This time, without stopping in his breathless course, he went by. One way was as good as another to him, who had no reason for going any. He would keep on to Cliff Wrangham.
At first, panting doggedly onward, he ran this way as he had run that. If his clothing had been on fire instead of his brain, like this he would have wildly run, seeking flight from the agony that consumed him.
But conviction came upon him as he ran. It seemed incredible he could be making all this desperate endeavor for nothing. It must surely end by repaying him with positive result. Little by little the mad, fitful uncertainty gave way to the madder flame of assurance. Of all madness, this fixed madness is the most to be feared. Now he was merely pursuing the girl, who was along here in front of him. At times, turning his ear before him as he lunged onward, he seemed to hear elusive footsteps; thought he saw her flitting aside into gateways and hedgerows to escape him. Once he staggered halfway across a grass close because, he saw her standing in the middle of it, trying to deceive him by her motionlessness into thinking her some inanimate thing. When he came near she was a pump-well. Then he saw that he had relinquished the substance for the shadow. She was on the roadway there, in advance of him; her skirts flying, her hands to her hat. And he lumbered back over the soft grass, soddened by the recent rain, to the roadway, and resumed his forward pursuit.
Full of fresh strenuous desire to press ahead, and worn out with this unaccustomed exertion, he passed, half running, half walking, with his hand bound over his heart, and his breath drawn up convulsively, like a child with the croup—through the final gateways, one after another. Now he was in the little end lane, making a poor pretence of caution. Now he waw by the stable; now he was by the iron wicket. The hope that had been his while he ran stopped dead as his flight stopped. By the little iron wicket, and still under cover of the kitchen-garden wall, he stayed, gasping, and dared not go further, or look at the front of the house, for fear of what he should see—the sight of all its moonlit windows looking out with the calm, self-communing gaze of the blind, that know nothing of what they gaze upon. As the Vicarage had faced him, so this house should face him. It was the end. He knew his doom.
And knowing it, he found strength to see, and saw.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Saw the magnified yellow window thrown over the pathway and out across the tangled grass to the mouldy green railings, from the Spawer's room. Here was life at last. Thank God! Here was life at last.
His heart gave a convulsive leap of exultation within him. Could it be mere coincidence that of all Ullbrig and Cliff Wrangham this man should be unnumbered among the sleepers? Could it be that the late light, flowing from that little low window beyond the porch, had no concern with his own misery and the girl's flight? He could not think it. Here was his journey's end. Let him take the girl red-handed in shame, if need be. Shame, even, counted for nothing in his love of her. Had she been dyed to the neck in iniquity he would have wished her, and followed to the world's end for her, without the lash of his own sin to whip up the pursuit.
Slowly, with his eyes fixed on the sidelight from that fateful window, he advanced; arms outspread for caution, doubling inwards from his middle at each step, and making a semi-circle upon the grass to get sooner and deeper sight into the room. All at once his eye cleared the obstruction of trailing porch, and he stopped here, as though to take in fresh supplies of cautious reserve and get leverage upon the position. Then, more laboriously he worked forward again; his head far in advance; his knees bent; his arms like a baboon's, extended to the ground—as though at an alarm he would clutch at the long grass and draw himself into its shelter. The piano-end came into view. Its keyboard of chequered ivory lengthened as he approached upon it; next he gained sight of the mantel-shelf; and last of all ... with his finger-nails clenched into his palms for self-repression ... the man.
He was seated on an end of the table, with his back towards the window, and appeared to be reading or scrutinising something beneath the powerful light of the big hanging lamp. What it was he bent his head over the schoolmaster could not see, but his acute, tormented vision saw something else that discharged itself at once in lightning of revelation through the whole length and breadth of his being, and blinded him for a moment with fierce, flashing passion and exultant joy. The room was heaped up under the confusion of a departure. There were books stacked together carefully on the table; music in fat portfolios; there were garments folded and unfolded; coats and trousers; boots on trees; and to give crowning evidence to his deduction, a big leather traveling portmanteau, open of lid, beyond the fireplace. Ah! was it any longer a coincidence, these two departures? Thank God he was in time. The Lord had not deserted him. It was the Lord that had brought him here this night.