Joan, The Curate/Chapter 10
It was not without a chilly feeling down the marrow that Lieutenant Tregenna heard these last words, which Joan uttered quickly indeed, but with the most impressive earnestness, ere she turned her back upon the departing visitors and hastily re-entered the house.
Far from causing him to waver in his determination to get at the bottom of the mystery of Rede Hall and its occupants, Joan's words did but make him more impatient for the adventure. He was ashamed of himself for certain doubts which would arise in his mind as to her good faith in giving him this warning. He hated the thought of believing her treacherous; but, at the same time, it was impossible to deny that her interest in the people he was pursuing was intensely strong, so that it was pardonable to doubt whether her professed solicitude on his account was genuine.
And yet he hesitated to admit the possibility of her playing him false. After all, he could make allowance for her feelings towards these people, among whom she had spent her childhood, and from whom she had received kindness from her earliest years. Was there not something noble, rather than perverse, in her honest espousal of their cause, even in her defiance of law and order in the persons of himself and the soldiers?
Tregenna, if the truth must be told, thought quite as much about Joan as he did about the important affairs in which he was engaged. He decided to pay his visit to Rede Hall on the night of the following day. It was from no foolhardiness that he resolved to venture alone on this expedition; it was from the certainty he felt that a sharp lookout would be kept, and that any attempt to bring a force against the place would be met by the same ignominious result as the visit of the morning.
The following evening proved an admirable one for his purpose. It was dark; it was wet; it was gloomy. After leaving orders that a sharp lookout was to be kept for the smugglers, to whom such a night was as propitious as it was to his own purpose, Tregenna went ashore, and started alone and on foot across the cliffs for Rede Hall.
He had taken care to procure a loose, rough countryman's coat, waistcoat, and breeches, which disguised him very effectually, and which had the further advantage of enabling him to conceal a brace of pistols and a cutlass, with which he thought it prudent to arm himself. A brown George wig and an enormous three-cornered hat, in a high state of shabbiness, completed his attire. And there was nothing but the springy, elastic walk of youth about him to betray that he was not some decent innkeeper or small farmer on a late trudge along the lanes.
He took a short cut, and was in sight of the hall in less than an hour.
He had kept a careful watch to see that he was not observed or followed; and he was quite sure, when he first saw the faint lights of the farmhouse through the drizzling rain, that so far he had passed unsuspected and undetected by such wayfarers as he had met on the road.
Instead of going straight up to the hall, he walked along at the bottom of the hill, by the side of the stream, keeping his eyes upon the building. And it was with a strange excitement that he heard, when he had come well in sight of the gray barn, a dull sound, repeated at intervals, like the noise of a descending flail.
At the same time he became aware of a faint and flickering light, which was just visible through certain slits and gaps in the boarding with which the original chapel windows of the barn had been filled up.
There was not a living creature in sight, though the slight noises made by the animals in the farmyard came to Tregenna's ears as he went slowly and cautiously up the slope towards the barn.
The wall was high, but easy to climb; he crossed the straw of the yard quickly and without noise, while the muffled sounds from inside the barn grew louder and more distinct. It was not until he was close under the south wall of the barn that a hoarse murmur of men's voices reached his ears, deadened, muffled, scarcely audible above the steady sound of blows.
He looked about for some means of getting up to the level of the slits in the boarding of the windows, by which the barn now received ventilation and light. Only a sailor would have been able to avail himself of such means as he found. A bit of straggling creeper, that gave way under the touch of the foot; part of a wooden drain-pipe rotten and broken; the crevices between the rough stones: such were the footholds by which he was able to scramble up to the old east window; and once at this level, he climbed by the help of the stone tracery to the rose heading at the top, where there was a gap in the boarding large enough for him to see the interior of the barn from end to end.
It was a weird sight that met his astonished eyes. By the flaring light of some half-dozen smoking torches, which threw a fantastic glare upon the stone walls, upon the still perfect arcade at the base, upon fragments of arch and pillar, corbel and broken groin, a dozen men were at work upon the building of a boat some thirty feet long, which lay, like some huge sprawling creature, on the floor below.
Tregenna watched with fascinated eyes. He had heard of the secret shipbuilding yards, where the smuggling craft were manufactured, and whence they were drawn down to the sea on the farm wagons in the darkest hours of the night; but no suspicion of the gray barn in connection with such doings had ever entered his head; and it was clear that even the country folk had been kept out of the secret.
Clash! clash! upon his ears, in his place of vantange, came the sound of the driving in of the iron bolts. He saw the brawny bare arms of the men go up above their heads, hammer in hand, to come down with a thud upon the ship's groaning sides. He saw the great skeleton monster shiver under the blows; heard the hoarse laugh, the muttered oaths, which the men, cautious even at their toil, exchanged as they worked. And presently, as he got used to the din, to the waving, smoking lights, to the excitement of his strange position, he began to distinguish the words they uttered, and presently to discover that he himself was one of the subjects of their conversation.
"Curse me if I think the boat'll ever swim, with all these eyes afore and behind us what we've got now!" cried one voice, which Tregenna knew that he had heard before.
