Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/50

44 siastic tenantry were hovering through her brain. Mr Howard had only the other day given her an account of a grand reception of the sort, when the farmers had taken out the horses and dragged their landlord to his door. The excitement was almost too great to be borne, and Ascelinde in this supreme moment, the culminating point as it were of her life, put out her hand mechanically and pressed her daughter's fingers with convulsive force.

Some acacia-trees were passed – five on one side, and six on the other; the carriage jolted heavily into a rut and heavily out of it again. Ascelinde saw the driver pointing his whip, as if at something ahead of them. That must be Draskócs – that must be It! Ascelinde could stand this no longer: she wrenched her hand away from her daughter, and she put it over her face.

She had scarcely done so when the carriage stood still. She looked up with a start. Dr Komers was slowly descending from his seat, and Gretchen, leaning over the side, was staring eagerly on in front.

Oh, irony of Fate! Had a horse come down, or had a wheel given way just as they were so near reaching the wished-for goal? Were they to be kept here in the middle of this cart-track when they had all but arrived at Draskócs? Must they be detained here, at its very gates?

Ascelinde stood up in the carriage in an agony of impatience. There was a long, low, tumble-down house – a lower edition of the sort they had passed at intervals in the forenoon – staring at them over a wall of rotten planks.

"Dr Komers, what has happened?" cried Ascelinde, trembling with agitation. "Why are we being stopped here? Are we going to be robbed? – or are the horses lame?"

Dr Komers having carefully descended to the ground, adjusted his spectacles and said, in a rather diffident tone, –

"Nothing has happened."

"Can't you take the stones out of the horses' feet, or whatever it is?" exhorted the Countess. "Be quick, I implore you!"

"There are no stones in the horses' feet, Madame Mohr."

"Then the man is drunk, I am certain of it; you must take the reins."

By this time Vincenz was rubbing his spectacles hard. "I assure you the man is perfectly sober," he said, hesitating.

"Then what have we stopped here for?" demanded the big woman, with a tragedy stare, as she stood to her full height in the carriage.

The driver was quietly filling his pipe, with the reins flung over his arm, while the horses stood with lowered heads and a dejected droop of the shoulders.

Gretchen sat still, leaning over the side, looking with a sort of fascination at the crumbling house which stood behind the rotten planks. The planks seemed to run all round in a square, and they covered half the height of the house, so that only the roof and a narrow strip of the wall remained visible. Through a chink between two boards a pink rose had pushed its inquisitive head, and nodded them a hospitable welcome. To the right and to the left, to the back and to the front, the waste land stretched; the cart-track ran on, its dust lying undisturbed by any passer-by. There was no human being in sight, and no other house within eye-range, except where, in the far distance, a group of acacias