We stood for a moment or two listening, and then crept down into the quiet of Lincoln's Inn Fields. As our feet touched the pavement Jervis Fanshawe stopped, and looked over his shoulder back into the dark house.
"Don't you hear anything, Charlie?" he whispered.
"Nothing," I replied. "What should we hear?"
"No door opening quietly?—no soft pad, pad of feet down the stairs? Quick!—don't you hear it?"
"Come away," I said abruptly; for the horror of the thing was creeping over me again.
Yet before we were out of the place he had turned—not once but many times—to look over his shoulder, whispering to me more than once that something was creeping along the other side—there—in the shadow of the railings!—and didn't I see that hand against the breast, gripping something?—and was I sure that the door had been closed?—and would it not be better if we went back, and listened again outside it?
We were well on our way back to his lodging when he stopped, and gripped me, and cried out suddenly that the candle had been left alight; he was sure of it—sure that some one would see it shining through the chinks of the door. But that I gripped him firmly he would have set off then and there, perhaps to burst into the place in some mad fashion, to see what had happened. But I got him back to his lodging, and saw him presently stretched upon the bed, muttering and moaning to himself, and starting up every now and then to ask me if there wasn't a footstep on the stairs, or a hand knocking at the door.
But in the morning he was calmer, and I made him as respectable as possible, and took him down presently to the docks. There we found the Eaglet, in the midst of much bustle and excitement, getting ready to start; and I sent him on board, and left him there. The last I saw of him was when the vessel was moving away into the river, and I was standing at the dock side, watching. And Jervis Fanshawe was leaning over the side, with that nervous hand of his plucking at his lips, and with his haunted eyes staring straight through me and behind me, as though at the last he saw Murray Olivant, with the knife in his breast, rushing to stop him.