“Are you the little girl for Truslow Manor?” he asked; and then continued, speaking so rapidly that there was no answer needed:
“All right—here you are—give me your hand. Rather a high step. Take care. Capital!” as Biddy struggled up with the porter’s help, and arrived, umbrella and all, flat at the driver’s feet in the bottom of the cart.
“Now, then,” he went on, having picked her up and placed her on the narrow seat at his side, “put this on, and this, and this.”
He plunged into the back of the cart and produced numerous shawls and wraps, which he threw upon the breathless Biddy, talking all the while.
“You’ll find it fresh up on the downs. Where’s your box? In at the back? All right! Then off we go!”
Biddy was quite confused and “put about” by this impetuous behaviour, and she had just made up her mind that this was not the Reverend Roy, when her ideas were upset by the porter, who called out, “Good-night, Mr Roy!” as they drove away. Parsons in the country were, then, different from those in London, like everything else. It was surprising to find them so “short and free in their ways.”
To her relief he did not speak to her again, but puffed away at his pipe in silence while they crawled slowly up a long hill leading out of the town. But this quiet pace did not last, for, the road becoming level, the pony took to a kind of amble which seemed its natural pace, and was soon urged from that into a gallop by its driver. Rattle, rattle, bump! Went the little cart over the rough road; and Biddy, feeling that she must otherwise be tossed out like a nine-pin, clung desperately to her new master’s many wrappings. The Reverend Roy drove very wild, she thought, and how dark it was! She could just dimly see on either side of her, as they bounded along, wide open country stretching far away in the distance; great gently swelling downs were lying there in the mysterious darkness, and all the winds of heaven seemed to have met above them to fight together. How it blew! And yet it managed to rain too at the same time. The wind battled with Biddy’s umbrella, and tugged madly at her bonnet strings, and buffeted Mr Roy’s wide-awake, and screamed exultingly as it blew out his pipe!
“Fresh up here, isn’t it?” he remarked as he took it out of his mouth.
Fresh! Biddy had never felt so cold in her life, and could not have thought there had been so much fresh air in the whole world put together.
On they went, swinging up and down until her brain reeled; on, on, through the rain and whistling wind, over the lonely downs, while she strained her eyes in vain for sight or sound of a living creature. If this was what they meant by a “lonesome” place it was “terr’ble” indeed.