose is——”
Somebody interrupted her.
“Hush, hush, my good woman. We haven’t got so far as that yet. You shall hear all in good time.”
The housekeeper apologised, and the coroner and jurymen returned to the drawing-room. In a very few minutes they issued forth again, drawing their mufflers more closely round their necks, and putting on their hats.
Verdict? Oh, yes, the verdict. It was: That the deceased died from the effects of a gunshot wound; but by whose hand the weapon was discharged there was no evidence to show.
Mrs. Bean ushered them out with a decently grave and sad visage. But when she re-entered the house from the court-yard she was singing like a lark.
Freda was puzzled. Back to the recess she went, and feeling with her feet and her crutch very carefully, she soon touched the rattling boards. Then she dropped upon her knees, lit her candle and passed her hand over the floor. Two of the boards were loose, she found, and looking round for something with which to try to raise them, she saw a flattened iron bar lying close under the wall. Suspecting that this had been used previously for the same purpose, she proceeded to raise one of the boards with it. This task easily accomplished, she shifted the board so as to be able to see underneath it.
Extending to a depth of four feet below the surface of the floor, was one of those mysterious enclosures between the ceiling of one room and the floor of the one above, which so often exists in very old houses to testify to forgotten dangers of persecution and pursuit. It was dark, close, musty. Freda bent lower and lower, her eyes fixed in horror on an object at the bottom. Something long, swathed in white: the body of a dead man.
Freda had begun this search full of suspicion; but the shock was almost as great as if she had been entirely unprepared for the discovery of this ghastly secret. She did not scream, although after the first shock she put her hands before her mouth in the belief that she had done so. She felt benumbed, stunned. Who was it? She must look, she must find out, if the discovery killed her. With trembling hands she picked up her candle, which had fallen and gone out, and relighting it, peered down at the dead face.
For the first moment she did not recognise it, or death had refined the coarse outline and effaced the sinister expression. Presently, however, came full recollection. It was the dead face of the servant Blewitt.
Thebody of Blewitt, still wearing its clothes, had been wrapped in a sheet and dragged to this hiding-place that morning. As soon as she recognised the dead face, Freda sprang up from her knees, dropping her candle and forgetting to replace the loose board. With flying feet, not caring now who heard her, she went clattering down the stairs, sick with horror of the house and everything in it, capable of only one thought, one wish: that she could leave it at once, never to enter it again.
The front door into the garden was ajar. Freda ran out into the snow, which was now falling pretty thickly. But the intense cold was pleasant to her: it seemed to give a little relief to her feverishly hot head. She ran to the bottom of the garden; but the door in the wall was locked. Returning slowly, despondently, she caught sight of the door leading to the out-house and stable-yard. This had been left open. She saw the track of many feet leading to one of the out-houses, and guessing that it was that in which the jury had viewed her father’s body, she instantly resolved to satisfy herself on one point of the mystery. The door was not locked. Creeping in, her heart beating wildly with excitement, Freda found herself in a bare stone-paved building, which might once have been a court-house. It was badly lighted by a small window, high up in the right-hand wall. Near the middle of the floor was a coffin, supported by trestles. Freda approached slowly, her feet slipping on the pavement, which was wet with snow brought in by many feet. She was so much stupefied by the sensations of the morning that she was no longer able to feel any shock acutely. One dull pang of astonishment rather than any other feeling shot through her as she looked in, expecting to see her father’s face.
The coffin was empty.
Freda staggered away out of the building. She was now only capable of one sensation—a longing to escape so strong, so fixed, that it became at once a resolution. She stole past the stables, a long line of stone buildings, with remnants of monastic character in blocked up Gothic doorways and disused niches. No one had passed that way this morning, for the night’s snow was untrodden. From the other extremity of the line of stables, however, there were footprints in the snow going backwards and forwards through the stone entrance to the open space in front of the banqueting-hall. From this entrance the gates had been torn down, so that the one barrier between Freda and liberty was now the outer gates at the lodge.
She had nothing to fear from the blind eyes of the blocked-up windows in the roofless hall. So she went across the enclosure to the lodge, and tried the iron gates. They were fastened. She did not dare to summon the woman in charge to open for her: hatless as she was, she would never be allowed to pass. This place, with its secret locks, its well-guarded exits, its high stone walls, was practically a prison at the will of its owners. Her only chance was to wait until the gates were opened for some one else to go in or out, and then to slip past and take her chance of being unnoticed. Of course this plan could not be tried until darkness set in; but it was such a gloomy day that dusk could not fail to be early. In the meantime she must find a hiding-place. There was no nook or corner in this great bare enclosure into which she could creep; she had to retrace her steps, forgetting the tell-tale print of her poor little feet in the snow, to the stable-yard, where she found an unlocked door. Entering a four-stall stable, which had evidently not been used for years except as a storage-place for lumber, she sat down on an empty packing-case, and prepared to wait.
