CHAPTER XXXVIII

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It was not long that the Spawer had to wait. He had scarcely subsided into his position, indeed, when he heard, on the other side of the hedge, the rapid "rff, rff, rff," that told where long grass was being torn aside to the passage of hurried feet. The fellow was running, then. It flashed across the Spawer's mind grimly, as he listened to the sound of him, that he did not think himself of such interest to any mortal man. And almost before he had time to gratify his ironic humor with a smile, the mortal man had scrambled desperately over the stile, flinging himself to ground on this side of it with such a thud of precipitation that he had to preserve his equilibrium with spread fingers in the grass. Next moment he pushed himself upright again, ran hesitatingly forward some paces, stopped dead, and commenced to beat about in a wild, blind search on all sides of him, as though he were dazed with the loss of his quarry. For a moment it came into the Spawer's head as he watched him that perhaps the man was mad or drunk. Certainly there seemed little of rationality about his actions. At times he ran; at times he cast himself so close upon the edge of the cliff that the Spawer's flesh crept cold, and he wondered whether he ought to stand by and see a deluded fellow-being submit himself to such dangers. If he went over there, with the boiling sea beneath, it was little chance he would ever come up again--till the tide brought him. But after a moment or two, the Spawer grew reassured that this catastrophe was not likely to happen, and continued watching in silence.

He was a furtive, unprepossessing-looking fellow, it struck the Spawer. His coat-collar was buttoned up to his neck, lending a particularly sinister touch to his appearance, and the coat itself hung upon him loosely, as though he had no shoulders, and bagged with an empty flatness about the waist, as though, too, he had no stomach. It was a tramp's coat, with tails--such as no honest rustic would wear--but had found its way here, through a nameless course of degradation, from the towns. And they were tramp's trousers too, that looked as though any minute they might come down; loose, lifeless, shapeless trousers, whose bottoms his boots trod on at every step. Otherwise, he wore a dark cloth cap, pulled tightly over his scalp, with its neb scowling down to his eyebrows, and his breath came and went vindictively--or so it seemed to the Spawer--as though he had been baulked of something, and was panting more through rage than exertion.

And all at once, puzzled to fit some kind of a key to the fellow's strange conduct, what enmity or what design he could have against him, the Spawer's mind harked back to the two letters he had received this night, and to the enigmatical epistle of the girl, and in a flash he knew his man.

But though he knew him, whatever the recognition might serve him in despatching theories of robbery and violence, it served him little for enlightenment. Added, indeed, to his perplexity, instead of subtracting from it. For what object had caused this man to follow him--him, his poor, crushed, and trampled antagonist--to the sea to-night? Had he not injured him enough, but that he must needs track him in this despicable fashion, and play spy upon his doings? All the hatred and unreasoning disregard that the unsuccessful have for the successful rose up within him at the discovery. Of the schoolmaster's virtues he knew nothing; sought to know nothing. It was enough for him that to this man he was indebted for his soul's humiliation; that this sinister-looking figure had supplanted him for occupation of the dearest territory in the world; and he rejoiced with a cruel and unhallowed joy that this, his vanquisher, had been given over thus into his hand.

Ten to one, were he only to make no sound, he could succeed in eluding discovery, for the fellow showed no aptitude in search, but success of this sort was not what he desired. He had been contemptibly dogged for some purpose or other, and he would have full revenge of the man's shame. Very quietly he stepped out of his shelter and showed his tall figure in the moonlight.

"You appear to be looking for something," he said.

At the sound of his voice, the man spun round eagerly on his heel, as though his first emotion had been of pure incredulous joy that his quarry was not lost to him. Shame succeeded upon that, to think of what the Spawer had been a witness, and his forward impulse was checked momentarily into a falling back on the heel that had urged him. Then, just as quickly, anger succeeded upon shame. Those chance words, uttered so carelessly, but with such a frigid tone of scorn--as though the Spawer in mind towered above him like an Alpine summit, and his lofty contempt was snow-capped--roused his wrath to desperation.

