"Kill him--or he shall me."
Then, with a hurried step he sprang up through the higher part of the
garden in and out among the shrubs and bushes, climbed on to the very
top, and struck out over the mountain slopes.
Dinah listened till the rustling sounds he made died away, and then, hot
and trembling, she went up slowly to her room, and sat down with her
face buried in her hands; but there was no relief--the source of her
tears was dry.
Clive took a short cut across the rugged moorland, and twice over he
narrowly escaped death. The first time he was pulled up short by coming
violently in the darkness against the rough, unmortared wall built up
round an ancient shaft on the mine land; and as he checked himself by
grasping the loose stones, one of them fell over and went down and down,
striking once against the side, and sending a chill through him as a
reverberating roar came up, followed at a short interval by a dull
echoing splash, after which he could hear the water hiss and suck
against the sides, sending up strange whisperings, which sounded to his
disturbed imagination like demoniacal confidences about Dinah Gurdon and
his brother.
He hurried away, as another stone was dislodged, and the sullen plunge
came to his ear when he was yards distant, tearing along in the most
reckless way, to trip at last over a stone and fall headlong down one of
the deep gully-like ravines with which the mountain land was scored.
He caught at a rough projection, against which he struck, and held on
while a little avalanche of stones continued falling; then half-stunned
and trembling from the shock, crept back again to proceed more
cautiously along the edge of the gully, making for the path once more,
fully awake now to the fact that it was utter madness to attempt to
cross that region in the darkness.
"Not yet," he muttered, with a savage laugh, "I must square accounts
with brother Jessop first."
Then he laughed as he wiped away the blood which had trickled down like
perspiration from a cut in the forehead, and which came like a blessing
in disguise, relieving, as it bled freely, the tension upon his
overcharged brain; for if ever man was on the border-line which
stretches between sanity and utter madness, Clive Reed was then.
"Of course," he said, "I am a fool, a pitiful, childlike fool, ever to
imagine that a light-hearted girl would care for such a dreamy student
as I--a man whose whole conversation is about mines and shares, and
money. I had my lesson with Janet, who tolerated me, as long as she
could, for her father's sake; but I would not take it, and went on in my
folly once more. Jessop again! Of course: the good-looking,
well-dressed, plausible scoundrel. They always said he was a ladies'
man, and the more infidelities proved against such a one, the more
attractive he becomes, I suppose."
"Ah!" he ejaculated savagely, "what is it to me? It shall not be for
that, but for the money. If I want an idol, it shall be gold, and he is
trying to rob me of it."
He struggled on, stumbling in the darkness over stones and tufts of
heather, till he reached a rift which led sloping to the pathway close
by the tunnel-like notch, and as he let himself down on to the firm,
level way, he ran through the dark part with his hands holding his head
as if to keep it from bursting with the agonising memories of what he
had witnessed that night, a scene photographed upon his brain by that
sharp flash of light before all was black darkness--a darkness which now
enshrouded his soul.
"But I must be cool and strong," he muttered, as he subsided into a walk
once more, and went steadily on toward the entrance to the mine gap with
a confused idea in his head that he would hunt down his brother, bring
him to bay, and then--
Yes--and then? His brain carried him no farther. Something was to
happen then to one of them; and he only muttered an insane, mocking
laugh, and either could not or would not try to plunge into the future.