The first result of his present experiences and position had been a development of astounding patience in Maurice Malherb. Patient, indeed, he was not in any real sense; but a self-control relatively wonderful marked his goings now. He waited for the inevitable. Every instinct called out to him to hasten it, yet he took no step. This personal attitude amazed him in secret. Sometimes even a gleam of hope touched his darkness, and the fact that no word had been heard of Lovey, and no report of her death had reached mankind, awoke a shadowy thought that she was not dead. But he knew right well that no human foot trod the desert south of Cater's Beam once in a year. The dead might there mingle with dust and never be discovered or recorded. He did nothing from day to day for thinking of his wife and daughter. They stood between him and open confession of the crime. Yet each week of delay galled him worse than the last. Memory kept such a vivid wakefulness as it only holds under conditions of remorse. His sin coloured his life, and the hues of it faded neither by day nor night. As the hideous incubus of a dream slowly crawls upon us, to fasten its fangs in our bosom, so this horror nightly destroyed sleep, and by day it rode abroad with him, ate with him, thought with him, thrust its shadow between him and the few things he still loved.
A thousand times his feet turned to Cater's Beam, a thousand times he chose rather to live on and cherish the pallid hope that his daughter and his wife were not for ever disgraced. For him the events of that appalling dawn were neither gyves nor ropes about his real nature. He had long since retraced all in spirit, probed his act to the core, and even taken the consequences of it. For no thought of self-destruction returned to him; but his women came between and held his hand, and, though they knew it not, played the first part in his hidden life, as they now stood openly for all that he still held dear.
Yet at last, by an indirect road, he consented to satisfy himself, and after countless petitions from Grace and from Annabel, he gave way and abandoned what, from their standpoint, was a senseless determination. His daughter finally prevailed with him.
"Lovey Lee fled to save her own life," declared Grace. "Perchance she never returned to her hiding-place at all. There, then, remain her treasures and the amphora that I saw with my own eyes. Surely it is worth the trouble of a search?"
"'Twould be fifteen thousand pounds at least to us. Your brother himself might purchase it," said Annabel.
"He at least never will," answered her husband. "Rather would I grind it under my heel. 'Brother'! 'Tis too noble a title for him. Norcot can offer to aid me in my extremity, yet he whose duty it should be, and whose privilege—does he come forward?"
"For the best of all reasons, dearest. You have not told him a word of your circumstances."
"'Told him'! Do such things want telling to a brother? He ought to feel it in his bones; he ought to dream that all is not well with me; he ought to breathe it in with the air. If he were in trouble, my blood would have beat it into my heart. Nevertheless, no farthing of his would I take to keep my wife and daughter from starving."
"Yet here's your own money as like as not hid within five miles," said Grace. "How I've longed to go! Once I rode in sight, and I never felt so tempted to break my word to you, dear father. But I was glad afterwards, for, looking back, I marked a man moving in the ruin. He saw me too and vanished."
The matter dropped then; yet, within a week Malherb resolved to permit a search. To him the enterprise must be a crucial test of matters more vital than the amphora. If it was there, then Lovey indeed had perished; if it was not there, then she lived. But the truth might still be buried in his own bosom. It was not necessary that others should know of it; and, in any case, the circumstances of his family must be ameliorated by recovery of the treasure. That fact alone he strove to keep before him; yet now, as he tramped over the Moor with his daughter, and saw wan sunlight all soaked in moisture, spread great fleeting vans along the way, he prayed very earnestly that his mission might fail.