ng, I'd tear your vitals
out, here in this room--tear them out--I'd tear them out! Damn, damn,
damn! You think me weak? I can bite, bite to the blood, bite you, hurt
you, disgrace you ..."

He was thus incoherently raging when the scene was interrupted by the
arrival of the landlord and inn servants in various degrees of
deshabille, and to them I gave my temporary lunatic in charge.

"Take him to his room," I said, "he's only drunk."

These were my words; but I knew better. After all my study of Mr.
Bellairs, one discovery had been reserved for the last moment--that of
his latent and essential madness.

CHAPTER XX

STALLBRIDGE-LE-CARTHEW

Long before I was awake the shyster had disappeared, leaving his bill
unpaid. I did not need to inquire where he was gone, I knew too well, I
knew there was nothing left me but to follow; and about ten in the
morning, set forth in a gig for Stallbridge-le-Carthew.

The road, for the first quarter of the way, deserts the valley of the
river, and crosses the summit of a chalkdown, grazed over by flocks of
sheep and haunted by innumerable larks. It was a pleasant but a vacant
scene, arousing but not holding the attention; and my mind returned to
the violent passage of the night before. My thought of the man I was
pursuing had been greatly changed. I conceived of him, somewhere in
front of me, upon his dangerous errand, not to be turned aside, not to
be stopped, by either fear or reason. I had called him a ferret; I
conceived him now as a mad dog. Methought he would run, not walk;
methought, as he ran, that he would bark and froth at the lips;
methought, if the great wall of China were to rise across his path, he
would attack it with his nails.

Presently the road left the down, returned by a precipitous descent into
the valley of the Stall, and ran thenceforward among enclosed fields and
under the continuous shade of trees. I was told we had now entered on
the Carthew property. By and by, a battlemented wall appeared on the
left hand, and a little after I had my first glimpse of the mansion. It
stood in a hollow of a bosky park, crowded, to a degree that surprised
and even displeased me, with huge timber and dense shrubberies of
laurel and rhododendron. Even from this low station and the thronging
neighbourhood of the trees, the pile rose conspicuous like a cathedral.
Behind, as we continued to skirt the park wall, I began to make out a
straggling town of offices which b