“That’ll do,” said Blewitt sullenly, “I’m going to have a talk with you, ma’am. We’d best have things square before your precious son Robert comes back. I want to know when I’m to have my wages. I don’t mean my thirty-five pounds a year for waiting at table, but the wages I was promised for more important work.”
“I will speak to Mr. Robert as soon as he returns, Blewitt,” said Mrs. Heritage, who was evidently in a paroxysm of terror. “I am quite sure——”
“That I shall get no good out of him,” went on Blewitt, doggedly. “Do you think I don’t know Mr. Robert? Why, miss,” and the man turned, with a sudden change of manner to deprecating respect, to Freda, “your father, Captain Mulgrave, knows what Mr. Robert is, and that’s why he’s made up his mind, like the wise gentleman he is, not to have anything more to do with him. And I’ve made up my mind,” he went on with vicious emphasis, heeding neither Mrs. Heritage’s spasmodic attempts to silence him, nor the young girl’s timid remonstrances, “either to have my due or to follow his example.”
Freda had crept up, with her little crutch, to Mrs. Heritage’s side, and was offering the mute comfort of a sympathetic hand thrust into that of the lady.
“Run away, my dear child, run away,” whispered the latter eagerly.
The man went on in a brutal tone:
“I’m not such a fool as Master Dick, to stay here and be made a catspaw of, while your precious son goes off to enjoy himself. Why should some do all the work, and others——”
The rest of his sentence was lost to Freda, who had got outside the door into a great bare apartment beyond. Here, lifting the latch of a little modern door which most inappropriately filled an old Gothic doorway, she found herself, as she had expected, in the courtyard.
CHAPTER IV.
Freda crossed the courtyard to one of the ruined corner-towers, and finding the staircase still practicable, continued her wanderings, with cautious steps, along the top of the broken castle-wall. She got along easily as far as the thatched roof of a big barn. But here her crutch slipped on the snow and went crashing through a tarpaulin-covered hole in the thatch, carrying its owner with it, into a loft half-filled with hay. There was no way of escape until somebody came by to rescue her. Freda therefore could do nothing but look down into the hazy light of the barn below; and presently, nursed into a comfortable warmth by the hay, she fell asleep.