CHAPTER XXXVII

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Saw the magnified yellow window thrown over the pathway and out across the tangled grass to the mouldy green railings, from the Spawer's room. Here was life at last. Thank God! Here was life at last.

His heart gave a convulsive leap of exultation within him. Could it be mere coincidence that of all Ullbrig and Cliff Wrangham this man should be unnumbered among the sleepers? Could it be that the late light, flowing from that little low window beyond the porch, had no concern with his own misery and the girl's flight? He could not think it. Here was his journey's end. Let him take the girl red-handed in shame, if need be. Shame, even, counted for nothing in his love of her. Had she been dyed to the neck in iniquity he would have wished her, and followed to the world's end for her, without the lash of his own sin to whip up the pursuit.

Slowly, with his eyes fixed on the sidelight from that fateful window, he advanced; arms outspread for caution, doubling inwards from his middle at each step, and making a semi-circle upon the grass to get sooner and deeper sight into the room. All at once his eye cleared the obstruction of trailing porch, and he stopped here, as though to take in fresh supplies of cautious reserve and get leverage upon the position. Then, more laboriously he worked forward again; his head far in advance; his knees bent; his arms like a baboon's, extended to the ground--as though at an alarm he would clutch at the long grass and draw himself into its shelter. The piano-end came into view. Its keyboard of chequered ivory lengthened as he approached upon it; next he gained sight of the mantel-shelf; and last of all ... with his finger-nails clenched into his palms for self-repression ... the man.

He was seated on an end of the table, with his back towards the window, and appeared to be reading or scrutinising something beneath the powerful light of the big hanging lamp. What it was he bent his head over the schoolmaster could not see, but his acute, tormented vision saw something else that discharged itself at once in lightning of revelation through the whole length and breadth of his being, and blinded him for a moment with fierce, flashing passion and exultant joy. The room was heaped up under the confusion of a departure. There were books stacked together carefully on the table; music in fat portfolios; there were garments folded and unfolded; coats and trousers; boots on trees; and to give crowning evidence to his deduction, a big leather traveling portmanteau, open of lid, beyond the fireplace. Ah! was it any longer a coincidence, these two departures? Thank God he was in time. The Lord had not deserted him. It was the Lord that had brought him here this night.

Meanwhile, the Spawer kept his attitude, with bowed head of absorption beneath the lamp; and the man watched.

Yes; he was going. The schoolmaster had made no mistake. A child, looking in at the open window, would have declared as much. Of a truth, Maurice Ethelbert Wynne had had his last decisive bout with that big bully Destiny. No mistake about it, he had been badly beaten. All through the hours after supper he had been collecting his effects together; packing the big trunk down here, that it might be more easily conveyed to the spring cart on the morrow; packing the smaller portmanteau upstairs. Upstairs to-night for the most part his work had been, only quitting it at long intervals to bring down further contributions for the yawning leather trunk. And now, on this last occasion of his descent, he had been made aware, for the first time, that a couple of letters lay on the keyboard of the pianoforte, by the bass end, near the window.

At the beginning his eye had rested upon them, and accepted their presence as a matter of course, without any further inquiry or speculation, quite content with seeing them. It was a customary place for him to leave things of the sort, only he did n't remember having left anything there lately. By the way, what letters would they be? More out of idleness than real curiosity, he put out his hand and took them up.

The first, addressed to him in that firm, feminine handwriting--almost masculine--beneath a wealth of green stamps and postmarks, he recognised at a glauce. But it had not been opened. Strange that! Which of all her letters had escaped him like this? When had it come? How long had he overlooked it? Still asking himself the questions, he turned his eye upon the second letter. That too, was addressed to him in a handwriting he knew no less surely--though with less familiarity: the soft, neat, girl-like script of Pam, and that, too, must be unopened, for it was the first he had received from her. From Pam, of all people in the world. What had she to say to him? Perhaps this letter would explain the other. Very nervous of finger, he tore open the envelope.

