CHAPTER XIII.
The body 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, you do know. 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.