Crispin had breakfasted, but he remained in the room, “to wait,” as
he said with grim jocularity, “on the mistress of the house.” Whenever
she tried to bring the talk again to the subject of the noises of the
night, he slid away from it in a most skilful manner, so that she
could find out nothing from him, and presently got rather a sharp
warning about the value of silence. When she again expressed a wish to
see her father, too, he answered very shortly, so that she began to
understand that Crispin’s goodwill did not render him pliable. Mrs.
Bean was in the room when she made this last request. She stood up
suddenly, with a crumb-brush in her hand, and a look of great
annoyance upon her face.
“There’ll have to be an inquest!” cried she. “Did you ever think of
that?”
And she turned in great agitation to Crispin, who was just lighting
his pipe. He only nodded and said quietly:
“Don’t you trouble yourself. I’ve thought of all that. You just put on
your bonnet and run down to the town, and tell Eliza Poad that the
master’s shot himself. Then it will be all over the county in about
three quarters of an hour, and the police will have notice, and the
coroner will be sent for without any trouble to you. And within two
hours Mr. Staynes will come panting up the hill with religious
consolation.”
“I sha’n’t see him, interfering old nuisance!” said Mrs. Bean
indignantly.
“No, Miss Freda will. And you, Nell, will go to the undertaker’s; go
to John Posgate--we owe him a good turn--and tell him you don’t want
any of his measuring: he’s to send a coffin, largest size he makes, up
to the house-door by to-night, and leave it there. And then go round
to the house of that young doctor that’s just come here (he lives in
one of the little new red houses on the other side of the bridge past
the station) and tell him what has happened. And you will be glad if
he will step up at once. That’s all.”
These details made Freda sick; she retreated, shivering, to the
window, and there she perceived a long, much trampled foot-track in
the snow across the walled-in garden. She noticed it very
particularly, wondering whether it was by this way that the men had
entered the house on the preceding evening. Then, as she was by this
time alone, she went softly out of the room and upstairs, and turned
the handle of the door of her father’s room. It opened. She saw, with
a wildly-beating heart, that the curtains of the bed were drawn back,
and that on it there lay the body of a man.
Suddenly she was lifted off her feet, and carried back from the door
of the room.
“Look here,” said Crispin drily, as he put her down, “haven’t you
learnt by this time that it’s of no more use to try to circumvent me
than to fight the sea? You will see your father when I please and not
before. Now go downstairs and wait till the Vicar comes, and tell the
old fool just as little as you can help, if you don’t want to get
yourself or anybody else into trouble.”
Freda obeyed, mute and ashamed. She crept downstairs, returned to the
dining-room, and fed the hungry birds till the bell sounded. Running
out to the court-yard gate, she drew back the two heavy bolts which
fastened it. Waiting outside were a lady and gentleman whom she at
once guessed to be the Vicar and his wife.
The Reverend Berkley Staynes was generally considered the greatest
“character” in Presterby. A member of one of the county families, with
a fairly good living and a better private income, he was an autocrat
who considered his flock of very small account indeed compared with
the well-being of their pastor. Although close upon eighty years of
age, and quite unable to perform a tithe of his parish duties, he
would never take a curate, partly from motives of economy, and partly
because he feared that an assistant might introduce some “crank” of
week-day services or early Communion, and wake up some of the
parishioners into disconcerting religious activity. Never at any time
over-burdened with brains, he had been at one time an exceedingly
handsome man, athletic and muscular, and a great encourager of
health-giving sports and pastimes. For these former good qualities,
and from a natural, loyal conservatism, the good Yorkshire folk bore
with him, maintained respectful silence while he droned out his
antiquated sermons, and shut their eyes to his inefficiency. Mrs.
Staynes belonged to a type of clergyman’s wife sufficiently common.
She was much younger than her husband, and slavishly devoted to him,
giving him the absurd homage which he believed to be his due, and
working like a nigger to shield his deficiencies from the public
notice.
Something of this was to be guessed even by inexperienced Freda as she
opened the gate to them. A tall, but somewhat bent old gentleman,
still handsome in his age, with silver-white hair and a good-looking,
rather stupid face, dressed well and with scrupulous neatness, stood
before her. Behind him rather than at his side was a small,
middle-aged woman dressed in what looked like a black pillow-case, a
long narrow black cloth jacket and a rusty black hat of the old
mushroom shape. She had a fresh-coloured face and a simple-minded
smile, and she habitually carried her left hand planted against her
waist in a manner which emphasised the undesirable curves in her
“stumpy” figure.
“H’m, a new servant!” said the Reverend Berkley Staynes, looking
searchingly at Freda. “Well, what the Captain wanted more servants
for, considering that he never received anybody or kept the place up,
I’m sure I don’t know! Why don’t you wear a cap, young woman?”
“I’m not a servant,” said Freda. “I’m Captain Mulgrave’s daughter.
Will you please come in?”
She led the way, without waiting for any more comments, across the
court-yard, through the hall, and into the dining-room; and she
noticed as she went how both her visitors peered about them and walked
slowly, as if they had not been inside the house before, and were
curious about it. In the dining-room they sat down, and the Vicar,
glancing round the room inquisitively as he spoke, began a close
interrogatory as to Freda’s history. His wife looked uncomfortable and
he solemn when she mentioned the convent.
“Ah! Bad places, those convents,” he said, shaking his head, “nests of
laziness and superstition.”
“Dear me, yes,” said Mrs. Staynes. “But we’ll cure you of all that.
You shall come to the Sunday school and hear Mr. Staynes talking to
the girls; and when you feel pretty firm in the doctrine, we’ll have
you confirmed.”
“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?