Bildungsromans; Boys -- Fiction; Criminals -- Fiction; Kidnapping victims -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction
Let no man talk of murderers escaping justice, and hint that Providence
must sleep. There were twenty score of violent deaths in one long
minute of that agony of fear.
There was a shed in a field he passed that offered shelter for the
night. Before the door were three tall poplar trees, which made it very
dark within, and the wind moaned through them with a dismal wail. He
_could not_ walk on till daylight came again, and here he stretched
himself close to the wall—to undergo new torture.
For now a vision came before him, as constant and more terrible
than that from which he had escaped. Those widely staring eyes, so
lustreless and so glassy, that he had better borne to see than think
upon, appeared in the midst of the darkness; light in themselves, but
giving light to nothing. There were but two, but they were everywhere.
If he shut out the sight, there came the room with every well-known
object—some, indeed, that he would have forgotten if he had gone over
its contents from memory—each in its accustomed place. The body was in
_its_ place, and its eyes were as he saw them when he stole away. He
got up and rushed into the field without. The figure was behind him.
He re-entered the shed and shrunk down once more. The eyes were there
before he had lain himself along.
And here he remained in such terror as none but he can know, trembling
in every limb, and the cold sweat starting from every pore, when
suddenly there arose upon the night-wind the noise of distant shouting,
and the roar of voices mingled in alarm and wonder. Any sound of men in
that lonely place, even though it conveyed a real cause of alarm, was
something to him. He regained his strength and energy at the prospect
of personal danger, and springing to his feet rushed into the open air.
The broad sky seemed on fire. Rising into the air with showers of
sparks, and rolling one above the other, were sheets of flame, lighting
the atmosphere for miles round, and driving clouds of smoke in the
direction where he stood. The shouts grew louder as new voices swelled
the roar, and he could hear the cry of Fire mingled with the ringing of
an alarm-bell, the fall of heavy bodies, and the crackling of flames as
they twined round some new obstacle, and shot aloft as though refreshed
by food. The noise increased as he looked. There were people there—men
and women—light, bustle. It was like new life to him. He darted
onward—straight, headlong—dashing through brier and brake and leaping
gate and fence as madly as the dog who careered with loud and sounding
bark before him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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