"Listen at the secret door," exclaimed the Buccaneer. "When he cannot
find you above, he will seek you at the only entrance he knows of: I
need not say, answer not the sign."
"Robin, Robin!" ejaculated Barbara, "take me, oh! take me with you!--You
are not, surely, going to leave me in this horrid place, and with a
stranger too!"
Poor Dalton! what painful and powerful emotions convulsed his heart and
features!--"a stranger!"--a stranger, indeed, to his own child!
Robin quitted the place without replying to her entreaty; and when the
Buccaneer spoke, it was in that low and broken voice which tells of the
soul's agony.
"Why call me stranger?" he said, approaching, and tenderly taking her
hand; "you have seen me before."
"Yes, good sir, the night previous to my dear lady's death--it is an ill
omen to see strangers for the first time where there is death. I thank
you, sir, I will not sit. May I not go after Robin?"
"Then you prefer Robin to me?"
"So please ye, sir; I have known Robin a long, long time, and he knows
my father: perhaps you, too, may know him, sir; you look of the sea,
and I am sure my father is a sailor. Do you know my father?"
The gentle girl, forgetting her natural timidity under the influence of
a stronger principle, seized the hand of the Buccaneer, and gazed into
his face with so earnest and so beseeching a look, that if Robin had not
returned on the instant, the Skipper would have betrayed the secret he
was so anxious to preserve until (to use his own expression) "he was a
free man, able to look his own child in the face."
"He is at the entrance, sure enough," said Robin; "but it will occupy
him longer to climb the rocks than it did to descend them; we can take
the hollow path, and be far on the road to Cecil Place before he arrives
at the summit."
"But what can we do with her?--She must not longer breathe the air of
this polluted nest," argued Dalton, all the father overflowing at his
heart; "if we delay, Burrell may see her: if so, all is over."
"I can creep along the earth like a mocking lapwing," she replied. "Let
me but out of this place, I can hide in some of the cliff-holes--any
where out of this, and," she whispered Robin, "away--above all things
away--from that fearful man."