"Margery," she said, "you shall show me the way back to the cottage among the trees. I will go and endeavour to find out for myself what it is that has brought Mr. Crofton so far away from home. Come."
"O mistress!" said Margery with a gasp. It was her only protest: with her to hear was to obey.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
Varley's Cottage, which place George Crofton and his confederates had fixed upon as their rendezvous, was a spot of ill repute for miles around, and one which no inhabitant of the district would willingly go near by day, much less after dark. A grim tragedy centred round the spot. Some quarter of a century previously the cottage had been the home of a certain gamekeeper, Varley by name, who had made himself specially obnoxious to the poachers of the district. One night he was shot dead on his own threshold and his cottage fired in two places. The crime was never brought home to any one, neither was the cottage ever rebuilt. But of all this neither Clara Brooke nor Margery, being newcomers in the neighbourhood, knew anything.
The elder woman hurried feverishly onward, the younger leading the way. Scarcely a word passed between them. Presently they reached the stile through which Margery had followed the two men, and crossing it, took a winding footway through the fields. They went swiftly and silently, walking not on the path itself but on the soft grass which bordered it. Not a creature did they see or hear, and before long the path began to dip to a hollow, then came some straggling patches of brushwood, and presently they were in the spinney itself, with trees and a thick undergrowth on both sides of them. Margery led the way as by a sort of instinct, only pausing for a second now and again to listen. To Clara, the adventure, with its darkness, its silence, and its mystery, had all the complexion of a nightmare. Again and again she had to ask herself whether it were indeed a reality.
"We are nearly there now, mum," said Margery presently in a whisper. "Do you wait here among the trees, while I creep forward and try and find out what they be about." So saying, the girl stole forward, and was at once lost to view.
The young wife waited with a heart that beat high and anxiously. The moments seemed terribly long till Margery returned, although in reality she was not more than three or four minutes away. Clara trembled so much that she could not speak.
"There's four of 'em now, mum," said the girl. "I could see them quite plain through the crack in the shutter, and from what I could make out, there's more to come. O mistress, I wouldn't go near 'em if I was you; they're a desperate bad lot, and if they found you there, nobody can tell what might happen."
Of a truth, Clara might well hesitate, and it was only the thought that some new and unforeseen danger might possibly at that very moment be closing like a net round the husband she loved so devotedly that nerved her to the task she had set herself to do. "Margery," she said after a brief silence, "where you can go with safety I can surely go. I must see and listen to these men for myself.--Now, attend to this. Should I be discovered by them, or should anything happen to me, you will fly as for your life and warn your master."
"I understands, mum, never fear," was the girl's earnest response.