"We should be all right," Dunbar said as the two men set off; "we are up to time. The boat is bound to be there. It's lucky the fog hasn't come. That's a contingency I never thought of. The path down to the Cove is off here, to the right of the cottage somewhere. I've studied every inch of the country round here."
The path appeared. "Tell me, did you have a queer time with Crispin—the elder one, I mean?"
"I've never had so strange a conversation with any one," said Harkness. "Madness is a queer thing when you are in actual contact with it, because we have, every one of us, enough madness in ourselves to wonder whether some one else is so mad after all. He talked the most awful nonsense, and dangerous nonsense too, but there was a kind of theory behind it, something that almost held it all together. A sort of pathos too, so that you felt, in spite of yourself, sorry for the man."
But Dunbar was no analyser of human motives. He despised fine shades, and was a man of action. "Sorry for him! Just about as sorry as you are for a spider that is spinning a nest in your clothes cupboard. Sorry! He wants crushing under foot like a white slug, and that he'll get before I've finished with him. Why, man, he's murderous! He loves torture and slow fire like the old Spaniards in the Inquisition. There's so little to catch on to—that's the trouble; but I bet that if he had caught us helping Hesther out of that house to-night there would be something to catch on to! Why, if we were to fall into his hands now! Ugh! it doesn't bear thinking of!"
"Oh yes, of course," Harkness agreed. "He's dangerously mad. He'll be in an asylum before many days are out. If ever I have been justified in any action of my life it has been this, in helping that poor girl out of the hands of those two men. All the same . . . oh! it's sad, Dunbar! There is something so tragic in madness, whether it's dangerous or no—something captive, like a bird in a cage, and something common to us all. . . ."
"Well, if you think that the kind of things that Crispin Senior is after are common to us all you must have a pretty low view of humanity. The beastly swine! Something pathetic? Why, you're a curious fellow, Harkness, to feel pathos in that situation."
"You may hate it and detest it, you must confine it because it's dangerous to the community, but you can pity it all the same. His eyes—that longing to escape."
But Dunbar had found the cleft. They were now right above the sea. Although there was so slight a wind, the waves were breaking noisily on the shore. The stars had gone again, but the edge of the cliff was clear, and far below it a thin line of ragged white leapt to the eye, vanished, and leapt again.
"Here's the path down," said Dunbar. "There isn't much light, but enough, I fancy. We'll both go down so that we can be sure of our way when we come back with Hesther, and we may be both needed to help her. The path's all right, though. It's slippery after wet weather, but there's been no rain for days. Can you make it out clearly enough?"
"Yes," Harkness said, but he felt anything but happy. Of all the things that he had done that evening this was the one that he liked least. He had a very poor head for heights, growing dizzy under any provocation; the angry snarl of the sea bewildered him, and little breaths of vapour curled about him changing from moment to moment the form and shape of the scene. He would have liked to suggest to Dunbar that there was no need for him to go down this first time, but, coward though he might be, he had come down to Treliss to beat that cowardice.