I  
Nan rose upright, crying aloud; the wind of terror had blown violently in upon the stillness of the gallery. Silas towered amongst the vats; he wore an air of unearthly triumph and exaltation. “Nan! Nan!” he said, stretching up both arms with the gesture of the fanatic over the blood-offering. “What have you done? what have you done?” she cried. “Saved you,—bought you free,” he answered loudly, still lit up by his triumph, but she hid her face in her hands, and moaned, shuddering.
Morgan stirred, and lay gazing without comprehension. He whispered Nan’s name; she started, and turned to him, but seeing his eyes opened she wildly laid her hand across them. “You mustn’t look,—you mustn’t look,” she said, distraught, in the effort to preserve him although she understood nothing herself.
In that absence of understanding she saw only 278Silas erect there with his arms still stretched out, as a sinner might stare into heaven, or a martyr into hell, accepting either, because enlightened as to both.
“Silas!” she called, unbearably alarmed.
“Builders and destroyers,” he replied from afar, and in the tone of one giving utterance to a quotation of secret familiarity.
“What am I to do?” she cried, in a lost whisper. She felt immeasurably removed from the succour of mankind, forced into the kindred of the Denes, amongst grotesque surroundings, and grotesque and terrible events, high above the comings and goings of the temperate world. There was no room in her mind for the thought that the body of Gregory was pitched sinking through the morass of that deadly cauldron. Then the word “Gregory!” came to her, and, wonderingly, she pronounced it aloud, “Gregory,” thereby bringing realisation upon herself, and the first conscious dismay.
She went to Silas and seized him by the arm.
“Silas, speak to me....”
He turned his eyes full upon her face.
“O God, can you see me?” she murmured, shrinking away.
“There was nothing else to be done,” he said.
279“Oh, yes, yes!” she protested, inarticulate in her extreme distress and bewilderment.
“There was nothing else,” he repeated.
II
 
She perceived then that, according to the temper of his mind, there was indeed nothing else. She ceased to protest, overtaken by the actual consequence of his uncompromising creed.
“You have killed Gregory,” she said.
A change came over him; his look of flaming justification died down.
“Hannah. Martin. Christine. Gregory,” he said sorrowfully.
Nan was crying; she was frightened by the monstrous, fantastic extravagance of the scene. Silas must have decoyed her to the heart of some distorted maze, where death was not solemn, nor grief venerable; and therein she was lost. Crying, her arm crooked across her eyes, she made her way over to Linnet, who had risen to his feet. “It’s soap,—soap,” she stammered, taking refuge against him.
He held her, since no words could help, and she made herself as small as possible within his arm. Silas called out to him across the gallery, “I have 280thrown Gregory into the vat,” pointing to the wrong vat, and forcing himself to laugh very loudly.
“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.
281Then 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 282iron 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 me............