There was an unsettled suggestion in the first part of this statement of Mrs. Sparhawk that gave a shock to Mr. Brimmington’s nerves. He laughed uneasily.
“Oh, er, yes! I see. Very probably there’s been some understanding. I suppose I am to regard the horse as a sort of lien upon the place—a—a—what do they call it?—an incumbrance! Yes,” he repeated, more to himself than to Mrs. Sparhawk; “an incumbrance. I’ve got a gentleman’s country place with a horse incumbrant.”
Mrs. Sparhawk heard him, however.
“It is a sorter cumbersome horse,” she said. And without another word she gathered her shawl about her shoulders, and strode off into the darkness.
Mr. Brimmington turned back into the house, and busied himself with a vain attempt to make his long-cherished furniture look at home in his new leaden-hued rooms. The ungrateful task gave him the blues; and, after an hour of it, he went to bed.
He was dreaming leaden-hued dreams, oppressed, uncomfortable dreams, when a peculiarly weird and uncanny series of thumps on the front of the house awoke him with a start. The thumps might have been made by a giant with a weaver’s beam, but he must have been a very drunken giant to group his thumps in such a disorderly parody of time and sequence.
Mr. Brimmington had too guileless and clean a heart to be the prey of undefined terrors. He rose, ran to the window and opened it. The moonlight lit up the raw, frosty landscape with a cold, pale, diffused radiance, and Mr. Brimmington could plainly see right below him the cumbersome horse, cumbersomely trying to maintain a footing on the top of the little mound before the front door. When, for a fleeting instant, he seemed to think that he had succeeded in this feat, he tried to bolt through the door. As soon, however, as one of his huge knees smote the panel, his hind feet lost their grip on the soft earth, and he wabbled back down the incline, where he stood shaking and quivering, until he could muster wind enough for another attempt to make a catapult of himself. The veil like illumination of the night, which turned all things else to a dim, silvery gray, could not hide the scars and bruises and worn places that spotted the animal’s great, gaunt, distorted frame. His knees were as big as a man’s head. His feet were enormous. His joints stood out from his shriveled carcass like so many pine knots. Mr. Brimmington gazed at him, fascinated, horrified, until a rush more desperate and uncertain than the rest threatened to break his front door in.
“Hi!” shrieked Mr. Brimmington; “go away!”
It was the horse’s turn to get frightened. He lifted his long, coffin-shaped head toward Mr. Brimmington’s window, cast a sort of blind, cross-eyed, ineffectual glance at him, and with a long-drawn, wheezing, cough-choked whinny he backed down the mound, got himself about, end for end, with such extreme awkwardness that he hurt one poor knee on a hitching-post that looked to be ten feet out of his way, and limped off to the rear of the house.