Nell? So it was the St. Bernard bitch belonging to the Scot.
And then came a stream of foreign words which to my complete astonishment made me realize that my uncle knew English.
His invectives resounded in the silence of the night.
The dog gathered itself together; it was just going to spring when Lerne, at the end of his resources, threatened it with a revolver and with the other hand pointed out the way he wanted the beast to go.
Now, it has happened to me, when out shooting, to see a dog run away when a gun is leveled at it; he knows its deadly power. That this should happen in presence of a pistol seemed to me decidedly less ordinary. Had Nell already experienced the effect of the weapon? That was a plausible theory; but I fancied that she had understood the English—English being Macbeth’s tongue—rather than my uncle’s revolver.
She calmed down, as at the voice of Orpheus, cowered and with her tail between her legs, made for the gray buildings which Lerne was pointing out to her. He ran after the hound, and the darkness swallowed them.
In my clock the imperishable Harvester mowed down several minutes.
In the distance a door banged noisily. Then Lerne came in again.
That was all.
So there were at Fonval two beings whose existence had till then been unsuspected by me; Nell, whose pitiful appearance hardly showed her to be happy, Nell, abandoned doubtless by her master in a hasty flight—and the practical joker. For this latter could not, in reason, be either of the two women or one of the Germans; the nature of the joke betrayed its author’s age. Only a child could divert itself at the expense of a dog. But nobody to my knowledge lodged in that wing.