Part 6 (1/2)
The vergers alone inspected the monster unmoved. They eyed it with glances not only of curiosity, but of appreciative intelligence. Not so, however, later in the day. Then Mr. Swainson appeared, leading by a strong chain a brindled bull-dog, of the most ferocious description and about sixty pounds weight. The animal contemplated the nearest verger with much satisfaction, and licked his chops: it might be at some grateful memory. The verger, who was in a small way a student of natural history, p.r.o.nounced it however a lick of antic.i.p.ation, and appeared not a little disconcerted. Mr. Swainson entered with the dog by a small door at the corner, and came out again without him. The other vergers then left.
Their coming and going was nothing to Mr. Swainson. It was enough for him that he stood there the cynosure of every eye in the Close; even Mrs. Dean was watching him from a distant garret window. In slow and measured fas.h.i.+on he walked to the steps of his own house, and, taking from them a board he had previously placed there, returned to the entrance of his plot, now enclosed to the height of about ten feet by this terrible h.o.a.rding. Above the door he carefully hung the board and drew back a few feet to take in the effect. Mrs. Dean sent down hastily for her opera-gla.s.ses, but really there was no need of them.
The legend in huge black letters on a white ground ran thus: ”No Admittance! Beware of the Dog!!!” A smile of content crept slowly over Mr. Swainson's face, and he said aloud,
”Trump that card, Mr. Dean, if you can.”
As he turned--Mrs. Dean saw it distinctly and declared herself ready to swear to it in any court of justice--he snapped his fingers at the Deanery. And the dog howled!
It was the first of many howls, for he was a dog of great width of chest; and not even the surgeon of an insurance company, if he had lived twenty-four hours in Bicester Close, would have found fault with his lungs. Why he howled during the night, for it was not the time of full moon, became the burning question of each morning. That he joined in the Cathedral services with a zest and discrimination which rendered the organ almost superfluous, and drove the organist to the verge of resignation, was only to be expected. There was nothing strange in that, nor in his rivalry of the Praecentor's best notes, whose voice was considered very fine in the Litany. The voluntary, Tiger made his own; and of the sermon he expressed disapproval in so marked a manner that it was hard to say which swelled more with rage, the Dean within or the dog without. Their rage was equally impotent.
Things went so far that the Dean publicly wrung his hands at the breakfast-table. ”You could not hear the benediction this morning! And I was in good voice too, my dear!” he wailed, with tears in his eyes.
”You should appeal to the Marquis,” suggested his wife. It must be explained that the Marquis in Bicester ranks next to and little beneath Providence. But the Dean shook his head. He put no faith in the power even of the Marquis to handle Mr. Swainson. ”I will lay it before the Bishop, my dear,” he said humbly. And then, indeed, Mrs.
Dean knew that the iron had entered into his soul, and that the hand of the Mayor of the Palace was very heavy upon him; and her good, wifely heart grew so hot that she felt she could have no more patience with her daughter.
For Clive's sympathies were no longer to be trusted. She was not the Sweet Clive of a month ago, but a sadder and more sedate young person, who had a troublesome and annoying way of defending the absent foe, and of sighing in dark corners, that was more than provoking. Duty demanded that she should be an ocean, into which her father and mother might pour the streams of their indignation and meet with a sympathizing floodtide, and lo! this unfeeling girl declined to make herself useful in that way, and instead sent forth a ”bore” of light jesting that made little of the enemy's enormities and a trifle of his outrages. More, she showed herself for the first time disobedient; she altogether refused to promise not to speak to King Pepin if opportunity should serve, and, clever girl as she was, laughed her father out of insisting upon it, and kissed her mother into being a not unwilling ally. A wise woman was her mother and clear-sighted; she saw that Clive had a spirit, but no longer a heart of her own. Yet at such a time as this, when her husband was wringing his hands, Clive's insensibility to the family grievances tried Mrs. Dean sorely. It was hard that the Canon's sleepless night, the Praecentor's peevishness, the singing man's influenza, and all the countless counts of the indictment against Mr. Swainson, should fail to awaken in the young lady's mind a t.i.the of the indignation shared by every other person at the Deanery, from the Dean himself to the scullery maid. But then love is blind; for which most of us may thank Heaven.
