CHAPTER III.
THE GRANGE.
The excited nerves of children people the darkness of the nursery with phantoms. The moral and mental darkness of suspense provokes, after its sort, a similar phantasmagoria. Alice Maybell’s heart grew still, and her cheeks paled as she looked with most unreasonable alarm upon the carriage, which had come to a standstill.
There was, however, the sense of a great stake, of great helplessness, of great but undefined possible mischiefs, such as to the “look-out” of a rich galleon in the old piratical days, would have made a strange sail, on the high seas, always an anxious object on the horizon.
And now Miss Alice Maybell was not reassured by observing the enemy’s driver get down, and taking the horses by the head, back the carriage far enough across the road, to obstruct their passage, and this had clearly been done by the direction of the lady in the carriage.
They had now reached the point of obstruction, the driver pulled up; Miss Maybell had lowered the chaise window and was peeping. She saw a tall woman, wrapped up and reclining, as I have said. Her face she could not see, for it was thickly veiled, but she held her hand, from which she had pulled her glove, to her ear, and it was not a young hand nor very refined,—lean and masculine, on the contrary, and its veins and sinews rather strongly marked. The woman was listening, evidently, with attention, and her face, veiled as it was, was turned away so as to bring her ear towards the speakers in the expected colloquy.
Miss Alice Maybell saw the driver exchange a look with hers that seemed to betoken old acquaintance.
“I say, give us room to pass, will ye?” said Miss Maybell’s man.
“Where will you be going to?” inquired the other, and followed the question with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder, toward the lady in the tweed wrappers, putting out his tongue and winking at the same time.
“To Church Carwell,” answered the man.
“To Church Carwell, ma’am,” repeated the driver over his shoulder to the reclining figure.