Standing to make a choice of one, Katrine was seized with consternation. On the lower shelf, staring her right in the face, was Mr. Reste’s Bible. It had been given him by his dead father, and he set store by it. He must have left it downstairs the previous Sunday, and Joan had put it away on the shelves amongst the other books.
“I wonder if papa would mind opening the portmanteau again?” thought Katrine, as she hastened to the gun-room, and entered.
“Papa! papa! here’s Mr. Reste’s Bible left out,” she cried, impulsively. “Can you put it into the portmanteau?”
Mr. Barbary stood by the small safe in the wall, the door of which was open. In his hand lay some bank-notes; he was holding them towards the candle on the deal table, and seemed to be counting them. Katrine, thinking of the Bible and of nothing else, went close to him, and her eye fell on the notes. He flung them into the cupboard in a covert manner, gave the door a slam, turned an angry face on Katrine, and a sharp tongue.
“Why do you come bursting in upon me in this boisterous fashion? I won’t have it. What? Will I undo the portmanteau to put in a Bible? No, I won’t. Keep it till he chooses to come for it.”
She shrank away frightened, softly closing the door behind her. Those bank-notes belonged to Mr. Reste: they were the same she had seen him put into his pocket-book two days ago. Why had he not taken them with him?—what brought them in her father’s possession? The advance shadow of the dark trouble, soon to come, crept into Katrine Barbary’s heart.
In no mood for reading now, she went to bed, and lay trying to think it out. What did it all mean? Had her father conjured the pocket-book by sleight-of-hand out of Mr. Reste’s keeping and stolen the notes? She strove to put the disgraceful thought away from her, and could not. The distress brought to her by the poaching seemed as nothing to this, bad though that was.—And would he venture abroad to-night again?
Joan’s light foot-fall passed her door, going up to her bed in the roof. Once there, nothing ever disturbed the old servant or her deafness until getting-up time in the morning. Katrine lay on, no sleep in her eyes; half the night it would have seemed, but that she had learned how slowly time passes with the restless. Still, it was a good while past twelve, she thought, when curious sounds, as of digging, seemed to arise from the garden. Sounds too faint perhaps to have been heard in the day-time, but which penetrated to her ear unless she was mistaken, in the deep, uncanny, undisturbed silence of the night. She sat up in bed to listen.
There, it came again! What could it be? People did not dig up gardens at midnight. Slipping out of bed, she drew the blind aside and peeped out.
The night was light as day, with a bright, clear, beautiful moon: the hunters’ moon. Underneath the summer-apple tree, close at this end of the garden, bent Mr. Barbary, digging away with all his might, his large iron spade turning up the earth swiftly and silently. Katrine’s eyes grew wide with amazement. He had dug up that same plot of ground only a few days ago, in readiness to plant winter greens: she and Edgar Reste had stood looking on for a time, talking with him as to the sort of greens he meant to put in. Why was he digging up the same ground again?—and why was he doing it at this unearthly hour?