Yet something there was that gave out a stealthy sound by and by—something that all the time they talked had held its panic breath in the copse, and sweated with terror lest the little snap of some twig under its feet should reveal its hiding-place—something with a puffed, leaden face and coward eyes—the unlovely Mr. Breeds, in fact.
He would not come out into the road, even after the last echo of the horsemen’s retreat had died away. But he crept to his little windy house on the hill by the way he had come—and Mr. Breeds’s way was always a backstairs one. Once only he paused, and his weak, evil features gathered all the definite expression of scoundrelism they could master.
“Betty Pollack!” he muttered. “So it was you, my girl, that set your dirty little torch to the beacon! Now ain’t it dangerous to play with fire, Betty? And what should you say if it came to burn your own fingers?”
He mused a moment; then brought his hand softly down on his thigh.
“But the skull comes first,” he murmured. “What’ll they give me for that piece of news, I wonder?”
CHAPTER XXXVII.
The night fell dead and blank, and with it came the snow, crisp, large-flaked, dropping silently as autumn leaves in a windless garden. These were but the pickets of a gathering army—whose cloudy regiments moved up unwieldily from the north-west, where for weeks they had been forming and manœuvring—and the world looked indifferently on them, little thinking how presently it should be overwhelmed in the rush of forces of which they were the pioneers.
Sometimes a little galloping wind, like one of a distracted staff, would scatter a company of them right and left; and then to folks within-doors would sound a rubbing noise on window-panes, as if stealthy fingers were feeling for the hasp.
“If I had not lived all my life amongst ghosts,” said Luvaine, “I should fear this house of yours, Mr. Tuke.”
He rose as he spoke (the three gentlemen were sitting over their wine in the great dining-hall of “Delsrop”), and, walking to the casement, plucked aside a corner of the wide crimson curtain that hung thereover, and stood looking out into the night.