Neither of the group answered, and a man stepped up to them and flashed the light of a lantern quickly over them before closing it again.
“That’s you, is it?” he said. “I’ll have a word with you by-and-by; but look here, I call upon you two men in the Queen’s name to help me to take him. If you help him to get away, it’s felony, so you may take the consequences. You haven’t got to do with your local police now.”
The man turned away and walked swiftly back toward the town, the darkness seeming to swallow him up. He paused for a few moments at the edge of the harbour, to throw the light of his lantern across the water.
“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.”
Chapter Thirty One.
“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 were 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 Saint 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.