At first both Dick and Freda listened to the faint sounds in
silence. Then Dick spoke.
“They’ve come back. I sha’n’t be able to get out that way,” he said.
“Why should you? I can let you out by the front-gate.”
“But--I don’t want to be seen,” he said. “If Captain Mulgrave were to
see me----”
Freda was startled by this suggestion, which betrayed how much the
young man knew or guessed. She turned from the door, where she had
paused with her fingers on the handle.
“Oh, yes,” he said in a low voice and very quickly, understanding her
thought, “it did take me in, for a time, and my cousin Bob too, that
story about his being dead, although we both knew him very well.”
“But why should he pretend any such thing?”
“That’s what we want to find out. It makes us careful. So Bob’s gone
away, and I keep watch.”
“And you are so sure he is alive?”
“I’ve seen him.”
Freda began to tremble. Here was an answer to the question she had so
often asked herself, whether her father was not really in hiding about
the place after all. She led the way out of the library, along the
corridor and out into the courtyard by the nearest door, without a
word. It was so dark that there was little fear of their being seen
crossing to the gate; though indeed Freda had forgotten that there was
need of caution, being absorbed in conjectures about her father. She
took the big key from its nail, opened the heavy gate, and led Dick
through to the open space before the blank wall of the
banqueting-hall. They crossed this, still in silence, and came to the
lodge. Here she was about to summon the lodge-keeper, when Dick
stopped her.
“Don’t,” said he. “The old woman would recognise me, and you would be
made to suffer. I must get out some other way.”
“There is no other way,” said Freda. “And when my friends come to see
me they should go out by the front way.”
And, before he could stop her, she had seized the iron bell-handle
which hung outside the wall of the lodge and rang it firmly.
The old woman who kept the key looked rather frightened when she saw
who was with Freda, but she unlocked the gate, waited, curtseying,
while the young people shook hands, and then popped back into her
cottage like a rabbit.
But there were eyes about more to be dreaded than the old woman’s.
When Freda returned to the inner gate, which she had left open, she
found it locked, and had to ring the bell. Mrs. Bean did not answer
the summons for some time, and when she did, it was with a frown of
ill-omen upon her face.
“So you’ve been receiving visitors, I see,” she began shortly.
“Yes, I’ve had one visitor.”
“One of the young Heritages, whom your father specially wished you not
to have anything to do with. Crispin told you that.”
“Yes,” said Freda tremulously, “but since they leave me here all by
myself with nobody to speak to, they can’t be surprised if I make any
friends when I can.”
“Well, and am I not friend enough for you, without your having to run
after any stranger or vagabond that happens to come into the parish?”
“No, you’re not, for I certainly couldn’t say anything I liked to you,
as one can to a friend. If I ask you a question, you put me off with
an answer that tells me nothing, as if I were a child. But I’m going
to show you that I’m grown up, and do some things that will astonish
you.”
And Freda hopped quickly away across the court-yard to the entrance of
the west wing, leaving Nell a little anxious and perturbed by this new
independence.
Freda returned to the study, her little brain actively spinning
fancies concerning her late visitor, all of a pretty, harmless kind,
dowering him with a great many ideal qualities to which the young man
could certainly not lay claim. It was now so dark in the room that she
had to feel her way carefully, well as she knew it. She walked along
close by the wall, touching the book-laden shelves as she went, until
she came to a point where they seemed to yield under her fingers. Her
heart leapt up. This was the secret door through which Dick had
entered: and he had left it open.
Freda’s first impulse was delight; her second fear. Now that the way
was at last open to her to learn the secrets of this guilty house, she
began to shrink from the knowledge she was about to gain. She opened
the door, listened, and looked in. Pitch-black darkness; utter
silence. She knew that Dick had come down by a staircase, so she felt
for it and mounted carefully. She counted fourteen rather steep steps,
and then she found that she had reached a level floor. It was so cold
here that her hands and feet were stiff and benumbed, although her
head was burning; she was in a passage the walls of which were of
stone, just like those outside her own room. But this passage was
narrower, she thought. There was no light whatever, so that she groped
her way cautiously, with her left hand outstretched before her face,
while with the right she tapped her crutch lightly on the ground in
front of her. After a few steps she came to a blank stone wall; it was
the end of the passage and she had to turn back. As she retraced her
steps, she suddenly came to a slight recess on the right hand, where
the stone wall was broken by a wooden door. Something in the sound of
this as she rattled it made her believe that this was the panel-door
into the gallery. If this were so, the way down was through a
trap-door in the floor; for this was the way Crispin had brought her
on the day that he found her in the disused stable. Down she went upon
her knees, feeling about until her hand touched an end of knotted
rope. Pulling this up, she found, as she had expected, that it raised
a door in the floor, beneath which was a flight of wooden steps. There
was still no sound to be heard, so, after a moment’s hesitation, she
decided to continue her explorations, and to trust to luck to hide
herself if she heard any one coming. The steps were rickety, but she
got down them in safety, and found herself in a stone passage, similar
to that on the floor above. At the end of this was a door, which
Freda, still groping in the dark, decided to be that which opened into
one of the out-houses in the yard outside. It was securely fastened.
She felt her way back along the walls until a door on the right
suddenly gave way under her hand, and a flash of light, after the
darkness in which she had been so long, streamed into her eyes and
dazzled her.
Freda thought she was discovered; but the utter silence reassuring
her, she presently looked up again, and found that she was standing
before the doorway of a big, stone-walled, windowless room, piled high
with bales and boxes which reeked with the unmistakable odour of
strong tobacco. She was in the smugglers’ storeroom. An oil-lamp,
which hung opposite to the door and gave a bright light, enabled her
to make an exhaustive survey of the room and its contents. In one
corner there was a rope and pulley fastened securely to one of the
strong beams which ran from end to end of the roof. There was no
ceiling. Directly under this rope and pulley was a square hole in the
floor; and Freda, peeping down, saw that a rope-ladder connected this
chamber with another underneath, which, however, was unlighted. She
had scarcely had time to make these discoveries when she heard dull,
muffled sounds which seemed to come from beneath the cellar. Afraid of
being caught by one of the unknown men whose coarse voices she had so
often heard, Freda hid herself among the bales not far from the
opening in the floor. The sounds came nearer, became distinguishable
as the tramp of one man’s feet, and then the rope-ladder began to
shake.
Freda, peeping out, began to tremble at her own daring. The man was
coming up, and already she knew, whether by instinct or by his tread
she hardly could tell, that it was not Crispin. She shrank back, with
a loudly-beating heart, and crouched behind the bales as the newcomer
reached the floor and pulled up the rope-ladder after him. He began to
move some of the bales, and Freda was half dead with fear lest he
should touch those behind which she was hiding. But presently he
desisted from this work, and she heard him drag out a heavy weight
from the space he had made, draw a cork, and presently began to take
long breaths of pleasure and to smack his lips. Very cautiously,
believing him to be too agreeably employed to notice her, she then
dared to peep at him. But the sight of his face turned her sick with
surprise and dread.
For she saw the grinning, withered face she had seen about the house
in the darkness, the face which Nell had tried to persuade her was the
creation of her imagination.