Day after day went by and the h.o.a.rding still reared its gaunt height, and the unclean beast of the Hebrews still made night hideous, and the day a time for the expression of strong feelings. At length the Dean met his legal adviser in the Close--ay, and within a few feet of the obnoxious erection; he kept his back to it with ridiculous care, while they talked.
”We have come to something like a settlement at last,” said the lawyer briskly;--”confusion take the dog! I can hardly hear myself speak.--We are to meet at the Chapter House at five, Mr. Dean, if that will suit you: Mr. Swainson, the Bishop, Canon Rowcliffe, and myself. I think he is inclined to be reasonable at last.”
The Dean shook his head gloomily.
”Ah, you will see it turn out better than you expect. Let me whisper something to you. There is an action commenced against him for shutting up a road across one of his farms at Middleton, and it will be fought stoutly. One suit at a time will be sufficient to satisfy even Mr. Swainson.”
”You don't say so? This is good news!” cried the Dean, with unmistakable pleasure. ”Certainly, I will be there.”
”And--I am sure I need not hint at it--you will be ready to meet Mr.
Swainson halfway?”
The Dean looked gloomy again. But at this moment a long loud howl, more frenzied, more fiendish than any which had preceded it, seemed to proclaim that the dog knew his reign was menaced, and, like Sardanapalus, was determined to go out right royally. It was more than the Dean could stand. With an involuntary motion of his hands to his ears, he nodded and fled with unseemly haste to a place less exposed, where he could in a seemly and deca.n.a.l manner relieve his feelings.
The best-laid plans even of lawyers will go astray, and when they do so, the havoc is generally of a singularly wide-spread description.
The meeting in the chapter-house proved stormy from the first. Whether it was that the writ in the right-of-way case had not yet reached Mr.
Swainson, and so he clung to his only split-straw, or that the Dean was soured by want of sleep, or that the Bishop was not thorough enough--whatever was the cause, the spirit of compromise was absent, and the discussion across the chapter-house table threatened to make matters worse and not better. Whether the Dean first called Mr.
Swainson's enclosure the ”toadstool of a night,” or Mr. Swainson took the initiative by styling the Dean the ”mushroom of a day” (the Dean was not of old family), was a question afterwards much and hotly debated in Bicester circles. Be that as it may, the high powers at length rose from the table in dudgeon and much confusion.
There was behind the Dean at the end of the chapter-house a large window. It looked directly down upon what he, in the course of the discussion, had more than once termed ”The Profanation,” and since the eventful day of Mr. Swainson's match at croquet it had been, by the Dean's order, kept shuttered, to the intent that, when occupied in the chapterhouse, the Profanation might not be directly before his eyes.
On this occasion the shutter was still closed; it may be that this phenomenon had weakened Mr. Swainson's not over-robust resolves on the side of amity.
The Dean was a choleric man. As the party rose, he stepped to this shutter and flung it back. He turned to the others and said excitedly--
”Look, sir; look, my Lord! Is that a sight becoming the threshold of a cathedral? Is that a thing to be endured on consecrated ground?”
They stepped towards the window, a wide low-browed Tudor one, and looked out. The Dean himself stood aside, grasping the shutter with a hand that shook with pa.s.sion. He could see the others' faces. He expected little show of shame or contrition on that of Mr. Swainson, but he did wish to bring this hideous thing home to the Bishop, who had not been as thorough in the matter as he should have been. Still, as a bishop, he could not see that thing there in its horrid reality and be unmoved!
No, he certainly could not. Slowly, and as if reluctantly, his lords.h.i.+p's face changed; it broke into a smile that broadened and rippled wider and wider, second by second, as he looked. His color deepened until he became almost purple! And Mr. Swainson? His face was the picture of horror: there could not be a doubt of that. Confusion and astonishment were stereotyped on every feature. The Dean could not believe his own eyes. He turned in perplexity to the lawyer, who was peeping between the others' heads. His shoulders were shaking and his face was puckered with laughter.