He remounted his horse, and pricked him to the ascent beyond the dip. Looking back as he neared the top, he noticed that the fisherman was disjointing his rod with a snapping, impatient hurry of action that seemed to signify his sport was no longer the uppermost interest with him.
“I am destined to be stalked for some weeks as a black swan,” thought he crossly. “My advent will be better than a raree-show to these local blockheads.”
He breasted the summit, and rode on. Almost immediately, he came in sight of the ale-house alluded to, and read “Dog and Duck” on its flaked and blistered sign-board that hung posted in the roadway opposite the tavern.
The latter was a forlorn and barren-enough-looking little temple of conviviality—a mere whitened sepulchre for the entombment of dead-drunks. It stood in a sterile patch of garden that was so flogged by bitter winds that the very cabbages lost heart, and the stunted potatoes cowered in their trenches like the rawest of Nature’s recruits. There was a vagabond look about the building, too, that was rather accented by a strip of lead over its dinted doorway, that gave to the two round bosses of opaque glass let into the upper panels of the latter, the appearance of weak bibulous eyes protected by a monstrous shade. To one side of the door a wooden bow-window, with its lower panes lined with some stuff of a crimson hue, projected; and on the outer sill of this, a figure, quite in keeping with the character of his surroundings, lounged at cumbrous ease, and drew the while at a long “churchwarden.”
Mr. Tuke caught only a fleeting view of this figure as he rode past; but an impression of it was taken on the retina of his mind’s eye with curious fidelity. Yet there had been nothing so remarkable about the man, who was a thick-set burly fellow, of low statue and unobtrusive physiognomy. Only, his cropt hair and eyebrows had been very white and his face very red, and somehow the combination had had an extremely ugly look. A hundred yards further on, looking backwards, with the common self-consciousness of the wayfarer, he saw that the lounger had slouched out into the road, and was watching his recession with weighty curiosity; and—“Oh!” he groaned, “that I should come to be the eye-salve of such a parcel of oafs!”
On he rode by swale and hillock, and presently the sombreness of his journey wrought a little mood of discomfort in him. He had loitered so much by the way, that dusk was beginning to gather in the hollows, and the melancholy of his surroundings found something of a kindred feeling in his heart. The rising of the mist along water-courses, as if silent trains of powder had been fired to give warning of his passing; the monotonous progression of thorny hedgerows; the flickering of sudden bats and rustle of unseen things in the roadside tangle—all oppressed him as if with a certain alarm of ominous expectancy.
Often now he dived into swoops of lower ground that were mere pits of blackness from the density of the trees that grew about them. Then the wind, that had lain coiled awhile, reared itself anew and went moaning through the branches, and met the traveller full-face on ascents, so that he shivered and greatly desired the comfort of a cloak;—but still, nothing like a house appeared in any corner of the desolate and lonely landscape.
It was in one of these dismal plunges into gloom that, as he began to toilfully breast the incline beyond, the memory of a gate half-hidden in the bush-tangle at the bottom occurred to him as something he had passed but a minute before with an abstracted eye.
At the thought he drew rein, turned his horse, with the sound of a tired trailing of hoofs, and retraced his steps a length of fifty paces.
Sure enough, set in the height of a dense shrubbery, was a tall twofold gate of wrought iron that sloped off into the bushes on either side. But years of neglect had assimilated the paint of the metal to the colour of the leafiness about it—blue and mossy green—so that little wonder was that it should stand unobserved by the belated passer-by.