Well, After All--

by Frank Frankfort Moore

He stopped suddenly opposite to her.

“It was the cruellest thing ever done on earth!” he cried. “Call it Fate or Destiny or the will of Heaven—whatever you please—I say it was the cruellest thing that ever happened! Why could not he have been spared for a couple of months—until I had seen him—until he had known that I was safe—that I had done more in the way of discovery than I set out to do? But to think that he was killed just the day before—perhaps only an hour before, the news of my safety arrived in England!—it maddens me—it maddens me! I feel that it would be better for me to have remained lost for ever than to return to this. I feel that all that fierce struggle for years—the struggle with those savages, with the climate, the malaria, the agues, the diseases which exist in that awful place but nowhere else in the world—I feel that all that struggle was in vain—that it would be better if I had given in at once—if I had sent a bullet through my head and ended it all I Where is your brother? He was with him on that fatal evening. Why did he go away before he had seen me and told me all that there was to tell about my poor Dick?”

Still she was silent. What answer could she make to such wild questions?

“Cyril should not have gone off to the other end of the world, as I hear he has done,” he continued. “He might have known that I would want to ask him much; and yet, when I come here, I find that he has been gone for more than a month, and there is positively no one in this neighbourhood who can tell me anything more of the horrible affair than has appeared in the newspapers. Fawcett, the solicitor, had kept for me the newspaper account of the inquest and the trial. I saw Fawcett last night, and then the surgeon—Crosby. We went to him after dinner. He it was who showed up the suicide theory. How could it ever be supposed that Dick would commit suicide? And yet, if it hadn't been for Crosby—Oh, it was clearly proved that he could not have shot himself; and yet if it wasn't for the possibility of his having shot himself, would they have pardoned the wretch who did the murder? I read the whole account of the trial, and Fawcett told me a good deal more. If ever a brutal murder was done by a man it was that—and yet they allowed the fellow to escape—to escape-to keep his life! That is what they call justice here! Justice! I tell you that those savages—the most degraded in existence—among whom I lived, have a better idea of justice than that.”

Still she was silent. What could she say to him while he was in this mood? He had resumed his pacing of the floor. She no longer watched him. She looked out of the window. She had a strange impression that she had been present at such a scene before, and that she had taken the same impersonal interest in it all. Yes, it had been at a theatre: she had watched one of the actors pacing the stage and raving about British justice—the playwright had made the character a victim of the unjustness of the law. But the man had kept it up too long: he had exhausted the interest of the audience. They had looked about the theatre and nodded to their friends; but now she only looked out of the window. The audience had yawned: she was not so impolite. She would not interrupt the man before her by speaking a word.

“What excuse did they give for letting the assassin escape?” Claude Westwood was standing once more at the window—the window through which she had watched him coming up the drive to bid her good-bye upon that October evening long ago. “Excuse? The man was found guilty of murder—the most contemptible of murders. He had not the courage to face his victim; he fired at him from behind—and yet they let him escape. But if they had only done that it would not have mattered so much. If they had given him his freedom I would have had a chance of amending the lapse of justice. But they give him his life and protection as well. Why did they not set him free and give me a chance of killing him as he killed my poor brother?”

He stamped upon the floor, and struck his left palm with his right fist as he spoke.

She gave a little cry as she shuddered. He had at last succeeded in startling her. She had put up her hands before her face.

He looked at her quickly and came in front of her.

“Forgive me, Agnes,” he said in an agitated voice. “Forgive me; I have frightened you—horrified you. I have been so long among savages; but I feel that I could kill that wretch, and be doing no more than the will of Heaven. I feel that I could kill all that bear his accursed name, and yet be conscious of doing no evil. My brother—ah, if you knew how I have been supported through these long dismal years by thinking of him—by the thought of the pleasure it would give him to see me again! It was chiefly during that eight months which I spent alone in the forests that I thought about him. What a life I led! I had previously lived the life of a savage, but in the forest I had to live as a wild beast. The terrible vigilance I needed to exercise—it was a war to the knife against all the wild things with fangs and tusks and claws. It was the Bottomless Pit; but the hope of returning to him made me continue the fight when I had made up my mind to fling away my knife and to await the end, whether it came by a snake, a wild elephant, or a lion. I thought of him daily and nightly; and now when I come home I find And I cannot kill the man who made my hour of triumph my hour of bitterness! There I go, raving again. Forgive me—forgive me, and tell me about him. You saw him on that day, Agnes.”