Clive took a short cut across the rugged moorland, and twice over he narrowly escaped death. The first time he was pulled up short by coming violently in the darkness against the rough, unmortared wall built up round an ancient shaft on the mine land; and as he checked himself by grasping the loose stones, one of them fell over and went down and down, striking once against the side, and sending a chill through him as a reverberating roar came up, followed at a short interval by a dull echoing splash, after which he could hear the water hiss and suck against the sides, sending up strange whisperings, which sounded to his disturbed imagination like demoniacal confidences about Dinah Gurdon and his brother.
He hurried away, as another stone was dislodged, and the sullen plunge came to his ear when he was yards distant, tearing along in the most reckless way, to trip at last over a stone and fall headlong down one of the deep gully-like ravines with which the mountain land was scored.
He caught at a rough projection, against which he struck, and held on while a little avalanche of stones continued falling; then half-stunned and trembling from the shock, crept back again to proceed more cautiously along the edge of the gully, making for the path once more, fully awake now to the fact that it was utter madness to attempt to cross that region in the darkness.
“Not yet,” he muttered, with a savage laugh, “I must square accounts with brother Jessop first.”
Then he laughed as he wiped away the blood which had trickled down like perspiration from a cut in the forehead, and which came like a blessing in disguise, relieving, as it bled freely, the tension upon his overcharged brain; for if ever man was on the border-line which stretches between sanity and utter madness, Clive Reed was then.
“Of course,” he said, “I am a fool, a pitiful, childlike fool, ever to imagine that a light-hearted girl would care for such a dreamy student as I—a man whose whole conversation is about mines and shares, and money. I had my lesson with Janet, who tolerated me, as long as she could, for her father’s sake; but I would not take it, and went on in my folly once more. Jessop again! Of course: the good-looking, well-dressed, plausible scoundrel. They always said he was a ladies’ man, and the more infidelities proved against such a one, the more attractive he becomes, I suppose.”
“Ah!” he ejaculated savagely, “what is it to me? It shall not be for that, but for the money. If I want an idol, it shall be gold, and he is trying to rob me of it.”
He struggled on, stumbling in the darkness over stones and tufts of heather, till he reached a rift which led sloping to the pathway close by the tunnel-like notch, and as he let himself down on to the firm, level way, he ran through the dark part with his hands holding his head as if to keep it from bursting with the agonising memories of what he had witnessed that night, a scene photographed upon his brain by that sharp flash of light before all was black darkness—a darkness which now enshrouded his soul.
“But I must be cool and strong,” he muttered, as he subsided into a walk once more, and went steadily on toward the entrance to the mine gap with a confused idea in his head that he would hunt down his brother, bring him to bay, and then—
Yes—and then? His brain carried him no farther. Something was to happen then to one of them; and he only muttered an insane, mocking laugh, and either could not or would not try to plunge into the future.