“Aren’t you coming to bathe?” he said, when I drew near. “It’ll cool your temper.”
I could have struck him, but I answered nothing and only began to undress.
“Where have you been all day? We were wondering, Zyp and I, as we lay in the meadow out there.”
Still I answered nothing, but I knew that my hands trembled as I pulled off my coat and waistcoat.
He stood watching me a little while in silence, then said: “You seem to have lost your tongue, old Renny. Has it followed your heart because Zyp talks for two?”
I sprung up, but he eluded me and, with a hateful laugh, leaped on the moment into the deep center of the pool. A horrible tightness came round my throat. Half-undressed as I was I plunged after him all mad with passion. He rose near me, and seeing the fury of my face, dived again, and I followed. It took but an instant, and my life was wrecked. We met among the weeds at the bottom, and he jumped from me. As he rose I clutched him by one foot, and swiftly passed a great sinew of weed three or four times around his ankle. It held like a grapnel and would hold; for, though he was a fair swimmer, he was always frighted and nervous in the face of little difficulties. Then swerving away, I rose again, with laboring lungs, to the surface.
Barely had my drenched eyes found the daylight again, when the hideous enormity of my crime broke into my brain like the toll of a death bell. The water near me was heaving slightly and some welling bubbles swayed to the surface. They were the drowning gasps of my brother—my own brother, whom I was murdering.
I gave a thin, wretched scream and sunk again into the deep hole beneath me. He was jerking convulsively, and his hands clutched vainly at his feet and slipped away in a dying manner. I tore at the weed to unwind it—only to twist it into new fetters. I pulled frantically at its roots. I felt that I should go mad if it did not yield. In a moment it came away in my hands and I shot upward, struggling. But the other poor body followed me sluggishly, and I seized it by the hair, with all my heart gone crazy, and towed it ashore.
His face, I thought, looked fallen away already and was no longer loutish or malicious. It seemed just a white, pathetic thing freed from suffering—and I would have given my life—ay, and my love—ten times over to see the same expression come back to it it had worn as it turned to me before he dived.
I fell on my knees beside him and broke into a passion of tears. I kissed, with no shame but a murderer’s, the wet forehead, and beat and pressed, in a futile agony too terrible for words, the limp unresisting hand against my breast. It seemed that he must wake if I implored him so frantically. But he lay quiet, with closed eyes, and the water ran from his white skin in trickling jerks and pauses.