Meantime, with a clod or two whizzing past his head, Humphrey reached the street corner and hastened round it. Here was silence and peace. He stopped, and his brain grew dizzy. Such exertion he had not made for many years. He heard the noise of men and hastened on. A chaos of ideas choked his mind and dammed all play of coherent thought. He had heard a rumour that the thing he had done for his brother was regarded differently by different men, but he knew not that so many were incensed and enraged. The shock of the discovery disarmed him now and left him frantic. He looked forward, and believed that his last hope of reconciliation with humanity was dead. He envied the eternal peace of his brother as he struggled on against the hill homeward.
Into the black and water-logged heart of Shaugh Moor he climbed presently, and from exhaustion and faintness fell there. He stopped upon the ground for a few moments; then lifted himself to his hands and knees; then sat down upon a stone and stared down into the theatre of this tragedy.
Overhead a sky as wild as his soul made huge and threatening preparations for the delayed tempest. Through the tangled skirts of the darkness westerly there strove and spread great passages of dazzling silver all tattered and torn and shredded out of the black and weltering clouds. For a moment in the midst of this radiance there opened a farewell weather-gleam, where the azure firmament was seen only to vanish instantly. Then the gloom gathered, and huddled up in ridges of purple and of lead. Aloft, from the skirt of the main cumulus, where it swept under the zenith, there hung, light as a veil, yet darker than the sky behind them, long, writhing tentacles, that twisted down and curled in sinister suspension, that waved and twined, and felt hither and thither horribly, like some aerial hydra seeking prey.
For a time these curtains of the rain swayed clear of earth; but their progress swept them against it, and they burst their vials upon the bosom of the Moor. The storm shrieked, exploded, emptied itself with howling rage out of the sudden darkness. Then the fury of these tenebrous moments passed; the hurricane sped onward, and the dim wet ray that followed struck down upon a heath whitened with ice for miles. A bitterness of cold and an ice-blink of unfamiliar radiance were thrown upwards from the crust of the hail; but soon it melted, and the waste, now running with a million rivulets, grew dark again.
The spectacle must have been impressive to any peaceful mind, but Baskerville saw nothing hyperbolic in the rage of wind and water. The storm cited by Nature was not more tremendous than that tornado now sweeping through his own soul.
END OF SECOND BOOK
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
Humphrey Baskerville continued to stalk the stage of life like a lonely ghost, and still obscured from all men and women the secrets of his nature, and the fierce interest of his heart in matters human. The things that he most wished to display he deliberately concealed, as a shy child who makes a toy, and longs to show it, but dares not, yet grows warm to the roots of his being if the treasure is found and applauded. Behind doubts, suspicions and jealousies he hid himself; his tongue was rough; his utterances at the outrage put upon him before the people by his brother's grave were bitter and even coarse. Nor did it abate his concern to know that the hostile explosion was as much simulated as genuine, as much mischievous as meant. It drove him in upon himself; it poisoned his opinion of human wisdom; and for a time he moved through darkest night.