She was so bitterly cold that she began to feel too benumbed to move or even to think. She tried to clap her hands together, but the movement caused her so much pain that she gave up this attempt, and remained in a crouching attitude with her arms folded. The incident of the morning faded from her mind, so that she soon almost forgot how she came there. Perhaps she was dreaming it all. Then she drew herself up with a start, remembering stories that she had heard of the danger of falling asleep in the cold. Danger! why danger? If she died there she would go to heaven, and meet the Mother-Superior and Sister Agnes and the rest some day, and perhaps God would forgive her father for the sake of her prayers. She could pray for him now, die praying for him, that was the best thing she could do. For now, although the mystery was not cleared, there seemed no doubt possible that he was the murderer of the man Blewitt.
So she fell on her knees, and, supporting herself against a pile of old hampers and mouldy straw, tried to pray. But she could not keep her mind from straying, and, with the words of supplication still on her lips, the thought would flit through her mind that it was to Barnabas Ugthorpe she must escape; or again, the figure of Dick Heritage would seem to appear before her eyes, with the good-humoured smile which had so won her heart. And then prayers and thoughts alike merged into a sensation of nameless horror, which she could neither understand nor fight against.
At this point, when she was on the verge of insensibility, there came a noise, a light, a touch. She was shaken by the shoulder, then lifted up bodily, and some one spoke to her in a voice which at first seemed to come from a long way off, and then suddenly, without any warning, sounded close to her ear.
“Wake up, child, wake up. Are you asleep?” Then it was that the change came, and the words almost stunned her like a loud cry: “Merciful God! She is not dead, not dead?”
Freda raised her head feebly.
“Is it you, Barnabas?” she said.
There was no answer, and the girl had time to collect her thoughts. Raising herself, she found she had been supported by the arms of Crispin Bean, who hung over her with a face of dumb solicitude. Struggling away from him, with what would have been a shriek if her vocal powers had been fully restored, she ran towards the door, but stumbled blindly. He ran after her and supported her against her will.
“Let me go, I entreat you let me go,” she pleaded hoarsely.
“Presently, perhaps,” answered Crispin in a gentle tone, “but I want to talk to you first.”
Freda was still too benumbed with cold and fright to offer much resistance. Finding that her hands were blue and stiff and that she looked starved and miserable, Crispin lifted her right off her feet, and, without heeding her weak ejaculations of protest, carried her out of the stable, holding her with her face against his shoulder, so that she could not see. Freda protested and tried to cry out, but he only laughed at her.
“Oh,” she cried hoarsely, when she found that Crispin stopped to turn the key in a lock, “don’t take me into that dreadful house again; I shall go out of my senses if you do.”
“No, you won’t.”
He spoke rather peremptorily, and she was cowed into silence. The next moment she heard the tramp of his feet on stone flags and heard the echo of every step, so that she fancied they must be passing through a passage or chamber with a vaulted stone roof. In spite of the warnings she had received, she first tried to lift her head and look round, and being checked in this attempt by the wary Crispin, she suddenly endeavoured to jump out of his arms. He laughed grimly.
“Don’t you ever intend to learn prudence?” he asked.
Freda was desperate.
“No,” she cried with determination. “I don’t care what happens to me as long as I have to stay in this wicked place, and if my curiosity causes me to be sent away any sooner, why, I shall be very glad.”
“I suppose it depends where you will be sent away to?”
“No. I would rather be anywhere in the world, yes, anywhere than here.”
She was now being carried up a flight of wooden steps. She counted twenty. The next flight, a shorter one, was of stone. Then came a few steps of level ground, and again Crispin proceeded to turn a key. When they had passed through this second door, and while Crispin was engaged in relocking it, Freda took the opportunity to drop her own handkerchief unseen by him. Then she was carried on again, along boarded floors and through two or three more doors, down a flight of stairs and to the dining-room. Here Crispin put her down and pushed her gently inside. Then he summoned Mrs. Bean, who looked at her with a puzzled and frightened face, and told her to bring something for the young lady to eat. Freda, who had sunk down in a chair by the fire to warm herself, sprang up at these words, and interrupted Crispin.
“Not for me,” she cried. “I will never eat anything again till I’m out of this house.”
“Then you’ll starve,” said Crispin quietly.
The girl flew up, shaking with fear, and horror, and anger. Mrs. Bean, who kept her eyes on the ground, but looked exceedingly troubled, remained in a half-furtive manner near the door.
“Do you think I care?” cried the girl, in a broken voice, “I know this house is a place to murder people in, and if I’m to be hidden away under the floor, like the poor man I found upstairs, I don’t care by what way you kill me first!”
