The clouds were flying fast, and the wind was coming
up in gusts, banging some neighbouring shutters that had broken loose,
twirling the rusty chimney-cowls and weather-cocks, and rushing round
and round a confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow
the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering in
all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this
attempted desecration, and to mutter, 'Let them rest! Let them rest!'
Mistress Affery, whose fear of thunder and lightning was only to
be equalled by her dread of the haunted house with a premature and
preternatural darkness in it, stood undecided whether to go in or not,
until the question was settled for her by the door blowing upon her in
a violent gust of wind and shutting her out. 'What's to be done now,
what's to be done now!' cried Mistress Affery, wringing her hands in
this last uneasy dream of all; 'when she's all alone by herself
inside, and can no more come down to open it than the churchyard dead
themselves!' In this dilemma, Mistress Affery, with her apron as a hood to keep the
rain off, ran crying up and down the solitary paved enclosure several
times.
Why she should then stoop down and look in at the keyhole of the
door as if an eye would open it, it would be difficult to say; but it
is none the less what most people would have done in the same situation,
and it is what she did. From this posture she started up suddenly, with a half scream, feeling
something on her shoulder. It was the touch of a hand; of a man's hand.
The man was dressed like a traveller, in a foraging cap with fur about
it, and a heap of cloak. He looked like a foreigner. He had a quantity
of hair and moustache--jet black, except at the shaggy ends, where
it had a tinge of red--and a high hook nose. He laughed at Mistress
Affery's start and cry; and as he laughed, his moustache went up under
his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.
'What's the matter?' he asked in plain English. 'What are you frightened
at?' 'At you,' panted Affery. 'Me, madam?'
'And the dismal evening, and--and everything,' said Affery. 'And here!
The wind has been and blown the door to, and I can't get in.'
'Hah!' said the gentleman, who took that very coolly. 'Indeed! Do you
know such a name as Clennam about here?'
'Lord bless us, I should think I did, I should think I did!' cried
Affery, exasperated into a new wringing of hands by the inquiry.