CHAPTER XXXVI

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The schoolmaster, never a sound sleeper at the best of times, this night slept his worst. Being but a novice in practical iniquity, and lacking yet the reposeful assurance that lulls the veteran evil-doer upon his pillow, and gives him slumber unknown of the godly, who have consciences to lie upon their breast like lobster, he tossed hotly between his sheets. Sleep came to him, indeed, but it was a troubled sleep, blown across his mind's sky in fitful patches, like the clouds that had scudded seawards over the land this day, and gave him no repose.

Thoughts, like teetotums, spun too fast for the mind's eye to recognise the figures on them. But always the basis of his delirium was Pam; the ceaseless desire of her possession; his love of her; his remorse of the evil that had been done to get her; her horror of him that his act had inspired in her; wild resolutions to atone to the girl for his past iniquity by his future dedication to her worship; to justify the means by the end, and make her bless him at last for the sin that had brought them together.

So his mind was spinning on its unchecked dizzy orbit in space through the hours, like a star through the centuries, when all at once, with a shock that shuddered him from head to foot, some unseen power arrested its flight as with an omnipotent hand, and left him wide-eyed and wakeful on his bed; no star at all now, but the bed-bound, trembling body of a man, filled with sudden fear and apprehension.

What had happened? Had his being just wrested itself from the bonds of a horrid nightmare? Had he been dreaming or thinking when the shock came? He could remember nothing, whether it had been dream or reflection, to which he could attribute the alert horror of this moment. It had dropped upon him from somewhere without himself; as though it had been a mighty, soundless peal of thunder, shaking his soul to its foundations. His thoughts he could recall with equanimity; there was nothing in them to cause him fear--and still fear filled him, the more greatly for having not form nor expression. Fear, or apprehension, filled him to such extent that the cold, tingling fingers of terror crept up his scalp, from neck to forehead, brushing all his hairs the wrong way; and a great, boiling sweat burst out next moment upon his face and body. So men have been made aware at times of the doings of death, and the schoolmaster, recalling cases of the kind, drew himself up palpitatingly in his bed. On the cane-bottomed chair by the head of it, it was his nightly custom to set his candle, which he thus extinguished, with a hand thrust out from between the sheets. Thrusting out the same hand now, he possessed himself, in agitated haste, of the match-box, struck nervously for a light with the match's unphosphorused end, and with the red tip of phosphorus on the unsand-papered side of the box; and lastly, after much work of the sort, drew into existence a fitful, wavering flame, that died in giving light to the candle. Then he pulled forth his watch by its chain from under the pillow, and holding it out from him, fixed a disturbed eye upon its face. Half-past twelve.

Half-past twelve! No more than that! Ages he seemed to have been battling with the fever of thought. Could the watch be true? He pressed it to his ear, and heard the active click-click, click-click heart go beating in its busy little body. It had not stopped then. It spoke the truth.

He replaced it under the pillow, and remained drawn up in bed, with both arms outstretched on the coverlet, as though debating action--though what to do, or what might be supposed to be required of him, he knew not. His heart, thumping against his ribs, gave abundant evidence that he had been rudely roused--if otherwise he had had any inclination to doubt. And there was the relaxed weakness about his legs, too, and his limp arms, that bore witness to the sharpness of the shock. Had the shock come upon him standing, his first instinct would have led him to sit down. Over and over in his mind he kept turning this awakening like a strange, unknown coin, seeking to find some decipherable superscription upon it, and learn what it might presage. It had come upon him suddenly. It was like to a clap of thunder without noise; the boom of a gun; the slam of a door. Something whose sound he had not heard, but whose shock had stirred him. Yet all he could think of was death. Somebody was dead; somebody was dying; somebody was going to die. To such extent did the idea of death possess him that it seemed to expire from him like a mighty stream, whose fount was in his brain. The whole room was filled with the awesome presence of it. Death was at the bed-foot; at the window curtain; shrouded the candle. And then, of a sudden, thoughts of death and thoughts of the girl, circling round each other, came into horrible collision, and commingled, and lo! death and the girl were one.