The housekeeper’s face blanched at the girl’s words, but she did not utter a word, did not even look up. Crispin dismissed her with a nod, and turned to the young girl. Freda cowered on a chair, expecting a great outburst of anger from him. But there was a long silence, during which she heard him poke the fire and push the blazing logs together. At last he said, in an unemotional voice:
“I am not surprised that you want to know the meaning of the strange things you have seen and heard here.”
Freda answered passionately, only raising her head sufficiently to be heard,
“I do know the meaning of it all. It is you who have murdered both my father and Blewitt!”
“The d——l it is!” exclaimed Crispin, in unmistakable amusement and surprise. “If you give information against me on that ground, you will create a small sensation in Presterby.”
Freda perceived at once that her shot was wide of the mark. She sat up and looked at him.
“Well, if you didn’t, then who did?”
Crispin looked at her steadily, with rather a comical expression, for a long time. Then he shook his head.
“Of course you won’t believe me,” he said; “but I don’t know.”
“But wasn’t it you that brought Blewitt’s body into the house?”
Crispin nodded.
“And had it seen by the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“And then hid it under the floor?”
“Well, I had a hand in that too.”
“Why?”
“Because, if the body had been found in the road, your father would have been hanged for the murder.”
“But he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it,” wailed Freda, in a tone which implored him to agree with her.
“Perhaps he thought a live man could prove his own innocence better than a dead one,” suggested Crispin drily.
Freda sprang up, and in great excitement, forgetting her crutch, half hobbled, half leapt across the room until she stood close to him, face to face, eye to eye.
She seized his hands, and devoured his face with eyes which seemed to burn and shoot forth flames.
“Then he is—not—dead?” she hissed out, with hot breath.
“Hush, hush, for goodness’ sake, girl, hold your tongue,” said Crispin, whose turn it was to feel alarmed. “Do you know, you little fool, what it would mean to everybody in this house if such—such craziness were suspected?”
“Oh, yes,” said she, turning suddenly grave, “of course I know that. Tell me, Crispin, where is he? where is my father?”
“He’s where he hasn’t got to trust his life to your prattling tongue,” said Crispin gruffly.
“He is about the house somewhere, I expect,” said Freda yearningly. “I saw the empty coffin,” she continued, in a whisper of suppressed horror, “not more than half an hour after they had all gone, so I am sure he cannot have got far. He is in hiding somewhere about. Oh, Crispin, Crispin, you are in all the secret, you were the chief witness, you helped in it all, youdoknow. Tell me, tell me where he is. Is he going away? Can’t I see him, just for one moment. I would not say one word.”
She seemed to be moving him: as she clung about him, he turned away his head uneasily. She continued her pleading, more and more earnestly, more and more passionately, until at last he burst out: “He was a bad man. You’d better forget him.”
“How can he be so bad when you and your wife take all sorts of risks to shield him?”
“It’s to our interest.”
“I believe you’re a better man than you pretend, Crispin,” said Freda after a pause.
“Perhaps so. Here’s your tea,” he answered laconically, as Mrs. Bean, tray in hand, entered the room.
Thefuneral was to take place on the following day. It was not without a shudder that Freda made her way up to her bedroom that night, although she had taken the precaution of insisting that Mrs. Bean should accompany her to the very door. Even then she was reluctant to let the housekeeper go.
“Mrs. Bean,” she said in a whisper, as she clung to the housekeeper’s rough arms after bidding her good-night. “What room is there under this one?”
The housekeeper looked rather uneasy, and laughed.
“Really, I don’t know what it was. It’s a long time since any of the rooms in this wing have been used except this one.”
“But it was used the other night! I heard men talking there. Crispin said they were the sailors of my father’s yacht.”
“Well, if he said that, what more do you want to know?”
“I want to know how they got in. I haven’t seen any door on the outside of this part of the house.”
“I suppose they came through the other part then.”
“I suppose so.”
There was a pause, and Mrs. Bean shuffled a step nearer the door. Then she turned, to whisper plaintively:
“Child, I wish you’d be persuaded to keep a still tongue in your head.”
But not only was Freda unable to obey this precept, she was further resolved to use both eyes and ears on her own account. Being assured now that both Crispin and Nell were her friends, she felt bold enough to try to satisfy herself on the one point of greatest interest to her: Was her father still in the house? Perhaps that very night he was going away, under cover of the darkness! Stung to action by this suggestion, conquering even the horror of the day’s adventures, she took her candle from the table and went out of the room into the stone passage. Freda softly open the door into the gallery, and shielding her candle with her hand, to minimise the risk of its light betraying her, crept along that portion of it which ran along the west side of the house. As she went she caught sight of something white on the ground, close underneath the panelling. It was the handkerchief she had slyly dropped that day, in the hope that it would afford some clue to the way Crispin was bringing her.
