In ten minutes the trap was ready, and the bailiff started the horse at a walk down the rutted lane.
“Give me them reins, ye fat oaf!” Ellen exclaimed. “D’ye think to-morrow’ll do for this?”
She shook up the horse, and the trap rocked and jolted. She made a cut with the whip as they reached the street; but Jessie, her face buried in the shawl, saw nothing of the throng a couple of score yards away.
“He trots better nor he gallops,” the bailiff suggested mildly, as they turned into another miry lane.
Soon Ellen passed the reins to the bailiff and set her arm about Jessie’s swaying, jolting body. She turned back a corner of the shawl to say in her ear, “‘Twill be all right yet, dearie! Come, be easy, now.”
Before them, where the road wound round the headland, spread the impenetrable blackness of the sea. A sharp turn showed lights half a mile ahead, a little way up the hill; and as they drew nearer the bailiff remarked, as if the fact were not without interest, “He’s up, for a wonder; I’d have laid a crown he’d gone to bed.”
He pulled up at a wooden gate that had neither lodge nor avenue. One end of the large house a little way up the hill was brightly lighted.
“Lean on my shoulder, lassie,” Ellen said. “And you, Matthew, just step as if ye knew what ye’d come about.”
They passed up the treeless drive, and at a dark side door the bailiff rang a bell. A servant appeared with a candle, the bailiff said a few words, and they were shown into a small office with a desk and ledgers and tin boxes. The servant left the candle on the desk, and they waited.
In five minutes a heavily-built, grave-looking, elderly man appeared in the doorway. He looked first at one, then at another of the three, and, finally, he turned to the bailiff.