In his guilty state of mind, he was an easy prey for terror. He tried to rid himself of the idea with a hundred assurances drawn from pure reason. How could she be dead? She had never died before ... why should she die now? She was sleeping safely in her own bed, not four yards from him. Draw a bee-line through the wall at his head, through the landing beyond, and through the wall of the girl's room, and there she should surely be. Only last night he had been speaking to her; hardly more than four hours ago he had heard her voice. Death could not have come to her so soon. The idea was nonsense. But like a child, terrorised by things unseen, that the wisdom of grown-up logic cannot pacify, the more he reasoned the more his unreasonment grew. For all this ill-gotten authority over her that he had been wielding so unmercifully these days past ... to what might it not have driven her? Desperately he listened--with his face turned toward the wall--as though death were a thing audible, like the tick-tacking of the big clock in the passage below. But the tick-tacking of the big clock, and the irregular thudding of his own heart, and the long-drawn snores of the postmaster, were all that he could hear. This trinity of sounds hung like a creaking door before his hearing. He was sensible of a deep and deadly silence beyond, flowing like the sea of eternity; but despite his desperate fishing, he could draw up nothing from its depths. Last of all, wrought to the supreme pitch of suspense, he threw aside his coverings, slid from the bed, and stole across the room towards the door--a miserable figure of inquietude in his thin, bare legs and short scholastic night-gown, that took him pathetically somewhere by the bone of the knee. Again, at the door itself he listened for a while, trying to cancel those three intrusive factors--the snore, the clock, and his own heart--and base his calculations on the silence beyond; but he could not. If he would gain any reassurance for his disquieted spirit, he must go forth and inquire deeper of the surrounding stillness than this.

And he went forth, and saw the moonlight bathing all the landing through the little staircase window and issue idly in a pale, phosphorescent stream round the three sides of the girl's part-opened door.

Like a wide-mouthed statue of horror, he stood marble in the white moonlight and stared. Her door was open; her door that had been closed and locked upon her last night was open now--open so emptily and with such desolation, while the moonlight flowed placidly through it, like sea-water through the hollow hulk of a submerged vessel--that it seemed as if never it could have held the live, blood-warmed body of the girl. For a moment, the shock of what he saw was twin to the shock of what--so short a while back--he had failed to see. Then in his little, wasted cotton night-dress and his bare legs as he was, he started forward into

## action, pushed open the panels unhesitatingly with his fingers, and

entered.

All to itself the moonlight possessed the room; filled it from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner. There was no girl. Her bed had been merely laid upon from the outside; she had not slept in it. There was her night-dress untouched in its embroidered case. Except for the callous, white moonlight, that showed him these things without a thought for his anguish, the room was empty as a sieve. The girl had gone; gone where and why and when, he could not tell. Whether with thoughts of death, or thoughts of flight, or thoughts of treachery--he could not tell. The discovery flew to his head like the vintage of bitter grapes. He searched madly about the room; threw up the white valances of her bed, lest perchance she were but hiding from him; opened her cupboards and beat his hands wildly among the darkness of skirts and hanging garments for some clasp of fugitive flesh and blood; part shut the door to assure himself she was not lurking behind its hinges, with her face in her hands and her forehead against the wall.

But she was not. He knew she was not when he searched. She was gone! she was gone!

And thence, with his thin, worn, calico lapels blowing about his legs, he scurried down the twisted staircase to see what the lower regions had to show him.

As soon as his feet flinched on the bristles of the fibre mat, they showed him all that they had to show. The two letters spread out side by side on the window table, white as driven snow in the moonlight. It needed no slow investigation to assure him what they were. Gravestones did not more certainly indicate what lay beneath them than did these two pallid envelopes. He was on them at once, like a hawk. "To Mr. Frewin," he read on the first, in Pam's neat, well-known script, and ripped it open regardlessly, as though he were gutting herrings. So did his heart beat at him from within, and so did his brain contract and swell, and so did his apprehensive hand tremble, that for some seconds the piece of paper, for all the words he distinguished on it, might have been a white, waving flag. But in the end he got control over himself, and wrested the girl's last message to him from the paper on which, to all intents and purposes, it was scarcely dry.

"When you get this..." he read. Ah! that familiar, time-worn overture for stricken messages of grief. How many miserables, by water-sides, by lone lochs, by canals, reservoirs, and railways, have prefaced their journey to eternity with these four words. Scarcely a suicide so unliterary that, at this last moment, he cannot call them to his aid for epitaph to his misery. As soon as the schoolmaster read them, he knew all. Death or departure ... this was the end.

"... When you get this" (he read), "I shall be far away from Ullbrig, and you will know why. If you had done differently with me, I might have done differently with you. But it is too late now for regrets. After the sin you have forced me to share with you, I could never, never love you. The future frightens me. For all you have made me suffer I forgive you freely, but I pray God we may never meet again. I have been as wicked as you, and for this reason I dare not join our wickednesses, for fear of where they may lead us. Please forgive me for the things in which I have sinned against you, and beg God to forgive us both for the things we have done against Him. Pray for me too, as I will pray for you. Perhaps your life may be all the brighter and better for my absence. Strive to do your best that it may be so; and please remember, if at any time you are tempted to think hardly upon me, that I am not angry with you, and that I do not blame you. Good-by for ever. PAM."

