Olivia blushed and looked annoyed, but she answered, quietly—
“Mat would do a kind deed for any one, Mr. Mitchell. And I should be sorry for him to think that it is a sign of great wisdom to be discourteous to a woman.”
“Very good,” said Ned grimly. “Sorry I haven’t time to let you exercise your wit on me a little longer. Good-night.”
He hobbled up the hill with great and evident difficulty, his dogs slinking behind him. He was absolutely faint with pain by the time he reached home.
It was quite dark in the cottage when he arrived, and he made his way at once to a shelf in a passage where a box of matches and a candle were kept. But he felt from end to end of the shelf without being able to find either. The dogs, having become excited since their entrance, sniffed about the floor, yelped and pulled afresh at the leash, impeding his movements. He had shut the front door on entering, relying on his candle and match box; so that he could not even see the forms of the struggling animals to avoid them. Two or three times he stumbled and set them growling as he groped his way towards the room where he kept them shut up. A dizziness was creeping over him, which seemed from time to time almost to overcome him, while occasionally for a moment it seemed to leave his head again perfectly clear. He remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had left the door of the room wide open for ventilation; but now he went the whole length of the wall, feeling with his disengaged hand, without finding any opening.
The hounds meanwhile were growing more excited—more troublesome than ever; so that, in his dizzy and wearied condition he could not move or even think with his usual precision. Their behavior, however, at last roused a suspicion in his mind.
“Somebody’s been in here,” he muttered to himself. “And the dogs know it by the scent.”
He had grown bewildered in the darkness, and no longer knew in what part of the passage he was standing, as the dogs, still straining to get free, pulled him from side to side. Suddenly he heard the faint creaking of a door. The dizziness was coming upon him again, and he turned, in a half-blind, stupefied way; saw, or thought he saw, a faint light come as if through an open door, and the next moment found himself lying on the floor, while the sound of the hasty shutting of another door behind him fell upon his dull ears. After this he became unconscious. When Ned came to himself, it was a long time before he could remember, even in the vaguest manner, the experiences he had just gone through. He fancied himself in one of the dungeons he had read about in his boyhood, which bold, bad barons built under their castles for unlucky prisoners who fell into their hands. In strange contrast to the prosaic reflections which occupied his mind in every-day waking hours, the most fantastic fancies now passed through his brain; that he was a prisoner, flung down here by an enemy; that fetters of red-hot iron had been fastened to one his legs. He thought he heard the sounds of every-day life, muffled by the thick stone ceiling between, in the castle above him; the noises of animals; sounds of a man’s voice; then of a woman’s. He recognized the tones of the latter, he felt sure, though he could not remember the possessor’s name. Then suddenly a light was struck in his dungeon and a hand touched him, and it flashed upon him that he had come back, that he was in his own cottage lying on the stone floor of the passage, with a grey-bearded man kneeling beside him, and a woman’s skirt brushing against his feet.
“He must have fallen very heavily,” whispered the woman.
And Ned’s senses came fully back to him.