CHAPTER XX.
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.