Now, plainly and solemnly: Had I been face to face with an awful fragment of the truth, or had I been but the chance hearer of certain delirious ravings on the part of a drink-sodden wretch—ravings as baseless as the unsubstantial horror at which he had flung his cap?
That the latter seemed the more probable was due to an obvious inconsistency on the part of the half-insane creature. If the boy had been murdered, how could he have been buried alive? Moreover, it was evident that the sexton was near a monomaniac on the subject of living interments. Moreover, secondly, it was altogether improbable and not to be accounted for that the keen-witted doctor should intrust a secret so perilous to such a confederate. And what object had he to gain by the destruction of Modred, beyond the satisfying of a little private malice perhaps? An object quite incompatible with the fearful danger of the deed.
On the other hand, I could not but recall darkly that the sexton, on the morning when, apparently sane and sensible, he had conducted me to my brother’s grave, had thrown out certain vague hints and implications, which, hardly noticed by me at the time, assumed a lurider aspect in the light of his more definite charge; that, by Zyp’s statement to me after my illness, it would seem that Dr. Crackenthorpe had shown some eagerness and made voluntary offer of his services, in the matter of hushing up the whole question of Modred’s death; that it was not impossible that he also had discovered the boy’s knowledge of the secret of the hiding-place and had jumped at a ready opportunity for silencing forever an unwelcome confederate.
Stung to sudden anxious fervor by this last thought, I broke into a hurried walk, striving by vigorous motion to coax into consistent order of progression the dread hypothesis that so tore and worried my mind. Suddenly I found that, striding on preoccupied, I was entering that part of the meadowland wherein lay the pool of uncanny memories. It shone there before me, like a silver rent in the grass, the shadow of a solitary willow smudged upon its surface, and against the trunk of the tree that stood on the further side of the water a long, dusky figure was leaning motionless. It was that of the man who was most in my thoughts; and, looking at him, even at that distance, something repellant in his aspect seemed to connect him fittingly with the stormy twilight around him that was imaged in my soul.
Straight I walked down to the water’s edge and hailed him, and, though he made no response, I saw consciousness of my presence stir in him.
“I want a word with you!” I called. “Shall I shout it across the river?”
He slowly detached himself from his position and sauntered down to the margin over against me.
“Proclaim all from the housetops, where I am concerned,” he answered in a loud voice. “Who is it wants me, and what has he to say?”
“You know me, I suppose?”
“I have not that pleasure, I believe.”