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"All right, sir," cried Dan'l; and as Peter held on to the leg, the old gardener, after a good deal of grunting and grumbling, climbed to his side, and began to let in daylight by thrusting off tile after tile, which slid rattling down the side of the roof into the leaden guttering.
It was exactly the hour of midnight by a clock upon the mantel; a single candle, by which he had made a show of reading, was guttering all to a side and an ungracious end in a draught that came from some cranny in the ill-seamed ingle-walls, for all that the night seemed windless. A profound stillness wrapped all; the night was huge outside, with the sea dead-flat to moon and pulsing star.
The last, leaden flicker of daylight glimmered in through the pointed windows, and beyond the level rows of dusky pews, tenanted only by a litter of prayer-books, two guttering candles revealed the organ pipes, and the young girl's swaying figure. She played vigorously.
They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple child-like pleasure at having outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.
The drawing-room was large and contained old furniture but it was rather worn than venerable, an Aubusson carpet flapped about the floor, the wind seemed momently to enter the room, and old draughts haunted corners; the stealthy feet of rats that were never at rest indicated the extent of the ruin that time had wrought in the wainscot; somewhere far off a shutter flapped to and fro, the guttering candles were insufficient to light so large a room.
And thus the rare wine of Araby ran guttering to the unseen blackness of the mystery river far below. The Master, hands on hips, watched this labor; and as he watched he laughed. "Whatever comes to us, men," judged he, "we are here and now doing great evil to the men of El Barr.
Doctor Beckerleg stood in the doorway and for a moment contemplated the scene the empty bottles, the unsnuffed candles guttering down upon the table, and the grey faces of both drunken men. Then he turned and whispered a word to the drawer, who had hurried out of bed to admit him and now stood behind his shoulder. The fellow shuffled downstairs.
All this he had done in entire ignorance of one startling fact namely, that outside his window for the past hour a dark figure had been standing in an insecure position upon the lead guttering of the wing of the château which ran out at right angles, leaning forward and peering in between the blind and the window-frame, watching with interest all that had been in progress.
He stood up, once more, in his zany garb, and, looking in the mirror, lost sight of himself for a poignant second while the dressing-room changed into an evil-smelling dug-out, dark save for one guttering candle stuck in a bottle, and in the shadows he saw half a dozen lean, stern faces lit with the eyes of men whom he was sending forth to defy death.
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