“The London man,” said Uncle Luke, unconcernedly. “Well, God save the Queen, but I’m sure she don’t want us to help to capture our poor boy.”
Volume Two—Chapter Twelve.
“Oh! Absalom, my Son, my Son.”
Harry Vine had but one thought as he dashed out of his father’s house, and that was to escape—far away to some other country where neither he nor his crime was known—to some place where, with the slate of his past life wiped clean, he might begin anew, and endeavour to show to his father, to his sister, perhaps to Madelaine Van Heldre, that he was not all bad. How he would try, he told himself. Only let him get aboard one of the fishing-luggers, and after confiding in some one or other of his old friends, the bluff fishermen who had often given him a sail or a day’s fishing, beg of him to take him across to Jersey or St. Malo; anywhere, so as to avoid the terrible exposure of the law—anywhere to be free.
“I’d sooner die than be taken,” he said to himself as he sped on downward at a rapid rate.
The way to the harbour seemed clear, and, though the officer was pursuing him, Harry had the advantage of the darkness, and the local knowledge of the intricate ways of the little town, so that he felt no fear of being able to reach the harbour and some boat. He was reckoning without his host. His host, or would-be host, was the detective sergeant, who had gone about his business in a businesslike manner, so that when Harry Vine was congratulating himself upon the ease with which he was able to escape, one of the local policemen started from his post right in the fugitive’s way, nearly succeeding in catching him by the arm, an attention Harry avoided by doubling down one of the little alleys of the place. Over and over again he tried to steal down to the harbour, but so sure as he left his hiding-place in one of the dark lanes or among the fishermen’s stores he heard steps before him, and with the feeling that the whole town had now risen up against him, and that the first person he encountered would seize and hold him until the arrival of the police, he crept back, bathed with cold perspiration, to wait what seemed to be an interminable time before he ventured again.
His last hiding-place was a wooden shed not far from the waterside—a place of old ropes and sails, and with a loft stored full of carefully-dried nets, put away till the shoals of fish for which they were needed visited the shore. Here, in profound ignorance of what had been done on his behalf, he threw himself down on a heap of tarred canvas to try and devise some certain means of escape. He had a vague intention of getting the fishermen to help him; but after thinking of several he could not decide which of the sturdy fellows would stand by such a culprit as he. And as he lay there the bitter regrets for the past began to attack him.
“Louise—sister,” he muttered to himself, “I must have been mad. And I lie here groaning like the coward I am,” he said fiercely, as, thrusting back all thoughts of the past with the intention of beginning afresh, he stole out once more into the dark night, meaning to get to the harbour, and, failing a better means, to take some small sailing-boat, and to trust to his own skill to get safely across. The place was far more quiet now; and, avoiding the larger lanes, he threaded his way through passage after passage among the net-stores and boat-houses till he reached the main street, along which he was walking noiselessly when a heavy regular pace ahead checked him, and, turning shortly round, he made for the first narrow back lane, reached it, and turned trembling as he recognised that it was the familiar path leading by the back of Van Heldre’s, the way he knew so well.