The shadows had fallen over the town and he could no longer see the castle, save as an indistinct hump or a shrugged shoulder. He began to walk down by a path longer than it had seemed in the silver light. By the time he had reached the first straggling houses, darkness was complete, pierced here and there by the yellow flicker of oil lamps, crowned by dingy pinnacles of smoke from the lengthening wicks. Cautiously he made his way into the High Street, and stood for a while in the shadow of a doorway, probing his mind for the position of the various inns. There were few persons about in the street, which was like the deck of a sleeping ship lit by two lamps, fore and aft, and on each side a sudden fall into a dark sea. Opposite him two old houses leant crazily towards each other, almost touching above the narrow lane called Keerie Street, which dived chaotically into the night—a few confused squares and oblongs of inn signs, six steep feet of cobbles and then vacancy. Out beyond, but he could not see, was Newhaven and the Channel, France. Even there lay no complete freedom for him. Along the coasts were scrubby little men, with squinting eyes, hard wrists and a sharp mispronounced knowledge of the English coinage who knew his face well and Carlyon’s better.
His shoulder falling from force of habit into a self-pitying droop, Andrews moved further down the street. Here and there shops were still open, and their lit windows showed old white-bearded men peering at their ledgers with little lines of content around their eyes. Never, not even at school nor under the pain of the smugglers’ hardly veiled contempt, had Andrews felt so alone. He passed on. Two voices speaking softly in a doorway made him pause. He could not see the speakers. “Come tonight.” “Shall I? I oughtn’t to.” “I love you, love you, love you.”
Andrews, to his own surprise, smote the wall against which he stood with his fist and said aloud with a crazy fury, “You damned lechers,” walked on weeping with anger and loneliness. “I’ll be drunk if I can’t be content in any other way,” he thought. “I’ve still enough money for that, thank God.”
With sudden resolve he dived down a side street, stumbling at its unexpected steepness, and came to rest with unerring instinct at the door of an inn. Two windows were cracked and stuffed with rags, the sign was long past the possibility of repair. Of the goat, which was the inn’s name, remained only the two horns, as though a mocking warning to husbands not to enter. Loneliness and the desire to forget his loneliness drove away even the instincts of fear and caution, and Andrews flung the door carelessly open and stumbled, eyes red and blind with childish tears, within. The air was thick with smoke, and a roar of human voices, each trying to drown the others and make its opinions heard, smote him in the face like a wave. A tall thin man with small eyes and a red flabby mouth, who was standing by the door, caught his elbow. “What do you want, son?” he asked and immediately began to shoulder his way through the throng, calling out to an invisible potman, “Two double brandies for a gentleman here,” and presently re-emerged with what he sought, and vanished again with his own quota leaving Andrews to pay. His brandy drunk, Andrews looked round the room with a clearer mind. He chose a small, respectable man, who stood alone, and asked him to join him in a drink. Looking deprecatingly at the empty glass in Andrews’s hand, the stranger replied that he would not mind a glass of sherry.
Andrews fetched it and himself revived by fresh brandy began to question his new acquaintance.
“I’m looking for a night’s lodging,” he said. “I suppose that won’t be easy now. The town will be full for the Assizes?”
“I can’t tell that,” the man replied, eyeing him a little askance as though he feared that Andrews was about to ask him for money. “I’m more or less a stranger here myself.”
“And these Assizes,” Andrews considered, “what are they for anyway? To bring money to the tradespeople. There’s no need for such a fuss to hang a few poor skunks.”
“I don’t agree with you at all—not at all,” said the little man sipping his sherry and eyeing Andrews suspiciously. “Justice must be done in the proper order.”
“Yes, but what is the proper order?” Andrews asked, raising his voice so as to be heard above the din and at the same time signalling to the potman that his glass was empty. “Surely the crime and then retribution.”
“You must prove the guilt,” the stranger said, turning the sherry gently on his tongue.
“Isn’t it proved well enough without a judge and jury?” Andrews’s caution vanished still further out of sight at the stinging touch of a third glass. “They were caught by the revenue in the act and you can’t dispose of a dead body.”
The stranger put down his glass of sherry carefully on the edge of the table and eyed Andrews even more curiously. “You are referring to the smugglers and the alleged murder?” he asked.
Andrews laughed. “Alleged!” he cried. “Why, it’s patent.”
“No man is guilty until he is proved so,” the little man commented as though he were repeating a well-learnt lesson.
“Then you must wait till Doomsday in this