A close inspection of the panelling disclosed a tiny keyhole in the ornamental part of the carving, and although the panel in which it was pierced fitted perfectly into its place, yet a tap revealed the fact that there was a hollow or open space behind. She hailed this discovery with much excitement. This then was a very good place to watch, if her father really was in hiding about the house. The question now was how to conceal herself. There was nothing in the gallery but pictures, and a row of chairs. As she stood debating with herself, she heard footsteps, as it seemed to her, behind the panelling. In a frenzy of excitement she instantly blew out her candle, and scurried across the gallery to the furthest corner, where she crouched in a heap on the floor. She had not to wait long. A little scraping sound, and a panelled door opened from the other side. Then Freda heard a distant murmur of voices, and the next moment the man who had opened the door stepped into the gallery.
Freda need not have been afraid of discovery. The man carried no light, and she could only dimly see the outline of his figure as he crossed the floor noiselessly towards one of the long windows. This he pushed up with only the very faintest sound, and putting his head out, said in a low voice:
“Ready?”
Freda who in her eagerness to discover whether this was her father on the point of escaping, had crawled along the bare boards close under the windows, was listening, watching with her heart beating so violently that she was afraid it would betray her. She heard no answer given, but the man drew in his head and retired again through the panel-door. By his gait she knew that he was not a gentleman, and therefore that he could not be her father. She heard him go down the stone steps, which she guessed to be those up which Crispin had carried her; and then making the most of her opportunity, she ran to the open window, and looked out.
A man was waiting in the court-yard underneath. He must have heard her footsteps, for he raised his head, and seeing that somebody was at the window, he said, in a hoarse whisper:
“Eh, but thou’rt a long toime to-neght. Thou’rt not very spry for a sailor! Art droonk again?”
Freda drew in her head before he had time to see that it was a woman whom he was addressing; but not before she had seen enough of his figure, and heard enough of his rough, thick voice, to ask herself whether this was not Josiah Kemm, of the “Barley Mow.” The man, whoever he was, had hardly finished speaking, when from behind the panelling she heard again the distant murmur of voices, and footsteps coming up the stone staircase. She hastily retreated from the window, not to the corner she had left, but to the door by which she had entered the gallery. She had scarcely done so when the man she had previously seen reappeared. As she was now much nearer to him, she could distinctly see that he had upon his back a package about three feet square which was evidently heavy. This he carried across to the window, and let down by means of a rope into the court-yard. Then she heard faintly the voice of the man in the court-yard asking some question. Although she could not distinguish his words, the answer of the man above, “No. Nobody,” told her that the question had concerned her own appearance at the window. Judging therefore that an investigation might follow, she crept along the stone passage and locked herself in her own room as quickly as she could.
Next morning, however, she would not have her breakfast until she had found an opportunity of exchanging a few words with Crispin Bean.
“Crispin,” she began solemnly, “you remember telling me that the sailors of my father’s yacht were in the house one night when I heard a noise?”
He grunted an affirmative rather shortly.
“Well,” she went on, “they were here again last night.”
“What of that?” said Crispin.
“I believe they were stealing something. I saw one of them throw a package out of the window to a man in the court-yard underneath.”
“I should like to know what you don’t see,” grumbled Crispin, not very well pleased.
Freda drew herself up.
“I ought to know all that goes on in my own house,” said she, holding her head back with a pretty little air. “And I mean to go over the place, and see that there is no way for people to get in that have no business here. And as for this yacht, it is of no use now, so what is the use of paying a lot of sailors for doing nothing.”
Crispin looked down on the floor, with rather a whimsical expression of face.
“They’re all old servants of your father’s, you know. If they’re turned off, they’re very likely to starve. As for what you thought was stealing, it was only an old salt, who has been one of the yacht’s crew for seven years, throwing down his own traps to a friend from the town who had promised to take care of them.”
“But why did he do it so mysteriously, and at night?” asked Freda, still incredulous.
But Crispin was tired of answering her questions, or else he had no reply to give, for without any more words he proceeded to light his pipe and walk away.
Theday of the funeral was a trying one for Freda. She ran up to her own room when the undertaker’s men arrived, and would have remained there for hours if she had not been disturbed by a peremptory knock at her door, and by Crispin’s voice telling her to get ready to go to the church. She opened the door, trembling with fear and repugnance.
“Crispin,” she entreated, “don’t make me go! I can’t go, when I know it is only a sham. I can’t pretend to be sorry, I can’t, and I won’t.”
“Oh, well, nobody will expect much sorrow from you, but you will have to go to the church. Haven’t you got a black dress?”
“Yes.”