A curious little letter it was, perplexingly short, that puckered up his brows and left him more puzzled after its perusal than before. It appeared to be, in some sort, a confession for an imaginary crime that the girl had committed--though wherein lay the enormity of it, or the necessity for this present epistle, not for the life of him could he perceive. Pam, indeed, whose own guilt was so vivid that a word was sufficient to depict it, had thought that the same word could reveal it to all the world. Her letter was like the answer to a riddle, with the question lacking. Apparently, the Spawer told himself, the girl had failed to deliver a letter--the letter accompanying this, he presumed--and it had preyed terribly upon her mind. He was to forgive her, as she felt sure he would forgive her if he could only know what suffering it had cost her. And then followed an outburst of affectionate gratitude for all the kindness he had lavished on her; his never-failing goodness and patience. These she should never forget. With a concluding appeal to him that he should try and think as leniently of her as he could.

Think as leniently of her as he could! Miserable topsy-turveydom of life, where all one's acts turn upside-down in the acting, and one's deeds misrepresent one with the deliberate purpose of political agents. Here he had been holding himself a supplicant upon the girl's mercy, and lo! all the while, it seemed their positions were exactly reversed, and it was she who imagined herself an offender against him! This letter of the girl's troubled him. Did it mean she had never been sure of his friendship? Did it mean she had altogether overlooked the signs in his conduct that should have told her he would have forgiven anything ... to her? Had all their relationship been built up of vain imaginings and misunderstandings? If ... for instance...

But he would have no more "ifs." Already he had had too many. What might have been and what was were as asunder as the Poles. Let him not revive the old unworthy desires under the cloak of If. What did the second letter say?

He opened it more slowly than the first--as though he felt a little the shame of going before its presence, and did not anticipate much happiness from this interview of pen and ink. But as he read, it seemed he could not tear his eyes away from their fascinating occupation. If Pam's letter had added cloud to his confusion, this letter was explicit indeed--and yet dazed him at the same time with an overwhelming sense of unreality.

The freedom that he had felt himself unable to ask of the Other Girl, in this letter she was asking of him. All the old stock-in-trade arguments of love that he had thought once of bringing to bear upon her, she was bringing to bear on him. Their attachment, she pointed out, was a mere boy-and-girl attachment, that had never taken deep root in their later lives. He had offered her her liberty once, but he would know that all her sense of loyalty had refused the gift at the time. But now it was different. Another stronger love had come into her life, and she would not disguise the fact from him--it had more to offer. She was not cut out for the wife of a composer. He would know that, really, without her telling him. She could never be helpful to him; never even give him the full measure of sympathy that the creative mind needed. In a word, love and worldly position had been laid together at her feet and she dared not proceed with this flat, stale attachment of theirs, that had neither reason nor riches. It was always a woman's privilege to change her mind, and she would avail herself of it to accept the liberty he had offered her before. Friends they had been, all this while--never lovers at all--and friends, she trusted, they would never cease to be. There was a little blot of tears at the end, a slight incoherence of phraseology in a sentimental reversion to their happy past ... but only slight--only very slight. Love had been dead between them long ago. She was reconciled to that. But this letter was its official funeral--and it is a strong woman whose tears can resist the appeal of a burying.

And this was the letter the Spawer read with face bent down, while the man outside kept watch.

No wonder he sat motionless on the corner edge of the table, as he had first seated himself, poring over that magnetising something that the watcher, for all his watching, could not see. For what did this letter mean to him? Nothing at all now, in hard fact, perhaps ... but yet ... what tantalising riches in speculation. Here were his trunks, and here was he, all ready for dutiful departure--and in his hands was the instrument of reprieve. His duty had been remitted him. From that duty he was free. Who should say what was his duty now? Had he a duty at all--to himself, or anybody? Or was he, by virtue of this relinquishment, become a mere jellyfish, without volition, to float this way or that at the mercy of the tides? What was there to take him from Ullbrig now? What was to keep him? If he stayed? If he went? If this letter had come sooner! If this letter had only come sooner!

And the whole thing began over again.

