The lateness of the hour was natural, therefore. Still, it rendered her task more difficult. She dared not interfere with the heavy bars that secured the two doors which looked on the lake. She would be heard, even if the task were not beyond her strength. And to gain the back entrance she must thread a labyrinth of passages guarded by wakeful dogs and sleeping servants; for servants in those days slept on the stairs or in any odd place. She would be detected before she had undone a single bolt.
Then what was she to do? Her bedroom was on the second floor, and exit by the window was not possible. On which, some, surveying the situation, would have sat still, and thought themselves justified. But Henrietta was of firmer stuff; and for such where there is a will there is a way. Mr. Rogers’s room, of which she had still the use, was on the first floor of the south wing and somewhat remote from the main part of the house. Outside the door was a sash window which gave light to the passage; and owing to the rise of the hill on every side of the house save the front, the sill of this window was not more than six feet above the garden. She could drop from it with safety. Return was less easy, but with the help of a chair, which she could lower before she descended, she might manage to climb in again. The feat seemed easy and she did not feel afraid. Whether she would feel afraid when the time came was another matter.
In the meantime she had to wait, and sleeping ill that night, she had many uneasy dreams, and waking before daybreak thought herself into a fever. All the dreadful things that might befall her rose before her in the liveliest shapes; and long before the house awoke—there is no fear like five-o’clock-in-the-morning fear—she had given up the notion. But when the dull November day peered in at the bedroom window, and she had risen, she was herself again. She chid herself for the childish terrors in which she had indulged, and lest she should give way to them again she determined to take a decisive step. Long before noon she slipped out of the house and turned towards Ambleside.
Unfortunately it was a wet morning, and she feared that her promenade in such weather must excite suspicion. Eyes, she was sure, were on her before she had gone a dozen paces. To throw watchers off the scent and to prove herself careless of espial she would not look back; but when she reached the first corner she picked up a stone, and threw it at an imaginary object on the edge of the lake. She stood an instant with her wet-weather hood drawn about her face as if to mark the effect of her shot. Then she picked up another stone and poised it, but did not throw it. Instead, she walked on with the stone in her hand. All without looking back.
She came to the second gate on the Ambleside road. It was out of sight of the inn, and it seemed an easy and an innocent thing to lay the stone on the head of the pillar—gate-posts in that country are of stone—and to go on her way. But she heard a footstep behind her and panic seized her. She felt that nothing in the world would be so suspicious, so damning as such an act. She hesitated, and was lost. She walked on slowly with the stone in her hand, and the fine rain beating in her face.
Her follower, a country clown, passed her. She loitered until he was out of sight; then she turned and retraced her steps. A half-minute’s walking brought her again to the gate. There was no one in sight and in a fever lest at the last some one should take her in the act she set the stone on the top of the post, and passed on.
Half-way back to the inn she stopped. What if the stone had not kept its place? She had merely thrust out her hand as she passed, and deposited the stone without looking. Now she was sure that her ear had caught the faint sound which the stone made in striking the sodden turf. She turned and walked back.
When she reached the gate she was thankful that she had had that thought. The stone had fallen. Fortunately there was no one in sight, and it was easy to pick up the first stone that came to hand and replace the signal. Then she walked back to the inn, inclined to laugh at the proportions to which her simple task had attained in her mind.
She would have laughed after another fashion had she known that her movements from beginning to end had been watched by Mr. Sutton. The chaplain, ashamed yet pursuing, had sneaked after her when she left the inn, hoping that if she went far he might find in some lonely place, where she could not escape, an opportunity of pleading his cause. He fancied that the lapse of three days, and his patient, mournful conduct, might have softened her; to say nothing of the probable effect on a young girl of such a life as she was leading—of its solitude, its dullness, its weariness.
On seeing her turn, however, he had had no mind to be detected, and he had slipped into the wood. From his retreat he had seen her deposit the stone: he had seen also her guilty face—it was he, indeed, who had removed the stone. He had done so, expecting to find a note under it, and he was all but surprised in the act. When she placed the second, he was within three paces of her, crouching with a burning face behind the wall. The thought of her contempt if she discovered him so appalled him that, cold as it was, he sweated with shame; nor was it until she had gone some distance that he dared to lift his eyes above the wall. Then he saw that she had put another stone on the gate-post.