“Fiddle-de-dee, Tibbie!” she exclaimed. “Your master would have a good deal to say if we turned anybody from his door on a night like this. You must come in,” she went on, turning smilingly to me. “Mr. Parslewe is the most hospitable man alive, and if he were in he’d welcome you heartily. I don’t know whether he’ll manage to get home to-night or not. But I’m at home!” she concluded with a sudden glint in her eye. “Come up the stair!”
I waited for no second invitation. She was already tripping up the stair, holding her skirts daintily away from the grey stone wall, and I hastened to follow. We climbed some twenty steps, the old woman following with her lamp; then we emerged upon another and larger hall, stone-walled like that below, and ornamented with old pikes, muskets, broadswords, foxes’ masks; two doors, just then thrown wide, opened from it; one revealed a great kitchen place in which an old man sat near a huge fire, the other admitted to a big, cosy parlour, wherein the firelight was dancing on panelled walls.
“Take off your things and give them to Tibbie,” commanded my hostess. “And, Tibbie—tea! At once. Now come in,” she went on, leading me into the parlour, “and if you’d like whisky until the tea comes, there it is, on the sideboard. Have some!”
“Thank you, but I’ve just had a dose,” I answered. “I had some in my flask, very fortunately. You are extremely kind to be so hospitable.”
“Nonsense!” she laughed. “You couldn’t turn a dog out on a night like this. I don’t know if my guardian will manage to get home—he and his old pony can do wonders, and they’ve sometimes got through when the drifts were two or three feet thick. But you’re all right—sit down.”
She pointed to a big arm-chair near the fire, and I obeyed her and dropped into it—to make a more leisurely inspection of my surroundings, and my hostess. The room was evidently a part of the square tower I had seen from without, and filled a complete story of it; there were two high windows in it, filled with coloured glass; the panelling all round was of some dark wood, old and time-stained; the furniture was in keeping; there were old pictures, old silver and brass, old books—it was as if I had suddenly dropped into a setting of the seventeenth century.
But the girl was modern enough. She seemed to be about nineteen or twenty years old. She was tallish, slenderish, graceful; her hair was brown, her eyes grey, her face bright with healthy colour. I thought it probable that she spent most of her life out of doors, and I pictured her in tweeds and strong shoes, tramping the hills. But just then she was very smart in indoor things, and I was thankful that I myself, now that my outer wrappings had been discarded, was wearing a new suit, and looked rather more respectable than when I knocked at the door.
There was a lamp on the table, recently lighted, and the girl turned up the wick, and as its glow increased turned and looked at me, more narrowly.
“You’re a stranger, aren’t you?” she said. “You don’t belong to these parts?”
“Quite a stranger,” I answered, “or I shouldn’t have been so foolish as to attempt what I was attempting.” I gave her a brief account of what I had been after. “So you see how lucky I am to be saved, as you have saved me! And please allow me to introduce myself—my name’s Alvery Craye, and I come from London.”