"Cornwall at last," said Trewhella, with a sigh of satisfaction. "’Tis a handsome place, Plymouth, but I do dearly love to leave it behind me."
The heavy November twilight caught them as the train roared through the Bobmin valley past hillsides stained with dead bracken—like iron mold, Jenny thought. St. Austell shone white in the aquamarine dusk, and darkness wrapped the dreary country beyond Truro. Every station now seemed crowded with figures, whose unfamiliar speech had a melancholy effect upon the girls in inverse ratio to the exhilaration it produced in Trewhella. Jenny thought how little she knew of her destination: in fact without May's company she might as well be dead—into such an abyss of strange gloom was she being more deeply plunged with every mile. Trewhella, as if in reply to her thoughts, began to talk of Trewinnard.
"Next station's ours," he said. "And then there's a seven-mile drive; so we sha'n't get home along much before half-past eight."
"Fancy, seven miles," said Jenny.
"Long seven mile, 'tis, too," he added. "And a nasty old road on a dark night. Come, we'll set out our passels."
It was like action in a dream to reach down from the rack various parcels and boxes, to fold up cloaks and collect umbrellas. Jenny watched from the window for the twinkle of town lights heralding their stopping-place, but without any preliminary illumination the train pulled up at Nantivet Road.
"Here we are," shouted Trewhella, and as the girls stood with frightened eyes in the dull and tremulous light of the platform, he seemed fresh from a triumphant abduction. The luggage lay stacked in a gray pile with ghostly uncertain outlines. The train, wearing no longer any familiar look of London, puffed slowly on to some farther exile, its sombre bulk checkered with golden squares, the engine flying a pennant of sparks as it swung round into a cutting whence the sound of its emerging died away on the darkness in a hollow moan. The stillness of the deep November night was now profound, merely broken by the rasp of a trunk across the platform and the punctuated stamping of a horse's hoof on the wet road.
"That's Carver," said Trewhella, as the three of them, their tickets delivered to a shadowy figure, walked in the direction of the sound.
"Carver?" repeated Jenny.
"My old mare."