The vehemence of this amazed my tutor, who could supply no cause for the outburst; but ’twas no more than I had expected in the beginning.
“Me!” my uncle gasped.
There was a knock at the door....
Ay, a knock at the door! ’Twas a thing most unexpected. That there should come a knock at the door! ’Twas past believing. ’Twas no timid tapping; ’twas a clamor––without humility or politeness. Who should knock? There had been no outcry; ’twas then no wreck or sudden peril of our people. Again it rang loud and authoritative––as though one came by right of law or in vindictive anger. My uncle, shocked all at once out of a wide-eyed daze of astonishment, pushed back from the board, in a terrified flurry, his face purpled and swollen, and blundered about for his staff; but before he had got to his feet, our maid-servant, on a fluttering run from the kitchen, was come to the door. 117 The gale broke in––rushing noises and a swirl of wet wind. We listened; there was a voice, not the maid-servant’s––thin, high-tempered, lifted in irascible demand––but never a word to be distinguished in that obscurity of wind and rain. ’Twas cold, and the lamp was flaring: I closed the door against this inrush of weather.
My wretched uncle beckoned the tutor close, a finger lifted in caution; but still kept looking at me––and all the while stared at me with eyes of frightened width––in a way that saw me not at all. “Parson,” he whispered, “they wasn’t ar another man landed by the mail-boat the day, was they?”
The tutor nodded.
“Ye wouldn’t say, would ye,” my uncle diffidently inquired, “that he’d be from St. John’s by the cut of um?”
“A gray little man from St. John’s.”
“I ’low then,” says my uncle, “that he talked a wonderful spell about a lad, didn’t um?”