V
At five o'clock of the same afternoon Freemantle, Gates, and Beckett, with Arthur Abercrombie, came running along the narrow streets of a village some miles from Pæstum.
The stone houses of which this village was composed stood like two solid walls facing each other, rising directly from the stone-paved road, which was barely ten feet wide; down this conduit water was pouring like a brook. The houses were about forty in number, twenty on each side, and this one short street was all there was of the town.
It was raining, not in drops, but in torrents, with great pats of water coming over, almost like stones, and striking upon the heads of those who were passing below; every two or three minutes there came a glare of blindingly white lightning, followed immediately by the crash of thunder, which seemed to be rolling on the very roofs of the houses themselves. The four boys must have been out in the storm for some time, for they paid no attention to it. Their faces were set, excited. Every thread of their clothing was wet through.
"This is the house," said Arthur.
They looked up, sheltering their eyes with their arms from the blows of the rain-balls. From the closed windows above, the faces of Isabella Holland and the three Abercrombie girls looked down at them, pressed flatly against the small panes, in order to see; for the storm had made the air so dark that the street lay in gloom.
The next moment the boys entered.
"No, we haven't found him," said Arthur, in answer to his white sisters' look. "But we're going to."
"Yes, we're going to," said the others. And then, walking on tiptoe in their soaked shoes, they went softly into an inner room.
Here on a couch lay Griffith Carew, dying.