My companion nodded and I went breathlessly on. Any question of his staggered me. I was so ignorant of the facts at his command, of the facts at any one’s command outside my own experience and observation, that the simplest admission I made might lead directly to some clew of whose very existence I was unaware. I was not even able to conjecture by what chance or at whose suggestion the police had raided the place and discovered the tragedy which had given point to that raid. No one had told me, and I had met with no encouragement to ask. I felt myself sliding amid pitfalls. My own act might precipitate the very doom I sought to avert. Yet I must preserve my self-possession and answer all questions as truthfully as possible lest I stumble into a web from which no skill of my own or of another could extricate me.
“Fastening my horse to one of the pine trees in the thickest clump I saw—he is there now, I suppose—I crept up to the house, and tried the door. It was on the latch and I stole in. There was no light on the lower floor, and after listening for any signs of life, I began to feel my way about the house, searching for the intruder. As I did not wish to attract attention to myself, I took off my shoes. I went through the lower rooms, and then I came upstairs. It was some time before I reached the—the room where a fire had been lit; but when I did I knew—not,” I hastily corrected, as I caught his quick concentrated glance, “what had happened or whom I should find there, but that this was the spot where the intruder had been, possibly was now, and I determined to grapple with him. What—what have I said?” I asked in anguish, as I caught a look on the coroner’s face of irrepressible repulsion and disgust, slight and soon gone but unmistakable so long as it lasted.
“Nothing,” he replied, “go on.”
But his tone, considerate as it had been from the first, did not deceive me. I knew that I had been detected in some slip or prevarication. As I had omitted all mention of the most serious part of my adventure—had said nothing of my vision of Carmel or the terrible conclusions which her presence there had awakened—my conscience was in a state of perturbation which added greatly to my confusion. For a moment I did not know where I stood, and I am afraid I betrayed a sense of my position. He had to recall me to myself by an unimportant question or two before I could go on. When I did proceed, it was with less connection of ideas and a haste in speaking which was not due altogether to the harrowing nature of the tale itself.
“I had matches in my pocket and I struck one,” I began. “Afterwards I lit the candle. The emptiness of the room did not alarm me. I experienced the sense of tragedy. Seeing the pillows heaped high and too regularly for chance along a lounge ordinarily holding only two, I tore them off. I saw a foot, a hand, a tress of bright hair. Even then I did not think of her. Why should I? Not till I uncovered the face did I know the terrors of my discovery, and then, the confusion of it all unmanned me and I fell on my knees—”
“Go on! Go on!”
The impetuosity, the suspense in the words astounded me. I stared at the coroner and lost the thread of my story—What had I to say more? How account for what must be ever unaccountable to him, to the world, to my own self, if in obedience to the demands of the situation I subdued my own memory and blotted out all I had seen but that which it was safe to confess to?
“There is no more to say,” I murmured. “The horror of that moment made a chaos in my mind. I looked at the dead body of her who lay there as I have looked at everything since; as I looked at the police when they came—as I look at you now. But I know nothing. It is all a phantasmagoria to me—with no more meaning than a nightmare. She is dead—I know that—but beyond that, all is doubt—confusion—what the world and all its passing show is to a blind man. I can neither understand nor explain.”
VI
COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS
There is no agony and no solace left;
Earth can console, Heaven can torment, no more