No wonder he sat motionless on the corner edge of the table, as he had first seated himself, poring over that magnetising something that the watcher, for all his watching, could not see. For what did this letter mean to him? Nothing at all now, in hard fact, perhaps ... but yet ... what tantalising riches in speculation. Here were his trunks, and here was he, all ready for dutiful departure—and in his hands was the instrument of reprieve. His duty had been remitted him. From that duty he was free. Who should say what was his duty now? Had he a duty at all—to himself, or anybody? Or was he, by virtue of this relinquishment, become a mere jellyfish, without volition, to float this way or that at the mercy of the tides? What was there to take him from Ullbrig now? What was to keep him? If he stayed? If he went? If this letter had come sooner! If this letter had only come sooner!
And the whole thing began over again.
All the old fever of reasoning set in anew with him, and rose up to its height. All the old desires. All the old wild hopes. He had been tired when he came downstairs, less with physical fatigue than with the dull, sleepless lassitude of established despair—but now he was very wide awake. His eyes revolted at the thoughts of being closed perforce upon a pillow; they wanted license to keep open house for his brain all night through. Suddenly, too, came upon him the nervous appetite for activity; the desire to give a bodily articulation to the movement of his mind. He felt as though he could have set off, and walked the globe round, and been back again here by to-morrow's breakfast. And submitting to the feeling, he rose all at once from his place on the table, turned down the twin burners of the swing lamp, picked up his cap, squeezed his way out through the two doors and the narrow porch, and set off towards the sea.
He walked with a brisk, purposeful step, for the night was chill beneath the white moon and the many cool stars. Part way across Luke Hemingway's big ten-acre field, at a sudden turn of his head towards some recumbent, cud-chewing cattle, his eye-corner caught the tail-end of an upright figure, vanishing into the hedge at some distance behind him. There was nothing, of course, when he looked, to confirm the impression, beyond the clear-defined, moonlit path along which he had come. But his eye retained such an obstinate remembrance of its own delusion, that at a few yards further on, choosing his moment, he turned on his heel again. And again, strangely enough, his eye seemed to be just eluded by the vanishing figure of a man. Had he been nervously given, he might have felt tempted to walk back and scrutinise the hedgerow that had thus twice afforded refuge to his shadowy pursuant. But for one thing, his mind was too busy for nerves to-night, and knowing, moreover, the strange receptive sensitiveness of the human eye, and the assurance with which it attests, as realities, mere miraculous figments of the brain, he passed on—reserving the right to turn again when he had given his visual informant an opportunity to forget its impression.
After a longer interval, therefore, he looked back again, on the pretext of stooping to his shoe-lace, and three times after that. Twice his eye attested to the presence of a furtive figure, that seemed to drop to earth in the thick fog grass when he turned, only now he knew that his eye did not deceive him. He was being followed.
That the discovery did not tend to add much zest to his midnight ramble—even had there been any before—the Spawer would have been the last to deny. It is an unpleasant thing, at any time, to have one's back turned towards a stealthy follower of undeclared intentions, but moonlight and a lonely coast add still further unpleasantness to the situation. However, the fact remained, and it was no use getting into an unnecessary fuss about it. To turn back openly would not remedy matters much, or give the Spawer any particular advantage over his unknown pursuer. He decided, therefore, keeping cautious vigil over alternate shoulders as he walked, to push on to the cliff, without betraying the least sign of suspicion, and see to what extent this figure would press pursuit. So, quickening his step imperceptibly, and setting up a blithe, not too noisy whistle of unconcern, he came to the cliff, the shadow following.
The wind and storm of the past few days had troubled the sea, that thundered up in ugly assailment of surf about the cliff's soft earthen base, for the tide was rising. Awhile he stood, at the point where he had come upon the path, watching the great waste of chill waters with one eye, and the spot where the figure had vanished, with the other. The keen gaze of Farnborough gleamed out at him in sudden recognition, and here and there little intermittent pin-points of yellow pricked the horizon where boats rose and fell upon the bosom of the sea. Then he lifted his leg leisurely over the gate-stile, by which he had been standing, and sat for a moment astride of it. From this perch he commanded the hedgerow—that ran down to the cliff edge at right angles—on both sides, and could not be approached without his observance. But whatever object his follower had, it seemed certainly, so far at least, that it was unconnected with any ideas of direct encounter. There had been no attempt to gain on him; their relative positions now were what they had been at the first moment of discovery; and it seemed he might sit here till daybreak without his shadow's making any advance in the open. Suddenly, an idea to test the situation came into his mind, and on the instant he acted on it. The man, whoever he might be, was about fifty yards or so inland, on the shady side of the hedge, and watching the Spawer's conspicuous, upright figure keenly, no doubt. All at once the Spawer brought his second leg over the rail, descended, stepped quickly some paces inland, and drew into the hedge. Though the moon fell on him, the hedge was straggling and untrimmed, with somewhat of a dry ditch at its bottom, and long grass. Standing here, unobtrusively, it would take an active search to come upon him, and such a search would not only show him his pursuer, but give him some shrewd idea of the man's intentions.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
It was not long that the Spawer had to wait. He had scarcely subsided into his position, indeed, when he heard, on the other side of the hedge, the rapid "rff, rff, rff," that told where long grass was being torn aside to the passage of hurried feet. The fellow was running, then. It flashed across the Spawer's mind grimly, as he listened to the sound of him, that he did not think himself of such interest to any mortal man. And almost before he had time to gratify his ironic humor with a smile, the mortal man had scrambled desperately over the stile, flinging himself to ground on this side of it with such a thud of precipitation that he had to preserve his equilibrium with spread fingers in the grass. Next moment he pushed himself upright again, ran hesitatingly forward some paces, stopped dead, and commenced to beat about in a wild, blind search on all sides of him, as though he were dazed with the loss of his quarry. For a moment it came into the Spawer's head as he watched him that perhaps the man was mad or drunk. Certainly there seemed little of rationality about his actions. At times he ran; at times he cast himself so close upon the edge of the cliff that the Spawer's flesh crept cold, and he wondered whether he ought to stand by and see a deluded fellow-being submit himself to such dangers. If he went over there, with the boiling sea beneath, it was little chance he would ever come up again—till the tide brought him. But after a moment or two, the Spawer grew reassured that this catastrophe was not likely to happen, and continued watching in silence.
He was a furtive, unprepossessing-looking fellow, it struck the Spawer. His coat-collar was buttoned up to his neck, lending a particularly sinister touch to his appearance, and the coat itself hung upon him loosely, as though he had no shoulders, and bagged with an empty flatness about the waist, as though, too, he had no stomach. It was a tramp's coat, with tails—such as no honest rustic would wear—but had found its way here, through a nameless course of degradation, from the towns. And they were tramp's trousers too, that looked as though any minute they might come down; loose, lifeless, shapeless trousers, whose bottoms his boots trod on at every step. Otherwise, he wore a dark cloth cap, pulled tightly over his scalp, with its neb scowling down to his eyebrows, and his breath came and went vindictively—or so it seemed to the Spawer—as though he had been baulked of something, and was panting more through rage than exertion.