His sentence was not finished, for the horseman broke in upon it with a masterful rataplan upon the oak, seemingly with a whip-head or a pistol butt, and a cry, new to my ear and uncanny, rose through the beating rain.
With a sigh the most distressing I can mind of, my father seemed to reconcile himself to some fate he would have warded off if he could. He unbolted and threw back the door.
Our visitor threw himself in upon us as if we held the keys of paradise—a man like a rake for lankiness, as was manifest even through the dripping wrap-rascal that he wore; bearded cheek and chin in a fashion that must seem fiendish in our shaven country; with a wild and angry eye, the Greig mole black on his temple, and an old scar livid across his sunburned brow. He threw a three-cocked hat upon the floor with a gesture of indolent possession.
“Well, I'm damned!” cried he, “but this is a black welcome to one's poor brother Andy,” and scarcely looked upon my father standing with the shaded candle in the wind. “What's to drink? Drink, do you hear that Quentin? Drink—drink—d-r-i-n-k. A long strong drink too, and that's telling you, and none of the whey that I'm hearing's running through the Greigs now, that once was a reputable family of three bottles and a rummer to top all.”
“Whist, whist, man!” pleaded father tremulously, all the man out of him as he stood before this drunken apparition.
“Whist I quo' he. Well stap me! do you no' ken the lean pup of the litter?” hiccoughed our visitor, with a sort of sneer that made the blood run to my head, and for the first time I felt the great, the splendid joy of a good cause to fight for.
“You're Andrew,” said my father simply, putting his hand upon the man's coat sleeve in a sympathy for his drenchen clothes.
That kindly hand was jerked off rudely, an act as insolent as if he had smitten his host upon the mouth: my heart leaped, and my fingers went at his throat. I could have spread him out against the wall, though I knew him now my uncle; I could have given him the rogue's quittance with a black face and a protruding tongue. The candle fell from my father's hand; the glass shade shattered; the hall of Hazel Den House was plunged in darkness, and the rain drave in through the open door upon us three struggling.
“Let him go, Paul,” whispered my father, who I knew was in terror of frightening his wife, and he wrestled mightily with an arm of each of us.
Yet I could not let my uncle go, for with the other arm he held a knife, and he would perhaps have died for it had not another light come on the stair and my mother's voice risen in a pitiful cry.