But that Mervyn had learned to be astonished at nothing, he might well have felt surprised. Here was an exact description of Heath Hover, and yet the only man who had seen it, and who bore the terrible and mysterious Sign, had died within its walls, and the method of his death he alone in all England knew. And now here in this far Eastern wilderness was another—were others—who knew.
“The Sign was not delivered to me,” he answered.
“Not delivered?” repeated the other slowly, and fixing upon his face a glance that seemed to burn, so glowing was it with fell, vengeful intent. “Not delivered? It was delivered not once only, but twice.”
Now, indeed, the listener’s self possession all but betrayed the shock this announcement could not but cause him. How well he recalled that lovely summer morning when he had looked out to behold the two girls coming down the sluice path and Melian carrying the deadly shining thing in her white, unsuspecting fingers—and his own frost of horror at the sight. So all that time he had been shadowed, his every movement keenly watched from the recesses of those hanging woods—not as he had thought by honest English Nashby and his random, all-at-sea suspicions, but by this deadly Brotherhood, whose ranks, in an ill-starred moment, and moved chiefly by curiosity, he had joined. Yet how on earth could their emissary or emissaries have hung about the Plane woods all that time undetected by keepers, or unseen and uncommented on by the surrounding rustic population? Of a truth the problem was a record one for stiffness of solution. But he answered:
“It was not delivered once, nor yet twice. It was not delivered at all.”
The fierce, copper-hued, shaggy faces, the gleaming eyes reflected in the firelight, were bent still more threateningly upon the speaker. The latter, in sheer hopeless desperation, was probing behind his very brain to try and make out a case for himself, and at the same time realising its utter hopelessness; His remorseless indicter went on.
“The first who delivered thee the sign thou didst kill.”
“That did I not. On the very contrary, I saved him—saved him from the icy death. Listen brothers.” And then Mervyn went on to give the narrative of the events of that wild, sleet-tossed winter night, when we first saw him. He told it graphically and well, speaking in the Pushtu with, as had happened throughout all the dialogue, an odd word here and there of a coined language peculiar to the Brotherhood, thrown in.
“Now? Did I not save him from certain death?” he concluded, looking with an anxiety which he hoped did not appear, into the fierce faces that ringed him round. But his heart sank within him, as he realised that any hopes he might have entertained on that score were doomed; for no sign of softening could he trace. On the contrary, the set grimness on every countenance seemed to deepen.
“Not knowing him—then,” supplied the stranger, who seemed to have constituted himself—or been constituted—judge in chief, or president of the proceedings. “Afterwards—that was made good.” And his eyes again seemed fixed with a deeper, more compelling glow, upon those of the Englishman.