Then he raised himself and got slowly to his feet. He looked round him for a moment vaguely, as though earth and sky and place were strange to him. Then he turned and ran, crashing wildly through brambles and bracken and furze, as though there was a fiend out of hell pursuing him.... Perhaps there was.
CHAPTER XXXIV
It was the evening of the same day.
A clock somewhere struck five, and Darkham suddenly heard it. It seemed to wake him from his frightful dream—a dream in which he had been walking—walking always—he did not know where.
Now as he looked up he knew. He stood at the gate of General Montgomery's avenue.
He opened the gate and went in. The place was familiar to him. How often he had been here attending on the old man until this Dillwyn came! He went slowly onwards into the deeper twilight of the trees. How cool it was—how green, how quiet! He took off his hat and let his forehead bathe itself in the dewy stillness.
When he came close to the house he stopped short. Masons were hurrying in and out of one of the side doors, and a ladder lay against a wall that led to an upper window. He had heard that some improvements were being made in the house which was a hideous structure, but he had imagined they would have been put back by the General's illness. That ladder—why, up there was the room in which the old man used to sleep.
Presently a mason came out of the house and towards the spot where he was standing. Darkham, who was quite himself again, felt a little ashamed of being discovered here without any purpose. Going quickly forward, he met the man half-way.
"Surely you are not working here, when the General is so ill?" he said, in a tone of polite surprise.
"No, sir. We've just got our orders to do no more for some days. We're collecting out tools, that's all, and are off to another job."