VENGEANCE ASTRAY.
OHN HATFIELD had left Dartford, his wife, and his work, driven by an impulse as vague as it was irresistible. He did not know what he meant to do; his one idea was that he must face his daughter's betrayer, and tax him with his crime. He did not very much care what came after. But the long tramp through England, broken though it was by many a lift from good-natured waggoners, had given him time for thinking. Reflection did not soften his resentment. On the contrary, the more he thought, the harder his heart felt, and each new hour of solitary musing left him more bitter, more vindictive, more angered than he had been the hour before. His wife's story convicted him of the one fault from which he had always believed himself to be free—blind stupidity. The loss of his daughter had never been out of his mind for half an hour at a time since she had gone away, and he had thought and thought, till his brain had seemed to spin round, over every least detail of her flight, and of the time just before it, in the hope of finding out who was her betrayer. And yet in all his thinking he had never come anywhere near the truth. Other people had, though; he knew that, as he remembered hints he had sneered at from some of the least brilliant of the hands—fools he had often called them. Yet, fools as they were, they had been able to see more clearly than he, the father, whose brain sharpest love and sorrow ought surely to have had power to quicken.
Added to all this, the thought that he had gone on working for, taking the money of, and, to a certain extent, living in a condition of dependence on, the man who had wronged him, and then had turned him out on to the world, stung his spirit almost to madness.
The spring woke early that year, and the weather was bright and glad, the air clear and sweet and joyous with a thousand bird-voices. The Midland woods and hedges that he passed were beginning to deck themselves in the fresh greenness of their new spring garments. Their beauty brought no peace to him. He but noticed them to curse their monotony and apparent endlessness. The only things he did notice with anything like satisfaction were the milestones and fingerposts, which told him that so much more ground had been got over. He put up at night at the cheapest and poorest-looking inns he could find. They were good enough to lie awake in, for his feverish longing and impatience to reach his end almost consumed him and made sleep an impossibility. Eager as he was to get on, he had self-restraint enough to spend none of his store of money—such a little store as it was—on travelling. Roland Ferrier might not be at Thornsett after all, and he might have to follow him, or mayhap return to Dartford and bide his time; and so, though his progress was straight and steady it was slow, and he did not reach Thornsett until the night that had witnessed the explanations between the brothers.
He had done more than twenty-five miles that day, and he was footsore and tired out when, as night was falling, he reached the top of the hill at whose foot lay the village which had been his home for thirty years. All along he had been determined to make straight for Thornsett Edge, and to confront Roland at once. He felt that the young man might be surprised into more admissions than he would choose to make if he were prepared. But physical fatigue is wonderfully effective in upsetting mental decision. Hatfield felt that neither in body nor in mind was he fit to go through at once with the part he had chosen. He must rest—sleep, if possible. He threw himself down on the heather by the pathside, and leaned his head on his arm, while he debated what to do. Nature decided for him, and he fell asleep.
When he woke, a young moon was shining coldly down upon him. He felt stiff, and not rested. The heather was wet with night-dew. How late was it? He thought by the moon about eight o'clock.
He would go down to the village and see who was left in the old place; perhaps he might get a lodging there. The Spotted Cow was closed, he had heard. He limped down the steep stony street. There were no lights to be seen. As he reached the house that had been his, he saw that it was empty, and a longing came over him to get inside it. Why not sleep there? So, turning aside, he went up the three stone steps and along the narrow paved pathway that ran under the windows separating the house from the tiny front garden. His hand fell on the latch of the door quite naturally, and it never occurred to him that it would not yield to his touch as it had been wont to do. But it did not yield. He was in that frame of mind when any resistance is intolerable. He drew back and then threw himself against the door with all his weight. It gave way noisily and he went in. He passed round the wooden screen, and stood in the middle of the flagged floor.