CHAPTER XVI.
Freda Mulgrave had 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.