‘I dare say,’ said Wylder, with a sneer,
’he was asking affectionately for me, eh?’
’No; not that I recollect—in fact
there was not time; but I suppose he does not like
you less for what has happened; you’re worth
cultivating now, you know.’
Wylder was leaning on his elbow, with just the tip
of his thumb to his teeth, with a vicious character
of biting it, which was peculiar to him when anything
vexed him considerably, and glancing sharply this way
and that—
‘You know,’ he said, suddenly, ’we
are a sort of cousins; his mother was a Brandon—a
second cousin of Dorcas’s—no, of her
father’s—I don’t know exactly
how. He’s a pushing fellow, one of the coolest
hands I know; but I don’t see that I can be
of any use to him, or why the devil I should.
I say, old fellow, come out and have a weed, will
you?’
I raised my eyes. Miss Brandon had left the room.
I don’t know that her presence would have prevented
his invitation, for Wylder’s wooing was certainly
of the coolest. So forth we sallied, and under
the autumnal foliage, in the cool amber light of the
declining evening, we enjoyed our cheroots; and with
them, Wylder his thoughts; and I, the landscape, and
the whistling of the birds; for we waxed Turkish and
taciturn over our tobacco.
RELATING HOW A LONDON GENTLEMAN APPEARED IN REDMAN’S
DELL.
I believe the best rule in telling a story is to follow
events chronologically. So let me mention that
just about the time when Wylder and I were filming
the trunks of the old trees with wreaths of lingering
perfume, Miss Rachel Lake had an unexpected visitor.
There is, near the Hall, a very pretty glen, called
Redman’s Dell, very steep, with a stream running
at the bottom of it, but so thickly wooded that in
summer time you can only now and then catch a glimpse
of the water gliding beneath you. Deep in this
picturesque ravine, buried among the thick shadows
of tall old trees, runs the narrow mill-road, which
lower down debouches on the end of the village street.
There, in the transparent green shadow, stand the
two mills—the old one with A.D. 1679, and
the Wylder arms, and the eternal ‘resurgam’
projecting over its door; and higher up, on a sort
of platform, the steep bank rising high behind it,
with its towering old wood overhanging and surrounding,
upon a site where one of king Arthur’s knights,
of an autumn evening, as he rode solitary in quest
of adventures, might have seen the peeping, gray gable
of an anchorite’s chapel dimly through the gilded
stems, and heard the drowsy tinkle of his vesper-bell,
stands an old and small two-storied brick and timber
house; and though the sun does not very often glimmer
on its windows, it yet possesses an air of sad, old-world
comfort—a little flower-garden lies in
front with a paling round it. But not every kind
of flowers will grow there, under the lordly shadow
of the elms and chestnuts.
