“But what is to become of you? madman!” Linnet exclaimed.
This was a new idea to Silas.
“Yes, I must think of getting away, it’s true,” he replied, suddenly busy; and he moved excitably in what he thought to be the direction of the door. But he had lost his bearings, and struck himself against the corner of a vat. “What’s that?” he called out. “I’ll have no nonsense,” he added, speaking in a tone of incipient panic which he tried to cover up by menace. “There is no time to be lost; I can’t be kept hanging about here, or I shall be taken. I must get away, and hide somewhere. I must hide in a barn. You will have to bring me food. The first thing to be done is to get away.” All the while he was speaking he moved about, groping amongst the vats, trying to find his way out, but amongst that number, where nothing helped him to distinguish one from the other, with each step he became more confusedly lost. “I’m blind!” he cried, at last standing stock-still, and from the anguish in his voice it might have been believed that he had never made the discovery before.
Then he started to stride about, up and down, in and out of the gangways left between the vats, taking any opening that offered itself. Linnet tried to speak to him; he was interrupted, reasonable words fluttered vainly amongst the vibrant emotions with which Silas’s soul was strung. Neither Linnet nor Nan could have any cognisance of such a diapason. “You shall not come near me,” Silas shouted; “how am I to know you wouldn’t give me up? although I killed Gregory for you; and I loved Gregory.—We’ve destroyed one another. It’s right,—people like us ought to go. There’s no place for us. I can’t save myself,” he said, “I’m blind; every one can take advantage of me. How could I live hidden for weeks in the country? But I’ll give them trouble first....”
He was full of a crazy, hopeless defiance; he turned upon them the wild flash of his sightless eyes. “It must end in defeat,” he said, “what match is a blind man for clear-seeing men? You had me at a disadvantage, all my life,—all of you! You were orderly, while I struggled. Gone under! but not as tamely as you think.” As he spoke he found the door that gave access to the outside stairs, and dragged it open, blundering out into the air on the iron landing. They saw him there, against the sky, silhouetted for a moment, before he disappeared on his reckless descent of the hazardous stair.
III
Evening was rapidly falling, but the coming of night would befriend him, since it could not hinder. As he reached the foot of the stair he stood for a moment in hesitation. He listened. The tessellated square was silent, but for a drip of water off a gutter into one of the great butts; no footsteps rang across the cobbles; no voice exclaimed “Why, Dene!”; no call from Nan or Linnet echoed down to him from above. He felt himself more utterly alone than ever in his life before, more finally at bay. Never for an instant did the idea of giving himself up cross his mind. He was calmer now than he had been up in the gallery, where he had bruised himself so cruelly against these serried vats. Here, at least, he had space around him; and out there, where he meant to go, would be still wider space, the flat freedom of the Fens, the sky above his head, and night, the only ally that could begin to equalise his chances with other men.
But there would be uncertainty. Always the uncertainty whether he had or had not been seen. He might be ringed about by pursuers closing in upon him, and not know it. He must make up his mind to that; he must make up his mind to the knowledge that defeat would overtake him in the end. This knowledge came to him with a strangely familiar quietness; it was as though it had been with him all his life, although he might not have given it a name.
In the silence of the evening he passed beyond the factory and gained the road on the top of the great dyke stretching across the Fens. Upon its eminence he paused, forlorn, uncertain, and derelict. That illumination which had sustained him before, seemed now to have deserted him; he no longer trod with the same assurance, but cautiously, afraid of making a false step and of slipping down the sides of the dyke, afraid of being seen, upright upon the skyline, yet not venturing to leave the road and to make his way across the flooded country. Yet as he stumbled on, he realised that therein lay his wisest course: the floods would reveal no footmarks, and he would be less conspicuous than erect on the height of the dyke. In so far as his hopelessness could devise a plan, that was the plan to follow. He struck across the road, and, crouching on his heels, allowed himself to slither down the escarpment. At the bottom he found the water, icy about his ankles, and shivered at its sinister touch. Nevertheless, he plunged forward into it, his hands outstretched before him, determined to put all possible distance between himself and Abbot’s Etchery. Behind him the three chimneys of the factory vomited their black plumes of noiseless smoke that trailed across the sky, but of this he did not reckon; he was aware only of the cry of the curlew circling above him, and of the marshy ground that sucked back his steps beneath the water. He fought his way, each foot held down and his progress hampered as in a nightmare, and with an effort he dragged one foot after the other stickily out, ploughing onwards into the unknown breadth of the marshes, ignorant of his surroundings, of whether night had fallen, concealing him, or whether the last bars of day still made of him a distinguishable mark. And, for his greater misery and discomfort, as he advanced across the submerged fields, he came periodically to the ditches that were their boundaries, and knew them because his footing suddenly failed him and threw him forward into the water, pitching down upon hands and knees, so that presently he was drenched, and the touch of the water which at first had been only about his ankles now conquered his body also, little by little, penetrating to his skin, glacial as the presaged touch of death. Still he advanced, striving towards no known prospective refuge, but merely, irrationally, to increase the distance, without considering the paltriness of the help those few poor miles could afford him.
By now, although he could not be certain of it, night had fully come. A huge, low moon stole up above the horizon, and sailed slowly higher into the heavens over the flooded country. In its light the few bare trees stood up like twigs, black and stark; and still across the now shining expanse of water the blind man held on his laborious, hindered way the splash of his steps breaking the placid surface into a ripple of jet and silver. He had no notion how far he might have gone; he was uncertain even whether he had succeeded in keeping straight in the same direction. Every now and then he came to a hillock of higher ground, which lifted him for the moment out of the floods, and every now and then he stumbled into a ditch, from which he extricated himself, his teeth chattering; and all the time he walked with his hands groping before him, but they could not save him from the ditches that seemed to lie in wait for him and to take pleasure in trapping him unawares. He thought that he must have been walking half the night. Even the curlews had ceased to cry long since, and no owl hooted across the waste of waters. His extreme weariness deadened him; but fever reanimated him; and it was a conflict as to which would gain the advantage. At one moment he thought that he must sink down from exhaustion, even into the floods; the next moment, a bout of fear and determination spurred him on, and he splashed forward, behind his groping hands, while obscure mutterings came in the immense silence of the night from his moving lips.