Sea Mew Abbey

by Florence Warden

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.”