We do as he suggests. In the shadow of the hedge we walk close in front of the row of heated labourers, who, sitting or lying on the hedge bank, are eating unattractive looking dinners. I scan one face after another—honest bovine English faces. I have seen a hundred thousand faces like each one of the faces now before me—very like, but the exact counterpart of none. We are getting to the end of the row, I beginning to feel rather ashamed, though infinitely relieved, and to smile at my own expense. I look again, and my heart suddenly stands still and turns to stone within me. He is there!—not a hand-breadth from me! Great God! how well I have remembered his face, even to the unsightly smallpox seams, the shagged locks, the grinning slit mouth, the little sly base eyes. He is employed in no murderous occupation now; he is harmlessly cutting hunks of coarse bread and fat cold bacon with a clasp knife, but yet I have no more doubt that it is he—he whom I saw with the crimsoned sickle in his stained hand—than I have that it is I who am stonily, shiveringly, staring at him.
“Well, Miss Bellairs, who was right?” asks Robin’s cheery voice at my elbow. “Perish ‘Bradshaw’ and all his labyrinths! Are you satisfied now? Good heavens!” (catching a sudden sight of my face) “How white you are! Do you mean to say that you have found him at last? Impossible!”
“Yes, I have found him,” I answer in a low and unsteady tone. “I knew I should. Look, there he is!—close to us, the third from the end.”
I turn away my head, unable to bear the hideous recollections and associations that the sight of the man calls up, and I suppose that they both look.
“Are you sure that you are not letting your imagination carry you away?” asks he presently, in a tone of gentle kindly remonstrance. “As I said before these fellows are all so much alike; they have all the same look of debased squalid cunning. Oblige me by looking once again, so as to be quite sure.”
I obey. Reluctantly I look at him once again. Apparently, becoming aware that he is the object of our notice, he lifts his small dull eyes and looks back at me. It is the same face—they are the same eyes that turned from the plundered dressing-table to catch sight of me last night. “There is no mistake,” I answer, shuddering from head to foot. “Take me away, please—as quick as you can—out of the field—home!”
They comply, and over the hot fields and through the hot noon air we step silently homewards. As we reach the cool and ivied porch of the house I speak for the first time. “You believe me now?”
He hesitates. “I was staggered for a moment, I will own,” he answers, with candid gravity; “but I have been thinking it over, and on reflection I have come to the conclusion that the highly excited state of your imagination is answerable for the heightening of the resemblance which exists between all the Irish of that class into an identity with the particular Irishman you dreamed of, and whose face (by your own showing) you only saw dimly reflected in the glass.”
“Not dimly,” repeat I emphatically, “unless I now see that sun dimly” (pointing to him, as he gloriously, blindingly blazes from the sky). “You will not be warned by me then?” I continue passionately, after an interval. “You will run the risk of my dream coming true—you will stay on here in spite of it? Oh, if I could persuade you to go from home—anywhere—anywhere—for a time, until the danger was past!”
“And leave the harvest to itself?” answers he, with a smile of quiet sarcasm; “be a loser of two hundred or three hundred pounds, probably, and a laughing-stock to my acquaintance into the bargain, and all for—what? A dream—a fancy—a nightmare!”