Mr. Goring overtook them before they had gone far, and walked on with them, talking to Gladys about Andersen’s evident insanity.
“It’s no good my trying to do anything,” he remarked. “But I’ll send Bert round for Luke as soon as I get home. Luke’ll bring him to his senses. They say he’s been taken like this before, and has come round. He hears voices, you know, and fancies things.”
They walked in silence along the high upland road that leads from the principal quarries of the Hill to the Wild Pine hamlet and Nevil’s Gully. When they reached the latter place, the two girls went on, down Root-Thatch Lane, and Mr. Goring took the field-path to the Priory.
Before they separated, the farmer turned to his future bride, who had been careful to keep Gladys between herself and him, and addressed her in the most gentle voice he knew how to assume.
“Don’t be angry with me, lass,” he said. “I was only teasing, just now. ’Twas a poor jest may-be, and ye’ve cause to look glowering. But when we two be man and wife ye’ll find I’m a sight better to live with than many a fair-spoken one. These be queer times, and like enough I seem a queer fellow, but things’ll settle themselves. You take my word for it!”
Lacrima could only murmur a faint assent in reply to these words, but as she entered with Gladys the shadow of the tunnel-like lane, she could not help thinking that her repulsion to this man, dreadful though it was, was nothing in comparison with the fear and loathing with which she regarded Mr. Romer. Contrasted with his sinister relative, Mr. John Goring was, after all, no more than a rough simpleton.
Meanwhile, on Leo’s Hill, an event of tragic significance had occurred. It will be remembered that the last Lacrima had seen of James Andersen was the wild final gesticulation he made,—a sort of mad appeal to the Heavens against the assault of invisible enemies,—before he vanished from sight on the further side of Claudy’s Leap. This vanishing, just at that point, meant no more to Lacrima than that he had probably taken a lower path, but had Gladys or Mr. Goring witnessed it,—or any other person who knew the topography of the place,—a much more startling conclusion would have been inevitable. Nor would such a conclusion have been incorrect.
The unfortunate man, forgetting, in his excitement, the existence of the other quarry, the nameless one; forgetting in fact that Claudy’s Leap was a razor’s edge between two precipices, had stepped heedlessly backwards, after his final appeal to Heaven, and fallen, without a cry, straight into the gulf.
The height of his fall would, in any case, have probably killed him, but as it was “he dashed his head,” in the language of the Bible, “against a stone”; and in less than a second after his last cry, his soul, to use the expression of a more pagan scripture, “was driven, murmuring, into the Shades.”
It fell to the lot, therefore, not of Luke, who did not return from Weymouth till late that evening, but of a motley band of holiday-makers from the hill-top Inn, to discover the madman’s fate. Arriving at the spot almost immediately after the girls’ departure, these honest revellers—strangers to the locality—had quickly found the explanation of the unearthly cries they had heard.