CHAPTER XII
THE YEW WALK
Basset had been absent the greater part of the day, and returning at sunset had learned that Miss Audley had not come back from Brown Heath. The servant had hinted alarm—the Chase was lonely, the hour late; and Basset had hurried off without more, not doubting that John Audley was in the house.
Now he was sure that John Audley had been abroad at the time, and he suspected that Toft had known it, and had kept it from him. He stood for a moment in thought, then he crossed the court to Toft’s house. Mrs. Toft was cooking something savory in a bonnet before the fire, and the contrast between her warm cheerful kitchen and the stillness of the house from which he came struck him painfully. He told her that her daughter had received a blow on the head, and that Miss Audley needed supper—she had better attend to them.
Mrs. Toft was a stout woman, set by a placid and even temper above small surprises. She looked at the clock, a fork in her hand. “I can’t hurry it, Mr. Basset,” she said. “You may be Sir Robert Peel himself, but meat’s your master and will have its time. A knock on the head?” she continued, with a faint stirring of anxiety. “You don’t say so? Lor, Mr. Basset, who’d go to touch Etruria?”
“You’d better go and see.”
“But where’s Toft?”
Basset’s temper gave way at that. “God knows!” he said. “He ought to be here—and he’s not!” He went out.
Mrs. Toft stared after him, and by and by she let down her skirt and prepared to go into the house. “On the head?” she ruminated. “Well, ’Truria’s a tidy lot of hair! And I will say this, if there’s few points a man gives a woman, hair’s one of them.”
Meanwhile Basset had struck across the court and taken in the darkness the track which led in the direction of the Great House. The breeze, light but of an autumn coldness, swept the upland, whispering through the dying fern, and rustling in the clumps of trees by which he steered his course. He listened more than once, hoping that he might hear approaching footsteps, but he heard none, and presently he came to the yew-trees that masked the entrance to the gardens.
The trees formed a wall of blackness exceeding that of the darkest night, and Basset hesitated before he plunged into it. The growth of a century had long trespassed on the walk, a hundred and fifty yards long, which led through the yew-wood, and had been in its time a stately avenue trimmed to the neatness of a bowling green. Now it was little better than a tunnel, dark even at noon, and at night bristling with a hundred perils. Basset peered into the blackness, listened, hesitated. But he was honestly anxious on John Audley’s account, and contenting himself with exclaiming that the man was mad, he began to grope his way along the path.