Throughout the little discussion, Darda had stood in the entrance, passive and indifferent. Now, foreseeing the upshot, she turned and walked away into the gathering dusk of the house.
Mr. Tuke followed, jovially whistling. All the evening he was in great spirits, and at supper he had up a bottle of Muscadine, jacketed with a half-century growth of cobwebs and tartar, and drank to the blue of a couple of eyes that were comically, and a little sweetly, in his thoughts.
He went to bed, slept like Innocence, and woke like Justice, and, as he lay on his morning pillow, pondered the oddities of his new life.
One small matter exercised his mind perplexingly—his antipathy to the man Whimple. Whence it was born, and on what cherished, he found it difficult to decide. The fellow was respectful, obedient, and, so far as he knew, honest. Yet, from the first, he had felt an inclination, unusual to his bent, to bully him and depreciate his efforts. Something in the man—he could not tell what—woke suspicion in him—unjustified, he verily believed. He would remedy this, if possible; would look with a broader view of toleration on the conduct of his spiritless dependent.
The resolve was frank and characteristic enough; and he was decided to give it immediate expression. But so it happened, an incident of the coming day was to reawaken and confirm his deepest distrust in the unhappy caretaker.
All the morning he spent riding about his ragged estate, exploring, investigating, calculating possibilities and planning improvements. It was past mid-day when he turned his horse’s head homewards, and then he was by a dense thicket that skirted a little long wood of lofty trees. Here he dismounted; for it struck him that this was the fringe of the very holt he had penetrated on his first coming, and he must put his conjecture to the test. He tied up his horse and plunged amongst the branches, and presently was rewarded by catching a glimpse through the thronging trunks of the mossy lap of the drive and the dank stones of the ruined lodge. Right opposite the latter, but well hidden in the brush, he sat himself down upon a tumbled log; for he was hot and weary, and the high green silence of the place smote upon his senses like a cathedral anthem. Far away the tap of a woodpecker rang like an elfin hammer; things unseen pattered from a height upon the dead leaves—mere accents on solitude; the “caw” of a sailing rook came through the leafy canopy overhead with a weight of drowsy utterance.
He closed his eyes blissfully—and opened them again with a start.
Something soft-footed had entered the drive by way of the iron gate—had paused, and was peering forward with a concentrated gaze.
He made this out—cautiously shifting his body for the better view—to be a tall, dark-featured woman—a gipsy-like creature by every token—keen-faced; very poorly dressed. Presently she moved secretly, a yard at a time, in skirmishing advances, as a mouse does.
Suddenly she gave a little run; stopped; drew her ragged shawl tightly about her bosom, and uttered a low exclamation of greeting. To whom? It was with a curious wonder that the watcher saw coming from the other direction his man Whimple. He, the latter, moved as the woman, with a like air of secrecy; and he had a scared look in his face, too, as if he were on some errand of a disturbing privacy.