Only one idea occurred to him, and that was the natural one that occurs to the most ignorant under the circumstances: he had slain this man, and the penalty was death for death. He did not know that he wanted to live, the shock had been too horrible that night; but he must act—he must do something; and, yielding entirely to his impulses, he bent down, and, with a wonderful effort of nervous force, raised the fallen man, and stood thinking for a few moments.
Impulse moved him then; and, without further hesitation, he bore the body down the steps to the door of the mausoleum.
The door yielded to his pressure, and he stepped in with his load, the darkness proving no hindrance to him, for he knew the place so well that he could come and go without touching the sides for guidance.
He stood right in the middle of the place for a few moments, thinking; one brother hanging over his left shoulder, the other lying motionless upon that cold stone slab, as he had lain all through the series of experiments which had been tried.
“It is fate,” he muttered, as he softly lowered his burden down upon the sawdust-covered floor, the brothers side by side, save that the younger was lower—nearer to his mother earth.
Then, in a quick, business-like way, North stepped to the door, passed through, and locked it, and then served the iron gate in the railings the same.
“I must fetch my instruments away some day,” he muttered—“if I stay. No one will seek him there. He will be supposed to have fled from me. But Moredock?
“Moredock can be trusted; I can silence him,” he said grimly. “He knew who was there.”
North stood thinking for a few minutes in the churchyard, half startled, but feeling a certain relief as well as pleasure in the fact that his rival was removed from his path.
Then that word “rival” seemed to strike him a mental blow, for it brought up to his confused intellect why it was that he and Tom Candlish had been rivals; and at this thought he once again saw Leo, the woman he had loved, gazing wildly in his face; and, with a low moan, he staggered, more than walked, from the churchyard, making instinctively for home; but as he reached the sexton’s cottage, the faint light therein attracted him, and, feeling dizzy, he put his hand to his head, to find that it was bleeding freely.