The end of her recital was drowned in a fresh burst of drumming, but I was glad to see that civilisation had not recaptured Archie completely. Admiration for Norah's resource shone on his thin face. Admiration and gratitude. Then the sadness which had lifted returned.
'Norah,' he said, 'what a brick you are! I think it's the most sporting effort I've ever heard of. No one but you.... But you see, don't you? I can't profit by what you've done.' He turned the paper in his hands. 'I've got to go through with it now.' Norah, worsted in the second encounter, rose to her feet and faced him. Her lips framed the word "Why?"
'Because I'm a murderer,' he said, looking over her head, blindly, into the darkness.
As she did not speak, he went on carefully, dispassionately.
At first, he said, he had justified himself. In the forest, he had seemed to stand outside the Law... But Abercorn with its trim roads, its comfortable houses, its kind, commonplace inhabitants had drawn him back into its fold. Obscurely he felt that by accepting the standards of Jehovah and of the forest, he was deserting from the forces that for twenty or thirty centuries had fought for order, to make things shipshape, sane, reasonable.
White men went native sometimes, abjured their heritage, married black wives, lived in mud huts, ate native food. Well, if he set up in his heart the values he had found in the forest, he'd be a renegade like them.
Norah, who had bitten on her lip till it nearly bled, broke in with a cry of indignation.
What had this, she asked, to do with Dick's death? Why should Archie sacrifice his own life for vague ideas about Abercorn and society! What had society ever done for him? Let society look after itself!
'I'm not being clear,' said Archie; 'what I mean is that until I saw Abercorn standing like an advance guard in the fight for...' He felt his words were high-flown and he said, 'all that' with a dismissing wave of the hand. 'I did not feel I had done wrong. Abercorn showed me that I had. Now I must pay for what I did.'
'But Archie, Archie! What's the good? Dick's dead and nothing you can do will bring him to life.'