Holding the light for him to saddle, she called after as he rode away: "Go round be Misther Danvers'! 'Tis on'y a mile out av your way! Going by here at noon, himself told me that he was to have a sthag-party the night! They'll jump at the chance, an' fight none the worse for a smhell av the whiskey!"
A cold, with complications in the shape of rheumatic pains, sent the trustee early to bed that evening, and Helen was sewing by the fire with Mrs. Glaves when the charivari turned loose outside. As, jumping up, they stood staring at one another, he shouted for them to bolt the door; and as, after complying, Helen returned to the fire he came limping out, bent, warped, and twisted by sciatica, half dressed, but grimly resolute.
"Danger?" he rasped, swinging round on his wife as the house trembled under sudden thunder of scurrying hoofs outside. "Listen!" And when pained bellows followed dropping shots, he added: "Peppering the cattle. Scairt? Then go an' stick your fool head under a pillow. How is it with you?"
As a matter of fact, Helen's face was as white as the fluffy shawl from which her golden head rose like a yellow crocus above soft spring snows; but, noting the thin, scarlet line of her mouth, the trustee nodded his satisfaction. "You'll do. Swing round that lounge—here, where I can train a gun on the door. Good!" He eased his length along it with a groan of relief. "Now hand me the gun—no, the other." Rehanging his own long duck-gun upon its wooden pegs, she brought him the famous double-barrelled Greener which, having disarranged the lock action in trying to clean it, Danvers had left with the trustee for repairs. "There, put out the light an' take a look out at the window."
Pulling the curtain aside, she got full benefit of the brazen clamor while learning something of its genesis, for, while easily recognizable, the din of beaten pans, cow-bells, gunshots, and yells formed only a minor accompaniment to a barbarous metallic roll, louder than a corps of beaten drums, and a discordant screech that discounted the torment of a thousand tortured fiddles. Now she saw two men rapidly vibrating long cross-cut saws back and forth against the house, while others drew a rosined plank to and fro across a log, concentrating the discords of the world into a single excruciating note. Closing her ears, she took further note of the score of dark figures that came and went in the moonlight, leaping, shouting, gesticulating strangely, as though crazed by the frenzy of noise. Weird, sinister shapes, they moved, massed, and melted to units again as in some mad carnival or distorted madman's dream.
The trustee pulled her skirt. "Come away! They might shoot at the window."
Obeying, she knelt beside him—fortunately with her back to the pane that, a few minutes later, shivered and flew in fine rain. "Drunk!" Glaves commented; and as a piercing cry, clever imitation of a cougar, rang high over a slight lull, he said, "That's sure Bill MacCloud." He grimly added—for, besides being dissolute, the man was a scoffer and leader against religion: "Gosh! but the saints are keeping queer company. Bill ain't more'n a mile 'way from his bottle."
After that one lull the tumult increased in loudness and volume, and for a long half-hour Helen listened as some soft maid of Rome may have hearkened to the din of Goth or ravaging Hun in the sacred streets of the imperial city. To her, brought up under the shadow of law, with its material manifestation—a policeman—always within call, the brutal elemental passion behind that huge, amorphous voice was very terrible. Almost equally fearful was the sudden cessation that set the silence singing in her ears, the voiceless darkness, thick night of that black room.
Touching the trustee, more for the comfort of his presence than to draw his attention, she whispered, "What now?"
Just then the door rattled under a heavy kick; a strident voice answered her question: "Open, Glaves, an' send out that —— baggage" (it was a viler word) "or we'll burn the house over your ears!"