“Well, put it on, and make haste. Nell is waiting.”
“Aren’t you going?”
For Crispin wore his usual costume: a threadbare velveteen coat, evidently one of his late master’s, riding-breeches and gaiters.
He shook his head.
“No, I can’t stand old Staynes. If I went I should laugh.”
“People won’t think it very respectful of you, will they?”
“People know me. Besides, I don’t care what they think. Now you look sharp.”
He went away, and Freda very reluctantly obeyed his injunctions, dressed herself all in black and went downstairs to the hall, where she found Nell waiting for her.
“Come along,” said the housekeeper rather crossly.
And seizing Freda by the arm, she dashed across the court-yard and the enclosure beyond, and dragged her through the open iron gates, outside which the funeral procession could be seen on its way through the churchyard. Freda felt so sick with disgust at the part she had to play in the farce, that she looked unutterably miserable, and heard sympathetic murmurs from many lips, as Nell with a strong hand half dragged her through the crowd.
“Poor little thing!” “Doan’t she look unhappy, poor lass!” and many such exclamations reached Freda’s ears and made her furious. Nell seemed to feel that there was a danger of the girl’s wrathful honesty breaking out, for she hurried her on into the church, and heaved a sigh of relief when she had pushed the girl into a square pew lined with green baize, immediately over which an old-fashioned three-decker pulpit frowned. Freda, at last distracted from her thoughts of the proceedings, looked about her in amazement.
“Is this achurch?” she whispered.
Her ignorance was pardonable. Surely never yet did wild churchwardens in the frenzy of their Puritanism so run riot in a church before. Originally a plain Norman structure, erected by the monks of Presterby Abbey, and given to the townsfolk when their own Abbey church was completed, it had been transformed by later improvements into a very good copy of the interior of a ship. Clumsy little galleries had been erected wherever there was room for one, even before the old Norman chancel-arch. These galleries were entered from the outside of the church by covered flights of wooden steps, made on the model of the entrance to a bathing-machine. The roof was perforated by small cabin windows; the whole of the interior was covered with white-wash, including any small fragments of stone-work which the modern improvements had left visible; the Norman windows had all been carefully stopped up, and replaced by ordinary house windows, filled with small panes of poor glass. The only decorations were an enormous coloured coat of arms over the gallery of the chancel-arch, and a series of texts, indifferently spelt and painted coarsely on square wooden boards, which hung on the white-washed walls.
Nell scented popery in the girl’s innocent question, and answered with a frown.
“Of course it is. People don’t want tawdry fal-lals to help them to worship God, when they come in the right spirit,” she said severely. “Be quiet, here comes the Vicar.”
She thrust a prayer-book into the hand of the girl, who did not, however, follow the service, and who certainly could not understand much from the mumbling delivery of Mr. Staynes. She was shocked at the deception which was being carried out through all these solemn details, and when she was led to the side of the grave she shuddered and looked away.
When it was all over, Nell tried hard to lead her at once back to the house. But little Mrs. Staynes was too quick for her. Trotting up to the girl with what was only a decorous caricature of grief on her round apple face, she said:
“You must bear up, my dear Miss Mulgrave. ‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’ We must be resigned to His will. You must control your grief, my dear.”
“I haven’t any grief,” said Freda in spite of Nell’s warning fingers on her arm.
Poor little Mrs. Staynes looked shocked and disconcerted.
“Of course, my dear, we know it’s not the same as if you had been brought up at home. Indeed, I told the poor Captain so, times without number, but he hardened his heart and would not listen to me. But still, of course, you feel all that it is right for a daughter to feel under the circumstances.”
Mrs. Staynes was getting hurried and nervous. Indeed, she could only give half her mind to the consolation of her husband’s bereaved young parishioner, for she held the Vicar’s goloshes in her hand, and if she did not turn up with them exactly at the moment when he was ready to put them on, both he and she were apt to think that she had only escaped perdition by the skin of her teeth.
Before Freda had time to answer, a rather loud and peremptory voice close to them startled both ladies. Standing beside them was a robust-looking man in a close cap and thick travelling ulster, who suddenly struck in:
“And pray what is it, ma’am, that a daughter should feel under the circumstances of losing a father who had, from a sentimental point of view no claim to the name?”
He took Freda’s hand and shook it warmly, almost before she had had time to recognise in him her friend of the journey.
“A friend of yours, Miss Mulgrave?” asked the Vicar’s wife rather primly.
The new-comer replied for her.
“Yes, ma’am, a friend of Miss Mulgrave’s—whether she likes it or not,” said he.
“This gentleman has been very, very kind to me,” said Freda, recovering her voice. “On the journey here I——”
“Was indebted to this good gentleman for a biscuit and a cup of tea,” chimed in the stranger’s good-humoured voice. “And unlike most ladies to whom one may chance to render a small service of the kind, she remembers it.”
