Leaning on the arm of his wife he passed slowly out of the door, into the night and his freedom. The landlord still leant against the wall: not a word did he speak; not a finger did he lift to stay the departing guests. Diggory Fargus tarried behind an instant to speak a word in the landlord’s ear. “Mate,” said he, thrusting his one eye into the quivering face of the landlord, “I said, if ye played me false I would twist your head off your body with these two hands. But I shall leave it to others, d’ye see. I shall kind o’ leave it to my deppities. They’ll make a cleaner job of it than me. They’ll do it more formal and more lawyerlike. Besides, I have hardly the time to do it now. But let me tell ye, mate, as one man to another, that when next I am around this coast, I shall make a call at this old grog shop, and if I find that them there soldiers has not done their dooty by you, ye can lay to it as Diggory Fargus is a christened man he’ll keep his word. A pleasant evenin’ to you, mate.” The sailor spat vehemently upon the kitchen floor, and lurched out into the darkness in the wake of his companions. [Illustration: CHAPTER XVII _The Landlord_] Gamaliel closed the door upon the last of his visitors. Gradually their slow footsteps receded into the roar of the sea. He listened, and fancied he could hear them long after he had ceased to do so. Insensibly his mind lingered on their sound, for when they should die away he knew that his life was at an end. As one who has suffered the tortures and paroxysms of a disease may lose his agonies as soon as it develops mortal symptoms, so the landlord, possessed with the knowledge that his own life was the price he must pay for his weakness, sat down in his chair by the fire with a clear mind. There was no longer any need for him to torment himself. He foresaw the issue as plainly as the man in the cart when he looks upon the scaffold. He had lost all. Events had been too great for his second-rate character. They had called for a strong man--a man of courage, of indomitable spirit and tenacity of purpose--to grapple with them. For such a one there had been a fortune. The landlord, self-deceived because all his life he had never been put to the test, had attempted to bend them to his own purposes. But they had proved too great and unwieldy; he had not had the physical strength to overcome them. Instead they had overcome him. The landlord did not give himself up to despair. He was too far gone for that. He was bitterly afraid of death. A death by violence would still have the power to revolt him; but the thing uppermost in his mind was his humiliation. It was so fierce and overpowering, that it became an anodyne to lull and allay all the passions of his soul. It took the sting out of death itself. He had been tried and found wanting. At the age of sixty the supreme moment of a laborious and fairly successful life had come. He had failed; let him perish.