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Tadman stood at the open door, peering out and listening, and still without result. Then, with a shrill sudden sound through the long empty passages, there came a shriek, a prolonged piercing cry of terror or of pain, which turned Mrs. Tadman's blood to ice, and brought Ellen to her side, pale and breathless. "What was that?" "What was that?"
Ellen Carley had been married something less than a fortnight, and had come to look upon the dismal old farm-house by the river with a more accustomed eye than when Mrs. Tadman had taken her from room to room on a journey of inspection. Not that the place seemed any less dreary and ugly to her to-day than it had seemed at the very first. Familiarity could not make it pleasant.
Tadman only working laboriously because existence was more endurable to her when she was busy than when she was idle.
"But perhaps he never will marry," argued Ellen coolly. "O, yes, he will, Miss Carley," replied Mrs. Tadman, with another significant movement of her head; "he's set his heart on that, and he's set his heart on the young woman he means to marry." "He can't marry her unless she's willing to be his wife, any how," said Ellen, reddening a little.
"She must be a very weak-minded young woman if she marries him against her will," Ellen said laughing; and then ran off to get the tea ready, leaving Mrs. Tadman to her meditations, which were not of a lively nature at the best of times.
In the mean time he went on living his lonely sulky kind of life, drinking a great deal more than was good for him in his own churlish manner, and laughing to scorn any attempt at remonstrance from his wife or Mrs. Tadman.
Although Mrs. Whitelaw did not, like Mrs. Tadman, associate the idea of the stranger's visit with any apprehension of her husband's impending ruin, she could not deny that some kind of change had arisen in him since that event.
Whitelaw gave his wife the candlestick with an air of profound indifference, there was an uneasy look in his countenance which she could plainly see, and which perplexed her not a little. "Come, Mrs. Tadman," she said decisively, "we had better see into this. It was a woman's voice, and must have been one of the girls, I suppose.
The ceilings were lower too, the beams that supported them more massive, the diamond-paned windows smaller and more heavily leaded, and there was a faint musty odour as of a place that was kept shut up and uninhabited. "There's nothing more to see here," said Mrs. Tadman quickly; "I had better go back I don't know what brought me here; it was talking, I suppose, made me come without thinking.
Mother Tadman will march, of course, between this and my wedding-day. I sha'n't want her when I've a wife to keep house for me." "Of course not," said the bailiff. "Relations are always dangerous about a place ready to make mischief at every hand's turn." "O, Mr. Whitelaw, you won't turn her out, surely your own flesh and blood, and after so many years of service.
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