“It was very quiet and I went down,” Michael continued his account. “Something drew me on. I groped my way to the cellar stairs step by step. There I stood a long time. Dawn was rising; I could see it from the narrow window above the door. I stood at the head of the cellar stairs. Steps of stone lead downwards. I saw first one, then two, then three, then four. The lighter it grew, the more steps I saw, but the light could not get beyond the sixth step.”
It was harder and harder for him to speak. Sweat stood on his forehead. He leaned back and seemed about to fall over. Christian supported him. He got up and bent over the boy. In his attitude and gesture there was something wonderfully winning. Everything depended now on discovering the last, most fearful truth. His whole being concentrated itself in his will, and the boy yielded to this silent power. What he confessed now sounded at first confused and dim as the story of ghostly visions or the dreams of fever. One could hardly tell from the words what was reality and what the compulsive imaginings of fear. One grisly fact stood out—the finding of the blood-soaked handkerchief. Thrice Christian asked whether he had found it on the stairs or in the cellar. Each time the boy’s answer was different. He quivered like a rope in the wind when Christian begged him to be exact and to think carefully. He said he didn’t remember. Yes, he did, too; it had, been down below. He described a partition, wooden railings, and a small, barred cellar window, through which the yellowish pale light of morning had now come in. But he hadn’t really been master of his senses, and couldn’t remember whether he had really entered the room. And at that he gave a loud sob.
Christian stood beside him, laying both hands on the boy’s shoulders. The boy quivered as though an electric current were passing through him. “I beseech you,” said Christian, “Michael, I beseech you!” and he felt his own strength ebbing. Then Michael whispered that he had recognized Ruth’s initials on the handkerchief at once. But from that moment his brain seemed to have been hacked to pieces, and he begged Christian to plague him no more. He wouldn’t go on; he’d rather drop down dead. But Christian grasped the boy’s wrists. And Michael whispered: the house had betrayed the fact to him that something nameless had happened to Ruth, and the air had roared it to him. The walls seemed to have piled themselves on him and he had had a vision of everything, everything, and had whined and moaned and lacerated his neck with his own nails. “Here and here and here,” he sobbed and pointed to his neck, which was indeed covered with the scars of recent scratches. Then he had run to the door of the house and rattled the knob, and then back again and had counted the cellar steps, just out of sheer despair. Then he had run up the stairs, and suddenly, at a door, he had seen a man; in the twilight he had seen a fat man with a white apron and a white cap, such as are worn by bakers, and a kerchief around his neck with stiff, white, protruding ends. The man had stood on the threshold, white and fat and sleepy. He might have been a shadow or an apparition. But he had said in a low, sleepy, surly voice: “Now they’ve gone and killed her, lad.” After that he had vanished, simply vanished; and he, Michael, had rushed breathlessly into Molly Gutkind’s room. She had waked up, and he had lain down on the bed and besought her with all the passion of his stricken soul to be silent and to keep him hidden, even if he were to fall ill, to tell no one but to keep him there and be silent. Why he had asked that, why it had seemed so necessary to him that the girl should say nothing—even now he didn’t understand that. But he felt just the same this minute, and he would be utterly devoted to Christian all his life if he, too, would never betray what he had just confessed to him.
“Will you? Will you?” he asked, solemnly, and with a dark glow in his tormented eyes.
“I shall keep silent,” Christian replied.
“Then perhaps I can go on living,” the boy said.
Christian looked at him, and their eyes met in a strange harmony and understanding.
“And how long did you stay with the girl after that?” Christian asked.
“I don’t know. But one morning she said she couldn’t keep me any longer and I’d have to go. All the previous time my consciousness hadn’t been clear. I must have talked as in delirium. The girl did all she could for me; my condition went to her heart. She sat at the bedside for hours and held my hands. After I left her I wandered about in the suburbs and in the woods, I don’t know where. At last I came here. I don’t know why I came to you, except that it seemed as though Ruth were sending me to you. You seemed to be the only human being that existed for me in all the world. But what am I to do now? What is going to happen?”