CHAPTER XLIV.
The Poythresses were cordiality itself. No sooner had the Don’s foot crossed their threshold, than Mr. Poythress, taking him by the hand, gave him a warm welcome to Oakhurst. “Yes, you are truly welcome,” said Mrs. Poythress, taking the other hand; while Lucy, too, smiled in hospitable assent.
The latter has told me since that she was struck, at the time, with a certain something very singular in his manner of meeting these courtesies. As the boat had neared the shore, she had observed that the Don grew more and more silent; and now, in response to greetings of such marked cordiality, he had merely bowed,—bowed low, but without a word. “Are you cold?” asked Mrs. Poythress, looking up into his face, as they entered the sitting-room. “Why, you are positively shivering! Mr. Poythress, do stir the fire. Are you subject to chills? No?”
“The wind was very keen on the River,” said the Don. He spoke with difficulty, and as he leaned over the fire, warming his hands, his teeth chattered.
Charley whispered to Mrs. Poythress.
“Not a drop,” replied she; “you know Mr. Poythress will not allow a gill of anything of the kind to be kept in the house. I am so sorry.”
“Well, it does not matter. Do you know it is past one o’clock? Suppose all of you go to bed and leave him to me.”
“Now,” said Charley, when he and the Don were left alone, “let’s adjourn to the dining-room and have a quiet pipe, after the labors of the evening. I don’t know why it is,” continued Charley, as they entered the room, “but fiddling—” Here Charley quickly drew back, as a horse when sharply reined up, with a look that seemed to show that his eyes had fallen upon some unwelcome object. The suppression of all appearance of emotion was, as we know, a foible of his. There was one thing, however, which he could not suppress; and it was this which often betrayed him to his friends; to wit, his infirmity of stammering; of which, as I do not care either to deface my pages or to make sport of my friend, I shall give but sparing typographical indication, leaving the rest to the reader’s imagination. “F-f-f-f-iddling,” continued he, “always gives me a consuming thirst for a smo-mo-mo-moke. By the way, thirst for a smoke strikes me as a mixed metaphor, but ‘hunger’ would scarcely improve matters. I presume that if our Aryan ancestors had known the divine weed, we should have had a better word wherewithal to express our longing for it.”
Whenever Charley began to stammer and philosophize, he always suggested to my mind a partridge tumbling and fluttering away through the grass; there was always a nest somewhere near.
“As it is,” continued he, “we must be content to borrow from the grovelling vocabulary of the eater and the drinker, leaving to civilization—there, toast your toes on that fender—to evolve a more fitting term.”
The Don, who had been looking serious enough before, could not suppress a smile at this quaint sally of our friend,—a smile that broadened into a laugh when Charley, having succeeded, after a protracted struggle, in shooting a word from his mouth as though from a pop-gun, parenthetically consigned all p’s and m’s to perdition; that being the class of letters which chiefly marred his utterance.
There is, about the damning of a mere labial, a grotesque impotency that goes far towards rescuing the oath from profanity; and we may hope that Uncle Toby’s accusing angel neglected to hand this one in for record.
“This is very snug,” said Charley, drawing together the ends of logs which had burned in two.
Charley had neglected to light the lamp, but the logs soon began to shed a ruddy glow about the room, in the obscure light of which the stranger began to look about him, as was natural. Charley could always see more with his eyes shut than I could with mine wide open; but I cannot very well understand how, in that dimly-lighted room, he contrived to observe all that he pretends to have seen on this occasion; especially as he acknowledges that he was steadily engaged at his old trick of blowing smoke-rings, sighting at them with one eye, and spearing them with the forefinger of his right hand.
The stranger did not stroll about the room with his hands behind his back, examining the objects on the sideboard, and yawning in the faces of the ancestral portraits, as he might have been pardoned for doing at that hour, and in the absence of the family. “Yes, this is very snug,” echoed he, in a rather hollow voice, while he glanced from object to object in the room with an eager interest that contrasted strangely with the immobility of his person; his almost motionless head giving a rather wild look to his rapidly-roving eyes. Presently, seeming to forget Charley’s presence, he gave vent to a sigh so deep that it was almost a groan. Charley removed his pipe from his mouth, and with the stem thereof slowly and carefully traced a very exact circle just within the interior edge of one of his whirling smoke-wreaths, in the spinning of which he was so consummate an artist.
The stranger, coming to himself with a little start, gave a quick glance at the sphinx beside him, who, with head resting on the back of his chair and eyes half closed, was lazily admiring another blue circle, that rose silently whirling in the still air. Had he heard the moan? And in his embarrassment the stranger seized the tongs and, with a nervous pull, tilted over one of the logs which Charley had drawn together on the hearth.
They flashed into a blaze.
“Why, hello!” exclaimed the stranger, chancing to cast his eye into the corner formed by the projecting chimney-piece and the wall. “There’s a dog. He seems comfortable,” he added, glad, seemingly, to have hit upon so substantial a subject of conversation. “That rug seems to have been made for him. Does he sleep there every night?”
