The fact was that Barnabas did not for a moment entertain the idea that Captain Mulgrave would have the heart to leave his newly-recovered daughter, and the farmer meant to come up to the Abbey-house in a day or two and let him know quietly that he had nothing to fear from him as long as he proved a good father to the little lass. But just now Barnabas felt shy of showing himself again, and he shook his head when Freda begged him to come a little way further with her. For a glance through the gates at the house showed her such a bare, gaunt, cheerless building that she began to feel frightened and miserable.
“Noa, missie, Ah woan’t coom in,” said Barnabas, who seemed to have grown both shyer and more deferential when he had landed the young lady at the gates of the big house; “but Ah wish ye ivery happiness, an’ if Ah meay mak’ so bawld, Ah’ll shak’ honds wi’ ye, and seay good-bye.”
Freda with the tears coming, wrung his hand in both hers, and watched him through the gates while he turned the horse, got up in his place in the cart and drove away.
“Barnabas! Barnabas!” she cried aloud.
But the gates were locked, and the old woman, without one word of question or of direction, had gone back into the lodge. Freda turned, blinded with tears, and began to make her way slowly towards the house.
Nothing could be more desolate, more bare, more dreary, than the approach. An oblong, rectangular space, shut in by high stone walls, and without a single shrub or tree, lay between her and the building. Half-way down, to the right, a pillared gateway led to the stables, which were very long and low, and roofed with red tiles. This bit of colour, however, was now hidden by the snow, which lay also, in a smooth sheet, over the whole inclosure. Freda kept close to the left-hand wall, as she had been told to do, her heart sinking within her at every step.
At last, when she had come very near to the façade of the house, which filled the bottom of the inclosure from end to end, a cry burst from her lips. It was shut up, unused, deserted, and roofless. What had once been the front-door, with its classic arch over the top, was now filled up with boards strengthened by bars of iron. The rows of formal, stately Jacobian windows were boarded up, and seemed to turn her sick with a sense of hideous deformity, like eye-sockets without eyes. The sound of her voice startled a great bird which had found shelter in the moss-grown embrasure of one of the windows. Flapping its wings it flew out and wheeled in the air above her.
Shocked, chilled, bewildered, Freda crept back along the front of the house, feeling the walls, from which the mouldy stucco fell in flakes at her touch, and listening vainly for some sound of life to guide her.
CHAPTER VII.
Freda Mulgrave was superstitious. While she was groping her way along the front of the dismantled house, she heard a bell tolling fitfully and faintly, and the sound seemed to come from the sea. She flew instantly to the fantastic conclusion that Saint Hilda, in heaven, was ringing the bell of her old church on earth to comfort her in her sore trouble.