Even as he did so, the father pulled the trigger.
Then he turned, reclimbed the ladders, and went home.
That night the priest went outside the reef in his canoe, and emptied Michael’s store of gold-dust into the sea, scattering it like seed on the ocean floor at a point where the tide ran swiftest. On his return, with a cunning that seemed to him the inspiration of the devil, he got out the lay brother’s spare hat and some of the clothes that were in his chest, and left them, to tell their own tale, on the sandy beach. At dawn he made his way back to the valley, still sustained, in spite of all his fatigue, by a consuming fire of activity. He felt that the sands of his own life were running out; that at any moment he might be struck down himself by an unseen hand; that those strange, benumbing premonitions in his brain bade him imperiously to close the chapter of his crime. The horror of dying with his purpose unfulfilled spurred him on to desperate exertions. He stumbled again and again on the path; he had recurring fits of giddiness, when the sun seemed darkened to his eyes, when for a space he half forgot his dreadful errand, and wondered to find himself in the bush. He expected, when he reached the brink of the cliff and began to descend the long, shaky ladders, to feel some recrudescence of the emotions of the day before. But, to his own surprise, he discovered in himself a callousness that set all such qualms at defiance; he had exhausted, in the course of those last forty hours, all his capacity for such paralysing susceptibilities; like some soldier after the battle, he was sated with the horrors through which he had passed, and had become altogether deadened to those about him. Even when he stood on the very place from which Michael had made his last appeal, and, looking in the air above, more than half expected to see the protruding muzzle of another rifle, he felt, indeed, no answering thrill or perturbation. The burden of his own fatigue seemed of greater moment than this reliving of a tragedy; and the thought of how much there was for him still to do moved him infinitely more.
At the foot of the ladder, shrunken and disordered, the corpse of the dead brother lay tumbled in the grass like a sack. With his face upturned to the sky, his sightless eyes, filming with corruption, his tangled hair in a slime of blood and dirt, he opposed a ghastly barrier to the old priest’s further progress; and seemed, even in death itself, to continue to resist and defy him. But the father had passed the stage when such a sight could turn him back, though he faltered for a moment in the throes of an unconquerable disgust before daring at last to set his foot across the body. Even when he did so, driving off the swarming flies with both his hands, it was with an agony of precaution against the least contact with that dead flesh.
Descending into the valley, he drew together all the tell-tale evidences of their work below, the cradles, picks, and shovels, the tins and boxes and ends of boards and scantlings, which had been carried, at one time and another, into that secluded place, and buried them in one of the deepest holes along the stream. He broke down the dams that Michael had spent days in building, the stones that had been piled aside to uncover the ground of some new pocket, the rough shelters he had raised here and there against the sun; he obliterated with his knife the marks that had been blazed upon the trees, and searched everywhere, with a feverish pertinacity that took him again and again over the same ground, for the least detail that he might have overlooked.
Then, in a drip of sweat, and exhausted to such a pitch that he wondered whether he should ever leave the valley alive, he took the spade he had kept by him to the last, and mounted the bottom ladder. As he went he cut away the lashings that bound it to the rock, and from the top sent it headlong behind him. In the same manner, resting painfully at each stopping-place, he detached the second ladder and the third, arriving once more at the wide shelf where he had meant to dig the grave. But his little strength suddenly forsook him; he was overcome by a deadly nausea; he could hardly stand, much less dig. He cast the spade into a thicket, and with unflinching resolution detached the can of gold-dust from the dead man’s neck. That, at least, should not remain to tell its tale, and he let the stuff dribble through his fingers over the cliff.
To do more was impossible. His only thought now was to escape; to climb up into the fresher air above; to save himself while there was yet time. That unmoving, silent thing in the grass, obscurely dissolving into decay, must perforce be left as it was, to bear its horrible witness against him. The declining margin of his strength filled him with a frenzy of fear that if he waited overlong he might wait for ever. Between the two risks, the one of a possible detection, the other of a doom unspeakable, he did not venture to pause. He felt, indeed, an extraordinary sense of relief as he began, rung by rung, to rise above the narrow ledge; and with relief a strange fatalism, in which it seemed to him that everything had been predestined from the beginning of the world. As he clung to the ladder, overcome at times by spells of faintness which he knew might bring him to the point of letting go his hold, he was always sustained by the thought that the issue lay with destiny. He would live, or he would fall, as it had been written.
In this singular humour, in which all human responsibility for good or evil seemed to count for nothing, the priest continued to mount the steep face of the cliff. He rested at every second step; he struggled against the recurring fits of giddiness that threatened to dash him from his perch; he fought his way up inch by inch, wondering all the time with a grim composure whether or not he was ever destined to reach the top. When at last he drew himself into a coign of safety and sent the great ladder crashing in his wake, when at last he put his foot on the final goal and lay down beneath the trees, then it was that he began to realise the perils to which he had so nearly succumbed, and to quake with a thousand belated apprehensions.
For an hour he remained huddled in the grass, starting at every sound, and altogether daunted by the thought of returning to the village. How would he dare encounter those familiar faces, take up the threads of the old familiar life, endure those awful days to come when the mystery of Michael’s disappearance would be in every mouth? Could he trust himself to simulate the concern he was bound to show, the surprise, the alarm, the increasing astonishment and horror as the days passed and there would be still no news of the missing man? Ah, could he trust himself? Had he in him the power to live such a lie, to go as usual about his duties, to hear the confessions of others when his own tortured heart was so dark with guilt?