“It may make me talk too much,” he said; “I might say something I couldn’t take back.”
Hurriedly thrusting the temptation from him, he well bathed his burning temples, and felt refreshed by the cold water.
“Now,” he said, setting his teeth and trying to be firm; “there’s only one man who knows the rights of this case, and I am that man. If I go straight no one can find it out, and there’s a rich wife for me at the end of a few months, and freedom from this cursed load of debt. Well, I’ll go through it in spite of everything. I will face it out.”
But even as he tried to screw himself up his own words struck him with terrible force—
“A rich wife!”
How would he dare to continue his advances towards the child of the man he had murdered?
“I can’t do it. I dare not do it,” he said in a despairing way. “She will be looking me through and through, and some day she might find out. No; Gellow must do his worst, I can’t go on.”
But as he thought all this his eyes were directed towards the Fort, with its blank-looking casements, and though he shuddered as he thought of the dead man lying there behind one of those blank windows—his work—the man whose hand he had grasped only the night before in friendship, and whom he had cut off by that one act—though he thought of all this with shudders, and vainly tried to screen himself from the darts of conscience by holding up as shield the word accident—the place had a terrible fascination, and he felt that he must go on now, for there was the sweet young girl heiress to so great a property, there was the ideal seaside home for a man who had yachting proclivities. The place was pretentious, and the mockery of an old Norman castle jarred upon his tastes; but there was the place waiting for him, ready to be his if he only had patience and manly force enough to keep his own counsel.
“And I will,” he said, as he clenched his fists. “It isn’t cowardice; it’s overstrung sensibility. I have the strength, and I will face it all out, come what may.”
He felt cooler now, and began to hesitate as to what he should do. The coroners inquest was to him the enemy, and he would have to view the body.