Mr. and Mrs. Javelrack, the guardians of this unpleasant mansion, had received a telegram from its owner, telling them that he was coming, and consequently the male Javelrack had driven to the Denfield Station for his master, while the female Javelrack set the rooms in order and prepared a meal for Mr. Gartney.
Eustace had not brought his valet to Castle Grim, as that worthy would immediately have given notice had he been asked to stay in such a nerve-shaking place. So he drove away from the station slowly in the dog-cart with his quaint old retainer beside him, and his portmanteau behind.
It was a very decent dog-cart taking it all round, and the horse in the shafts was not by any means a bad specimen of his kind, as Gartney allowed the Javelracks a decent sum yearly to keep up the place, and they made amends for their lonely life by surrounding themselves with all the luxuries they were able. Report said they were misers, and perhaps there was some truth in the rumour, but whenever Eustace came down, he always found things in order, so he never troubled his head to ascertain what proportion of the income he allowed they had spent on the place, or what portion they stowed away in odd corners. Indeed, if he had found that these two old servants were spending as little as they could without being found out, and putting the rest by for a rainy day, he would not have been particularly annoyed, for they were only within their rights in having some pleasure in Castle Grim.
Eustace wrapped himself well up in his ulster, for the winds blew very keenly across the marshes, and as the horse was restive, they soon left the village behind and were moving rapidly across the straight road which stretched a narrow white thread until it vanished on the verge of the horizon. The gables of Errington Hall showed whitely above the sombre woods around it, but after a rapid glance at the roof which covered the woman he loved, Gartney shook the reins impatiently to make the horse go faster, and stared resolutely at the red glare of the sky lowering over the wild waste landscape.
"I'll see her to-morrow," he thought, as the hoofs of the horse beat steadily on the hard white road, "and then I can see for myself how things stand between her and Guy."
Some long sombre clouds lowered heavily over the crimson of the horizon as if Night, like some dark-winged bird, was waiting to settle down on the chill earth, and a keen cold wind, blowing sharply from the distant ocean, brought the salt odours of the sea to their nostrils.
Javelrack, his huge form bowed by age and rheumatism caught from the marsh mists, sat grimly silent beside his master with his large, hairy, brown hands clasped on his lap, and his mahogany-coloured face with its wiry black beard, so screwed up with facing the cutting wind, that under his weather-stained brown hat he looked like a fantastic Chinese idol. Eustace, wrapped up in his own thoughts, paid no attention to his silent companion, but, bowing his head against the blast, indulged in visions of Alizon Errington.
A dreary country, with the wide spreading marshes stretching on either side for miles, and the long straight road running through the heart of the swamp. Sluggish, slimy pools of oily stillness, fringes of stately reeds swaying to and fro in the blast, smooth patches of green grass, pleasing to the eye but treacherous to the unwary foot. Here and there a broken-down fence, deeply implanted in weeds of luxuriant growth, bordering deep ditches of black earth filled with stagnant water, on which floated green slime, rows of depressed-looking willows, and on occasions the gaunt stump of a tree sticking up as if to mark the site of a submerged forest.
Then suddenly against the dull red of the sky a misshapen pile of gables and chimneys on the verge of a slight rise, girdled by a gaunt ring of leafless trees. Beyond, heaps of wind-blown sand covered with sparse vegetation standing as a barrier between the marshes and the ocean, which tossed in waves of blood under the evil red sky as it moaned in a querulous voice on the starved-looking strip of sandy beach. And this was Castle Grim.
Eustace stopped the tired horse at the door of the house (or rather the horse stopped of its own accord), and giving the reins to Javelrack, jumped down. At the door he was met by Mrs. Javelrack, large and gaunt as her husband, with the same embrowned face and the same distorted features, suggestive of Chinese deities. Indeed, as the male Javelrack took the portmanteau into the house and stood by his wife, they looked like two ogres inhabiting Castle Grim, who were prepared to make a meal of Eustace as soon as he was safely within the walls.