All the old fever of reasoning set in anew with him, and rose up to its height. All the old desires. All the old wild hopes. He had been tired when he came downstairs, less with physical fatigue than with the dull, sleepless lassitude of established despair--but now he was very wide awake. His eyes revolted at the thoughts of being closed perforce upon a pillow; they wanted license to keep open house for his brain all night through. Suddenly, too, came upon him the nervous appetite for

## activity; the desire to give a bodily articulation to the movement of

his mind. He felt as though he could have set off, and walked the globe round, and been back again here by to-morrow's breakfast. And submitting to the feeling, he rose all at once from his place on the table, turned down the twin burners of the swing lamp, picked up his cap, squeezed his way out through the two doors and the narrow porch, and set off towards the sea.

He walked with a brisk, purposeful step, for the night was chill beneath the white moon and the many cool stars. Part way across Luke Hemingway's big ten-acre field, at a sudden turn of his head towards some recumbent, cud-chewing cattle, his eye-corner caught the tail-end of an upright figure, vanishing into the hedge at some distance behind him. There was nothing, of course, when he looked, to confirm the impression, beyond the clear-defined, moonlit path along which he had come. But his eye retained such an obstinate remembrance of its own delusion, that at a few yards further on, choosing his moment, he turned on his heel again. And again, strangely enough, his eye seemed to be just eluded by the vanishing figure of a man. Had he been nervously given, he might have felt tempted to walk back and scrutinise the hedgerow that had thus twice afforded refuge to his shadowy pursuant. But for one thing, his mind was too busy for nerves to-night, and knowing, moreover, the strange receptive sensitiveness of the human eye, and the assurance with which it attests, as realities, mere miraculous figments of the brain, he passed on--reserving the right to turn again when he had given his visual informant an opportunity to forget its impression.

After a longer interval, therefore, he looked back again, on the pretext of stooping to his shoe-lace, and three times after that. Twice his eye attested to the presence of a furtive figure, that seemed to drop to earth in the thick fog grass when he turned, only now he knew that his eye did not deceive him. He was being followed.

That the discovery did not tend to add much zest to his midnight ramble--even had there been any before--the Spawer would have been the last to deny. It is an unpleasant thing, at any time, to have one's back turned towards a stealthy follower of undeclared intentions, but moonlight and a lonely coast add still further unpleasantness to the situation. However, the fact remained, and it was no use getting into an unnecessary fuss about it. To turn back openly would not remedy matters much, or give the Spawer any particular advantage over his unknown pursuer. He decided, therefore, keeping cautious vigil over alternate shoulders as he walked, to push on to the cliff, without betraying the least sign of suspicion, and see to what extent this figure would press pursuit. So, quickening his step imperceptibly, and setting up a blithe, not too noisy whistle of unconcern, he came to the cliff, the shadow following.

The wind and storm of the past few days had troubled the sea, that thundered up in ugly assailment of surf about the cliff's soft earthen base, for the tide was rising. Awhile he stood, at the point where he had come upon the path, watching the great waste of chill waters with one eye, and the spot where the figure had vanished, with the other. The keen gaze of Farnborough gleamed out at him in sudden recognition, and here and there little intermittent pin-points of yellow pricked the horizon where boats rose and fell upon the bosom of the sea. Then he lifted his leg leisurely over the gate-stile, by which he had been standing, and sat for a moment astride of it. From this perch he commanded the hedgerow--that ran down to the cliff edge at right angles--on both sides, and could not be approached without his observance. But whatever object his follower had, it seemed certainly, so far at least, that it was unconnected with any ideas of direct encounter. There had been no attempt to gain on him; their relative positions now were what they had been at the first moment of discovery; and it seemed he might sit here till daybreak without his shadow's making any advance in the open. Suddenly, an idea to test the situation came into his mind, and on the instant he acted on it. The man, whoever he might be, was about fifty yards or so inland, on the shady side of the hedge, and watching the Spawer's conspicuous, upright figure keenly, no doubt. All at once the Spawer brought his second leg over the rail, descended, stepped quickly some paces inland, and drew into the hedge. Though the moon fell on him, the hedge was straggling and untrimmed, with somewhat of a dry ditch at its bottom, and long grass. Standing here, unobtrusively, it would take an active search to come upon him, and such a search would not only show him his pursuer, but give him some shrewd idea of the man's intentions.

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