“And––this is what I came to say––all the time I was guilty––guilty: guilty as Rafe Gadbeau!”
“I am not sure I understand,” said the Bishop slowly, as Jeffrey stopped.
“Oh, there’s nothing to understand. It is just as I say. I was guilty of that man’s death before I saw him at all that morning. I was guilty of it that instant when Rafe Gadbeau fired. I am guilty now. I will always be guilty. Rafe Gadbeau could say a few words to you and turn over into the next world, free. I cannot,” he ended, with a sort of grim finality as though he saw again before him that wall against which he had come the night before.
“You mean––” the Bishop began slowly. Then he asked suddenly, “What brought your mind to this view of the matter?”
“A girl,” said Jeffrey, “the girl that saved me; that French girl that loved Rafe Gadbeau. She showed me.”
Ah, thought the Bishop, Cynthe has been relieving her mind with some plain speaking. But he did not feel at all easy. He knew better than to treat the matter lightly. Jeffrey Whiting was not a boy to be laughed out of a morbid notion, or to be told to grow older and forget the thing. His was a man’s soul, standing in the dark, grappling with a thing with which it could not cope. The wrong word here might mar his whole life. Here was no place for softening away the realities with reasoning. The man’s soul demanded a man’s straight answer.
“Before you could be guilty,” said the Bishop decisively, “you must have injured some one by your thought, your intention. Whom did you injure?”
Jeffrey Whiting leaped at the train of thought, to follow it out from the maze which his mind had been treading. Here was the answer. This would clear the way. Whom had he injured?