He started to drag himself home. His gun seemed an intolerable weight now that his mood had weakened. For a moment he saw the murder as a fault—not as a crime or an infraction of the law—for the power of the forest was too absolute to let this lawyer care much for legality—but as a failure in hospitality. Ward had come to him, he remembered, for help, had put himself in his power. And the use he had made of his power was to deal death where he promised escape.
Remorse passed as quickly as it had come when he thought of the kiss which had forfeited Ward his claim to help, safety, life. But the duty of burying Dick had never left his mind, where it bred a fresh idea of his victim.
He no longer saw him in the abstract as the enemy, the defiler of Norah's body, the pest which must be killed. He saw him as a dead man. A poor dead man. Un povero morte, shut out from the daylight, from sight and feel and smell, from love of women, from hope and achievement. All he had now was stillness and a silence.
Archie felt no horror at his crime. He stood back from civilisation, remote from society, away from the herd that had created morality to make possible life in a herd. But pity took hold of him, pity for his victim, who was also, he saw, the victim of exasperating circumstance, of passions and stupidities. And heavily—if justly—had he paid.
A growl of thunder diverted his attention. It did not sound very distant. He hoped the rains would not break yet, but he quickened his aching steps.
It was dark when he reached the ruins and found no trace of the body he had come to bury. Even in the obscurity he expected that he would have seen the white clothes. They would not be so white now, but something should be visible. Had Norah had it carried into camp? If she had, that showed beyond palliation that she was careless of her husband's fate.
Had he come to the right spot? Yes, this was where he had stood. Ward over there, with Norah. He had fallen forwards. His body should lie here. Archie fancied he could smell the pool of blood, and the light of a match justified his senses.
He lit another and saw that the grass was bent and broken. In Ward's death agony? Or had the body been dragged away? He followed the wake in the grass, striking matches as he went, till at a distance of some fifty yards he came on the stained, white bundle. He had not come in time. Hyaenas, a flicker of lightning revealed, had been before him. The poor corpse was already mutilated. His pity for the dead man gathered force. He had never admired Ward's good looks (secretly he may have been jealous of them), but he knew they were there, and against his will he had been conscious of the man's light-hearted charm. Now this helpless, shapeless thing worried by the beasts of night was all that remained.
It was the war again, he thought. Bodies of Germans hanging on the wire—sons, husbands, lovers of some one bereaved in Germany. Only here the consolation was lacking of sacrifice for a country. Ward had died in no nobler quarrel than the fight of two dogs over a bitch.
For the first time it occurred to him that his victim was a human being. He had seen and killed him as an abstraction—the betrayer of Norah; he had seen him and pitied him as a corpse: now he knew that he had been a human being with human faults and qualities, human interests, human relationships; somewhere he had a family, friends, a home.