“You will when we get there,” I remarked.
“Yes—and the horse foundered meantime! I can’t risk it, sir; I’ll get into trouble with the patron.”
Finally an opportune argument induced him to get out and lead the stumbling horse, and we continued on our way. We seemed to crawl on for a long time through a wet blackness impenetrable to the glimmer of our only lamp. But now and then the pall lifted or its folds divided; and then our feeble light would drag out of the night some perfectly commonplace object—a white gate, a cow’s staring face, a heap of roadside stones—made portentous and incredible by being thus detached from its setting, capriciously thrust at us, and as suddenly withdrawn. After each of these projections the darkness grew three times as thick; and the sense I had had for some time of descending a gradual slope now became that of scrambling down a precipice. I jumped out hurriedly and joined my young driver at the horse’s head.
“I can’t go on—I won’t, sir!” he whimpered.
“Why, see, there’s a light over there—just ahead!”
The veil swayed aside, and we beheld two faintly illuminated squares in a low mass that was surely the front of a house.
“Get me as far as that—then you can go back if you like.”
The veil dropped again; but the boy had seen the lights and took heart. Certainly there was a house ahead of us; and certainly it must be Miss Pask’s, since there could hardly be two in such a desert. Besides, the old man in the hamlet had said: “Near the sea”; and those endless modulations of the ocean’s voice, so familiar in every corner of the Breton land that one gets to measure distances by them rather than by visual means, had told me for some time past that we must be making for the shore. The boy continued to lead the horse on without making any answer. The fog had shut in more closely than ever, and our lamp merely showed us the big round drops of wet on the horse’s shaggy quarters.
The boy stopped with a jerk. “There’s no house—we’re going straight down to the sea.”
“But you saw those lights, didn’t you?”