CHAPTER VIII.
“Oh,” began Mrs. Bean, with a fat and comfortable sigh, “I am glad to have you here, I declare. Ever since the Captain told me, in his short way, that you were coming, I’ve been that anxious to see you, you might have been my own sister.”
“That was very good of you,” said Freda, who was busily taking in all the details of the house, the wide, shallow stairs, low ceilings, and oaken panelling; the air of neglect which hung about it all; the draughts which made her shiver in the corridors and passages. She compared it with the farm-house she had just left, so much less handsome, so much more comfortable. How wide these passages were! The landing at the top of the staircase was like a room, with a long mullioned window and a wide window-seat. But it was all bare, cold, smelling of mould and dust.
“Isn’t this part of the house lived in?” asked Freda.
“Well, yes and no. The Captain lives in it—at least did live in it,” she corrected, lowering her voice and with a hasty glance around. “No one else. This house would hold thirty people, easy, so that three don’t fill it very well.”
“But doesn’t it take a lot of work to keep it clean?”
“It never is kept clean. What’s the good of sweeping it up for the rats?” asked Mrs. Bean comfortably. “I and a girl who comes in to help just keep our own part clean and the two rooms the Captain uses, and the rest has to go. If the Captain had minded dust he’d have had to keep servants; I don’t consider myself a servant, you know,” she continued with a laugh, “and I’m not going to slave myself to a skeleton for people that save a sixpence where they might spend a pound.”
It would have taken a lot of slaving to make a skeleton of Mrs. Bean, Freda thought.
They passed round the head of the staircase and into a long gallery which overlooked the court-yard. It was panelled and hung with dark and dingy portraits in frames which had once been gilt.
“Does any one live in this part?” asked Freda, shivering.
Mrs. Bean’s candle threw alarming shadows on the walls. The mullioned window, which ran from end to end of the gallery, showed a dreary outlook of dark walls surrounding a stretch of snow.
“Well, no,” admitted her guide reluctantly. “The fact is there isn’t another room in the house that’s fit to put anybody into; they’ve been unused so long that they’re reeking with damp, most of them; some of the windows are broken. And so I thought I’d put you into the Abbot’s room. It’s a long way from the rest of us, but it’s had a fire in it once or twice lately, when the Captain has had young Mulgrave here. It’s a bit gloomy looking and old fashioned, but you mustn’t mind that.”
Freda shivered again. If the room she was to have was more gloomy than the way to it, a mausoleum would be quite as cheerful.
“The Abbot’s room!” exclaimed Freda. “Why is it called that?”
“Why, this house wasn’t all built at the same time, you know. There’s a big stone piece at this end that was built earliest of all. It’s very solid and strong, and they say it was the Abbot’s house. Then in Henry the Eighth’s time it was turned into a gentleman’s house, in what they call the Tudor style. They built two new wings, and carried the gallery all round the three sides. A hundred and fifty years later a banqueting room was built, making the last side of the square; but it was burnt down, and now there’s nothing left of it but the outside walls of the front and sides.”
This explained to Freda the desolate appearance the house had presented as she approached it. The deep interest she felt in this, the second venerable house she had been in since her arrival in England, began to get the better of her alarm at its gloominess. But at the angle of the house, where the gallery turned sharply to the right, Mrs. Bean unlocked a door, and introduced her to a narrow stone passage which was like a charnel-house.
“This,” said Mrs. Bean with some enthusiasm, “is the very oldest part; and I warrant you’ll not find such another bit of masonry, still habitable, mind, in any other house in England!”
Was it habitable? Freda doubted it. The walls of the passage were of great blocks of rough stone. It was so narrow that the two women could scarcely walk abreast. They passed under a pointed arch of rough-hewn stone, and came presently to the end of the passage, where a narrow window, deeply splayed, threw a little line of murky light on to the boards of the floor. On the right was a low and narrow Gothic doorway, with the door in perfect preservation. Mrs. Bean opened it by drawing back a rusty bolt, and ushered Freda, with great pride, into a room which seemed fragrant with the memories of a bygone age. Freda looked round almost in terror. Surely the Abbot must still be lurking about, and would start out presently, in dignified black habit, cowl and sandals, and haughtily demand the reason of her intrusion! For here was the very wide fireplace, reaching four feet from the ground, and without any mantelshelf, where fires had burned for holy Abbot or episcopal guest four hundred years ago. Here were the narrow windows deeply splayed like the one outside from which the prosperous monks had looked out over their wide pasture-lands and well-stocked coverts.
