‘Halloa! Raining!’ exclaimed Gilbert. ‘Do you mind a drop of rain?’ he added, ‘or will you ride home?’
‘Oh, I’m not afraid of a little weather,’ replied Otho. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Where you have never been yet,’ said his companion. ‘Down to the Townend, as they call it. Come along. It isn’t much out of our way to Thorsgarth.’
Otho followed in a docile manner. Now that he had got what he seemed to have been aiming at, his tête-à-tête with Gilbert, all traces of sullenness and impatience had vanished. Bulldogs, surly to all the world beside, are tame and obedient to their masters; and there was a good deal of the bulldog in the way in which Otho followed Gilbert about.
When they had got through the busiest and most inhabited part of the town, they found themselves almost alone in a steep street, descending rapidly towards the river. As they got farther down it, the houses gradually became more bare and rough-looking; and, some of them, more and more ancient in appearance. Looking down the hill, it appeared as if the street ended in a cul de sac, as if there were no egress that way from Bradstane town. And the wall which appeared to shut the place in, and block up the road at that side, consisted of the frontage of two high factories. There was in reality a narrow passage between them, through which access was obtained to the river, and by means of which one arrived at an iron footbridge, ugly, but useful. This could not be perceived at the distance they now were from the mills.
‘What on earth do you want down here?’ growled Otho, between two puffs at his pipe.
‘We possess a bit of property down there,’ Gilbert answered him. ‘It is perfectly meaningless and perfectly useless to us. It cumbers the ground, and has swallowed up a pot of money which we ought to be enjoying the benefit of now. I sometimes walk down to it, to look at it, and think what a folly it was. “Langstroth’s Folly,” it ought to be called. Townend Mills is the name it actually bears. There it is!’ as the moon shone out brightly for a few minutes, and showed the dark mass of the factories rising almost directly in front of them.
‘You’re a queer one!’ said Otho, not without a kind of admiration in his tones. ‘Where’s the sense of fretting yourself by coming and looking at it? It’s like trying to heal a raw by scraping.’
‘Your simile would be just, if I did irritate myself,’ replied Gilbert, gently. ‘My dear Otho’—he spoke impressively, and laid his hand for a moment on the other’s arm—‘I never let anything irritate me. I make it a rule——’
‘Never—I never say never,’ said Otho. ‘No saying what will turn up. Leave it to chance. That’s the best way. Besides, Mag—some one was saying to me, only the other day, that it’s only very young people who never do what they oughtn’t.’