Chapter Twenty Two.
Jenny was almost breathless when she reached the park palings of the Manor House, some little distance from the gate at the end of the avenue; and here she paused for a few moments beneath an oak which grew within the park, but which, like many others, spread out three or four huge horizontal boughs right across the boundary lane, and made the way gloomy even on sunny days.
She looked sharply back in the direction by which she had come, but the evening was closing in more and more gloomy, and the mist exceedingly closely related to a rain, was gathering fast and forming drops on the edges of dead leaves and twigs, beside making the grass overhanging the footpath so wet that the girl’s feet and the lower parts of her skirts were drenched.
No one was in sight or likely to be in that secluded spot, and having gained her breath, she started off once more, heedless of the sticky mud of the lane, and followed it on, round by the park palings, where the autumn leaves lay thick and rustled as her dress swept over them. In a few minutes she reached a stile in the fence, where a footpath—an old right of way much objected to by Squire Wilton, as the village people called him—led across the little park, passing the house close by the end of the shrubbery, and entering another lane, which curved round to join the main road right at the far end of the village, a good mile away from the Doctor’s cottage.
There were lights in the drawing-room and dining-room, making a dull glow on the thickening mist, as Jenny halted at the end of the shrubbery, and all was still as death, till a dog barked suddenly, and was answered by half a dozen others, pointers and retrievers, in the kennel by the stables. This lasted in a dismal, irritating chorus, which made the girl utter little ejaculations suggestive of impatience, as she waited for the noise to end.
She glanced round once more, but the evergreens grew thickly just over an iron hurdle fence, and she satisfied herself that as she could only indistinctly see the shrubs three or four yards away, it was impossible for her to be seen from the house.
The barking went on in a full burst for a few minutes. Then dog after dog finished its part; the sextette became a quartette, a trio, a duet; and then a deep-voiced retriever performed a powerful solo, ending it with a prolonged bay, and Jenny raised her hand to her lips, when the hill chorus burst out again, and the girl angrily stamped her foot in the wet grass.
“Oh, what a cold I shall catch,” she muttered. “Why will people keep these nasty dogs?”
The barking went on for some minutes, just as before, breaking off by degrees into another solo; but at last all was still, the little sighs and ejaculations Jenny had kept on uttering ceased too. Then she raised her head quickly, and a shrill chirp sounded dead and dull in the misty air, followed at intervals by two more.
It was not a regular whistle, but a repetition of such a call as a night bird might utter in its flight as it floated over the house.