“Why are you so silent, Hugh; you have no secrets surely?”
“Hush, dear, we can not talk any more now; we have passed the church and the vicarage already—we are nearly home;” and as he spoke they came in sight of the lodge, where Catharine was waiting with her baby in her arms.
Fay smiled and nodded, and then they turned in at the gate, and the darkness seemed to swallow them up.
The avenue leading to Redmond Hall was the glory of the whole neighborhood.
Wayfarers, toiling along the hot and dusty road that leads from Singleton to Sandycliffe, always paused to look through the great gate at the green paradise beyond.
It was like a glade in some forest, so deep was its shadowy gloom, so unbroken its repose; while the arrowy sun-shafts flickered patterns on the mossy footpaths, or drew a golden girdle round some time-worn trunk.
Here stood the grand old oaks, under whose branches many a Redmond played as a child in the days before the Restoration—long before the time when Marmaduke, fifth baronet of that name, joined the forces of Rupert, and fell fighting by the side of his dead sons.
Here too were the aged beeches; some with contorted boles, and marvelously twisted limbs, like Titans struggling in their death-throes, and others with the sap of youth still flowing through their woody veins, as they stood clothed in the beauty of their prime. Fay had often played in this wonderful avenue. She remembered, when she was a child, rambling with her nurse in the Redmond woods, with their copses of nut-trees and wild-rose thickets; and their tiny sylvan lawns, starred over with woodland flowers, such as Spenser would have peopled “with bearded Fauns and Satyrs, who with their hornèd feet do wear the ground, and all the woody nymphs—the fair Hamadryades;” but though she peered eagerly out in the darkness, she could see nothing but the carriage lamps flashing on some bare trunk or gaunt skeleton branches.
“Dear Hugh,” she whispered, timidly, “how gloomy and strange it looks—just like an enchanted forest.”
“They have not thought fit to cut down the trees to give light to your ladyship,” observed her husband, laughing at her awe-struck tone. “Give me your hand, you foolish child; when we have passed the next turning you will see the old Hall. There will be light enough there;” and scarcely had the words passed his lips before the Hall burst upon them—a long low range of building, with its many windows brilliantly illuminated and ruddy with firelight, while through the open door the forms of the assembled servants moved hither and thither in a warm background of light.