Then a great trembling shook his whole body, and dropping the head gently back to the floor he rose to his feet. The General was dead, and he knew it.
He had seen death a hundred times before, but only on the battlefield, amid the boom of cannon, the wail of shell, the snap of rifles, and the oaths of men, but now it filled him with terror.
The silence was awful. A minute ago the General had been a living man, face to face with him, and the room had been ringing with the clashing of their voices; but now this breathless hush, this paralysing stillness, in which the very air seemed to be dead, for something was gone as by the stroke of an almighty hand, and there was nothing left but the motionless figure at his feet.
"What have I done?" he asked, and when he told himself that in his headstrong wrath he had killed a man, his head spun round and round. He, who had refused to obey orders because he would not commit murder was guilty of murder himself! What devil out of hell had ordered things so that as the very consequence of refusing to commit a crime he had become a criminal?
"God have pity upon me and tell me it is not true," he thought.
But he knew it was true, and when he told himself that the man he had killed was his General his pain increased tenfold. The General had loved him and favoured him, been proud of him and upheld him, and never, down to the coming of this trouble, had their friendship been darkened by a cloud.
"Oh, forgive me! God forgive me!" he thought.
In his blind misery, which hardly saw itself yet for what it was, the impulse came to him to carry the burden of his sin, too heavy for himself, to Helena, that she might help him to bear it; and he had taken some steps towards the door leading to her room when it struck him as a blow on the brain that she was the daughter of the dead man, and he was going to her for comfort after killing her father.
At that thought he stopped and laid hold of the desk for support, being so weak that he could scarcely keep on his legs. He remembered Helena's love for the General, how much of her young life she had given to him, and how the quarrel that had divided himself from her had come of her determination not to leave her father as long as he lived. And now he had killed him!
Beads of sweat started from his forehead, but after a moment he told himself that if he could not expect comfort from Helena it was his duty to comfort her—to break the news to her. He saw himself doing so. "Helena, listen, dear; be brave." "What is it?" "Your father—is—is dead." "Dead?" "Worse, a thousandfold worse—he is murdered." "Murdered?" "It was all in the heat of blood—the man didn't know what he was doing." "Who was it—who was it?" "Don't you see, Helena—it was I."