Sawyer cut at the dark straggling furzes bordering the path with his
walking-stick. Recollection of that laugh made him go red about the ears;
made his skin tingle and his eyes smart. It represented an insult not
only to himself but to his cloth. Yet he'd not lost control of himself,
he was glad to remember, though the provocation was rank--
He cut at the furze again, being by nature combative. And--stopped short,
with a start, a tremor running through him. Something rustled, scuttled
away amongst the bushes, and something flapped upward behind him into the
thick lowering sky above. A wailing cry--whether human, or of bird or
beast, he was uncomfortably ignorant--came out of the mist ahead, to be
answered by a like and nearer cry from a spot which he failed, in his
agitation, to locate.
Under ordinary conditions the young cleric was neither troubled by
imagination nor lacking in pluck. His habitual outlook was sensible,
literal and direct. But, it must be owned, this wide indistinct
landscape, over which pale vapours trailed and brooded, the immense
loneliness of the felt rather than seen, expanse of water, marsh and
mud-flat of the Haven--the tide being low--along with the goblin
whispering chuckle of the river speeding seaward away there on his left,
made him oddly jumpy and nervous.
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