“I advanced upon him. I was hell inside, though calm outwardly. And as I came, he pulled a pistol from his breast—he was left-handed, like the crooked beast he was—and held it at me. I told you he always went armed. ... Richard, I confess the creature appalled me. He would have made nothing of shooting me like a dog. I hesitated; and then fell to entreaty, expostulation, threats. He was grey and hard as steel. In the end I must desist, though still resolved to get at the paper by fair means or foul. When he was gone, in a hunger of agitation I threw myself upon the book. It told me nothing, of course. I flung it down again, and went to bed, poisoned with black thoughts. In the morning when I rose, late and racked with fever, I found him gone, him and the book and the paper—gone, without leaving anywhere a trace of his direction. I could not believe it for a time; then madness took me. I went up and down, mouthing like a beast—by day and night, Richard—by day and night. It was then I must inadvertently have fired the stock. You know the rest.”
He ended in a deep depression, and burying his face in his hands, set to rocking to and fro.
“Rest!” he suddenly cried. “No rest for me! All these years I have pursued him, a wicked, laughing shadow, in the likely places of the land—always on these eastern coasts or near them, exploring ruins or the histories of them—recognizing at last my own madness, yet unable to lay it. And still the shadow flies before; and still I follow, myself a shadow!”
Again I looked at Harry. He understood, and answered my mute inquiry.
“Yes, tell him,” he said. “Tell him, if he’ll believe, how he’s been mistaken by a madman for the risen ghost of his brother yonder.”
It was the conviction in both our minds. It grew inevitably out of the tale just told us. Time, place, circumstance; the combative brother who went armed; the pistol clutched in the dead left hand—these, taken together with Rampick’s discovery of our discovery, and his imagined identification of the dead, invoked by us, as he thought, to rise and denounce him, left us in no moral doubt whatever. Yet still, the coincidence was so amazing, I hesitated to commit myself. I must take breath, fencing a little longer with the truth.
“Mr. Pilbrow,” I faltered, “were you and Abel so much alike?”
He had started at Harry’s words, and was sitting rigid, awaiting my answer.
“We were twins,” he said quietly, “scarce separable, perhaps, in feature, unless by the lines which hate had chiselled to distinguish us. His were deeper scored than mine.”
“And his dress?” I said: “how did he go dressed?”