Then turning to John, he added, 'Pay! Why,
nobody.'
John stared round at the mass of faces--some grinning, some fierce, some
lighted up by torches, some indistinct, some dusky and shadowy: some
looking at him, some at his house, some at each other--and while he was,
as he thought, in the very act of doing so, found himself, without any
consciousness of having moved, in the bar; sitting down in an arm-chair,
and watching the destruction of his property, as if it were some queer
play or entertainment, of an astonishing and stupefying nature, but
having no reference to himself--that he could make out--at all.
Yes. Here was the bar--the bar that the boldest never entered without
special invitation--the sanctuary, the mystery, the hallowed ground:
here it was, crammed with men, clubs, sticks, torches, pistols; filled
with a deafening noise, oaths, shouts, screams, hootings; changed all at
once into a bear-garden, a madhouse, an infernal temple: men darting
in and out, by door and window, smashing the glass, turning the taps,
drinking liquor out of China punchbowls, sitting astride of casks,
smoking private and personal pipes, cutting down the sacred grove of
lemons, hacking and hewing at the celebrated cheese, breaking open
inviolable drawers, putting things in their pockets which didn't belong
to them, dividing his own money before his own eyes, wantonly wasting,
breaking, pulling down and tearing up: nothing quiet, nothing private:
men everywhere--above, below, overhead, in the bedrooms, in the kitchen,
in the yard, in the stables--clambering in at windows when there were
doors wide open; dropping out of windows when the stairs were handy;
leaping over the bannisters into chasms of passages: new faces and
figures presenting themselves every instant--some yelling, some singing,
some fighting, some breaking glass and crockery, some laying the dust
with the liquor they couldn't drink, some ringing the bells till they
pulled them down, others beating them with pokers till they beat them
into fragments: more men still--more, more, more--swarming on like
insects: noise, smoke, light, darkness, frolic, anger, laughter, groans,
plunder, fear, and ruin!
Nearly all the time while John looked on at this bewildering scene, Hugh
kept near him; and though he was the loudest, wildest, most destructive
villain there, he saved his old master's bones a score of times.
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