But this lame attempt at comfort met with no warm response from his sister. She looked at him with a poor little attempt at a contemptuous smile, and then, afraid of breaking down altogether, sprang up from the arm-chair in which she had been sitting and left him to himself.

Max did not recover his usual spirits at luncheon, where everybody else was full of mirthful antic.i.p.ation of the household dance, another idea of Mr. Wedmore's, which was to be a feature of the evening. And after that meal, instead of offering to drive to the station to meet Miss Appleby, as everybody had expected, Max took himself off, n.o.body knew where, and did not return home until dusk.

Coming through a little side gate in the park, he got into the great yard behind the house, where the stables stood on one side and a huge barn, which was only used as a storage place for lumber, on the other.

And it occurred to him that if the woman of whom the groom told him were still hanging about the premises, as the servants seemed to think, this was the very place she might be expected to choose as a hiding-place.

So he pushed open the great, creaking door of the barn and went in. It was very dark in there, and the air was cold and damp. A musty smell from old sacks, rotting wood and mildewed straw came to his nostrils, as he made his way carefully over the boards with which the middle part of the barn had, for some forgotten purpose or other, been floored.

Little c.h.i.n.ks of light from above showed great beams, some with ropes hanging from them, and stacks of huge lumber of fantastic shapes to right and left.

Max stood still in the middle of the floor and listened for a sound. But he heard nothing. Suddenly he thought of the signal by the use of which he had summoned Carrie to the door of the house by the wharf.

Getting close to one of the piles of lumber, he gave two taps on the panel of a broken wooden chest, waited a couple of seconds, and then gave two taps more.

There was a shuffling noise along the boards on the other side of the stack, followed by the striking of a match.

Max was around the obstacle in a moment. Holding a piece of candle in her bony hand was Mrs. Higgs.

"h.e.l.lo!" said he.

She said nothing. But the candle shook in her hand, and by the gla.s.sy look of dull yet fierce surprise in her colorless eyes Max saw that this woman, who had connived at his imprisonment in the room with the dead man, had never expected to see him again--alive.

CHAPTER XV.

MR. WEDMORE'S SECOND FREAK.

Even if Max had not had such an ugly experience of the ways of Mrs.

Higgs, even if this meeting with her in the barn had been his first, his sensations would hardly have been agreeable ones. There was something uncanny about the old woman, something which her quiet, shuffling movements and her apparent lack of interest in what went on around her only served to accentuate. Even now, while suffering the shock of a great surprise, Max could feel rather than see the effect which the unexpected meeting had upon her.

For she uttered no cry, no word; her eyes scarcely opened wider than before. Her jaw dropped a little, and then began to move rapidly up and down; that was all. And yet, as Max looked at her--at this helpless, infirm old creature with the palsied hands and the lackl.u.s.ter eyes--he shivered.

"You vile old hag!" thought he to himself. And then his thoughts flew to Carrie, and he asked himself what the attraction could be which bound her to this wicked old woman.

Mrs. Higgs, after staring at him in dead silence for what seemed a long time, asked, as composedly as if their meeting had been the most natural thing in the world:

"Where's your friend, young man?"

"W--what friend?" stammered Max.

"Oh, you don't know, I suppose!" retorted Mrs. Higgs, derisively. "No more than you know what you wanted to come spying about Plumtree Wharf for, eh?"

Max made no answer. There came a vixenish gleam into the old woman's faded eyes.

"What did you come for, eh?" pursued she, sharply. "Who sent you? Not he, I know! When he's got anything to do at the wharf he comes himself."

And Mrs. Higgs gave an ugly, mirthless chuckle.

As Max stared at the withered, lined face, which was growing each moment more repulsive in his eyes, a feeling of horror and of intense pity for Dudley seized him. To be pursued, as his friend evidently was pursued, by this vicious old hag, was a fate hideous enough to expiate every crime in the Decalogue.

A little rapid reflection made him decide that a bold course of defiance was the best to be taken. Whatever Dudley might have done, and whatever terrors Mrs. Higgs might hold over his head, it was very certain, after all, that the evidence of such a creature, living in such an underground fashion, could never be a serious danger to a man in his position.

Dudley himself seemed rather to have lost sight of this fact, certainly; but it could not be less than a fact for all that.

"Mr. Horne is not likely to trouble you or the rest of the thieves at the wharf again," said Max, with decision. "He's gone abroad for a holiday. And if you don't take yourself off at once, or if you turn up here again, or if you attempt to annoy us or Mr. Horne, in any way whatever, you'll find the police at your heels before you know where you are."