“It is not always prudent for young ladies to make chance friends on the railway,” said Mrs. Staynes.
“It is convenient though, madam, in case of an accident. And perhaps the young lady had the judgment to see that there’s very little of the gay Lothario about me.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Staynes, who thought the stranger rather flippant. “Ah, there’s the Vicar. I—er—I——Good-morning, Miss Mulgrave.”
With a curious little salutation to the stranger, which was half a bow and half a “charity bob,” the Vicar’s wife trotted off, waving the goloshes. Nell whispered to Freda to make haste home. The girl withdrew her arm suddenly.
“You go home, Mrs. Bean,” she said. “I will come in a few minutes.”
Then she turned, in spite of Nell’s remonstrances and rejoined the stranger.
The crowds of poor-looking people who had collected to see the funeral had begun very slowly to melt away, and Freda overheard enough of the remarks they exchanged to learn that her father had been very good to the poor, especially to the seafaring folk, and that there was much genuine sorrow at his death. She wanted to speak to some of these people, to assure them that as far as lay in her power, she would fill his place to them. But she was too shy. Her friend had to speak to her to recall her attention to himself.
“Rum business this altogether,” he said. “They say your father was found dead in his room, don’t they?”
“Yes,” mumbled Freda, with white lips.
“Nothing said about his being shot out-of-doors, eh?”
She shook her head.
“No man accused of having murdered him?”
“No.”
“Well, I could tell a tale—only it wouldn’t do for me just now to be telling tales, and bringing myself into prominence. Besides, without corroboration, I daresay my tale wouldn’t amount to much. Still——”
“Don’t, don’t,” said Freda hoarsely, “don’t find out anything, don’t try to. What good could it do now?”
He looked at her searchingly, not unkindly. Yet there was something in the expression of his face which impressed Freda with the belief that he was a man with whom no prayers, no entreaties would avail anything when he had once made up his mind.
She went on, as if anxious to change the subject: “You stayed the night with Barnabas, didn’t you?”
“Yes, and came on the next day, and climbed up to this old place because I wanted to see where you were going to live.”
“Did you meet anybody?”
“Only one person, a rough-looking fellow, who told me I was trespassing, and ordered me into the road. I had got over into the fields between the house and the ruin.”
“Was he tall, with a short greyish beard?”
“Yes.”
“That was Crispin Bean.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him; he was a devoted servant to your father. I’ve been making inquiries to find out whose care you’d been left in.”
“That was very kind of you. Then you’ve been in Presterby on business? What business?”
“Ah, that’s the question.”
“Secret business then?”
“No wise man cares to have his business prattled about.”
“But you will tell me if I guess right?”
“Perhaps I’ll go as far as that.”
“And you will tell me your name?”
“John Thurley.”
“And where you come from?”
“London.”
“John Thurley, of London.” She meditated a moment. “You have come on some business connected with trade?”
“Well, not exactly,” said he, as if rather offended at the suggestion.
“I mean Free Trade,” corrected Freda.
John Thurley was perceptibly startled. He paused for a few moments, looking at her attentively, before he asked, in an altered tone:
“What do you know about that?”
“Oh, I’ve heard people talking about it—on the journey. Nobody seems to think it beneath him to be interested in trade up here.”
“You mean Free Trade?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose you don’t know that Free Trade means smuggling?”
Now Freda had had suspicions of this before, so that she was not greatly surprised by the information. She jumped at once to a conclusion suggested by it.
“You are up here to look after the smugglers then?”
“Well, I’m not much given to disguise of any sort,” he admitted bluntly, “but the feeling up here is so strongly against the law and with the evildoers, that a little caution is absolutely necessary.”
“Have you caught them yet?” asked Freda with curiosity.
“No. Everybody seems banded together in a league to help them.”
“How are you sure there are any?”
“Well, we’ve had suspicions for years of a great organisation for smuggling, admirably planned and carried out, defrauding the revenue to the extent of thousands of pounds annually. The plans of these wretches were so well laid that, though we have again and again caught the receivers of smuggled spirits and tobacco, we have never yet been able to lay hands upon the big offenders, and it is only lately that we have had information pointing to the Yorkshire coast as the probable centre of the trade. I have been sent down to investigate.”
“And what will be done to these men if they are caught?”
“Well, the usual punishment for smuggling is by fines; to be strictly correct it is the value of the article smuggled and three times the duty on it. But if, as we suspect, we get hold of a chief or chiefs of a regular gang, why, then, he or they, whichever it proves to be, will have to be proceeded against by some method more convincing.”
“Oh, yes,” said Freda.
