CHAPTER XI
The paroxysm of tears swept Neal as the Atlantic waves sweep foaming and furious over Rackle Roy. Then it passed and left him panting, shaking with recurrent sobs, and a prey to an hysterical dread of hearing some sound from the vault beside him. He sat absolutely motionless. He hardly dared to breathe. He waited in horrible expectation of hearing something. He listened intent, agonised, feeling that if a sound reached him he would cry aloud and on the instant become a raving madman. The scene inside the vault rose to his imagination. Far more really than he saw the dim church and the trees, he saw Finlay grovelling on the ground and the stern men crouching over him. He saw a knife gleam in the lantern’s light. He shut his eyes, as if by shutting them he could blot out the pictures of his imagination. He waited to hear a shriek, a smothered cry, a groan, the laboured breath of struggling men, the splash of blood. The suspense became an agony. He rose to his feet and fled.
He stumbled over a grave, and fell headlong, bruising his outstretched hands against a tombstone. He rose instantly and fled again. Stumbling again, he struck his head against the wall of the church. Dizzy and bewildered, he hastened on, driven forward by the terror of hearing some death noise from the vault. Tripping, staggering, rushing blindly, he reached the stile at last, and stood beyond it on the road. Before him was Moylin’s house. The window was lighted up, the door was open. He saw men seated within, and heard them laugh aloud. They seemed to him not men, but fiends making merry over murder, and the winning for their hell of a new damned soul. He fled from them as he had fled from the sound he dreaded. He rushed down the steep lane. Loose stones rolled under his feet. Sparks started into sudden brightness where the nails in his boot soles struck flints. The hedges rose high on each side of him, making the lane, even in the pale June night, intolerably dark. He fled on, blind, reckless, for the moment mad.
Suddenly he was stopped short. Strong arms were round him. He was flung to the ground. A man knelt on his chest. Rough hands grasped his throat.
“Who have you there, Tarn?”
“A damned fool for certain, whoever he is. What brings him down a hill like this in the dark, as if the devil was after him?”
“Loose his throat; do you want to choke him. Let him speak. Now, then, man, tell us who you are, and what you’re doing here.”
Neal’s powers of reasoning and thought returned to him. With the presence of real danger his fear vanished. He saw the forms of the men above him, discerned against the dull grey of the sky that they were armed and in uniform. He understood at once that he had fallen into the hands of soldiers, perhaps of yeomen.
“Who are you?” said the voice again.