Then into her dull eyes there came a look of malignity which made Max doubt whether he had done well to be so bold.

"Thieves, eh? Tell your friend we're thieves, and see what he says to that! Police, eh? Tell your friend _that_, tell your friend _that_, and see whether he'll thank you for your interference!"

"Mr. Horne is away, as I told you."

"Away, is he? But he won't be away long. Oh, no; he'll come back--he'll come back. Or if he doesn't," added Mrs. Higgs, with complacency, "I'll fetch him."

"Well, you've got to leave this place at once," said Max, with decision.

"We don't allow strangers in the barn, and if you don't go quietly at once, I must send somebody to turn you out."

Mrs. Higgs kept her eyes fixed upon him with her usual blank stare while he said this in a very loud and decided tone. When he had finished she suddenly blew out the light with so much unnecessary force that Max felt something like a gust of wind upon his face.

"Turn me out!" and she laughed harshly. "Turn me out! Send for the police to do it, if you like."

Max went out of the barn, listening to her cackling laugh, and not feeling comfortable until he had found his way into the open air. He at once gave orders to the stablemen and gardeners to search the barn and to turn out the strangers they might find there.

But though they hunted in every corner, they found no one, and Max was only too glad to come to the conclusion that Mrs. Higgs had taken his advice, and got away with as little delay as possible.

This incident, however, following so closely on the heels of his experiences at the wharf, took away all the zest with which Max should have entered into the programme which, by Mr. Wedmore's special wish, had been prepared for that evening; and while Doreen and Queenie and Mildred Appleby and two young nephews of Mr. Wedmore's chattered and laughed, and made dinner a very lively affair, Max was quiet and what his cousins called "grumpy," and threatened to be a wet blanket on the evening's entertainment.

"Going to have all the servants in to dance Sir Roger!" cried he, in dismay, when Doreen told him the news. "Good heavens! Hasn't he had a lesson in yesterday's tomfoolery and what came of it? How do the servants like the idea?"

"Of course they hate it," answered Doreen, "and mamma has been all day trying to coax the cook to indulge him, and not to walk off and leave us to cook the Christmas dinner. And, of course, this a.s.surance that the notion was distasteful to everybody had made papa more obstinate than ever. Oh, we shall have a merry time."

Now, down in the depths of his heart Mr. Wedmore had begun to feel some misgivings about his plans for keeping Christmas in the good old fashion. But the first failure, the colossal mistake of the Yule Log, had made him obstinate instead of yielding, and he had set his teeth and made up his mind that they should all be merry in the way he chose, or they should not be merry at all.

The fact was that this prosaic middle-aged gentleman, who had pa.s.sed the greater part of his life immersed in day-books and ledgers and the details of a busy city man's life, found time hang heavy on his hands in these prosperous days of his retirement, and in this condition he had had his mind inflamed by pictures of the life that was led in The Beeches by his forerunners, easy-going, hard-riding, hard-drinking country gentlemen, with whom, if the truth were known, he had nothing in common.

Fired by the desire to live the life they led, to enjoy it in the pleasant old fashion, it had seemed to him an especially happy custom to give a dance at which masters and servants should join hands and make merry together. He had never a.s.sisted at one of these b.a.l.l.s, and he refused to listen to his wife's suggestion that it should take place in the servants' hall, that the servants should be allowed to invite their own friends, and that the family should limit itself to one brief dance with their dependants and then leave them to enjoy themselves in their own way.

No, it was his will that the dance should be held in the hall of the house, and that the pictures of the Ill.u.s.trated Christmas Numbers should be realized to the utmost.

Dinner, therefore, was scrambled over in a hurry, and the family with their guests went upstairs to the drawing-room or out to the billiard-room, while preparations were made for the great event of the evening, the lighting of the Yule Log and Sir Roger de Coverley.

Then the first mishap occurred in the inopportune arrival of the Rev.

Lisle Lindsay, whose rather sedate and solemn appearance cast a slight gloom upon everybody's spirits, which deepened when Queenie whispered to Mildred that he looked upon dancing as a frivolous and worldly amus.e.m.e.nt scarcely to be tolerated and never to be encouraged.

He soon made an opportunity of devoting himself to Doreen, who was playing the lightest of light music at the piano in the corner of the room.

It had been a fancy of Mr. Wedmore's, who had his own way in everything with his wife, to have this drawing-room, which was large and square and lighted by five windows, three at the front and two at the side, furnished entirely with old things of the style of eighty years back, with Empire chairs, sofas and cabinets, as little renovated as possible.