Perplexed, and a little afraid, she crept back to her room, closed the door gently, and, slipping back into bed, drew the clothes up over her knees. For a while she sat there in the darkness, listening. The wind blustered in the chimneys, and to Nance the grey house had become eerie and cold. Questions that she could not answer importuned her in the darkness. Her father was concealing something from her, and the thought hurt her and filled her with vague unrest.
Presently she lay down, and drew the clothes over, for she was beginning to shiver with cold. As for sleep, it eluded her. She lay there in the darkness, listening, till the old house became full of a hundred imaginary sounds.
At Rush Heath Mr. Christopher Benham snored in his great Dutch chair before the fire. Parson Goffin had talked the squire to sleep, and was still cocking his long clay pipe alertly and holding forth to Jasper Benham. His nose seemed to glow more angrily when he was in the heat of an argument, or venting a grievance. He would sit forward with his feet tucked under his chair, and emphasise each point with prodding movements of the stem of his pipe.
"I tell you, sir, the hangman is not kept busy enough in England. Freethinkers, atheists,—what! I'd string up the whole lot! They should have begun with Tom Paine, sir, and all scoundrels of that colour."
Jasper was stifling yawns, and glancing at the clock.
"Liberty indeed! Faugh, license, that's what liberty means. Right of Man! Bosh, sir,—bosh. The right of the pig to be swinish! There are men within ten miles of us who need hanging. Traitors, blasphemous scoundrels. Take that man Durrell, now, of Stonehanger."
Jasper straightened in his chair.
"Durrell——?"
"A Jacobin, sir, or I'm no parson. Tainted with all the sins of the Revolution. The justices ought to order the house to be surprised and searched. I warrant they would find seditious stuff enough at Stonehanger."
"What makes you think that, Parson?"