That was all the letter told him--but it was enough. His face was like the face of a snow-man when he had finished reading. Not only was he smitten to the heart with the lost love of the girl, after all his lavish outlay of unrighteousness and sin, but now she was gone, and he was here in Ullbrig to bear the brunt of his deed. For he had no misconceptions as to his true position in the matter, as Pam had. He knew his conduct for what it was, and his hold over her for what it was, and the world's judgment for what it would be. Her very going was a declaration of the thing he had held over her in his wickedness, and would have never dared employ. The worthless blackmail with which he had threatened her had served its purpose only too well. To such extent had the girl believed its power and feared it, and accredited him with the intentions of its use, that she had been terrorised into flight from him. And now the full responsibility of his act pointed at him with awful finger. To-morrow, tidings of the girl's departure would be out. Tongues would be busy. She who had been going to wed the schoolmaster had loved him so little that she had fled from him. Why had she fled from him? Because he had held a letter over her head that he had robbed from her desk--a letter belonging to neither of them--and by withholding it from its proper owner, and threatening the girl, he had got her to submit to his terms. When once that became known he was a ruined man. His love was ruined; his life was ruined. The death that had so terrorised him already must have been none other than his own. For rather than face this terrible exposure and degradation, he would die. He was a wild and desperate man now, holding the slipping cable of life and honor in his hands. To avert this catastrophe, to find the girl--at scarcely anything would he stop short. But what must he do? Where seek her? How act?

To cast his eye on the second letter was to seize upon it as he had done the first, and tear open its contents without a moment's hesitation. Emma Morland would never know what had been left for her this night, and beneath this envelope there might lurk a confession of the whole history of the girl's departure, with his own share writ incriminatingly large; at the least, some word or sentence that might give him a clearer clue to her intentions than her own letter to him. But he was disappointed. Beyond beginning: "Dearest Emma," this second epistle told him nothing that he consumed to know. It was a mere farewell of sorrow for all the sin Pam had committed against Emma, particularly during these last few days, and a pathetic begging for forgiveness. Emma did not know how unhappy Pam had been--Pam hoped Emma would never, never know such unhappiness. She was not the girl Emma thought her. She was a living lie, full of wickedness and deception. The only thing for her to do, she felt, was to blot out such a horrible lie from the face of Ullbrig and be gone. Then followed assurances of undying love to Emma, and to the postmaster and to Mrs. Morland, with a list of such things as Pam bequeathed to Emma for her own use and possession. To all intents and purposes, it was Pam's last will and testament, pathetically worded enough, had the man been in any mood for pathos other than his own. To the postmaster, Pam left this; to Mrs. Morland, that; to James Maskill, the other; to Ginger--if he would have it--some further token of her affection. Only the schoolmaster's name was absent. And at the end was Pam's own name, blurred and spotted with the tears that had fallen fast at this juncture.

But for these the man had no heed. He had read the letters, and they had told him nothing; now he must decide quickly, as he valued his life.

And first, he could accomplish nothing as he was. The remembrance of his ungarbed condition came upon him suddenly, and he cursed himself for his bodily unreadiness--although his mind had as yet no commission for his limbs to execute. Up the twisted staircase he pattered again, employing his hands on the steps in front of him like paws, to accelerate his pace, and thrust himself wildly into his clothes. Then he scurried down again to the little kitchen. There he sorted his own boots from the disorderly gathering for the morning's clean, strapped up their leather laces with the speed of desperation, stuffed the two letters into his coat pocket, caught a cap from the row of pegs where the postmaster's official regalia hung, and scuffled down the passage to the front door.

There was no mistaking signs of the girl's flight, or the way by which she had fled. For him there was no necessity to work back the big square bolt, or turn the traitorous key. Pam's fingers had done that service already. He was out in the street with scarcely a moment's delay, on the whitewashed step where Pam's own feet had rested less than fifteen minutes ago--could he only have known--closing the door upon him by stealth, as she had done, and looking up and down the roadway, divided lengthways between its far white band of moonlight and its nearer black shadow, with its serrated line of broken roofs and chimney-pots--like the keyboard of a piano--as she had looked before her purpose made its final plunge.

