CHAPTER XXVI.
Before the two women had entered the musty, damp-smelling apartment which had once been one of the best bedrooms of the house, the younger began to feel that her companion was unnerved and unstrung. Indeed they were no sooner inside than Mrs. Bean, sinking down on a chair, burst into tears. This was such an unusual sign of weakness in the self-contained housekeeper, that Freda, in alarm, stood for a few moments quite helpless, not knowing what to do. But the kindly womanliness of her nature soon prompted the right action, and putting her arms round Nell’s neck, she clung to her and soothed her with few words but with genuine tenderness.
Recovering herself, Nell suddenly pushed her away.
“It is not fit that I should sit here and be comforted by you, child,” she said, abruptly but not harshly, “when it’s you have brought it all upon us—and it’s ruin, that’s what it is—ruin!”
“Mrs. Bean! What do you mean?”
“Why, that this is the end of it all, the end I’ve been dreading for years, but worse, a thousand times worse, than I ever guessed it would be! I thought it would only be the smuggling, and a break-up of the old gang. I never thought it would be murder!”
“Murder!” hissed out Freda, not indeed in surprise, but in fear.
“Yes, and you know it, for all you may say. You know that the man-servant Blewitt was murdered. And if you go in there, and listen to that man’s mutterings”—and she pointed towards the sick-room—“you’ll know more.”
Freda shook from head to foot, and at first tried in vain to speak.
“What does he say! What does he know?”
“He knows that it was murder, for one thing, but he knows more than that, or I’m much mistaken. It’s on his mind, and as the fever rises, it will all come out.”
She began to sob again and to dry her eyes. Freda at first stood motionless beside her, but as Nell got the better of her outburst, the girl took courage and touched her on the shoulder.
“Mrs. Bean,” she said in a hoarse whisper, “who do you think did it?”
There was no answer.
“Do you think it was—Crispin?”
She asked this question timidly, but Nell did not seem offended by the suggestion. She shook her head, however.
“No, he was in the house here with me. He had been out all night in the yacht, and he was lying down to have a nap on the sofa in my sitting-room. Then”—she lowered her voice, and spoke in an awe-struck whisper—“the master came in, looking white and—and queer, bloodshot about the eyes and that, and he called Crispin out, and they both left the house together, by the back way, through the garden. And I wondered, and watched, and presently I saw them come back and they were carrying something. I didn’t guess what sort of burden it was though, not then. But while I was watching, your ring came at the bell; and as I was crossing the yard to answer it Captain Mulgrave came running after me, and he said: ‘If it’s my daughter, say I’ve shot myself, for I’m going away to-night, and I don’t mean to meet her.’ ”
Here Freda interrupted, in some distress:
“He didn’t mean to meet me! Didn’t he want me to come, then?”
“Yes, and no, I think. I believe it made him feel ashamed of himself; it reminded him, perhaps, of old days when your mother was alive, and made him feel sorry that things were not with him now as they were then.”
Freda, with tears in her eyes, drew nearer to Nell as the latter made these tardy confessions.
“Mind,” continued the housekeeper, drawing back suddenly as the girl’s arm stole round her neck, “it’s only like guess-work what I’m telling you. The Captain has never said anything of the sort to me——”
“But it’s true!” whispered Freda eagerly, “it’s true: I know it, I feel it. Go on, go on.”
“Well, at any rate that was only part of what he felt, remember; for he’s done things he had better have left undone for a good many years now. He also felt that a girl would be in the way here with her prying eyes—as it has proved; and between the wish to see you and the wish not to see you, he was quite unmanned. In fact, he’s not been the same man since you’ve been about: it’s Crispin who has become master.”
Nell said this with sorrow rather than with pride. She paused, and Freda urged her to go on:
“And on that day, when you were coming to let me in——?” she suggested.
“Ah, yes. Suddenly he made up his mind to let you in himself, and he said: ‘Don’t let her know who I am; I shan’t.’ ‘I shan’t say anything, sir, you may be sure,’ I said. And with that I walked back to my kitchen, and he let you in, and you took him for Crispin, as you know. And ever since then he’s been in two minds, now making believe to be dead, so that he might get away quietly, and now bent on staying here, whatever happened.”
“Whatever happened!” repeated Freda. “Why, what should happen, Mrs. Bean?”
The housekeeper rose, and made answer very abruptly:
“I suppose you have some nerve, or you wouldn’t have got down on the scaur by yourself to-night! Well, come with me, then.”
She opened the door, and led the girl back to the sick-room, where John Thurley lay quietly enough, looking up at the old-fashioned bed-draperies, and muttering to himself in a low voice from time to time. Leaving Freda by the door, with a significant sign to be silent, Nell went up to the bedside, and put her hand on the sick man’s forehead.
“Are you better now?” she asked gently.
“Better!” he muttered in a husky voice. “I don’t know. I haven’t time to think about that.”
“Why, what’s troubling you?”
“Oh, you know, you know. The old thing.”
“What, these men?”
“Yes, the gang. They’ve got to be caught, you know, to be caught, every man Jack of them.”
“Why, what have they done?”
He went on muttering to himself, and she had to repeat the question.
“Done! They’ve done everything: robbed, cheated, killed.”
Freda started.
“Hush, hush, sir. You are going too far, aren’t you?”
“Too far, yes, he went too far—that morning,” said the sick man drowsily, “I saw him slinking about—and I saw him take out his revolver—and he crept up past me, over the snow, to the top of the hill.”
“But you didn’t see him shoot, sir, now did you?”
He shook his head.
“I saw him return—presently, without the revolver,” he went on in a very low voice, “with a look on his face—all the savagery gone out of it—I did not understand it.”
“But when you heard later that a man had disappeared, and then a rumour that he had been murdered——?”
“I knew that I had seen the murderer. I knew his face. It was he.”
He uttered these last words slowly and dreamily, and then as Nell asked no more questions, he subsided into silence, and stared again at the bed-hangings. Freda slipped softly out of the room, ran downstairs into the library as fast as her feet and her crutch could take her, and went through the bookshelf door into the secret portion of the house for the third time that night. If she could only find her father, and warn him! That was the thought that was in her mind as she tripped up the first narrow stone staircase and down the second, and reached the room where she had had her interview with him.
There was no one either in this apartment or in the cellar below. The rope-ladder was hanging down just as she had left it, the lamp was still burning. Would her father come in by this way, she wondered, as she crouched on the floor by the opening, and listened for the sound of footsteps approaching from below. At first she heard nothing. She dared not go down into the cellar again, for fear of meeting Crispin, who bore no goodwill either to her or to the patient she had introduced into the house. Presently a distant rumbling down in the earth below riveted her attention. It grew louder and nearer until there was no mistaking the fact that some one was coming up the underground passage.
It was not until that moment that Freda realised the danger of her situation. She had been reckoning on meeting her father. But what foundation had she for this hope? She had scarcely acknowledged to herself that she had very little, when she perceived that her worst fears were fulfilled, and that the man who, lantern in hand, had just reached the floor of the cellar, was the real Crispin Bean. The faint cry which escaped her lips attracted his attention, and with an oath on his lips and a scowl on his face he made a rush for the ladder.
Freda was too quick for him. She pulled it up out of his reach with a jerk, flung to the trap-door which closed the opening, and with some difficulty drew the heavy iron bolt which made it fast. Then, frightened both by what she had done, and by the storm of oaths and blasphemies to which Crispin gave free vent, she crept out of the room like a mouse, and gained the library as fast as she could.