The man in shirt sleeves rose from the couch, on which he had been sitting, with a stream of sudden, surprised oaths. The girl who stood gazing with distended eyes at Anthony turned and flashed through the broken door. “Stop her!” was urgently cried; “the hall door—” Anthony heard a chair fall in the room beyond, shrill cries that sank, muffled in a further space.
The two men faced him in the silent room: the larger, with an empurpled visage, bloodshot eyes, shook with enraged concern; the other was as motionless as a piece of furniture, in his wooden countenance his gaze glittered like a snake's, glittered as icily as the diamond that sparkled in his crimson tie folded exactly beneath an immaculate collar. Only, at intervals, his fingers twitched like jointed and animated straws.
An excited voice cried from the distance: “She's gone! Alice's face is tore open... out the door like a devil, and up the street in her petticoat.”
The man with the flushed face wilted. “This is as bad as hell,” he whimpered. “It will come out, sure. You—” he particularized Anthony with a corroding epithet. “The captain is in it deep... this will do for him, we'll all go up—”
“Why?” the other demanded. He indicated Anthony with his left hand, while the other stole into his pocket. “He brought her here... you heard the girl and broke into the room; there was a fight—a fight.” He drew nearer to Anthony by a step.
LVI
ANTHONY gazed above their heads. There, again, clear and sweet, his name shaped like a bell-note. The familiar scent of a springtide of lilacs swept about him; the placid murmur of water slipping between sodded banks, tumbling over a fall; the querulous hunting cry of owls hovered in his hearing, singing in the undertone of that pronouncement of his name out of the magic region of his joy.
“No good,” a voice buzzed, indistinct, immaterial. “Who'll shut this—? who'll get the girl?”