"You know what I am looking for," he said hoarsely, and advanced with both hands up at his coat-collar.

Could the Spawer have had but one glimpse into the surging hot mind of the man at this moment, and seen of what wild charges he stood accused, he might have turned the sword of his words into a ploughshare, and tilled honestly for enlightenment. But in his own mind it was he who had been wronged. And besides that, the fierce, unexpressed hostility of love was between them. Even had there not been this present cause of quarrel to kindle anger, they would have been rampant for the fray like two rein-bucks.

"I know what you are looking for?" he asked, and his voice moved contemptuously away from the suggestion as he might himself have moved (so the schoolmaster thought) from the contaminating touch of an unclean beggar. A clear, well-pitched, musical voice it was--so different from the schoolmaster's hoarse, toneless utterance--and its very superiority, seeming now to take conscious pride in itself, stirred up the listening man's worst hatred. In birth, in station, in presence, in voice, in possessions, and in love, this tall, insufferable figure prevailed. "You make a mistake..." he heard it say to him. "I know nothing at all about you, except that you have been dogging my footsteps for this last quarter of an hour. I know that. If you have anything to add to it, I am ready to hear you."

The lean, shabby figure of the schoolmaster flinched visibly in the moonlight at each fresh phrase, as if it had been a whip-lash that his antagonist was curling about him. With both hands clenched at his coat-collar, he seemed almost to be hanging on to resolution against a groan.

"Yes," he blurted out fiercely at last, releasing his hands at the same moment from this occupation, and crying out his confession like a wild triumph of delinquency; "I have been following you. You may know it."

"I do know it," said the Spawer.

"I say you may know it," the schoolmaster repeated, raising his hoarse voice another tuneless semitone up its chromatic of passion. "I don't care."

"Don't care," the Spawer told him coolly, "as you may be aware, got hanged. I would advise you to take profit by his example."

The schoolmaster's hands flew back to his collar again with one accord.

"You thought you were safe from me," he forced through his unsteady lips. "You thought you were free to do as you liked."

"I certainly thought I was free to walk along the cliff without being persecuted with these attentions," the Spawer cut into him.

"Yes; you thought ... you could trample on me!" the schoolmaster hissed at him venomously.

"I have not the least desire to trample on you," the Spawer assured him frigidly. "I would not tread on a worm if I knew it. There is room in the world for us both--if you 'll be so good as to make use of it."

"You think..." the schoolmaster cried passionately, "that because you come from big towns, and live in fine houses, and wear fine clothes ... that you can do what you like in the country."

"It seems I am mistaken," the Spawer apostrophised sarcastically. "In the towns, at least, we have the police to defend us from molestation by night."

"You think," the schoolmaster shouted at him, as though to beat down his words and tread them and his opposition underfoot, "... you think we country people are fit subjects for your scorn. You think you can walk over our feelings, and trifle with all our happiness as though we were mere paving-stones for your own evil enjoyments. You think we are the dirt beneath your feet."

"Indeed?" the Spawer remarked. "I never thought half so much about you as you suppose."

"You have thought it," the schoolmaster cried at him; "and you are thinking it. Every word you say to me is an insult. You want to tell me that I am beneath your notice, and that your contempt is too good for me. You think you can mock me indiscriminately, and make a fool of me."

"Not at all," the Spawer responded carelessly. "I have my own business. You can do that quite well enough for yourself."

