"I have not said all I wish to say," the man cried, opening and clenching his fingers. "You shall not shake me off, for all your pretending. I have found you in time, and I will stick to you for the rights you want to rob me of. You shall not slip me. Where you go I will go. You shall not get away."

The Spawer pulled his moustache, and looked the man up and down.

"Really..." he said, after a while. "You are a smaller man than I ... but you tempt me very much to kick you."

In a second, at that threat of action, the pent-up torrents of the schoolmaster's rage and anguish burst forth from him. Anything was better than words. He rushed up wildly to his adversary.

"Kick me!" he cried fiercely, shouting up with hoarse voice of challenge into the Spawer's face. "Kick me! Touch me. Lay a hand upon me. You say you 'll kick me. Kick me."

He pressed so hard upon the Spawer, with arms thrown out and flourishing wildly, that even had he wished it, the Spawer would not have had purchase to kick him. Instead, he receded somewhat from their undesirable chest-to-chest contact, striving by gentle withdrawal to mollify the man's mad anger. For he had seen into his eyes, and their look startled him. Not for himself—he was in every sense the man's better, and could have wrought with him as though he were a schoolboy's cane—but for the man. It was borne in upon him suddenly anew, with terrible conviction, that the fellow was mad; the victim of some fierce hallucination—whose fixed point of hatred was in himself—and he repented now that he had goaded him to such a cruel pitch. And still the man pressed upon him. "Kick me!" he kept saying, utterly deaf to the Spawer's temporising and persuasive utterances. "Kick me. Touch me. Lay a hand upon me."

To lay a hand upon him now, even in mere pacification, meant an inevitable struggle, and such a termination was too unseemly to be thought of. As it was, matters had gone altogether beyond their bounds. To have chastised the fellow with scorn had been one thing, but to be involved in a retreat before the hoarse breath of a passionate madman was another, utterly outside all dignity. Sooner or later, too, he would have to stand or be forced over the cliff. The thought of the boiling sea below, to which, in the concentration of his faculties upon this ignominious encounter, he had been paying no heed, recalled him hotly, and he stole an anxious glance over his shoulder to learn where he stood.

And at that very moment he stood on the cliff edge, and it slipped and gave way with him. Wynne flung up his arms, beating the air with them like wings, to regain his balance, but he could not. An arm clutched out after him, whether to push or clasp him he did not know. Half spinning as he went, he doubled out of sight backward; and if anything were needed, apart from the anguish of his own mind, at that awful, inevitable moment, to add to the horror of his going, it was the schoolmaster's long, horrid scream.

CHAPTER XXXIX

That scream—having no part with the man's self, but tearing forth from him as though it were a liberated fiend—curdled the schoolmaster's own blood. This culminating horror of a night of horrors took hold upon the pillars of his reason, like a blind, despairing Samson, and overturned the temple quite. Before, he had had just the madness requisite to carry out what unaided reason could never have accomplished; but now, madness filled him like thick, suffocating smoke, and extinguished his last guiding spark of lucidity. From head to foot he was mad; mad with a terrorised madness that is one long mental scream, like the unrestrained scream of his lips. First, as the man went over, and his own cry rang like a terrible knell in his head, he dropped to his knees, and bound wild hands upon his eyes, to blot out the horror from them. Again and again and again, with insufferable rapidity, he saw—for all his binding—the horrid vision of the Spawer's beating arms; the sickening collapse; the sudden emptiness of sky. Again and again and again his own cry tore out in his ears. If his brain had been one great slate, and this cry the screech of a perpendicular pencil torn across it, it could not have scored it more terribly. All his hallucinations were reversed and turned against himself. His mind had no mercy upon him; he was a murderer. This was the death that came to him upon his bed. The horror of now fitted the horror of then like a bolt. He was a murderer, fore-ordained. The hot brand of Cain was on his brow. Twice the fatal cliff called upon him to come and look over at the scene of his crime, but twice he heard the surging of the sea below, and twice he dared not. Then the irresistible magnetism of his own murder drew him, and he crept forth the third time on all fours, and peered awfully over upon a small projecting shelf of the cliff. Close down by the roaring surf the Spawer lay stretched on his back, and looked with his dead face up at him. As he had fallen, so he lay. His head was to the sea; his feet toward the cliff at which they had struggled so desperately for hold; his right hand, by the force of rebound, had jumped across his breast, and seemed placed in mocking attestation upon his heart; his left lay limply from him without a bend, its palm turned upward, its fingers partly closed; his chin was thrown up, white and ghastly; his face a little sideways upon his cheek, as though in renunciation of this dark, wicked world, and seeking slumber. A very different figure of a fellow, indeed, from that proud six-footer of scathing independence that had mocked this miserable onlooker from above. And yet, how terribly triumphant. Even on his back, without a word between his lips, or a look in his eyes, he had more of majesty at this dread moment than life could ever have given him.