It was useless denying it to HER. “Yes, I have seen him,” I answered, in a confidential aside.
“Just now—this moment—at the back of the house—looking in at the window upon us?”
“You are right—as always.”
She drew a deep breath. “He has played his game,” she said low to me, in an awed undertone. “I felt sure it was he. I expected him to play; though what piece, I knew not; and when I saw those poor dead souls, I was certain he had done it—indirectly done it. The Matabele are his pawns. He wanted to aim a blow at ME; and THIS was the way he chose to aim it.”
“Do you think he is capable of that?” I cried. For, in spite of all, I had still a sort of lingering respect for Sebastian. “It seems so reckless—like the worst of anarchists—when he strikes at one head, to involve so many irrelevant lives in one common destruction.”
Hilda's face was like a drowned man's.
“To Sebastian,” she answered, shuddering, “the End is all; the Means are unessential. Who wills the End, wills the Means; that is the sum and substance of his philosophy of life. From first to last, he has always acted up to it. Did I not tell you once he was a snow-clad volcano?”
“Still, I am loth to believe—” I cried.
She interrupted me calmly. “I knew it,” she said. “I expected it. Beneath that cold exterior, the fires of his life burn fiercely still. I told you we must wait for Sebastian's next move; though I confess, even from HIM, I hardly dreamt of this one. But, from the moment when I opened the door on poor Tant Mettie's body, lying there in its red horror, I felt it must be he. And when you started just now, I said to myself in a flash of intuition—'Sebastian has come! He has come to see how his devil's work has prospered.' He sees it has gone wrong. So now he will try to devise some other.”
I thought of the malign expression on that cruel white face as it stared in at the window from the outer gloom, and I felt convinced she was right. She had read her man once more. For it was the desperate, contorted face of one appalled to discover that a great crime attempted and successfully carried out has failed, by mere accident, of its central intention.