“Who’s there?” asked a weary voice.
“George Barnwell,” answered Gilead. “I have come punctual to your appointment, sir.”
A clock, indeed, at the moment sounded the hour. It took the strokes deliberately, yet not so deliberately as the unseen stranger took Gilead’s statement. He appeared to ponder it exhaustively. Gilead could hear him through the keyhole breathing like a man asleep and gently snoring.
“Well,” said the voice at last. “I suppose I had better let you in.”
The alternative had occurred to Gilead, but he thought it politic to remain silent. There was the sound of a bar clanking down, of a laboured sigh, and one side of the gate opened, just a jealous aperture, through which the applicant caught glimpse of a doleful yard, with a woodshed at its further end, a block or two for chopping on, as many three-legged stools, a sawyer’s trestle, and everywhere in littered confusion chips, billets and indiscriminate debris of timber.
“Come in, can’t you,” said the voice, peevishly, and Gilead, slipping through, found himself face to face with Mr Winsom Wyllie.
He was in an undress of grey flannel. His braces were discarded; his shirt, open and collarless, drooped in moist folds; his trousers sagged down over his boots, almost concealing them. Behind, he bore a much greater resemblance to an exhausted elephant than to any sinister figure of melodrama. Nor was his obverse prepossessing. A lugubrious, ponderous man, who took his fleshiness badly; a man who might have figured for an over-blown clown, seeing how his grizzled hair stood up from his scalp and his whiskers out from his jaws; a man with a ridiculous lachrymose mouth, a man whose voice had suety tears in it, a man who seemed to pity himself profoundly—such was the general impression conveyed to Gilead. The creature’s adiposity, he was no less convinced, was no local rising. It was a general upheaval, and nothing short of a change of constitution would suffice to reduce it.
The stranger, Gilead once entered, closed the gate with a fretful slam and put up the bar. Then he turned to regard his visitor—the visitor thought morosely.
“H’m!” he said at last, wearily mopping his brow. “I have committed myself, and I must go through with it, I suppose. Do you know, young man, what decided my choice of you out of—my God, I don’t dare recall the number!—myriads?”
Gilead disclaimed any consciousness of exclusive merit.