“That’s his corner, whenever he wants it,” said Charley, rather dryly, and without looking towards the dog. “Let me fill your pipe for you.”
Charley, somehow, did not seem anxious to talk about the dog, but his companion, not observing this, very likely, would not let the subject drop. Rising a little in his chair and peering into the somewhat obscure corner: “He seems to be a—a—”
“Pointer,” said Charley. “He is very old,” added he, by way of a finisher.
“Oh, I understand,—an old hunting-dog of Mr. Poythress’s that he cherishes now for the good he has done in his day.”
This was not exactly a question, but it seemed to require some sort of a reply.
“Well, yes, so one would naturally think; but Mr. Poythress was never much of a Nimrod. It is Mrs. Poythress who claims the old fellow as her property, I believe.”
Charley pulled out his watch in rather a nervous way, looked at the time, and, thrusting it back into his pocket, gave a yawn.
“What rolls of fat he has along his back!” said the stranger, rising, and taking a step or two in the direction of the sleeper.
“Yes,” said Charley, rising, and knocking the ashes from his pipe with a few rapid taps, “it is the way with all old dogs.”
“Ah, I am afraid I have disturbed the slumbers of the old fellow,” said the Don, softly retracing his steps.
“He is as deaf as a post,” said Charley.
The old pointer had raised his head, and was rocking it from side to side with a kind of low whimpering.
“Speaking of slumbers,” said Charley, looking at his watch again, and closing it with a snap, “suppose—”
“What can be the matter with the old boy?”
The dog was acting singularly. He had risen to his feet, and, with staggering, uncertain steps, was moving first in this direction then in that, sniffing the air with a whine that grew more and more intense and anxious.
“He will soon get quiet, if we leave him.” And Charley made two or three rapid strides towards the door, then stopped as suddenly, stopped and stood biting his nails with unconscious vigor, then slowly turned, and, walking up to the mantel-piece, rested his elbow upon it and his cheek upon his hand. The attitude was one of repose; but his quick breathing, his quivering lips, his restless eyes that flashed searchingly, again and again, upon the face of his companion,—these told a different story.
“He is trying to find you,” said the Don, with a sympathetic smile. “Poor old fellow, he seems blind as well as deaf. Hello! he is making for me. What! is he in his dotage? Whom does he take me for?” he added, as the old dog, coming up to him and sniffing at his feet and legs with an ever-increasing eagerness, kept wriggling and squirming and wagging his tail with a vigor that was remarkable, considering his apoplectic figure and extreme age. Growing more and more excited, the old creature tried again and again to rear and place his paws upon the breast of the Don; but his weak limbs, unable to sustain his unwieldy bulk, as often gave way; and at last, with a despair that was almost human, he laid his head between the knees of the young man; and rolling his bleared, opaque eyes, as if searching for his face, he whimpered as though for help. The Don looked bewildered, and glancing at Charley, saw him standing, motionless, leaning upon the mantel-piece, his eyes fixed upon the fire. The Don started, then bent a sudden, eager glance upon the dog. The latter again strove to rear up, but falling back upon his haunches, lifted up his aged head, and rolling his sightless eyes, gave forth a low howl so piteous as must have moved the hardest heart.
It was then that the stranger, that man of surprises, as he had done once or twice before in the course of this story, revealed by a sudden burst of uncontrollable impetuosity the fervid temperament that ordinarily lay concealed beneath his studied reserve. Stooping forward like a flash, he lifted the dog and placed his paws upon his breast, sustaining him with his arms.
It was touching to witness the gratitude of the old pointer, his whining and his whimpering and his eagerness to lick the face that he might not behold. He was happy, let us hope, if but for a moment. Suddenly he fell,—fell as though stricken with heart-disease, all in a heap; then tumbling over and measuring his length along the carpet, his head came down upon the floor with a thump.
There he lay motionless,—motionless, save that every now and then his tail beat the floor softly, softly, and in a sort of drowsy rhythm, as though he but dreamt that he wagged it,—gently tapped the floor and ceased; once more, and stopped again, and yet again; and he was still. The stranger knelt over the outstretched form of the dying pointer.
“Ponto! Ponto, old boy! Can you hear me? Yes? Then good-by, dear old fellow, good-by!”
Deaf as he was, and breathing his last, that name and that voice seemed to penetrate the fast-closing channels of sense; and with two or three last fluttering taps—he had no other way—he seemed to say farewell, and forever.
The young man rose, and, staggering across the room, threw his arm over his face and leaned against the wall. Charley made two or three hasty, forward strides, then halted with a hesitating look, then springing forward, placed a hand on either shoulder of the figure before him, and leaned upon his neck.
“Dory!” whispered he, in a voice that trembled.
A shiver, as from an electric shock, ran through the stalwart frame of the stranger. For a moment he seemed to hesitate; the next he had wheeled about, and, clasping his companion in his mighty arms, hugged him to his breast.
“Charley!” cried he, in a broken voice; and his head rested upon the shoulder of his friend.