FullReads

She stood watching him while he carefully loaded the weapons and rammed home the wads. It is possible that she had a mind to relent, and suggest his whiling the time away with a game of dominoes. At any rate she went so far as to hazard–with a glance at the ivory tablets, and another at the hearth and the elbow-chairs–that he would find the waiting tedious.

‘Not if you can supply me with a book, ma’am,’ he answered, laying the two guns on the table, after sweeping the dominoes aside to make room for them.

Mrs Tresize left the room and returned bearing a volume–Blair’s Grave. She understood (she said) that the doctor preferred serious reading.

‘Among all the poets that ever wrote,’ said Doctor Unonius blandly, ‘with the possible exception of Young, I have the greatest contempt for Blair. He has the one unpardonable fault (not the one mentioned by Horace, though he has that, too): he is dishonest. The finest passage in the Grave is impudently stolen from Dryden, and marred in the stealing. But I thank Heaven, ma’am, that I can read any printed matter; and when Blair disgusts me I can always take a satisfactory revenge by turning him into Latin Elegiacs; by turning him, so to speak, in his Grave,’ concluded the doctor grimly.

This routed the lady, but she managed to get in the last word. ‘Well, I can’t pretend to understand you and your learning,’ she answered tartly; ‘but since we seem to be thanking Heaven, I’ll thank it that I have a fire lit in my bedroom. It’s the room just overhead, and I’m going to ask Tryphena to sleep with me when she has put up the bolts. Or, maybe, we shall sit up there for a while and talk. But anyhow, we are light sleepers, the both of us, and if there’s any trouble you have only to call. Good-night.’

‘Good-night, ma’am!’ said Doctor Unonius, and opened the door for her. Left alone, he went back to the table and began to turn the pages of Blair.

CHAPTER VI.

Doctor Unonius had drawn the table close beside an elbow-chair to the right of the fireplace. The excuse he made to himself was that, with a bright fire burning, he could the better see to read by blending its blaze with the light of the lamp. But it may be conjectured that, having disposed himself thus comfortably, he indulged in a nap. A strange sound fetched him out of it with a bounce. He leapt to his feet, and stood for a moment stupidly rubbing his eyes. The fire had burnt itself low. Blair’s Grave lay face-downward on the hearth-rug, whither it had slipped from his knee. The clock in the corner ticked at its same deliberate pace, but its hands pointed to twenty minutes past two.

What was the sound? Or, rather–since it no longer continued–what had it been? As it seemed to him, it had resembled the beat of horses’ hoofs at a gallop; a stampede almost. It could not have gone past on the high-road, for the noise had never been loud: yet it seemed to come from the high-road for a while, and then to drop suddenly and be drawn out in a series of faint thudded echoes.

Doctor Unonius went to the window, drew the curtains, unbarred a shutter, and stared out into the night. A newly risen moon hung low in the south-east, just above the coping of the courtlage wall, but the wall with its shrubs and clumps of ivy, massed in blackest shadow, excluded all view of the terrestrial world. The sound, whatever it had been, was not repeated.

Doctor Unonius stood for half a minute or so and gazed out with his forehead pressed to the pane. Then he closed the shutter again, let fall the curtain, and with a slight shiver went back to the fireplace.