Like a blow came the memory of Rampick’s cognisance of it, of my vision of him hurrying agitated for the Gap as I was drawn in. He had seen us enter; possibly, emerge. He must at least suspect us of having made some sort of discovery, and his knowledge of our knowledge was the terror.
I still stared up. If it was really murder, then, and this man an accessory?
He might have been, and yet none know the truth of his guilt but himself. Grant it a fact that the local and foreign gangs had worked apart. Had he not been, according to the same authority, their connecting link? What more likely then that he alone of all alive should be informed of the real nature of the act which at a stroke had shattered his connection? It would account for his eternal haunting of the neighbourhood, for his terror lest some one, exploring too far, should unearth his secret—if guilty secret it were. And what proof of that? Why, none that was direct—no proof of anything; not of murder, certainly. And yet I was as sure as if my soul had witnessed it that murder, in deed or intention, had been committed. It was the position, the settlement of the bodies, flung down with all that atmosphere of deadly suggestion. I felt that I could restore the scene, as sculptors restore a statue from a few significant fragments. That the man under the stone had been attacked, and had fired in a desperate self-defence, accidentally sending all to perdition, I had no doubt. He might have been a spy, a deposed chief—his clothing seemed to pronounce him above the order of the rest—he might have been one of, or other than themselves; he had precipitated a greater tragedy in trying to avert a lesser, of that I was sure. And Rampick?
It all resolved upon him, this doubt, this haunting stress of conscience—all concentrated itself upon the wretched, degraded creature in the tissue of whose story our destiny had entangled us. I stirred, and gave a little groan.
“Ha!” exclaimed a voice at my elbow.
With a shock I jerked round; and there was the stranger of the sands come softly up, and intently scrutinising me.
I felt unreasoningly ashamed, as if caught in some self-soliloquy. My face went like fire. “What do you——” I was beginning loud enough; and on the instant bit my teeth on the cry, and stood gaping. I could feel my jaw slackening idiotically. Minute by minute, it seemed to me, we stood silent there, regarding one another.
“Mr. Pilbrow!” I whispered at last.
It all came back to me across that shining gulf of years. I had forded the valley in the mean time, descending into deep glens and unremembering woods, distancing for ever, as I had supposed, the landmarks of childhood. And, lo! climbing the further side, and looking back, here was the past quite close; for the valley had been but a little fairy cleft after all, and all the time the memory of old things had been waiting there for me to resume them. Six years, with their fulness of growth and interest, stood between me and this man; yet I saw and knew him as if the interval were but a span. The story of him, the tragedy of my own connection with it, became in this moment the instant thing with me, bridging the abysmal lapse between.
He was not much changed, it is true. The face was the same haunting unearthly mask which had hung up before me in the court. A gurgoyle, I had called it; and still the stony inhumanity of it was the first thing to impress me. It was older only, and more scarred by wind and weather. The drench of unhealing waters had streaked its forehead and darkened the pits of its eyes; but with no other result than to emphasize the fire in them, and intensify the loneliness of the lost soul they windowed. I gave a little foolish fluttering laugh.