“What, then, could I do? Get the poor wretch carried down to a cab, have him borne to a hospital, and escape in the bustle of the ambulance being brought to him?
“That meant discovery, I felt sure. And I thought of the streets by night. In all probability, no one had seen him come up to the chambers; but I was damped directly there; for those who carried the man down would be able to tell whence he came, and hundreds would be glad to play the amateur detective and hunt me down.
“On all hands I was checked,” continued Brettison, “and I could not help thinking, as I found myself hedged in by obstacles, how much safer we all are in London than we think. The difficulty seemed to increase, and at last I began to recall the story in the ‘Arabian Nights’ about the man choking himself to death with a bone, and the trouble his host had to dispose of the body. You remember about how they propped it up against another man’s door, so that he knocked it down and imagined that he had killed the intruder. I fancied myself carrying the man into the streets myself, but I did not.”
Brettison said all this in so careless and jaunty a manner, that Stratton raised his head and gazed at him in horror and disgust. For how could he treat so terrible an event so lightly, and discourse of all his thoughts as they came to him with the body lying on the rug just at his feet.
Stratton’s look had its effect, for Brettison became a little uneasy.
“Ah, I see you are shocked at my way of treating the matter. Well, I suppose I am wrong. It is all fresh and terrible to you; it has no repulsion for me now. I am only able to look back upon it all as a curious experience of life—a singular turn of the wheel—by which I, a retiring, simple-minded botanist, whose greatest excitement was the discovery of a fresh herb or plant new to England, suddenly found himself playing the part of accomplice to one who had taken another’s life.”
“Accomplice?” faltered Stratton.
“Of course. The law would treat me as being so. Was I not trying to dispose of the body of the victim so as to screen you from discovery? Oh, yes; an accomplice. Yes, I argued to myself that the man died by his own hand, and that I was working for your happiness.”
“For Heaven’s sake, Brettison, don’t talk like this!” cried Stratton, almost fiercely. “It is too horrible!”
“You think so,” said the old man, with a faint smile of amusement. “Ah, well! we view these things from different points.”