Deep in the night there was a lull, a strange moment of arrest, that endured for scarcely as long as that one could count ten, and then, with the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent behind it, was hurled upon the world. All that night, and all the following day, the rain was like a wall about the house. It was flung in masses against the windows, as buckets of water are flung on a deck. To look forth was as though one looked through a dense sheet of moving ice. Gutters, eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed. The sorely-tried roof was mastered, and in all its angles and valleys yielded entrance to the enemy. Up in the top story hurrying drips beat, like metronomes, all the _tempi_, from a ponderous _adagio_ to a racing _prestissimo_. Buckets and jugs and baths filled, and were emptied, and filled again, the old Evans pair waddling to and fro, elated, almost gratified, by the magnitude of their task. And in the middle of the uproar, late in the afternoon, a new sound joined in the chorus of the storm, the coarse and ugly summons of a motor-horn. Old Evans spied at the car through the hall window, and contrived to signal a command to go round to the back of the house.
"If I let dhraw the bolts," he said to Barty Mangan at the kitchen entrance, "the door would fall flat on me!"
"I wouldn't be surprised at all," Barty replied. "Hardly I could force the car into the storm."
Christian was sitting on the floor by the fireplace in the hall, in the last of the daylight, examining and burning the contents of a drawer full of miscellaneous papers, as the visitor made his unexpected entrance from the back, and Barty, recognising his own improbability and unsuitability on such a day and at such a time, fell to confused apologies that were as incoherent, and seemed as unlikely ever to end, as the buzzing of an imprisoned bee on the window-pane. The fact at length, however, emerged, that there was a map of the Mount Music estate hanging in the library, and that the Major having promised to lend it to Dr. Mangan, had forgotten to do so.
"Some question of boundaries--a little grazing form m' fawther has--" Barty said, nervously.
The map was found, was rolled, and wrapped up, and yet Barty sat on. He talked incessantly, feverishly. He talked so fast, in his low voice, that, in the clamour of the storm, Christian could only distinguish an occasional word. She had a nightmare feeling as if a train were roaring through an endless tunnel, and that she and Barty were the sole passengers, and would never see daylight or know quiet again. His long, lean body was hooped into a very low and deep armchair, his thin hands clasped his knees; his immense dark eyes, fixed on Christian's face, gave her the impression that what he was saying was without relation to what he was thinking. In the direful gloom of the hall, with the rain and wind threshing on the half-shuttered windows, and the inconstant light of the burning logs the sole illuminant, his pale face, with the wing of black hair on his forehead, looked like the face of a strayed occupant of another sphere who had resumed such an aspect as he had worn in his coffin.