“I did not want to kill you.”
“But you saw me walking to my death—fortuitously, perhaps—and lifted no finger, until the last moment, to interfere. What would that have been, at the worst, but moral murder?”
“No matter. It did not happen.”
“Clearly through the interposition of Providence, working automatically on a coward’s fears. But, supposing it to work as automatically on his intended victim’s resentment, and that a sacrifice of some sort was demanded? I have twenty times your strength and will, and a thousand times your provocation. What is to prevent me from sending you where you proposed sending me, and leaving it to be inferred, as no doubt you had designed it should be inferred about me, that you had blundered to your doom in the fog?”
Involuntarily he had started back at my words. The lantern clattered in his hand. If he could be, like Falstaff, a lion on compulsion, it was plain also that he could be a coward on instinct.
“I saved your life!” he cried hoarsely. I walked towards him. As I approached, he put out his arms, lantern and all, as if to ward me off. “Monsieur, Monsieur; let us be reasonable; let us talk together. Before God, I came to risk the night perils of these hills in order to find, if possible, and rescue you. I knew you were coming here; and I knew, if you did not, of these quarry openings. Was I not calling you, here, there, everywhere—and did that look like premeditation? And when at last you answered and appeared, it was mere accident which interposed that temptation between us. And I resisted it, Monsieur—I resisted it.”
I laughed shortly, halting before him.
“M. Cabarus,” I said, “you are not qualified, it is obvious, for the heroic part you set yourself. But rest content: I am not going to kill you. After all, you did, as you assert, save my life in a way; though why you should ever have wanted it ended beats me.”
He sat down on a stone, quite overcome, and, putting the lantern beside him, buried his face in his hands.
“But for you she might listen to me,” he half sobbed, from that covert.