“I am going southward for a few days, to visit two or three places further down the coast. When I come back I shall call at the Abbey to see you: will you make me welcome for an hour?”
“Indeed I would if I might, if I could,” said she mournfully. “But I don’t feel that I am the real mistress there; there are Crispin and his wife.”
Her friend frowned and spoke with kindly impatience.
“I can’t bear to think of your having to put up with the companionship and protection of those people! I shall find out your guardian—you must have some guardian, and get him to send you back to the convent, at least for a little while, since that seems to be your ideal of happiness.”
“My ideal of happiness!” echoed Freda wonderingly.
“Yes, you said so the other day at the ‘Barley Mow.’ ”
“Did I!” said the girl, blushing.
“Yes, you did. Now, I suppose, it is something else.”
She hung her head.
“Some young fellow has been talking to you!”
Freda gave him a glance of terror. How horribly shrewd he was, to touch at once upon a kind of secret she hardly knew herself yet! She would admit nothing, yet she was afraid to be silent. He might blunder upon some other sensitive truth if she did not speak. So she evaded the point.
“You seem here in England,” she began proudly, “to think that there is only one subject which can interest a girl!”
“Quite true. Everywhere else it is the same. Thereisonly one. I don’t want to force your confidence, but I know that you stayed at Oldcastle Farm on the night of the journey.”
It seemed to Freda that an expression of disappointment crossed Mr. Thurley’s face when she made no answer to this, and the next moment he seemed suddenly in a great hurry to be off. Shaking her hand heartily in both his, he uttered a number of good wishes, and questions about her welfare with a bluff sincerity of interest which touched her. She watched him as he went down the steep churchyard without one look behind him, and the tears came into her eyes as she felt that here was a friend, none the less real for being a new acquaintance, going away.
Freda felt almost like a prisoner coming of his own accord back to the confinement from which he had escaped, as she pulled the lodge-bell and passed through the iron gates. Mrs. Bean, who was probably on the lookout, heard the loud clang, and was ready to open the inner gate. She did not seem in very good humour.
“You have been a long time talking with your gentleman friend,” she said coldly. “I didn’t know those were convent manners, to encourage every man who chooses to cast sheep’s-eyes at one!”
Poor Freda entered the dining-room thoroughly heart-sick and disgusted. Why did they say those coarse things to her, and about people she liked too! She felt so miserable that, instead of trying to eat, she sat down on the hearth-rug and cried, with her head on a chair.
Presently Crispin looked in at the window, and coming round to the door of the room, opened it and peeped in.
“What’s the matter?” asked he.
Freda sprang from the floor, but refused to give any other explanation than that she was tired, and had stood talking in the churchyard.
“Talking! Who to?”
“To the gentleman who was kind to me in the train. Mrs. Bean, doesn’t seem to think it was right of me to talk to him; but he was very kind.”
Crispin said nothing to this, but persuaded her to eat her dinner, waiting upon her himself. When she had finished, and he was making up the fire for her, she suddenly addressed him.
“Crispin,” she said, “I want to ask you a question. There is a thing which some people call Free Trade, and other people call smuggling. Which do you call it?”
Crispin, who was holding the poker in his hand, stopped short in his work, and remained for a few seconds quite still, without looking at her. Then he answered in a very quiet manner, and went on making up the fire.
“Smuggling, of course. And, what did your friend of the journey call it?”
He suddenly turned as he spoke, and under the piercing gaze which he directed upon her, Freda fancied that all her little girlish fancies and secrets were laid bare to his eyes.
“He called it smuggling too,” she answered.
“And what was his name?”
Freda hesitated. Such a hard, disagreeable tone seemed suddenly to be heard in Crispin’s voice. He repeated the question.
“His name is John Thurley.”
Without asking her any more questions, seeming, in fact, to become suddenly unconscious of her presence, Crispin abruptly left her to herself.
Freda Mulgravehad come face to face with the most difficult problem of conduct she had ever encountered. There was now no shirking the fact that her father was the organiser and head of a band of men who carried on smuggling in a systematic and determined manner. It was evident too that, if occasion came, they were quite as ready for still guiltier exploits as their fore-runners of a by-gone time. Whether, as she feared with a sickly horror, it was her father who had shot Blewitt, or whether the servant had been murdered by some one else, it was clear that his death was connected with the nefarious enterprises in which the whole country-side seemed to be so deeply engaged. She passed a miserable night, awake for a great part of the time, fancying she heard in the many night-noises of the old house, voices and footsteps, cries and even blows.
Next morning she wrote a long letter to Sister Agnes, saying that she had been left alone in a position of great difficulty, and asking for the prayers of all her old friends at the convent that she might do what was right.
Mrs. Bean, who came in while she was directing the envelope, offered to take it to the post, and Freda, with a reluctance of which she felt ashamed, gave it into her keeping.
