第45章
"Do you, sir?" answered Byrne, bitter with positive anguish."Iwonder what you would have said afterwards? Why! I might have been kicked out of the service for looting a mule from a nation in alliance with His Majesty.Or I might have been battered to a pulp with flails and pitch-forks - a pretty tale to get abroad about one of your officers - while trying to steal a mule.Or chased ignominiously to the boat - for you would not have expected me to shoot down unoffending people for the sake of a mangy mule...And yet," he added in a low voice, "I almost wish myself I had done it."Before dark those two young men had worked themselves up into a highly complex psychological state of scornful scepticism and alarmed credulity.It tormented them exceedingly; and the thought that it would have to last for six days at least, and possibly be prolonged further for an indefinite time, was not to be borne.The ship was therefore put on the inshore tack at dark.All through the gusty dark night she went towards the land to look for her man, at times lying over in the heavy puffs, at others rolling idle in the swell, nearly stationary, as if she too had a mind of her own to swing perplexed between cool reason and warm impulse.
Then just at daybreak a boat put off from her and went on tossed by the seas towards the shallow cove where, with considerable difficulty, an officer in a thick coat and a round hat managed to land on a strip of shingle.
"It was my wish," writes Mr.Byrne, "a wish of which my captain approved, to land secretly if possible.I did not want to be seen either by my aggrieved friend in the yellow hat, whose motives were not clear, or by the one-eyed wine-seller, who may or may not have been affiliated to the devil, or indeed by any other dweller in that primitive village.But unfortunately the cove was the only possible landing place for miles; and from the steepness of the ravine I couldn't make a circuit to avoid the houses.""Fortunately," he goes on, "all the people were yet in their beds.
It was barely daylight when I found myself walking on the thick layer of sodden leaves filling the only street.No soul was stirring abroad, no dog barked.The silence was profound, and Ihad concluded with some wonder that apparently no dogs were kept in the hamlet, when I heard a low snarl, and from a noisome alley between two hovels emerged a vile cur with its tail between its legs.He slunk off silently showing me his teeth as he ran before me, and he disappeared so suddenly that he might have been the unclean incarnation of the Evil One.There was, too, something so weird in the manner of its coming and vanishing, that my spirits, already by no means very high, became further depressed by the revolting sight of this creature as if by an unlucky presage."He got away from the coast unobserved, as far as he knew, then struggled manfully to the west against wind and rain, on a barren dark upland, under a sky of ashes.Far away the harsh and desolate mountains raising their scarped and denuded ridges seemed to wait for him menacingly.The evening found him fairly near to them, but, in sailor language, uncertain of his position, hungry, wet, and tired out by a day of steady tramping over broken ground during which he had seen very few people, and had been unable to obtain the slightest intelligence of Tom Corbin's passage."On! on! Imust push on," he had been saying to himself through the hours of solitary effort, spurred more by incertitude than by any definite fear or definite hope.
The lowering daylight died out quickly, leaving him faced by a broken bridge.He descended into the ravine, forded a narrow stream by the last gleam of rapid water, and clambering out on the other side was met by the night which fen like a bandage over his eyes.The wind sweeping in the darkness the broadside of the sierra worried his ears by a continuous roaring noise as of a maddened sea.He suspected that he had lost the road.Even in daylight, with its ruts and mud-holes and ledges of outcropping stone, it was difficult to distinguish from the dreary waste of the moor interspersed with boulders and clumps of naked bushes.But, as he says, "he steered his course by the feel of the wind," his hat rammed low on his brow, his head down, stopping now and again from mere weariness of mind rather than of body - as if not his strength but his resolution were being overtaxed by the strain of endeavour half suspected to be vain, and by the unrest of his feelings.
In one of these pauses borne in the wind faintly as if from very far away he heard a sound of knocking, just knocking on wood.He noticed that the wind had lulled suddenly.
His heart started beating tumultuously because in himself he carried the impression of the desert solitudes he had been traversing for the last six hours - the oppressive sense of an uninhabited world.When he raised his head a gleam of light, illusory as it often happens in dense darkness, swam before his eyes.While he peered, the sound of feeble knocking was repeated -and suddenly he felt rather than saw the existence of a massive obstacle in his path.What was it? The spur of a hill? Or was it a house! Yes.It was a house right close, as though it had risen from the ground or had come gliding to meet him, dumb and pallid;from some dark recess of the night.It towered loftily.He had come up under its lee; another three steps and he could have touched the wall with his hand.It was no doubt a POSADA and some other traveller was trying for admittance.He heard again the sound of cautious knocking.
Next moment a broad band of light fell into the night through the opened door.Byrne stepped eagerly into it, whereupon the person outside leaped with a stifled cry away into the night.An exclamation of surprise was heard too, from within.Byrne, flinging himself against the half closed door, forced his way in against some considerable resistance.