“Rochford and the papers! To sign! What do you mean: In the middle of the night!”
And here there came a white figure to the window, crying “Ally--are you sure, are you sure, Wat, all’s right with Ally?” through the midst of the question and reply.
“I tell you, father, Sir Walter’s dying. Be ready, be at the cross-roads if you can in half an hour. It’s three miles further, but this horse goes like the wind. Don’t stop for anything. In half an hour. It’s true; it’s not a dream,” he shouted, turning round to go away.
“Wat! dying, did you say? And a ball in the house! Wat! had they got the doctor? what was it? Wat!”
“I can’t stay. He may be dead before we get there. In half an hour at the cross-roads,” cried the youth, turning the horse with dangerous abruptness: and in a minute or two all was still again. The darkness and silence closed round, and the astonished family, terrified, startled out of the profound quiet of their repose, blinked, dazzled at the newly lit candles, and said to each other wildly, “Dying! perhaps before they can get there. But Ally--Ally and Wat are all right, thank God!” And soon there was a twinkle of lights from window to window. The servants got up last, being less easily awakened; but Mrs. Penton had already some tea ready for her husband, and Anne, in a little dressing-gown, was collecting the warmest coats and wrappers which the family possessed, before Mr. Penton himself, very grave, almost tremulous, in the sudden emergency, could get ready. His fingers trembled over his buttons. Sir Walter, whom he had not seen for years; the old man who had been as one who would never die; the kind uncle of old; the causeless antagonist of later years. It was strange beyond measure to Edward Penton to be thus sent for with such startling and tragic suddenness in the middle of the night. “What shall I do?” he said, wringing his hands, “if he should die before--” “Oh, Edward, make haste; lose no time; a minute may do it,” cried his wife in her anxiety. They almost pushed him out, Anne running before to see that the gate was open, with a lantern to show him the way. There was no one else to carry the lantern, and she went with him up the steep ascent with the flicker of the light flaring unsteadily about the dark road. She was very thinly clad, with an ulster over her dressing-gown, and her poor little feet thrust into her boots, and shivered as she ran, and stumbled with the lantern, which was too big for her, her father being too much absorbed in his thoughts to perceive what a burden it was. Anne shivered, but not altogether from cold. Her heart was beating high, the quick pulsations vibrating to her lively brain, and alarm, awe, the indefinite melancholy and horror of death mingling with that keen exhilaration of quickened living which any tremendous event brings with it to the young. It was a wonderful thing to be happening, to be mixed up in, to realize so much more vividly than even her father did. Her very lantern and course along this steep and dark road in the middle of the night gave a thrilling consciousness to Anne of having a great deal to do with it, of being really an actor in the drama. She would not leave him till the lights of the dog-cart showed far off, coming on swiftly, silently, through the dark, before any sound could be heard. It was all wonderful; the portentous darkness, without a star; the cold, the silence, the consciousness of what was going on; the sense, which took her breath away, that perhaps after all the lawyer, with his papers, and her father, who had to sign them, might be too late; that even now, when she turned to make her way, trembling a little with cold and fright and nervous excitement, Sir Walter might be dead, and Penton be “ours!” Mother would be my lady in any case; the servants would have to be taught to call her so. And all this might be determined in an hour or two, perhaps before daylight! Anne shivered more and more, and was afraid of the darkness under the hedge-rows as she went home alone with the heavy lantern. She had a great mind to leave it under the hedge and run all the way home, without minding the dark; but such darkness as that was not a thing which a girl could make up her resolution not to mind.