CHAPTER X.
THE MYSTERY OF THE GRAY BARN.
It was not without a chilly feeling down the marrow that Lieutenant Tregenna heard these last words, which Joan uttered quickly indeed, but with the most impressive earnestness, ere she turned her back upon the departing visitors and hastily re-entered the house.
Far from causing him to waver in his determination to get at the bottom of the mystery of Rede Hall and its occupants, Joan’s words did but make him more impatient for the adventure. He was ashamed of himself for certain doubts which would arise in his mind as to her good faith in giving him this warning. He hated the thought of believing her treacherous; but, at the same time, it was impossible to deny that her interest in the people he was pursuing was intensely strong, so that it was pardonable to doubt whether her professed solicitude on his account was genuine.
And yet he hesitated to admit the possibility of her playing him false. After all, he could make allowance for her feelings towards these people, among whom she had spent her childhood, and from whom she had received kindness from her earliest years. Was there not something noble, rather than perverse, in her honest espousal of their cause, even in her defiance of law and order in the persons of himself and the soldiers?
Tregenna, if the truth must be told, thought quite as much about Joan as he did about the important affairs in which he was engaged. He decided to pay his visit to Rede Hall on the night of the following day. It was from no foolhardiness that he resolved to venture alone on this expedition; it was from the certainty he felt that a sharp lookout would be kept, and that any attempt to bring a force against the place would be met by the same ignominious result as the visit of the morning.
The following evening proved an admirable one for his purpose. It was dark; it was wet; it was gloomy. After leaving orders that a sharp lookout was to be kept for the smugglers, to whom such a night was as propitious as it was to his own purpose, Tregenna went ashore, and started alone and on foot across the cliffs for Rede Hall.
He had taken care to procure a loose, rough countryman’s coat, waistcoat, and breeches, which disguised him very effectually, and which had the further advantage of enabling him to conceal a brace of pistols and a cutlass, with which he thought it prudent to arm himself. A brown George wig and an enormous three-cornered hat, in a high state of shabbiness, completed his attire. And there was nothing but the springy, elastic walk of youth about him to betray that he was not some decent innkeeper or small farmer on a late trudge along the lanes.
He took a short cut, and was in sight of the hall in less than an hour.
He had kept a careful watch to see that he was not observed or followed; and he was quite sure, when he first saw the faint lights of the farmhouse through the drizzling rain, that so far he had passed unsuspected and undetected by such wayfarers as he had met on the road.