And indeed, the vision of poor dumb little Boots in their relentless hold froze my blood. As my hands fell away from him in sudden, shrinking horror, he looked at me compassionately. "The Presence does not understand aright. Let him remember the strange doctor's face when he came in the dawn, thinking to find hope had fled. One of the two had to die. If the Presence had thought as I did, as I knew, what would he have done?"
I was silent.
His face, which had remained calm enough so far, assumed a look of agonised entreaty, as with an effort painful to see he dragged himself to my feet and clung to them. "What would you have done, Huzoor, in my place? What would you have done?"
Then a fearful fit of coughing seized him, and his lips were tinged with blood. Water lay close at hand, yet I knew that this murderer would sooner have died than accept it from my defiling hand; so I called the old man who all this time had sat like a carven image in the next archway. He came, and wiped the dews of death from his son's face without a word; and as he did so, Shivdeo, looking at the faint stains on the cloth, smiled an unearthly smile, and whispered, "I did not suck my lord's blood, for all that. It comes from my own heart."
I am not ashamed to say that my brain was in such a whirl that I turned to escape from a situation where I felt utterly lost. As I did so, I heard Shivdeo's voice for the last time. The old man was holding a little brass cup of water to the parched lips; but it was arrested by the dying hand, and the dying eyes looked wistfully up into his father's.
"Did I do well, O my father?" he asked.
"You did well, my son; drink in peace."
When I reached home, the English mail was in. It brought a letter from Terence. He was in Dublin and engaged to be married; considering that he was an Irishman, no more need be said. He wrote the kindest letter, saying that the great happiness which had come into his life made him all the more grateful to me, seeing that but for my care he would have gone down to the grave without knowing how the love of a good woman can make existence seem a sacred trust. He ended by these words: "And sure, old man, if it be true that all happiness is bought, some one must have paid dear for mine!"
I could not sleep that night--the war of conflicting thoughts waged too fiercely; but it was nearly dawn before I found it impossible to withstand the memory of Shivdeo's cry: "If the Presence had thought as I did, what would he have done?"
He was dead before I reached the house, but surely if he knows anything, he must know that I, for one, cast no stone.