"Heavenly sensation—to be a murderer. What beastly names things have and how we are obsessed by them! The word rings in my brain night and day—I haven't slept three hours since it happened, and I never had the remotest hope that he would live. It's the second time in my life I've been up against a cold ugly fact that stands by itself in a region where rhetoric doesn't enter. I believe I could tolerate the situation if I'd done it in cold blood, if I'd thought it out, determined to gratify my hatred of the man; if, in short, the deed had been the offspring of my intelligence, for which I have always had a considerable respect. But to have been under the control of a Thing, like any navvy, to be a criminal without the consent of my will—
"I don't know that that fact alone would make life insupportable. But there are other and sufficient reasons. I shall never get the hideous sight of Brathland as he doubled up, and his horrid gurgling shriek, out of my mind this side of the grave. And I am practically cleaned out. You know how much I have left of my mother's property! It barely covers what I paid out to-day. There isn't a penny for the girls. They will be dependent on Strathland—as I should be if I lived; a position for which I have as little relish as for that of a murderer on the loose. And should I ever be really safe? If this stinking quartet takes it into its head to levy annual blackmail, where is the money coming from? I won't have the others let in while I'm alive. If it did come to that—and of course it would—I'd get out anyhow, so I may as well go now and save myself further horrors. Besides, with all our precautions, we may have overlooked some significant detail, there may have been an eavesdropper, the undertakers may have had their suspicions—for all I know I may be arrested to-morrow—well, Jack, what would you do in my place?"
Gwynne shook himself and stood up. "I don't know. I have been feeling as if I had killed Bratty myself. But I cannot imagine myself committing suicide—talk about ugly words! In the first place I don't think that one crime is any reason for committing another, and in the second—"
"It is cowardly! You don't suppose that old standby slipped my mind, do you? Well, I am a coward. There you have my dispassionate opinion of myself. I don't see myself in the prisoner's dock, in the graceful act of dangling from the end of a rope; or, if the judge was inclined to have pity on the family, of dying in a prison hospital. Even if I trumped up the necessary fortitude I should be a blacker villain than I am to bring disgrace upon my five poor girls and the woman that has promised to marry me, to say nothing of Vicky and yourself. Nor, on the other hand, do I see myself skulking in some hole abroad with the hue and cry after me. I have just as little appetite for the rôle of the haunted man in comparative security. Well, what would you do yourself?"
Gwynne shuddered. His own eyes were hunted. "How, in God's name, can any man tell what he would do until he is in the same hole? I should like to think that I would speak out and take the consequences. There is little danger of your swinging, and as for imprisonment—one way or another you've got to answer for your crime, and it seems to me that the honest thing is to accept the penalty of the law you live under."
"Well, it doesn't to me," said Zeal, coolly, and lighting another cigarette. "I asked the question merely out of curiosity, as the workings of your mind always interest me. But I have quite made up my own mind. The only reason I hesitated a moment—to be exact, it was half a day—was on your account. Of course I know what my death will mean to you."
"It was for that reason I was almost coward enough not to remonstrate." Gwynne scratched a match several times before he succeeded in getting a light. "Nevertheless, I meant it."
"Don't doubt it. And I am sorry—it is about the only regret I shall take with me, that and some remorse on account of the girls. I suppose Strathland will throw them a bone each—"
"I will look out for them. But you are not bent on this horror!" he burst out. Wild plans of drugging his cousin, of locking him up, chased through his mind, and at the same time he was sick with the certainty of his own impotence. He knew his cousin, and he had the sensation that an illuminated scroll of fate dangled before his eyes.
Zeal nodded. His excitement, his fears, had left him. He felt something of the swagger in calm peculiar to the condemned in their final hour, that last great rally of the nerves to feed the fires of courage. He finished his cigarette and flung himself on the sofa.