The rain was now falling in torrents.
CHAPTER XIV.
[ALFRED PAULTON'S WALK.]
It was now pitch dark. The rain rushed downward through the still air in overwhelming sheets. Through the leafless trees it fell with a shrill, constant hiss. On the open road it beat with a loud dull rolling sound, sometimes like the dull murmur of distant traffic, sometimes like, the distant roar of a mighty concourse of people.
Out beyond the lamps of the town there was not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere. If one turned one's face upwards, the source of the rain seemed not to be more than a few feet overhead. If one turned one's face to the ground, a thick heavy vapour, born of the shattered drops, rose warm against one's mouth and eyes. There was no noise abroad but that of the incessant deluge. If it had abated or increased, one would have thought it was the result of a thunder-storm. But it did not alter in character or decree. It was a constant torrent, not a fitful flood.
It was between six and seven o'clock when Alfred Paulton found himself walking on a lonely road under this fierce downpour. How he got there he did not know. He had a confused memory of what had taken place within the past few hours. He had no clue whatever to where he now was. He had no more than a blurred image of the scene in that low, dingy, ill-lighted room at the "Wolfdog Inn." Even when Mrs. Davenport was giving evidence his attention had been but feebly aroused. He had felt drowsy, jaded. He then told himself that it would be much better for him to go home and have some rest and sleep. He had been without proper sleep for three nights. He had been too much excited to get to sleep soundly, and when for a time he fell into an uneasy doze, he had awakened with a shudder and a start from some dire form of nightmare, in which familiar forms and faces had been cruelly jumbled in hideous events.
But on this unknown road, and now, after wandering he knew not how long, all at once he was smitten with a sharp impression of his present situation. He moved his eyes this way and that in quick anxiety. It is not possible to say he looked in the sense that looking takes in objects by means of sight. He could hear and feel the rain, and smell the heavy damp vapour rising from the ground, from the flooded road at his feet. But if sight had been painlessly taken from him at that moment, he would have been unconscious of loss.
A feeling of desolation and infrangible solitude came upon him.
He paused in his walk and listened. His ears caught nothing but the muffled hiss of the rain through the air, the angry-beat of it among the leafless trees, and the slashing singing of it on the flooded ground. The effect of it was an awful combination of the darkness of the grave, an inviolate solitude, and a deluge lacking merciful power to overwhelm.
He would have greeted any companion with joy. The society of the humblest beast, the most abject man, would have cheered him almost beyond the bounds of reason.