For Lord Ludlow and Sean Cosgrove were having a beautiful row.
The Irishman’s gaze was hard and heavy, and seemed to bore into his antagonist. His face, I noticed, was still suffusing with blood. No one else ventured to intervene as madly as I had just done, and the silence when the two men ceased parleying was like the yawn of ocean after a gigantic wave.
Cosgrove’s bitterness seemed to be growing steadily, like the awful momentum of a railway train, and I had no doubt that the time was not many seconds away when he would arise and beard his foe with menacing hands. Lord Ludlow’s acerbity was like the nervous, sputtering viciousness of a dynamo. From his eyes seemed to come green electric sparks, while he shifted his ire from me toward Cosgrove again.
“As for you, sir—”
“I accuse you—”
Hark!
The great Hall of the Moth where we stood was gripped in a new hush, for the clock in the corner was speaking. I had regarded it curiously in the evening, a fine old carcase with hood, waist, and base enveloped in spider’s web marqueterie which obliterated the graining of the wood. The brass dial was finely engraved, and Cupid’s head appeared four times delicately chiselled in the spandrils.
Now its chime gave the burden it has tolled for two hundred years, and midnight was ringing sternly through the House from the Hall of the Moth. It is a strange clock, devised by some brooding or twisted or philosophic mind long ago: it strikes, they say, only at midnight, proclaiming the death and the birth of a day. The tones, vigorous and vibrant, were mellow with centuries, and their song was poignant.
Like some greybeard councillor’s, the old clock’s voice appeared to abash the hasty peer and the slowly enraged Irishman. They stared at each other in grimness for an interim of seconds before his Lordship shrugged his shoulders, cackled “Humph!” loudly, and turned to the disrupted card-table. Cosgrove’s clenched hands came down in his lap relaxed, and he, too, turned back to his table, moving his lips without utterance.
But the game did not go on. It could hardly have pursued its placid course again after this very distressing interruption of our peace, even if the crying sound had not begun from somewhere outside the Hall.