No other travellers alighted at Penkridge, and he went away to claim the baggage, while she waited, cold and depressed, on the little platform which, lit by a single oil lamp, looked down on a dim churchyard. Dusk was passing into night, and the wind, sweeping across the flat, whipped her skirts and chilled her blood. Her courage sank. A light or two betrayed the nearness of the town, but in every other direction dull lines of willows or pale stretches of water ran into the night.
Five minutes before she had resented Basset’s company, now she was glad to see him return. He led the way to the road in silence. “The carriage is late,” he muttered, but even as he spoke the quick tramp of a pair of horses pushed to speed broke on them, lights appeared, a moment later a fly pulled up beside them and turned. “You are late,” Basset said.
“There!” the man replied. “Minutes might be guineas since trains came in, dang ’em! Give me the days when five minutes made neither man nor mouse, and gentry kept their own time.”
“Well, let us get off now.”
“I ask no better, Squire. Please yourself and you’ll please me.”
When they were shut in, Basset laughed. “Stafford manners!” he said. “You’ll become used to them!”
“Is this my uncle’s carriage?” she asked.
“No,” he replied, smiling in the darkness. “He does not keep one.”
She said no more. Though she could not see him, her shoulder touched his, and his nearness and the darkness in which they sat troubled her, though she was not timid. They rode thus for a minute or two, then trundled through a narrow street, dimly lit by shop windows; again they were in the dark and the country. Presently the pace dropped to a walk as they began to ascend.
She fancied, peering out on her side, that they were winding up through woods. Branches swept the sides of the carriage. They jolted into ruts and jolted out of them. By and by they were clear of the trees and the road seemed to be better. The moon, newly risen, showed her a dreary upland, bare and endless, here dotted with the dark stumps of trees, there of a deeper black as if fire had swept over it and scarred it. They met no one, saw no sign of habitation. To the girl, accustomed all her life to streets and towns, the place seemed infinitely desolate—a place of solitude and witches and terror and midnight murder.