Then for ten days the poor child lived on the daily hope and expectation of an answer.
During all that time she never once saw Crispin, and although she two or three times tried to break through the ice of Nell’s reticence, she always failed. For blank, deaf, impervious stolidity, and an ignorance of everything outside her kitchen which approached the admirable, Nell could never have had an equal. Crispin was away on business. This was the most Freda could learn from her.
So the dull days passed, the wished-for letter never coming. For the first two days the snow remained thick on the ground, and when it began to melt the roads were in such a bad state that it was still impossible for Freda to go out. Nell unlocked the library and made a fire there. And in this old room, with its quaintly moulded ceiling, its rows upon rows of musty-smelling books, its dust and its cobwebs, the young girl passed her time, diving for the most part in records of the county, of ancient priory and dismantled castle. Her flesh would creep and her breath come fast as she read of lawless deeds in the time past, and thought that even while she read, acts just as illegal, if not as daring, might be taking place under the very roof which sheltered her.
At the end of the ten days, however, it seemed to Freda one morning that the patches of green on the snow-covered fields had grown much wider; and she said, first to herself and then to Nell, that the roads, if not yet clear, must now be passable to and from the town. Mrs. Bean looked at her out of the corners of her eyes.
“What you, coming from a walled-up convent, can want with walks, is more than I can understand. However, you can go over the ruins if you like.”
And Nell unlocked a side-door in the wall of the garden which admitted her into the meadow in which the Abbey-church stood.
“You’ll be safe there,” said Nell, half to herself, as Freda passed through. “You can’t do any worse harm than getting your feet wet, and that’s your own fault.”
“Safe! Of course I shall be safe!” laughed Freda.
But it occurred to her, as she turned and noted Nell’s furtive glance at her, that it was not with her personal safety that the housekeeper was concerned.
Freda cared little for this; she was half-crazy with the joy of being again by herself in the open air; and the ruins of the old church, as they rose above her in their worn majesty against the morning sky, filled her with delight and awe. She was approaching the old pile from the southwest, the quarter in which least of the building remained. Scarcely a trace was left of the south aisle or the south transept. Between the ruined west front and the pillars on the south side of the choir there was nothing left but grass-grown mounds of fallen masonry and one solitary pillar, massive and erect as when, seven hundred years ago, pious hands placed the stones which were to defy, through long centuries, the biting sea air, the keen north wind, the storms which beat upon the cliffs, and the waves which, decade by decade, had sapped and swallowed up, bit by bit, the once fertile Abbey lands. Nearer to the cliff’s edge now than in its prime, the dismantled church still filled one of its old offices, and formed, with its lofty choir and mouldering pinnacles, a landmark from the sea.
Freda began to cry as she stole reverently into the roofless choir. She had had no opportunity, in her secluded life, of visiting ruins as showplaces; to her this was still a church, as holy as when the monks kept watch before the altar. A sentiment of peace entered into her for the first time since her arrival in England as she wandered about, not heeding the fall of melting snow on her head and shoulders, and listened to the shriek of the sea-birds as they wheeled in the air above. She thought she had never seen anything so beautiful as the graceful succession of pointed arches, with their clustered shafts, and the triforium above, with the long-hidden beauties of its carving now exposed to the light of day. Time had mellowed the tint of the walls to a soft grey, deepening here and there into red. Crowned kings, winged angels, stern-faced saints still looked out to sea from the north side, with eager necks outstretched, all the deep meaning the old monkish sculptors knew how to express in stone still to be discerned in their weatherworn outlines. The gulls perched upon them; in summer the wallflowers grew about them; but still they kept watch and ward until, one by one, by storm and stress of weather they were loosened in their places, and fell, sentinels who had done their work, into the long grass underneath.
The north transept was still almost entire. An arcade ran round the lower part of the wall, and in one of the arches was an old pointed wooden door, leading by a circular staircase of steep steps, to the passages in the walls above. This door was locked. Yet it must still be used, thought Freda. For she noticed that the grass was worn away before it, and that a narrow track had been beaten thence as far as one of the windows on the north side of the nave. Here a gap had evidently been intentionally made in the stone, and looking through, Freda perceived that the foot-track went through the meadow outside as far as the stone wall which bordered the road.
As she was looking at this path, she caught sight of two young men on horseback whom, little as she could see of them above the stone wall, she at once recognised. They were Robert and Richard Heritage. Both saw her, raised their hats, and reined in their horses.
Freda pretended not to see them, yet she was conscious of a great uplifting of the heart when they dismounted, tied their horses up in the yard of a dismantled cottage at the other side of the road, and climbing over the stone wall with the agility of cats, came along the foot-path towards her.
“They have used that foot-path before,” thought Freda.