Turning, he fled with a speed born of his dementia, hurling himself through the door with a crash of shattered glass and a trail of incoherent ravings.
Without sense of direction or objective he raced here and there, doubling like a frightened rabbit, taking no account of paths or obstructions, seeing nothing but hordes of pursuing furies urged on by a parson and a hangman who led the chase.
The storm had begun anew, and out here in the darkness the cannonading of thunder and wind swelled the chorus of pursuit. When the refugee fell, he clawed and bit at the vines which had tripped him, in a fancied battle of Laocoön, until at last he saw the coolness of water ahead of him, and, dashing down the slope, hurled himself, shrieking, into its stillness.
There his outcry ended. His spread fingers clutched at a liquid emptiness and his fevered eyes showed once or twice briefly—and were quenched.
CHAPTER XXXIII
The logs on the hearth leaped and crackled, spurting tongues of blue flame, and after they had roared up to their fullest they slowly subsided, until the shadows about the walls spread and encroached from their corners toward the center of the room. The polish of furniture and the bright angles of silver and bric-à-brac stood out with diminishing high-lights. Hour by hour and minute by minute the faces of two unmoving figures seated on a low and heavily cushioned couch grew less clear and merged into the growing darkness.
Then the logs glowed only as embers against their bed of white ashes and the table lamp burned on in single steadfastness.
Silence held the place, abandoned now by the furies, to the smile on two unstirring faces. The gray of the east had begun to brighten into the rose that comes ahead of the sun, when slowly, as if struggling under a weight of pyramids the heavy lids of one of the faces fluttered. They fluttered with no recognition as yet of the difference between death and life, realizing only the burden of an immeasurable inertia.