[APPLEGARTH AGAIN.]
I travelled along the beach until I reached the southern cape of Morecambe Bay, and only now and again swerved inland when I espied ahead of me the smoke and houses of a village. This I did more for safety's sake than for any comfort or celerity in the act of walking. Indeed, the sand, which, being loose and dry, slipped and yielded with every step I took, did, I think, double the labour and tedium of my journey. But on the other hand, the country by the sea-coast was flat, so that I could distinguish the figures of people and the direction of their walk at a long distance—a doubtful advantage, you may say, and one that cut both ways. And so it would have been but for the grassy sand-hills which embossed the wide stretch of shore. It was an easy thing to drop into the grass at the first sight of a stranger and crawl down into the hollows betwixt the hillocks; and had such an one pursued me, he would have had the most unprofitable game of hide-and-seek that ever a man engaged in. I had other reasons besides for keeping near the sea. For since I travelled chiefly by night and in the late and early quarters of the day, I had need of a resting-place when the day was full. Now so long as I kept to the coast I had ever one ready to my hand amongst these lonely and desolate sandhills, where I was easily able to scoop out a bed, and so lie snug from the wind. For another thing, I had thus the noise of the sea continually in my ears. I did not know in truth what great store I set on that, until a little short of Lancaster I turned my back on it. The sea sang to me by day and by night, lulling me like a cradle-song when I lay cushioned among the sand-hills, inspiriting as the drums of an army when I walked through the night. It was not merely that it told me of the Swallow swinging upon its tides, and of the great hopes I drew therefrom, but it spoke too with voices of its own, and whether the voices whispered or turbulently laughed, it was always the same perplexing mystery they hinted of. They seemed to signify a message they could not articulate, and it came upon me sometimes, as I sat tired by the shore, that I would fain sit there and listen until I had plucked out the kernel of its meaning. I used to fancy that once a man could penetrate to that and hold it surely, there would be little more he needed to know, but he would carry it with him, as a magic crystal wherein he could see strangely illuminated and made plain, the eternal mysteries which girded him about.
From Morecambe Bay I turned inland towards the borders of Yorkshire, and passing to the east of Kirby Lonsdale, that I might avoid the line of Forster's march, curved round again towards Grasmere. Here I began to redouble my precautions, seeing that I was come into a country where my face and recent history might be known. For since I had left the coast I had voyaged in no great fear of detection, taking a lift in a carrier's cart when one chanced to pass my way, and now and again hiring a horse for a stage. The apothecary at Preston, in addition to his other benefactions, had provided me with an inconspicuous suit of clothes, and as I had money in my pockets wherewith to pay my way, I was able to press on unremarked, or at least counted no more than a merchant's clerk travelling upon his master's business.
From Grasmere, I mounted by the old path across Coldbarrow Fell, which had first led me to Blackladies, and keeping along the ridge crept down into Keswick late upon the seventh day. There was no light in Mrs. Herbert's lodging as I slipped down the street, and for a second I was seized with a recurrence of my fear that she had left the town. It was only for a second, however. For that conviction which I had first tasted when I rode down Gillerthwaite in the early morning, had been growing stronger and stronger within me, more especially of late. I was possessed by some instinctive foreknowledge that the occasion for which I looked would come; that somehow, somewhere I should be enabled to bring forward my testimony to the clearing of Mr. Herbert from the imputation of disloyalty. It was a thought that more and more I repeated to myself, and each time with a stouter confidence. It may be that these more immediate tasks to which I had set my hand—I mean the rescue of Mr. Curwen and his daughter from the consequence of participation in the rebellion—hindered me from looking very closely into the difficulties of the third and last. It may be, too, that this conviction was in some queer way the particular message which the sea had for me—that I had received the message unconsciously while pondering what it might be. I do not know; I only know that when I repeated it to myself, it sounded like nothing so much as the booming of waves upon a beach.
I slept that night under a familiar boulder on the hillside above Applegarth, and in the early morning I came down to the house, and without much ceremony roused the household. Mary Tyson poked her head out of a window.
"Miss Dorothy?" I cried
"She is asleep."
"Wake her up and let me in!"
So I was in time. Mary Tyson came down and opened the door; and in a little, as I waited in the hall, I heard Dorothy's footsteps on the stairs.
"You have escaped!" she cried; "and my father—you bring bad news of him?"