The red-faced guard was as good as his word; he and I became famous friends before I reached the end of my journey. At every station at which we stopped he came to the window to see how I was getting on, and whether I was in want of anything, and was altogether so kind to me that I was quite sorry to part from him when the train reached Tydsbury, and left me, a minute later, standing, a solitary waif, on the little platform.
The one solitary fly of which the station could boast was laid under contribution. My little box was tossed on to its roof; I myself was shut up inside; the word was given, "To Dupley Walls;" the station was left behind, and away we went, jolting and rumbling along the quiet country lanes, and under overarching trees, all aglow just now with autumn's swift-fading beauty. The afternoon was closing in, and the wind was rising, sweeping up with melancholy soughs from the dim wooded hollows where it had lain asleep till the sun went down; garnering up the fallen leaves like a cunning miser, wherever it could find a hiding-place for them, and then dying suddenly down, and seeming to hold its breath as if listening for the footsteps of the coming winter.
In the western sky hung a huge tumbled wrack of molten cloud like the ruins of some vast temple of the gods of eld. Chasmed buttresses, battlements overthrown; on the horizon a press of giants, shoulder against shoulder, climbing slowly to the rescue; in mid-sky a praying woman; farther afield a huge head, and a severed arm the fingers of which were clenched in menace: all these things I saw, and a score others, as the clouds changed from minute to minute in form and brightness, while the stars began to glow out like clusters of silver lilies in the eastern sky.
We kept jolting on for so long a time through the twilight lanes, and the evening darkened so rapidly, that I began to grow frightened. It was like being lifted out of a dungeon, when the old fly drew up with a jerk, and a shout of "House there!" and when I looked out and saw that we were close to the lodge entrance of some park.
Presently a woman, with a child in her arms, came out of the lodge and proceeded to open the gate for us. Said the driver--"How's Tootlums to-night?"
The woman shouted something in reply, but I don't think the old fellow heard her.
"Ay, ay," he called out, "Tootlums will be a famous young shaver one of these days," and with that he whipped up his horse, and away we went.
The drive up the avenue, for such at the time I judged it to be, and such it proved to be, did not occupy many minutes. The fly came to a stand, and the driver got down and opened the door. "Now, young lady, here you are," he said, and I found myself in front of the main entrance to Dupley Walls.
It was too dark by this time for me to discern more than the merest outline of the place. I saw that it was very large, and I noticed that not even one of its hundred windows showed the least glimmer of light. It loomed vast, dark, and silent, as if deserted by every living thing.
The old driver gave a hearty pull at the bell, and the muffled clamour reached me where I stood. I was quaking with fears and apprehensions of that unknown future on whose threshold I was standing. Would Love or Hate open for me the doors of Dupley Walls? I was strung to such a pitch that it seemed impossible for any lesser passion to be handmaiden to my needs.