“Well,” I had still protested, “isn’t that much the same?”
“Much the same, you gaby!” he had cried. “O yes, of course! Much the same as if two engine wheels connected by a rod turned up their noses about knowing one another.”
The technical inspiration of his simile had thereupon surprised him into a grin, and me, even, into a dismally funny attempt at a retort:—
“Well, they would move in different circles, you know. But we’ll sleep on it—that’s the best; and thrash it out between us to-morrow.”
That, however, as I have explained, we were debarred from doing; and now there was nothing for me but to possess my troubled soul in patience until Harry’s return. In Uncle Jenico, we had neither of us thought for a moment of confiding. Some instinctive sense of his lack of grasp, of his unpractical weakness prevented us. We would not confound or agitate the dear old fellow; and so here, in the result, I was solitarily and tragically cogitating our problem on the cliff edge.
We had, indeed, already come to one conclusion too obvious for dispute. The secret entrance to the smugglers’ lair had been patently near the spot whence we had emerged, and the significance of the now obliterated cliff-path was thus revealed. Those, however, were points which only concerned indirectly the main sources of our confusion, which sources were necessarily the nature of the tragedy and Rampick’s presumptive connection with it. There lay the deep core of the shadow—the stress of the moral obligations our reckless adventure had imposed upon us. We had opened the forbidden chamber, and our fingers were bloody.
Was it murder, in short? And, if so, was Rampick an accessory? And, if so, were we also become accessories?
I started at the thought, and went hurriedly down the Gap impelled by a sudden vision, It took the form of a tax-cart, and a handcuffed man in it being carried off to Ipswich Gaol. I felt the cold grip of the iron on my own wrists, and had to thrust my hands deep into my breeches’ pockets for some familiar reassurance of warmth. The stranger still paced the sands, a mechanic irritating figure. Now noticing my advent, he stopped to regard me, his hands behind his back, the wind gently undulating his coat-tails. Going northwards, I should come under the rake of his eyes. My nerves were on the jump. I flounced peevishly, and went down the coast, till, come opposite the scene of our yesterday’s escapade, I stopped involuntarily and stared up.
I had not intended to. I could master the inclination no more than I could the morbid concentration of my thoughts. They were drawn like smoke into that black gash high up in the cliff.
It was not very noticeable even now. Another storm, any hurricane of rain, might seal it once more, and close the evidence of our passage thereby. Why let any thought of our responsibility to it vex us? Our enterprise had been a purely private one, and——