“And dine in the room underneath?” asked Crow, with a comical look of distress at this suggestion.
“Well, let us go somewhere else. Is there no other inn in the neighborhood?”
“There's a small public-house near the gate of Cro' Martin, to be sure.”
“Then we'll dine there. I'll order a chaise at four o'clock, and we 'll drive over together. And now, I 'll just return to the house, for this wading here is not much to my taste.”
Mr. Merl returned gloomily to the house, his mind too deeply occupied with his own immediate interests to bestow any thought upon Mary Martin. The weather assuredly offered but little inducement to linger out of doors, for, as the morning wore on, the rain and wind increased in violence, while vast masses of mist swept over the sea and were carried on shore, leaving only, at intervals, little patches of the village to be seen,--dreary, storm-beaten, and desolate! Merl shuddered, as he cast one last look at this sad-colored picture, and entered the inn.
Has it ever been your ill-fortune, good reader, to find yourself alone in some dreary, unfrequented spot, the weather-bound denizen of a sorry inn, without books or newspapers, thrown upon the resources of your own thoughts, so sure to take their color from the dreary scene around them? It is a trying ordeal for the best of tempers. Your man of business chafes and frets against the inactivity; your man of leisure sorrows over monotony that makes idleness a penalty. He whose thoroughfare in life is the pursuit of wealth thinks of all those more fortunate than himself then hurrying on to gain, while he who is the mark of the world's flatteries and attentions laments over the dismal desolation of an uncompanionable existence.
If Mr. Merl did not exactly occupy any one of these categories, he fancied, at least, that he oscillated amidst them all. It was, indeed, his good pleasure to imagine himself a “man upon town,” who played a little, discounted a little, dealt a little in old pictures, old china, old cabinets, and old plate, but all for mere pastime,--something, as he would say, “to give him an interest in it;” and there, certainly, he was right. Nothing so surely imparted an “interest” in Mr. Merl's eyes as having an investment. Objects of art, the greatest triumphs of genius, landscape the richest eye ever ranged over, political events that would have awakened a sense of patriotism in the dullest and coldest, all came before him as simple questions of profit and loss.