“Dear Lucy, you are now the only one left of the three children. I have burnt the book. At all events, my children shall not see it or hear of this terrible story. I implore you to burn your copy.”
Mrs. Galley wrote after this: “I have read the book again quite through. I cannot understand at all why my brother killed himself. As for the murderer, of course it was the man named John Dunning. Who else could it have been?”
Leonard looked up. It was three o’clock in the morning. His face was troubled with doubts and misgiving.
“Why did they burn the book?” he said. “As for the murder, there must have been someone hidden in the wood. That is clear. No other explanation is possible. But why did my grandfather cut his throat? There is nothing in the book that could lead him to such an act.”
CHAPTER XII
ON THE SITE
LEONARD shut the book and threw it aside. He sat thinking over it for a little. Then he thought it was time to go to bed. There was not much of the night left; in fact, it was already broad daylight. But if it had been a night of mid-winter for darkness he could not have been visited by a more terrifying nightmare.
In his sleep the Family History continued. It now took the form of a Mystery—a Mystery in a Shape. It sat upon his afflicted chest and groaned. He was unable to guess or understand what kind of Mystery it was, or, in his sleep, to connect it with anything on the earth or in the world outside this earth. He woke up and shook it off; he went to sleep again, and it returned, unrelenting. It was vague and vast and terrible; a Thing with which the sufferer wrestled in vain, which he could not shake off and could not comprehend.
There are many kinds of nightmares; that of the unintelligible mystery, which will not go away and cannot be driven away, is one of the worst.
When he rose, late in the morning, unrefreshed and tired, he did connect the nightmare with something intelligible. It arose from the book and its story; which, like Chaucer’s, was left half told. That, in itself, would have mattered little. A strange thing happened: it began with this morning: there fell upon him quite suddenly an irresistible sense that here was a duty laid upon him: a duty not to be neglected: a thing that had to be done to the exclusion of everything else. He had to follow up this story, and to recover, after seventy years and more, the true history of the crime which cast a shadow so long and so terrible upon all those years and the children of those years. He looked at the papers on his table: they were the half-finished article he had undertaken: his mind bidden to think upon the subject rebelled: it refused to work: it would not be turned in that direction: it went off to Campaigne Park and to seventy years before.
Without words Leonard was mysteriously commanded to follow up the story to its proper conclusion. Without any words he was plainly and unmistakably commanded to follow it up. By whom? He did not ask. He obeyed.