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And all the time, the American clock on the mantelpiece remorselessly ticked off the accompanist's remaining moments. Mavis, heartsick and weary, got little sleep. She watched the night grow paler and paler outside the window, till, presently, the shaded lamp at the bedside seemed absurdly wan. Birds greeted with their songs the coming of the day.
Then later when she opened the piano she knew just what songs he expected, but, disposed now to tease him, sang just their opposites, and all the while the clock ticked the happy hours away.
"I wonder where the woman is!" a voice whispered again. There began now that slight shifting of feet, that artificial coughing among several, which betrays a nervous suspense. At length there was a titter. But the soldier never moved. There he stood, his face to the south-east, upright as a column, his cap in his hand. The clock ticked on.
There, too, was the stick and umbrella stand and the shelf with railway guides, directory, and telegraph forms. Clocks ticked everywhere with sounds like quiet footfalls. Light fell here and there in patches from the floor above. I stood a moment in the hall, letting my eyes grow more accustomed to the gloom, while deciding on a plan of search.
Well to the fore were Wrandall uncles and cousins and aunts, and one or two carefully chosen blood-relations to the mistress of the house, whose hand had long been set against kinsmen of less exalted promise. The room was dark. A forgotten French clock ticked madly and tinkled its quarter-hours with surpassing sprightliness. Time went on regardless.
It was half an hour before they could connect with Springfield, only to learn that the Governor had left for Chicago and was expected to arrive there about noon. In the Death House Shay sat calmly waiting as the big clock ticked his life away that morning in the house of death at Joliet. At eleven o'clock, Hartigan received Belle's telegram: "We have found Squeaks."
For fifteen minutes after that the travelling clock by Lady Rose's bed ticked loudly, and drowned the faint murmur of her prayers while she knelt at the prie-dieu. Lady Groombridge knew Rose too well to be surprised. But she did not, like the young widow, pass the time in prayer; she was worried even deeply so. She was of an anxious temperament, and she was really shocked at what had happened.
The old clock ticked away furiously, as if rejoicing that weary days were over for the pet and darling of the house: nothing else broke the silence. Without, the deep night paused, gray, impenetrable. Did it hope that far angel-voices would break its breathless hush, as once on the fields of Judea, to usher in Christmas morn? A hush, in air, and earth, and sky, of waiting hope, of a promised joy.
They raked the ashes off the bed of coals in the fireplace, and while the embers ticked and bristled, and flung out little showers of sparks, they hustled on their clothes, and ran down the back stairs into the yard with their guns.
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