A wild, piercing shout, almost too shrill to be human, aroused him from his trance of terror. He looked upward almost unconsciously, and it seemed to him that the mist had been drawn up like a curtain, and that a man in dark garb stood gazing on him from the summit of the rocks.
If it were so, it was but for a second’s space. The fog closed in thicker again than before, the torrent came roaring down in fiercer, madder flood, and wheeling his horse round, and spurring him furiously, it was all that Jasper St. Aubyn could do, by dint of hand and foot, and as iron a heart as ever man possessed, to avoid following his victim to her watery grave.
Once safe, he cast one last glance to the rocks, to the river, but he saw, heard nothing. He whirled the bloody whip over the falls, plunged his spurs, rowel-deep, into the horse’s sides, and with hell in his heart, he galloped, like one pursued by the furies of the slain, back, alone, to Widecomb.
——
CHAPTER IV.
The Vengeance.
A change came o’er the spirit of my dream,
The wanderer was returned.
Byron.
It was not yet high noon, when, wet from spur to shoulder with mud and spray, bloody with spurring, spotted from head to heel with gory foam-flakes from his jaded horse’s wide-distended jaws, and quivering nostrils, bareheaded, pale as death, and hoarse with shouting, Jasper St. Aubyn galloped frantically up to the terrace-steps of Widecomb House; and springing to the ground, reeled, and would have fallen headlong had he not been caught in the arms of one of the serving men, who came running down the stone stairs to assist him.