“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.