“I very much feared they would be late,” she observed, sitting down near her brother: and at that moment the church clock began to strike twelve.
“A good thing if they were too late!” he answered. “Listen.”
She supposed he wanted to count the strokes—what else could he be listening to? And now, by the stir at the distant gates, she saw that the bridal party had come out.
“Good heavens, what’s that?” shrieked Mrs. Carradyne, starting from her chair.
“The chimes,” stoically replied the Captain. And he proceeded to hum through the tune of “The Bay of Biscay,” and beat a noiseless accompaniment with his foot.
“The Chimes, Emma,” he repeated, when the melody had finished itself out. “I ordered them to be played. It’s the last day of the old year, you know.”
Laughing slightly at her consternation, Captain Monk closed the window and quitted the room. As Mrs. Carradyne took her handkerchief from her pocket to pass it over her face, grown white with startled terror, the note she had put there came out also, and fell on the carpet.
Picking it up, she stood at the window, gazing forth. Her sight was not what it used to be; but she discerned the bride and bridegroom enter their carriage and drive away; next she saw the bridesmaid get into the carriage from the Hall, assisted by Hubert, and that drive off in its turn. She saw the crowd disperse, this way and that; she even saw the gig there, its occupant talking with John Cale. But she did not look at him particularly; and she had not the slightest idea but that Harry was in India.
And all that time an undercurrent of depression was running riot in her heart. None knew with what a strange terror she had grown to dread the chimes.
She sat down now and opened Mrs. Peveril’s note. It treated chiefly of the utterly astounding ways that untravelled old lady was meeting with in foreign parts. “If you will believe me,” wrote she, “the girl that waits on us wears carpet slippers down at heel, and a short cotton jacket for best, and she puts the tea-tray before me with the handle of the tea-pot turned to me and the spout standing outwards, and she comes right into the bed-room of a morning with Charles’s shaving-water without knocking.” But the one sentence that arrested Mrs. Carradyne’s attention above any other was the following: “I reckon that by this time you have grown well acquainted with our esteemed young friend. He is a good, kindly gentleman, and I’m sure never could have done anything to deserve his wife’s treatment of him.”