"But you are wrong!" the schoolmaster shouted, in a voice almost inarticulate with passion, and the terrible cooped-up storm of hopes and fears. "You are wrong. You thought you could kick me aside like a dog, and leave me to the derision and contempt of Ullbrig. You thought you could break up an honest man's happiness for your own wicked diversion, and steal off like a thief with it. But you are wrong. You are wrong." He was almost weeping--though the Spawer did not know it--with the insufferable fever of desperation. Had the Spawer known it, he would have had mercy, and surrendered this wordy victory rather than fight to the finish with the poor God-forsaken, love-forsaken, self-forsaken devil that cut and lunged so furiously at him. But the only conclusion respecting this encounter, glimmering at the far back of his brain, was that the man was consumed with the fire of an unworthy jealousy, and he took joy in piling up its fuel--even at the risk of burning his own fingers. "But you are wrong! You are wrong!" the schoolmaster reiterated at him.

"It seems I am wrong in many things," the Spawer assented. "But that 's scarcely surprising; since I don't know who in the world you are, or where you come from, or what the devil you want with me."

"You know who I am," the schoolmaster shouted at him. "And you know what I want with you."

"Not in the least," the Spawer told him, "unless it is relief, but if so, you have a strange way of asking for it."

"You know it is not relief!" the tortured figure exclaimed. "If I were starving, I would go to my grave sooner than ask a penny of such as you--that have n't the heart of a dog. You want to put me off with words and sneers and scorns, but I won't be put off. You shan't put me off. I have stood everything that I will stand."

"You have certainly stood long enough," the Spawer remarked. "Don't stand any longer on my account. If you have said all you wish to say, perhaps you will kindly tell me which way is your way, and leave me free to choose the other."

"I have not said all I wish to say," the man cried, opening and clenching his fingers. "You shall not shake me off, for all your pretending. I have found you in time, and I will stick to you for the rights you want to rob me of. You shall not slip me. Where you go I will go. You shall not get away."

The Spawer pulled his moustache, and looked the man up and down.

"Really..." he said, after a while. "You are a smaller man than I ... but you tempt me very much to kick you."

In a second, at that threat of action, the pent-up torrents of the schoolmaster's rage and anguish burst forth from him. Anything was better than words. He rushed up wildly to his adversary.

"Kick me!" he cried fiercely, shouting up with hoarse voice of challenge into the Spawer's face. "Kick me! Touch me. Lay a hand upon me. You say you 'll kick me. Kick me."

He pressed so hard upon the Spawer, with arms thrown out and flourishing wildly, that even had he wished it, the Spawer would not have had purchase to kick him. Instead, he receded somewhat from their undesirable chest-to-chest contact, striving by gentle withdrawal to mollify the man's mad anger. For he had seen into his eyes, and their look startled him. Not for himself--he was in every sense the man's better, and could have wrought with him as though he were a schoolboy's cane--but for the man. It was borne in upon him suddenly anew, with terrible conviction, that the fellow was mad; the victim of some fierce hallucination--whose fixed point of hatred was in himself--and he repented now that he had goaded him to such a cruel pitch. And still the man pressed upon him. "Kick me!" he kept saying, utterly deaf to the Spawer's temporising and persuasive utterances. "Kick me. Touch me. Lay a hand upon me."

To lay a hand upon him now, even in mere pacification, meant an inevitable struggle, and such a termination was too unseemly to be thought of. As it was, matters had gone altogether beyond their bounds. To have chastised the fellow with scorn had been one thing, but to be involved in a retreat before the hoarse breath of a passionate madman was another, utterly outside all dignity. Sooner or later, too, he would have to stand or be forced over the cliff. The thought of the boiling sea below, to which, in the concentration of his faculties upon this ignominious encounter, he had been paying no heed, recalled him hotly, and he stole an anxious glance over his shoulder to learn where he stood.

And at that very moment he stood on the cliff edge, and it slipped and gave way with him. Wynne flung up his arms, beating the air with them like wings, to regain his balance, but he could not. An arm clutched out after him, whether to push or clasp him he did not know. Half spinning as he went, he doubled out of sight backward; and if anything were needed, apart from the anguish of his own mind, at that awful, inevitable moment, to add to the horror of his going, it was the schoolmaster's long, horrid scream.

*