“They drive me to madness,” he cried, “but in the end—in the end I shall have him! To hold him down and torture the life out of him inch by inch, with the terror in his eyes all the time! Why, I could kill him by that alone—by only looking at him.”
He gloated over the picture called up in his soul. If ever demon’s eyes looked from a human face, they looked from his that night.
“Duke,” I whispered in horror, “you have terrible cause for hate, I know; but oh, think of how one grain of forgiveness on your part would stand you with—with God, Duke.”
He gave a wretched, sickening laugh.
“By and by,” he cried. “But tell me first where he’s hiding!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Duke——” and I held out a yearning hand to him.
At that he struck at me savagely and, running crookedly into the night, was lost in the rainy darkness.
CHAPTER XXX.
I GO HOME.
So much of strange incident had crowded with action the long years of my life in London, that, as I walked from the station down into the old cathedral town, a feeling of wonder was on me that the hand of time had dealt so gently with the landmarks of my youth. Here were the same old gates and churches and houses I had known, unaltered unless for an additional film of the fragrant lichen of age. The very ruins of the ancient castle and palace were stone by stone such as I remembered them.
There was frost in the air, too; so that sometimes, as I moved dreamily onward, a sense as if all that gap of vivid life were a vanished vision and unreality moved strongly in me. Then it seemed that presently I should saunter into the old mill to find my father and Zyp and Jason sitting down as usual to the midday meal.