“You—O, Gaston! fetch me a priest—I am going!”
“She loves you still—I say, she loves you still. Is not that the best priest—and doctor, too? I will go and fetch her.”
The sick man clutched at him frantically.
“And confirm my sentence? You shall not. Though it parts us for ever, I must speak. I could live, I think, if once this load were thrown. Gaston!—”
“I am listening.”
“It was I murdered di Rocco!”
CHAPTER IX
The burden cast, the released soul ran out and on, babbling, half-delirious, growing in noise and volume, until, flowing to waste, it sunk into the silence of exhaustion.
“I knew—as you all know now—what he intended, and where he was going. I had been informed secretly, and I set out to waylay him. Coming to the point from which he was to cross the glacier, I hid among the stones; and presently I saw him approach. There were great clouds, but a little starlight between—enough to make him sure. On the slope of the moraine a drunken scoundrel, who carried a lantern, veiled till then, rose to greet him. He was the other’s guide and pander—and for whose undoing? O, my God! O, my God, Gaston! Think what it meant—to me! to heaven! and heaven was the coward at the last. It was all for me to do alone—prevent this horror, if I could not persuade it. God sleeps, I think, when the riddles of mortal wickedness get too much for Him: and then He wakes, and chastises weak Nature for its false solutions. It is so easy to say This must not be, and ignore the circumstances which will make this, and no other, inevitable.
“I saw them meet, I say; and even then I could scarcely believe that upon me, and me alone was thrust God’s responsibility to the maze He had permitted. Yet I had no thought at the first, I swear, but to prevail through gentleness. As I followed them down upon the ice, a prayer was in my heart that, seeing itself discovered and exposed, this sin would come to own itself—would at least deprecate my worst suspicions of it, and, if for policy alone, go the practical way to allay them. I did not know the man—no spark of decency or honour left to leaven his vileness—a liar without shame. How I came upon him is all a dream in my mind. I had pursued the light, now here, now gone, but always rekindling somewhere in front; until in a moment it stopped, and I had overtaken it. He was alone; had just, it seemed, re-lighted the lantern, and was taking breath from the exertion, while it rested near him on the snow. The other had disappeared, and we two stood face to face and alone in the heart of that desolation. I don’t know what I said to him, or he to me—things, on his part, monstrous beyond speaking. His tongue lashed me like a flame—drove me to madness. God should have torn it out; but God was sleeping. He would scourge me, he said, before he crucified. For he meant to kill me for my daring, and cast my body into a crevasse he pointed out hard by, and whistle up my ghost to follow and witness to his filthy triumph. He was a great man, a great power, a giant of strength and wickedness. But, as he came at me, he slipped, as even a giant may, and I put my knife into his heart.”