Stratton hesitated as he heard a low muttering again in the next room; but Brettison pressed his hand and thrust him away.
“Go,” he said, and softly closed the window, while, after standing listening for a few moments, Stratton moved away with a strange foreboding of coming peril, and walked back beneath the cliff to the inn, where the sleepy servant admitted him with a sigh of relief, and wondered how les Anglais could be so strange and care so little for their beds.
Chapter Fifty Two.
The Culmination of Despair.
Stratton went to his room, put out his light, and threw open the casement to sit and listen to the wash and rush of the coming tide. It was darker than ever, for the sea fog had grown dense, and the water sobbed and moaned among the rocks, and splashed against the sides of the fishing boats in a way that in the silence of the night sounded mysterious and strange.
All this added to Stratton’s depression, and the sense of coming trouble. It was impossible to pass it over as imaginary, face to face as he was with the terrible difficulties before him; for in that tiny place, unless Barron was hurried away, a meeting was imminent, and it was his doing—his.
Guest laughed at the idea of his presence there being due to fate, he recalled; but how else could he think of the strange complication but as being wrought out by a greater directing hand? “And for what?” he muttered. Could it be only to inflict fresh torture upon a gentle, loving woman?
The mental outlook was as black and misty as that across the sands to the moaning, sighing sea; and as Stratton sat there, with the damp, soft air cooling his brow, he longed for rest, and thought of the peace and gentle calm that he might find if he could take a boat and sail right away into the soft, black darkness.