It was late in the evening of an August day when Captain Chancellor and his wife reached Halswood. Beauchamp had been anxious to complete the journey at once without any halts by the way, but to do this it had been necessary to leave Winsley very early in the morning, in consequence of which Eugenia was very tired. A certain excitement had kept her up during the first part of the journey, an excitement arising from mingled causes, but of which the anticipation of the glories of Halswood about to be revealed to her was a much less considerable one than would have been generally credited. Till they had passed Marley Junction, the ugly familiar station where everybody coming south from or going north to Wareborough and Bridgenorth always changed carriages, Eugenia had not been without a childish hope that she might catch sight of some home face; Frank perhaps, or more probably his brother, or not impossibly her father even. A sort of warm thrill of pleasure passed through her at the thought; it was more than two months since she had seen arty one of the friends among whom her nineteen years of girlhood had been passed, and before her marriage she had never been away from her father’s house for more than a fortnight—some amount of home-sickness was surely to be excused. All the way to Marley she felt as if she were going home in reality; the sight of a tall chimney, the dirty smoke-begrimed red of the streets of brick houses of the first little manufacturing town through which they passed made the tears come into her eyes. Her husband noticed their dewy appearance and remonstrated with her on the folly of sitting close beside the window, “with that abominable smoke and filthy smuts flying in.” He got up and shut the window, remarking as he did so that railway lines to civilised places should really not be cut through these atrocious manufacturing districts; he trusted nothing would ever necessitate his entering Wareborough or Bridgenorth or any of these Wareshire towns again.
Eugenia said nothing, and changed her seat to the opposite side of the carriage as she was bidden. She had felt no temptation to confide to her husband the real cause of the emotion he had not even imagined to be such, but her eyes did not immediately recover themselves, and Marley once left behind, her spirits fell. Every mile of the unfamiliar country through which their journey now lay seemed to increase her painful sense of loneliness and strangeness.
“Oh,” thought she, as they at last reached Chilworth, the nearest point to Halswood. “Oh, if only this were Bridgenorth, and we were going to the little house, or even to the lodgings we used to talk of living in there, and Sydney perhaps waiting to welcome us.”
The tears got the length of dropping this time. She made no effort to conceal them, for by now it was too dark for her husband to see her face.
No sensation of any kind was perceptible at the little station on their arrival. Under the circumstances, of course any demonstration of rejoicing at the home-coming of the new lord of the greater part of the adjacent soil would have been the extreme of bad taste, and there was nothing by which a stranger could have guessed that the lady and gentleman who got out of the train and quietly passed through the station-gate to the carriage waiting outside were persons of more than ordinary local importance, save perhaps a certain extra obsequiousness on the part of the very unofficial-looking station-master, and a somewhat greater than usual readiness to bestir himself on the part of the solitary porter. Mrs Chancellor, however, was far too self-absorbed to notice anything of the kind; it had never occurred to her to think of herself and her husband as objects of interest or curiosity to the outside world, and had the joy bells been ringing and bonfires blazing she would probably have turned to her companion with an inquiry as to the cause.
There was a momentary delay as she was getting into the carriage—Captain Chancellor turned back to give some additional instruction respecting the luggage. Eugenia standing waiting could not fail to notice that the brougham was a new one, and that everything about it, including the deep mourning livery of the men-servants, was perfectly well-appointed.
“What a nice carriage this is, Beauchamp,” she said, when the door was shut, and they were rolling smoothly and swiftly away.
“Yes,” he replied, not ill-pleased by her admiration; “I wrote for it when I first came down here. There was nothing fit for use. Herbert Chancellor never brought any carriages down here—not of course that they would have been mine if he had. Yes, it is a first-rate little brougham. Did you notice the horses? Oh no, by-the-bye it was too dark.”
“I did not notice them. The lamps lighted up the carriage, and drew my attention to it. The horses were more in the shade. Not that I should venture to give an opinion on them. You know how dreadfully ignorant I am of such things.”
“You will soon pick up quite as much knowledge of the kind as you need. I loathe and detest ‘horsy’ women. Roma even, if she were any one but herself, I should say had a shade too much of that sort of thing. But on the other hand, of course, it doesn’t do to be in a state of utter ignorance about such matters.”