It was a difficult matter to recognize faces and figures so much foreshortened as they were from the lofty perch he occupied: but he presently perceived that the speaker was the little mean-looking man with the pimply face, who had taken part in the last fray, and who was known as "Bill Plunder."
"Ods rabbit it! What matters the eyes?" sang out the burly giant, Robin Cursemother, as he dealt a sounding blow on the head of the bolt he was driving in. "There's but one pair to signify, and we mean to close them, don't we, lads, so as they shan't see naught to hurt no more!"
Then up spoke a third man, who was seated on a barrel in a corner, with a pipe between his lips, and holding a torch in one hand. He limped when he moved, and Tregenna guessed that this was the "Gardener Tom" whom he had himself wounded, and whom the parson and his daughter had sheltered under their roof. He was a young fellow of not more than five or six and twenty, well made and handsome, with an open, honest face and manly voice: a man too good for a smuggler, Tregenna decided.
"Nay, the young officer does but his duty in running us down. And I don't want to see no harm come to him, though 'twas he shot me through the leg. So we can but keep clear of him, 'tis all I want. Miss Joan' ud be main sorry any harm should come to him; and for her sake I'd have no hand in doing him a hurt."
"Zoons, then we'll do without thee, Tom, when we give the lubber his deserts!" said Robin. "Though what you should want to spare him for I know not, since you're sweet on Ann; and 'tis ten chances to one she'll turn sheep's eyes upon him if we don't settle his business while she's hot against him, as she is now."
"Ay, Tom," said the mean-looking Bill, coming close up to him, and sniggering in his face, "you've already got Ben to settle with; you don't want no more rivals, my lad. You'd best let us do her bidding, and carry him off and let him down the monks' well, when he shows his nose up here again!"
"I won't have no hand in it, mates," said Tom, stubbornly. "I don't mind a fight, man to man; I like it when my blood's up. But to land a man over the head when he's alone, and to bind him when he's dazed and can't do naught to defend hisself, why, that's no work for a man as is a man, and it ain't no work for me."
"Odso, man, we'll do as well without thee!" retorted Robin, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a huge red hand.
"Ay, and better too!" piped out Bill. "For there'll be one less to share the plunder; and"
He was interrupted by a roar of mocking laughter from all the men within hearing.
"Ay, that's Bill Plunder, true to's name!" cried one. "Never no blows gets struck but what he's thinking whether there's guineas to come out of it, or but a matter of shillings! But there'll be cursed little to take from a fellow that's but a lieutenant!"
"There's his laced coat, and his sword, and maybe somat handsome by way of a pistol," grumbled Bill, angrily. "Pickings worth having, any way, and that 'ud not find me too proud to take 'em."
"Maybe you'll not have the chance, Bill, after all," said Tom. "Maybe the young officer'll know better nor to come."
"Not he!" retorted Bill. "He's got the spirit, deuce take him. He'll walk into the lion's mouth, sure as a die. And it's us that has to take care he don't walk out again."
"No fear o' that," said Robin, with an oath.
"What if he should come quiet?" suggested Tom.
"Sneaking by like them king's men do when they're after us?" cried Bill. "Dost think Ann won't keep too good a lookout for him for that? No. If he comes with the redcoats, she'll know long afore they be here, and they'll find all taut as they did yesterday morn. And if he comes alone, he'll walk in right enough; but he'll never walk out no more!"
There was a hoarse laugh at this, which passed round the circle, as the men repeated the words the one to the other. And then, quite suddenly, there fell a silence upon them all.
Tregenna felt that his heart almost stopped beating; for he was under the impression, for the first moment, that he had been discovered. But the hush had hardly fallen upon the group below, when a faint tapping was heard upon one of the great doors of the barn.
"Ay, ay," sang out Robin. And turning to the others, as he rested from his hammering, he made a gesture to them, with his brawny arm, to put down their tools. "They're back," said he "back from the shore. Down with the boat, mates, and let's see what luck they've had!"
Tregenna was furious on learning, as he did from these words, that on this very night there had been a smugglers' raid carried out in his absence.
But he had little time for reflection when a strange thing happened in the great barn below. The men stood silent all round, each holding a rope, which he had hastily untied from a post driven into the ground. At a signal from Robin, who directed the proceedings, the boat was slowly lowered until she had sunk below the level of the floor into the ancient crypt beneath.
For one moment the torches flashed and flared, as the men looked down at the unfinished hull of their boat. Then, just as Tregenna was wondering why the soldiers had not taken up the flooring-boards to look beneath them, he witnessed what he could not but confess was a very clever contrivance. A row of boards were placed, side by side, on high trestles across the boat, at a distance of some five feet below the chapel floor, which was then boarded over in the same way. On raising one of these upper boards, therefore, a stranger would have seen the false floor below, with a rough canvas thrown down upon it, which would have looked, in the imperfect light of the barn, like the bare ground.
So quickly, so quietly was this carried out, that it took but a few minutes to transform the busy workshop into a bare, deserted place, when the men extinguished their torches and filed out quietly by the west door into the darkness and the drizzling rain.
The last of them had gone; the great key had turned in the rusty lock; and Tregenna was asking himself by which way it would be safest to descend, so that he might get away undetected by any of the smugglers, when he felt his left ankle gripped by a strong hand.