It was as much as I could do myself, though I ran valiantly, to maintain my distance; and that (since I knew my countrymen so near) was become a chief point with me. A hundred yards farther on the cart whipped out of the high-road into a lane embowered with leafless trees, and became lost to view. When I saw it next the driver had increased his advantage considerably, but all danger was at an end, and the horses had again declined into a hobbling walk. Persuaded they could not escape me, I took my time, and recovered my breath as I followed them.
Presently the lane twisted at right angles and showed me a gate and the beginning of a gravel sweep; and a little after, as I continued to advance, a red-brick house about seventy years old, in a fine style of architecture, and presenting a front of many windows to a lawn and garden. Behind, I could see outhouses and the peaked roofs of stacks; and I judged that a manor-house had in some way declined to be the residence of a tenant-farmer, careless alike of appearances and substantial comfort. The marks of neglect were visible on every side, in flower-bushes straggling beyond the borders, in the ill-kept turf, and in the broken windows that were incongruously patched with paper or stuffed with rags. A thicket of trees, mostly evergreen, fenced the place round and secluded it from the eyes of prying neighbours. As I came in view of it, on that melancholy winter’s morning, in the deluge of the falling rain, and with the wind that now rose in occasional gusts and hooted over the old chimneys, the cart had already drawn up at the front-door steps, and the driver was already in earnest discourse with Mr. Burchell Fenn. He was standing with his hands behind his back—a man of a gross, misbegotten face and body, dewlapped like a bull and red as a harvest moon; and in his jockey-cap, blue coat and top-boots, he had much the air of a good, solid tenant-farmer.
The pair continued to speak as I came up the approach, but received me at last in a sort of goggling silence. I had my hat in my hand.
“I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Burchell Fenn?” said I.
“The same, sir,” replied Mr. Fenn, taking off his jockey-cap in answer to my civility, but with the distant look and the tardy movements of one who continues to think of something else. “And who may you be?” he asked.
“I shall tell you afterwards,” said I. “Suffice it, in the meantime, that I come on business.”
He seemed to digest my answer laboriously, his mouth gaping, his little eyes never straying from my face.
“Suffer me to point out to you, sir,” I resumed, “that this is a devil of a wet morning; and that the chimney corner, and possibly a glass of something hot, are clearly indicated.”
Indeed, the rain was now grown to be a deluge; the gutters of the house roared; the air was filled with the continuous, strident crash. The stolidity of his face, on which the rain streamed, was far from reassuring me. On the contrary, I was aware of a distinct qualm of apprehension, which was not at all lessened by a view of the driver, craning from his perch to observe us with the expression of a fascinated bird. So we stood silent, when the prisoner again began to sneeze from the body of the cart; and at the sound, prompt as a transformation, the driver had whipped up his horses and was shambling off round the corner of the house, and Mr. Fenn, recovering his wits with a gulp, had turned to the door behind him.
“Come in, come in, sir,” he said. “I beg your pardon, sir; the lock goes a trifle hard.”