Which way had she gone? he asked himself, in frenzied supplication. For all he knew, she had been gone an hour, a couple of hours, three hours ... four hours. Even now, while he was making this vein-bursting struggle to come abreast with her and stave off that awful exposure of to-morrow, it might all be ended. Destiny might have this shameful history written to the full in the book of record, and the book inexorably closed. Perhaps the girl's purpose had been maturing all these days past. Perhaps her plan had been prepared from the first ... and in abeyance, pending restitution of the letter. Fool that he was ever to give it! Why had n't he adhered to his first project, and given it to her only when they were in sight of the house, and he was with her, or left it there himself by night, with a message that it had been overlooked in a corner of the post-bag? Now what had she done with it? Had she restored it? That would mean the Cliff Wrangham road she must have taken. Or had she fled with it, bearing all traces of her guilt with her? That might mean any road ... the Hunmouth road, the Garthston road, the Merensea road. Or had she gone to cast herself upon the protection of the Vicar? Accursed old busybody! who had drilled and questioned and cross-examined him about the wedding like a school-thief under suspicion. There was probability about this latter surmise, and at least, to put the speculation to the test would not take him far out of his way. Full of the wild, unrestrained desire to do something, with tumultuous, incredulous hope in the desire, he quitted his place on the doorstep, and set off in madman's haste for the Vicarage.

But the moon poured down in sublime, unpitying indifference upon its unlighted windows. The house was as still and unawake as the church at its side and the white graves beyond. Baffled, he stood and glared hatefully, with his hands twitching about the upturned collar of his coat, and his face working as though the house were human and he would have throttled it. Of all men in the world to help him, here, behind these luminous opal windows, was the man, and he knew it, and was powerless to evoke his assistance, grinding his teeth together in the fierce agony of despair.

Motion took him in the legs again, and drove him down the narrow, crooked side-street towards the low road and Merensea Hill, between the rows of tumbled cottages, with their yellow window squares. He could have drummed on them with his fingers, and in his desperation and need of assistance would have done so, but fear withheld him. As he ran, he heard troubled night-coughs rap out sharp at him here and there, where some aged sufferer drew breath badly, and wrestled for such stagnant air as was contained in the sealed chamber. The buzzing of some big eight-day clock, too, chiming a belated hour, he heard, and the fretful crying of a baby, being lulled to sleep by its weary mother. Heaven knows where his run would have ended in this direction, for it was become so blended and amalgamated with his consciousness that he could have as soon stopped running as the feverish urging of his thoughts. But at the bottom of the street, where the road dips its lowest before making the sharp ascent of Merensea Hill, he saw the dark figure of a man, and death could not have stopped him sooner. It was only Bob Newbit, smoking his black cutty, with his hands in his belt, and a coat thrown over his shoulders, come out to watch over the fire of the brick-kiln that glowed red in the field across the roadway, but all men were one man in their power to read the schoolmaster's dark secret, and do him harm. He saw the burning end of the cutty turn his way, and without waiting to know whether he had been perceived, or give the chance of a hail, he turned on his tracks again like a hare, and was forging up the street through the square lighted windows towards the Vicarage.

This time, without stopping in his breathless course, he went by. One way was as good as another to him, who had no reason for going any. He would keep on to Cliff Wrangham.

At first, panting doggedly onward, he ran this way as he had run that. If his clothing had been on fire instead of his brain, like this he would have wildly run, seeking flight from the agony that consumed him.

But conviction came upon him as he ran. It seemed incredible he could be making all this desperate endeavor for nothing. It must surely end by repaying him with positive result. Little by little the mad, fitful uncertainty gave way to the madder flame of assurance. Of all madness, this fixed madness is the most to be feared. Now he was merely pursuing the girl, who was along here in front of him. At times, turning his ear before him as he lunged onward, he seemed to hear elusive footsteps; thought he saw her flitting aside into gateways and hedgerows to escape him. Once he staggered halfway across a grass close because, he saw her standing in the middle of it, trying to deceive him by her motionlessness into thinking her some inanimate thing. When he came near she was a pump-well. Then he saw that he had relinquished the substance for the shadow. She was on the roadway there, in advance of him; her skirts flying, her hands to her hat. And he lumbered back over the soft grass, soddened by the recent rain, to the roadway, and resumed his forward pursuit.

Full of fresh strenuous desire to press ahead, and worn out with this unaccustomed exertion, he passed, half running, half walking, with his hand bound over his heart, and his breath drawn up convulsively, like a child with the croup--through the final gateways, one after another. Now he was in the little end lane, making a poor pretence of caution. Now he waw by the stable; now he was by the iron wicket. The hope that had been his while he ran stopped dead as his flight stopped. By the little iron wicket, and still under cover of the kitchen-garden wall, he stayed, gasping, and dared not go further, or look at the front of the house, for fear of what he should see--the sight of all its moonlit windows looking out with the calm, self-communing gaze of the blind, that know nothing of what they gaze upon. As the Vicarage had faced him, so this house should face him. It was the end. He knew his doom.

And knowing it, he found strength to see, and saw.

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