CHAPTER XXVII.
Danger had roused Freda from a little frightened girl into a ready-witted and daring woman. No sooner had she fastened down the trap-door and made it impossible for Crispin to get into the house from below than another idea for securing the safety of her sick guest flashed into her mind. As soon as the thought suggested itself, she set about carrying it out. Flying out of the house, across the court-yard, unlocking the first gate and taking care to keep it from closing by a stone at its base, she was out of breath by the time she reached the lodge-gates and pulled lustily at the bell. Of course the old woman was asleep, and it was some moments before the gates opened. In the meantime, Freda had had another inspiration. As soon as one of the gates opened, she slipped through, and placed a stone at the foot as she had done with the inner gate, and watched for the effect. As she had hoped when the spring was pulled again by the lodgekeeper from within, the gate swung to, but remained open a couple of inches. Satisfied, the young girl went on her way.
She crossed the churchyard, not without certain nervous and superstitious terrors, for some of which her convent training was perhaps responsible: and passing by the shapeless church with its squat stone tower, and the seat underneath where the old fishermen would sit and smoke their pipes and tell their yarns, with one eye on the listener, and one on their old love, the sea, she came to the steep flight of worn stone steps that led down into the town.
The moon was in her second quarter, and the light she gave was bright enough for Freda to see the silver river below, for the tide was high. Here and there the weak little town-lights twinkled, but they were so far between that they did not save Freda from a feeling that she was plunging into an abyss of blackness and horror, as she found herself in the steep, stone-paved street at the bottom of the steps. She had been told where the Vicarage was, knew that she must turn to the left, and go down Church Street until she came to it. But the sound of her footsteps and her crutch on the rough stones of the narrow street frightened her. The little irregular, old-fashioned shops, with their overhanging eaves and tiny windows, seemed to the scared girl to have a threatening aspect; she fancied every moment that one of the desperate characters with whom her imagination peopled them was lying in wait for her at the entrance of one of the squalid courts which ran between the houses. Past the tiny market-place she ran, with a frightened glance at the pillars which supported a pretentious town-hall about the size of a large beehive. But no one was in hiding among them; and she reached the Vicarage without even meeting a drunken fisherman finishing his evening’s enjoyment by a nap on a friend’s doorstep.
Her ring at the bell brought Mrs. Staynes to an upper window, and a few words of entreaty brought her to the front door. The sight of Miss Mulgrave without hat or cloak at three o’clock in the morning filled her with shocked amazement; but when Freda implored her to come with her at once to help to nurse a sick man, a stranger, who had been wounded on the scaur that night in some not very clearly explained manner, the good little woman at once agreed to come, and retreated to get ready. Her toilette being always of the simplest, she soon reappeared, tying on her rusty mushroom hat and clasping round her neck a circular cloak, the rabbit-skin lining of which had been so well worn that there was only enough of the fur left to come off on the garments it touched. But to Freda’s eyes, who saw in her coming safety for John Thurley, no princess’s court dress ever looked more pleasing than the ragged garments of the Vicar’s old wife, as she stepped cheerfully out in the raw April morning, first insisting on tying up the young girl’s head and shoulders in her garden shawl.
“You have sent for a doctor, my dear, of course?” she said.
“No,” said Freda. “Mrs. Bean says it’s nursing and watching he wants. So I thought of you. I knew you were good to the sick. Everybody says so.”
“Everybody” only did the odd little woman justice. Tied to a selfish husband for whom she thought it an honour to slave, she had learned to look upon herself as born to drudge for his comfort and glory; and feeling that whatever she did as the Vicar’s wife redounded to the Vicar’s credit, she was a devoted nurse and visitor to the sick, at the disposal of anybody in the parish. She received Freda’s thanks almost apologetically.
“It is a luxury to do good,” she said.
And although her tone was dogmatic and “preaching,” she meant what she said.