CHAPTER IX

When Fielding had gone, Drake opened the window and stepped out on the balcony.

‘Unless you want to marry her yourself’; the words were stamped upon his mind in capitals.  They formulated to him for the first time the cause of that unreasoned conviction of his, and formulated it too, as he realised, with absolute truth.  Yes, it was just his desire for Clarice to which he owed his belief that she had an unquestionable right to know his responsibility for Gorley’s death.

He wanted her, and wanting her, was committed to scrupulous frankness.

Drake looked out across the city.  At his feet lay the quiet strip of garden, lawn and bush; beyond, the lamps burning on the parapets of the Embankment, and beyond them, the river shining in the starlight, polished and lucent like a slab of black marble, with broad regular rays upon it of a still deeper blackness, where the massive columns of Hungerford Bridge cast shadows on the water.  An engine puffed and snorted into the station, leaving its pennant of white smoke in the air.  Through the glass walls of the signal-box above the bridge Drake could see the men in a blaze of light working at the levers, and from the Surrey end there came to him a clink, and at that distance a quite musical clink, of truck against truck as some freight-train was shunted across the rails.  Away to his right the light was burning on Westminster clock-tower; on Westminster Bridge the lamps of cabs and carriages darted to and fro like fire-flies.  Drake watched two of them start across in the same direction a few yards apart, saw the one behind close up, the one in front spirt forward as though each was straining for the lead.  They drew level, then flashed apart, then again drew level, and so passing and repassing raced into the myriad lights upon the opposite bank.  That bank was visible to him through a tracery of leafless twigs, for a tree grew in front of his window on the farther edge of the gardens, and he could see the lights upon its roadway dancing, twirling, clashing in the clear night, just as they clashed and twirled and danced in the roadway beneath him, sparks from a forge, and that forge, London.  In their ceaseless motion they seemed rivulets of fire, and the black sheet of water between them the solid highway.  But even while he looked, a ruby light moved on that highway out from the pillars of the bridge, and then another and another.  Everywhere was the glitter of lights; fixed, flashing like a star on the curve, or again growing slowly from a pin’s point to an orb, and then dwindling to a point and vanishing.  And on every side, too, Drake heard the quick beat of horses, and the rattle of wheels struck out not from silence, but from a dull eternal hum like the hum of a mill, sharp particular notes emerging incessantly from a monotonous volume of sound.