Gathering in an excited group at the scene of the catastrophe, the sportsmen, keepers, and beaters found Elliot reclining against, or clinging to the stem of a tree in the old hedge, looking very pale, with his chest all bloody—at least his shirt dyed crimson, and divested of his coat and vest, which he had thrown off.
Spared by what he had done, the moment Hawkey Sharpe had seen his victim fall—the moment his finger had pulled the trigger—the savage and secret exultation that had filled his heart passed away.
He felt as if on the verge of a giddy precipice, over which he dared not look; yet he was compelled to confront the scene, and to proceed—but apparently with lead-laden feet—with the others, to where his victim was now supported in the arms of Gavin Fowler and Spens, the beater.
For a minute the intended assassin scarcely seemed to breathe, and to have but one wish—that the deed were undone, for the hot blood that prompted it was cool enough now, and the instincts of revenge had grown dull. Terror seized his soul, and his gaze wandered in the air, on the while flying clouds, on the yellow stubble fields and waving woods; but he nerved himself to approach the startled and infuriated group, whose menacing eyes were on him; and he nerved himself also to act a part, or, if not, lose his senses, and with them, everything.
He felt that beyond cheating, cardsharping, jockeying at horse races, and peculation at Earlshaugh, he had taken a mighty stride in crime, and that mingling curiously with his craven fear, there was an insane recklessness—a wild incoherence about his brain and heart, with a sickening knowledge that if Captain Elliot died, he—Hawkey Sharpe—would be that which he dared not name to himself, even in thought.
Hence his apparent sorrow and compunction seemed, and perhaps were, genuine pro tem., but the outcome of selfishness.
'How in Heaven's name came this to pass—how did it happen?' demanded Roland, his eyes blazing as he fixed them on Sharpe.
'It was an accident—an entire accident,' faltered the latter. 'The leaves of a turnip twisted round my right ankle, causing me to stumble and my rifle to explode.'
'A likely thing,' growled Jamie Spens, the beater, with a scowl in his eyes. 'Ye were oot o' the belt o' neeps at the time; but I've aye thocht ye wad pot some puir devil, as ye have done the Captain.'
'Silence, you poaching——,' began Sharpe in a furious voice; but Roland interrupted him.