Volume Two—Chapter Fourteen.
“What Have! Done?”
“Where am I?”
No answer. All was pitchy dark, but a pleasant, cool air fanned the speaker’s burning brow.
“Moredock! Are you asleep? The light’s out. What’s the matter? What’s this cloth about my legs?”
There was a rustling sound as Horace North rose to his feet, dragged a fallen surplice from his feet, and began to feel about him in a confused way.
But that was a wall, not the ends of coffins; that was an overturned table, not the stone slab with its hideous burden; and that—
“Oh!”
Horace North reeled against the wall, and rested there as he uttered that piteous groan; for, like a flash of lightning, the ray of memory had shot into his darkened brain, and he saw once more the wretched idol he had worshipped gazing wildly at him with starting eyes—she, the woman he had set upon a pinnacle, grovelling before him in her shame! The moment before, the lady of his frank, honest love; the next moment revealed to him as low in mind, as degraded as some miserable rustic wench, ready to accept the kisses of the first man who called her “dear!”
“Am I going mad?” he groaned. “Poor Salis! Poor Mary Salis! They must never know. And poor me! Fool! blind idiot! But I loved her,” he moaned: “and I thought her so sweet and pure and true—a woman for whom I would have shed my heart’s best blood—a woman for whom I—Pah! I must not stand puling here! Blood? Yes, blood! The brute! He’s strong as a horse.”
He took out a pocket-handkerchief, doubled it, and roughly bandaged his head; for it was bleeding from a cut at the back.
“Clear my brain,” he muttered; “I must not stand here. That place left open! Is Moredock there?”
He felt his way to the door; and, as he stepped cautiously along, his foot kicked against something which jingled on the tiled floor.
He felt about, touched the surplice which had been dragged down and entangled his legs; and, as he snatched it away, the key jingled once more, and he caught it up.
He opened and relocked the door after he had passed out, breathing more freely as he stood in the cool, dark night.
“Moredock!” he whispered. “Are you there?”
There was no reply, but he did not stir; for a curious feeling of confusion attacked him once more, and he put his hand to his head to try and master his thoughts.
“Yes,” he muttered; “of course I must go and close that place up. Even if I go mad, that must not be known.”
He took a few steps instinctively towards the vault, and fell over something in the path, contriving, however, to save himself, so that he only came down upon his hands and knees.
The shock acted like a spell, and brought back his wandering mind.
“Who’s this?” he muttered. “Moredock?”
He passed his hands rapidly about the body before him, lying flat upon its back.
“Tom Candlish!” he ejaculated, as his hands came in contact, the one with a curiously-shaped breast-pin the young squire wore, the other with the bunch of charms and the locket he wore on his chain.
“Good heavens! What have I done? The man is dead!”
North started to his feet, trying hard to collect his wandering ideas, for he was at sea once more. He could not comprehend how Tom Candlish had contrived to get there, till he recalled the window, and at the same time recollected that he had struck at him again and again with all his might.
“Have I killed him?” he muttered; and, suffering still from the blow upon his head, his mental faculties seemed to be quite off their balance. The calm medical man, with his accurate judgment, was no longer there; but one full of wild excitement—one moment bubbling over with delirious joy at having triumphed over his enemy, of whom he had been madly jealous; the next, ready to shrink and tremble at the deed he had done.
He did not—he could not—pause to calculate how it had happened, beyond feeling that he must have beaten his enemy horribly, till he had in his last efforts struck him down, and then crawled out from the window to fall and die. He could not arrange all this in an orderly manner, for he was now seized with a frantic horror of discovery; and the question filled his mind, what was he—a murderer—to do?
Only one idea occurred to him, and that was the natural one that occurs to the most ignorant under the circumstances: he had slain this man, and the penalty was death for death. He did not know that he wanted to live, the shock had been too horrible that night; but he must act—he must do something; and, yielding entirely to his impulses, he bent down, and, with a wonderful effort of nervous force, raised the fallen man, and stood thinking for a few moments.
Impulse moved him then; and, without further hesitation, he bore the body down the steps to the door of the mausoleum.
The door yielded to his pressure, and he stepped in with his load, the darkness proving no hindrance to him, for he knew the place so well that he could come and go without touching the sides for guidance.
He stood right in the middle of the place for a few moments, thinking; one brother hanging over his left shoulder, the other lying motionless upon that cold stone slab, as he had lain all through the series of experiments which had been tried.
“It is fate,” he muttered, as he softly lowered his burden down upon the sawdust-covered floor, the brothers side by side, save that the younger was lower—nearer to his mother earth.
Then, in a quick, business-like way, North stepped to the door, passed through, and locked it, and then served the iron gate in the railings the same.
“I must fetch my instruments away some day,” he muttered—“if I stay. No one will seek him there. He will be supposed to have fled from me. But Moredock?
“Moredock can be trusted; I can silence him,” he said grimly. “He knew who was there.”
North stood thinking for a few minutes in the churchyard, half startled, but feeling a certain relief as well as pleasure in the fact that his rival was removed from his path.
Then that word “rival” seemed to strike him a mental blow, for it brought up to his confused intellect why it was that he and Tom Candlish had been rivals; and at this thought he once again saw Leo, the woman he had loved, gazing wildly in his face; and, with a low moan, he staggered, more than walked, from the churchyard, making instinctively for home; but as he reached the sexton’s cottage, the faint light therein attracted him, and, feeling dizzy, he put his hand to his head, to find that it was bleeding freely.
As he hesitated whether to go in or hurry on, the door, which had been ajar, opened more widely, and a great, claw-like hand was thrust out, and he was guided to the big Windsor chair.
“Hurt, doctor? All over blood? Don’t say you didn’t dress him down.”
North made no answer, for the low-ceiled room seemed sailing round as he turned his ghastly face and gazed in the speaker’s eyes.