Even in the furniture there was little that was incongruous with the building. The roughly plastered walls were hung with tapestry much less carefully patched and mended than the hangings at Oldcastle Farm. The floor was covered by an old carpet of harmoniously undistinguishable pattern. The rough but solid chairs of unpolished wood, with worn leather seats; the ancient press, long and low, which served at one end as a washhand-stand, and at the other as a dressing-table; a large writing-table, which might have stood in the scriptorium of the Abbey itself, above all, the enormous four-poster bedstead, with faded tapestry to match the walls, and massive worm-eaten carvings of Scriptural subjects: all these combined to make the chamber unlike any that Freda had ever seen.
“There!” said Mrs. Bean, as she plumped down the candlestick upon the writing table, “you’ve never slept in a room like this before!”
“No, indeed I haven’t,” answered Freda, who would willingly have exchanged fourteenth century tapestry and memories of dead Abbots for an apartment a little more draught-tight.
“Ah! There’s plenty of gentlemen with as many thousands as the Captain had hundreds, would give their eyes for the Abbot’s guest chamber in Sea-Mew Abbey. Now I’ll just leave you while I fetch some hot water and some dry clothes. They won’t fit you very well, you being thin and me fat, but we’re not much in the fashion here. Do you mind being left without a light till I come back?”
Freda did mind very much, but she would not own to it. Just as Mrs. Bean was going away with the candle, however, she sprang towards her, and asked, in a trembling voice:
“Mrs. Bean, may I see him—my father?”
The housekeeper gave a great start.
“Bless me, no, child!” she said in a frightened voice. “Who’d ever have thought of your asking such a thing! It’s no sight for you, my dear,” she added hurriedly.
Freda paused for a moment. But she still held Mrs. Bean’s sleeve, and when that lady had recovered her breath, she said:
“That was my poor father’s room, to the right when we reached the top of the stairs, wasn’t it?”
Again the housekeeper started.
“Why, how did you know that?” she asked breathlessly.
“I saw you look towards the door on the left like this,” said Freda, imitating a frightened glance.
Mrs. Bean shook her head, puzzled and rather solemn.
“Those sharp eyes of yours will get you into trouble if you don’t take care,” she said, “unless you’ve got more gumption than girls of your age are usually blest with. We womenfolks,” she went on sententiously, “are always thought more of when we don’t seem over-bright. Take that from me as a word of advice, and if ever you see or hear more than you think you can keep to yourself, why, come and tell me—but nobody else.”
And Mrs. Bean with a friendly nod, and a kindly, rough pat on the cheek which was almost a slap, left the girl abruptly, and went out of the room.
But this warning, after all the mysterious experiences of the last two days, was more than Freda could bear without question. She waited, stupefied, until she could no longer hear the sound of Mrs. Bean’s retreating footsteps, and then, with one hasty glance round her which took in frowning bedstead, yawning fireplace and dim windows, she groped her way to the door, which was unfastened, and fled out along the stone passage. Her crutch seemed to raise strange echoes, which filled her with alarm. She hurt herself against the rough, projecting stones of the wall as she ran. The gallery-door was open: like a mouse she crept through, becoming suddenly afraid lest Mrs. Bean should hear her. For she wanted to see her father’s body. A horrible suspicion had struck her; these people seemed quite unconcerned at his death; did they know more about it than they told her? Had he really shot himself, or had he been murdered? She thought if she could see his dead face that she would know.
Tipity-tap went her crutch and her little feet along the boards of the gallery. The snow in the court-yard outside still threw a white glare on the dingy portraits; she dared not look full at them, lest their eyes should follow her in the darkness. For she did not feel that the dwellers in this gloomy house had been kith and kin to her. She reached the landing, and was frightened by the scampering of mice behind the panelling. Still as a statue she stood outside the door of her father’s room, her heart beating loudly, her eyes fixed on the faint path of light on the floor, listening. She heard no sound above or below: summoning her courage, she turned the handle, which at first refused to move under her clammy fingers, and peeped into the room.
A lamp was burning on a table in the recess of the window, but the curtains were not drawn. There was a huge bed in the room, upon which her eyes at once rested, while she held her breath. The curtains were closely drawn! Freda felt that her limbs refused to carry her. She had never yet looked upon the dead, and the horror of the thought, suddenly overpowered her. Her eyes wandered round the room; she noted, even more clearly than she would have done at a time when her mind was free, the disorder with which clothes, papers and odds and ends of all sorts, were strewn about the furniture and the floor. On two chairs stood an open portmanteau, half-filled. She could not understand it.
Just as, recovering her self-command, she was advancing towards the bed, with her right hand raised to draw back the curtain, she heard a man’s footsteps approaching outside, and turned round in terror. The door was flung suddenly open, and a man entered.
“Who’s in here?” he asked, sharply.
“It is I,” said Freda hoarsely, but boldly. “I have come to see my father. And I will see him too. If you don’t let me, I shall believe you have killed him.”
She almost shrieked these last words in her excitement. But the intruder, in whom she recognised the man she knew as Crispin Bean, took her hand very gently and led her out of the room.