CHAPTER XI.
Crispin had breakfasted, but he remained in the room, “to wait,” as he said with grim jocularity, “on the mistress of the house.” Whenever she tried to bring the talk again to the subject of the noises of the night, he slid away from it in a most skilful manner, so that she could find out nothing from him, and presently got rather a sharp warning about the value of silence. When she again expressed a wish to see her father, too, he answered very shortly, so that she began to understand that Crispin’s goodwill did not render him pliable. Mrs. Bean was in the room when she made this last request. She stood up suddenly, with a crumb-brush in her hand, and a look of great annoyance upon her face.
“There’ll have to be an inquest!” cried she. “Did you ever think of that?”
And she turned in great agitation to Crispin, who was just lighting his pipe. He only nodded and said quietly:
“Don’t you trouble yourself. I’ve thought of all that. You just put on your bonnet and run down to the town, and tell Eliza Poad that the master’s shot himself. Then it will be all over the county in about three quarters of an hour, and the police will have notice, and the coroner will be sent for without any trouble to you. And within two hours Mr. Staynes will come panting up the hill with religious consolation.”
“I sha’n’t see him, interfering old nuisance!” said Mrs. Bean indignantly.
“No, Miss Freda will. And you, Nell, will go to the undertaker’s; go to John Posgate—we owe him a good turn—and tell him you don’t want any of his measuring: he’s to send a coffin, largest size he makes, up to the house-door by to-night, and leave it there. And then go round to the house of that young doctor that’s just come here (he lives in one of the little new red houses on the other side of the bridge past the station) and tell him what has happened. And you will be glad if he will step up at once. That’s all.”
These details made Freda sick; she retreated, shivering, to the window, and there she perceived a long, much trampled foot-track in the snow across the walled-in garden. She noticed it very particularly, wondering whether it was by this way that the men had entered the house on the preceding evening. Then, as she was by this time alone, she went softly out of the room and upstairs, and turned the handle of the door of her father’s room. It opened. She saw, with a wildly-beating heart, that the curtains of the bed were drawn back, and that on it there lay the body of a man.
Suddenly she was lifted off her feet, and carried back from the door of the room.
“Look here,” said Crispin drily, as he put her down, “haven’t you learnt by this time that it’s of no more use to try to circumvent me than to fight the sea? You will see your father when I please and not before. Now go downstairs and wait till the Vicar comes, and tell the old fool just as little as you can help, if you don’t want to get yourself or anybody else into trouble.”