He was trembling and shaking and wiping his forehead with his handkerchief; the breeze stroked him with cool fingers. He must run for ever to be clear of that house—and then suddenly remembered that he must not run because he had his duty to do—and even as he remembered that a figure stepped up to him out of the trees. He would have called out—so wild and trembling were his nerves—had he not at once recognized from his great size that this was Jabez the fisherman.
He might have been an incarnation of the night with his deep black beard, his grave kindly face, and his simple, natural quiet. He was dressed in his fisherman's jersey and blue trousers and had no covering on his head.
"Good evening, sir," he said. "Mr. Dunbar told me as how you'd be wanting to be back in the house for a moment to fetch something you'd forgotten.
"We'd best be just stepping off the lawn, sir, if you don't mind. They foreigners are always nosing around."
They turned quietly off the grass and stood closely together under the dark shadow of the house.
"I must go back at once," said Harkness. "There's no time to lose. It struck half-past twelve some time ago."
"I don't know nothing about that, sir," said Jabez; "I only know as how you must be going back into the house for something you'd forgotten and I was to let you in."
"Yes," said Harkness, his teeth chattering, "that's right."
He wasn't made, in any kind of way at all, for this sort of adventure. He had never before realised how utterly inefficient he was. And of all absurdities to go back into the house when he was now safely out of it! Of all Dunbar's mad plan this was the maddest part. What could he do but be seen or heard and then rouse suspicion when it might so easily have been undisturbed?
Let Crispin find him groping among those dark passages and what was his fate likely to be? There flashed into his consciousness then a sudden suspicion of Dunbar. It might suit the boy's plans only too well that he should be found, and so turn attention to another part of the house, leaving the girl free. But no! There was Dunbar's own steady clear gaze to answer him, and beyond that the certainty that Crispin's suspicions, roused by the discovery of himself, would proceed immediately to the girl.