The truth, as she believed it before this most startling fact, came instantly to Honor's lips. She was enfeebled and unstrung by weeks of wayward living consequent upon great fret of mind. She had nursed this dreadful belief in an apparition until it had grown into a sort of real presence, and the conviction, fabricated through weeks of brooding, would not be dispelled at a word. Deep was the impress left upon her mind, and time must pass before a shape so clear could fade. As a result, the man now thought to be returned from the dead frightened her for a season, scarcely less than his fancied ghost had done. She was timid before the amazing whisper that he still lived. In this fear she forgot for the moment what had prompted Yeoland to his typical folly; she dreaded him in the body as she had dreaded him in the spirit; she turned to the solid being at her side, clung to Myles in her weakness, and held his great arm tightly round her waist.
"For my happiness indeed, dearest one. You have loved me better than I deserved, and forgiven so many faults. This makes me shiver and grow cold and fear to be alone; yet how different to the thing I thought!"
"And he may come home."
"He will never be real to me again—not if I see him and hear him. Never so real as there—-grey-clad with the moon on his face—a shadowy part of the great web of the night, yet distinct—all very ghost. I'm frightened still. You can forgive a little of what I made you endure, now that you know what I have suffered."
He hugged her up to his heart at these words, believed her as thoroughly as she believed herself, and thanked Heaven that blind Mark Endicott had been led to such a true prophecy.
A week passed, yet no step was taken, though the new position came to be accepted gradually by those acquainted with the secret. For Honor the knowledge was actually health-giving by virtue of the morbid cloud that it dispelled. Such tidings liberated her soul from a strange fear and offered her mind a subject of boundless interest. Many plans were proposed, yet scarcely a desirable course of action presented itself. Mark advocated no step, and Honor added her plea to his, for she openly expressed a hope that Christopher, if still he lived, would not return to Godleigh. And this she said upon no suspicion of herself, but rather from a continued dread of the man. It seemed impossible to her that she could ever think of him as among the living. Stapledon, on the contrary, desired an explanation, and his wish was gratified most speedily by an unexpected herald from Yeoland himself. An authentic representative arrived at Endicott's—a somewhat shame-faced and apologetic messenger laden with the facts.
For, upon a morning in August, Doctor Courteney Clack appeared, desired to see Mr. Endicott alone, and not only told the blind man that his theory was in the main correct, but begged that from the stores of his common sense and wisdom he would indicate the most seemly and least sensational means by which this news might be broken to those concerned. The doctor did not pretend to excuse himself or his part in the play. There was, indeed, no necessity for recrimination or censure. The future lay at the door, and Christopher Yeoland, who had, in truth, haunted his own domain by night, designed to return to it in earnest during the autumn. The temporary lease would then terminate, and circumstances now enabled the owner to free his land of every encumbrance and henceforth administer Godleigh in a manner worthy of its traditions.
The interview was an old man's triumph, for Mark Endicott, too frank to pretend otherwise, gloried in the relation of the story long afterwards, loved to dwell upon his own reasoned synthesis and explain how closely it fitted the revealed facts, despite their rare singularity. As for Courteney Clack, that gentleman's amazement, when he found his intelligence more than a fortnight old, may be guessed, but can hardly be stated. Mr. Endicott sent for Myles to substantiate him, and finally the astounded physician unfolded his own narrative, now shrunk to a tame and trivial thing—an echo for the most part of Mark's deductions.
On reaching Australia with Stapledon's messages the physician's first professional duty had been at the bedside of Christopher's ancient kinsman, with whom the young man was dwelling. For only two days after Doctor Clack's arrival, the old wool dealer was bitten by a whip-snake at his country seat on the Hawkesbury River, and there passed speedily out of life. This fact combined with Clack's news from home to determine Christopher Yeoland in the action he had taken, and the scheme, once adumbrated upon young Yeoland's mind, grew apace. The dead man, who was also named Christopher, proved to be very wealthy, and his money, willed to assist the establishment of technical schools in Sydney, had been withdrawn from that purpose after two months' intercourse with the youthful head of the race. Thus, in ignorance of his own near exit, the elder left it within Christopher's power to redeem the ancestral forests and roof tree in fulness of time. Apart from the imposition, built on the fact of his relative's sudden death, the traveller had already determined that he should lie in the family grave at home. It was the right place for one who had saved Yeoland credit at the last gasp and given the head of that family wherewithal to lift honour from the dust. Then came Stapledon's message and Clack's fearless gloss; so that, with wits quickened and a mind enlarged by his own unexpected good fortune, Christopher made final sacrifice of all love hope—a renunciation worthy of honest praise in sight of his own altered circumstances—and, with Clack's aid, practised his theatrical imposition that Honor's road might stretch before her straight and certain. Nothing less than his death would decide her, and so he let the implicit lie be told, and determined with himself at all cost to keep out of his own country until expiration of the period for which he had let Godleigh.
Clack indicated a circumstance in itself satisfactory at this stage in his story. Christopher's resurrection would not practically prove so far-reaching as Mark Endicott and Stapledon had imagined, for none existed with any right to question the facts. On the supposed death of the owner, Godleigh had reverted to a man of the same name in Australia—that was all the lawyers knew—and the legal difficulty of reclaiming his own and re-establishing his rights promised to be but trifling. Neither had the law very serious penalties in pickle for him, because it could not be showed where Christopher had wronged any man.