"Seven or eight hours' incessant dancing have no effect on such constitutions as ours, Captain Cavendish! We have been showing Miss Henderson the lions of Speckport!"
"And what does Miss Henderson think of those animals?"
"I like Speckport," she said, scarcely taking the trouble to lift her proud eyes; "this part of it particularly."
She was in no mood for conversation, and took little pains to conceal it. "Not at home to suitors," was printed plainly on those contracted black brows, and in the somber depths of those gloomy eyes. Captain Cavendish lifted his hat and rode on, and the distrait beauty just deigned a formal bend of her regal head, and no more.
Laura smiled a little maliciously to herself, not at all sorry to see the irresistible Captain Cavendish rather snubbed than otherwise. There was nowhere to go now but to Redmon, and they drove along the quiet road, in the gathering twilight of the short March afternoon. A gray and eerie twilight, too, the low flat sky, of uniform leaden tint, hanging dark over the black fields and moaning sea. The trees, all along the road, stretched out gaunt, bare arms, and the cries of the whirling sea-gulls came up in the cold evening blasts. They had fallen into silence, involuntarily—the gloom of the hour and the dreary scene weighing down the spirits of all. Something of the gloominess of the flat dull landscape lay shadowed on the face of the heiress, as she shivered behind her wraps in the raw sea-gusts.
Ann Nettleby stood at her own door as the party drove by. The cottage looked forlorn and stripped, too, with only bare poles where the scarlet-runners used to climb, and a dismal entanglement of broom stalks, where the roses and sweetbrier used to flourish. Mr. Darcy drew rein for a moment to nod to the girl.
"How d'ye do, Ann! Any news from that runaway Cherrie yet?"
"No, sir," said Ann, her eyes fixed curiously on the heiress.
"Is this Redmon?" asked Miss Henderson, looking over the cottage at the red brick house. "What a dismal place!"
Dismal, surely, if house ever was! All the shutters were closed, all the doors fastened, no smoke ascending from the broken chimneys, no sound of life within or without; not even a dog, to humanize the ghostly solitude of the place. Black, and grim, and ghostly, it reared its gloomy front to the gloomy sky; the stripped and skeleton trees moaning weirdly about it, an air of decay and desolation over all. Forlorn and deserted, it looked like a haunted house, and such Speckport believed it to be. The two young ladies leaning on Mr. Darcy's arms as they walked up the bleak, bare avenue, between the leafless trees, drew closer to his side, in voiceless awe. The rattling branches seemed to catch at the heiress as she passed them, to catch savagely at this new mistress, out of whose face every trace of color had slowly died away.