This antipathy was also to be found in the club. Even with the memory of Richard's voice in their ears one of the listeners had shrugged his shoulders, remarking with a bitter laugh that musical as was the poem, especially as rendered by Richard, it was, after all, like most of Poe's other manuscripts, found in a bottle, or more likely “a bottle found in a manuscript,” as that crazy lunatic couldn't write anything worth reading unless he was half drunk. At which St. George had blazed out:
“Hush, Bowdoin! You ought to be willing to be blind drunk half your time if you could write one stanza of it! Please let me have it, Richard,” and he took the sheet from his friend's hand, that he and Harry might read it at their leisure when they reached home.
Harry's blood had also boiled at the rude thrust. While under the spell of Richard's voice a cord in his own soul had vibrated as does a glass globe when it responds in perfect harmony to a note from a violin. He too had a Lenore whose loss had wellnigh broken his heart. This in itself was an indissoluble bond between them. Besides, he could understand the poet as Alec and his mother and his Uncle George understood himself. He had begun now to love the man in his heart.
With his mind filled with these thoughts, his hunger for Kate aroused tenfold by the pathos and weird beauty of what he had just heard, he left the group of men who were still discussing the man and his verses, and joined his uncle outside on the top step of the club's high stoop, from which could be seen the full length of the sun-flecked street on which the clubhouse stood, as well as the park in all its spring loveliness.
Unconsciously his eyes wandered across the path where Kate's house stood. He could see the tall chimneys and the slope of the quaint roof, and but that the foliage hid the lower part, could have seen Kate's own windows. She was still at home, he had heard, although she was expected to leave for the Red Sulphur any day.
Suddenly, from away up the street, past the corner of the park, there reached his ears a low winding note, which grew louder as it turned the corner, followed by the rattle of wheels and the clatter of horses' feet. He leaned forward and craned his head in the direction of the sound, his heart in his throat, the blood mounting to his cheeks. If that was not his father's horn it was wonderfully like it. At the same moment a coach-and-four swept in sight, driven by a man in a whitey-brown coat and stiff furry hat, with two grooms behind and a coachman next to him on the box. It was heading straight for the club.
