“Who sent your cousin from the East End? Who fired your imagination with half-told tales of trouble? Who sent you the book? How do you explain the absorbing interest of a case so old, so long forgotten?”
“Is it not natural?”
“No, it is not natural that a man of your willpower should become the slave of a research so hopeless—as it seemed. Who was it, after we had mastered every detail and tried every theory and examined every scrap of evidence, and after you had examined the ground and talked to the surviving witness—I say, after the way had been prepared—who was it sent the two voices from the grave—the one which made it quite certain that those two were the only persons in the wood, and the other which showed that they were quarrelling, and that one was ungoverned in his wrath? Can you explain that, Leonard?”
“You believe that we were led by unseen hands, step by step, towards the discovery, for the purpose of those who led.”
“There were two purposes: one for the consolation of that old man, and the other for yourself.”
“How for myself?”
“Look back only a month. Are you the same or are you changed? I told you then that you were outside all other men, because you had everything—wealth sufficient, pride of ancestry, intellectual success, and no contact with the lower world, the vulgar and the common, or the criminal or the disreputable world. You remember? Yes—are you changed?
“If to possess all these undesirable things can change one, I am changed.”
“If to lose the things which separate you from the world, and to receive the things which bring you nearer to the world, do change a man, then you are changed. You will change more and more; because more and more you will feel that you belong to the world of men and women—not of caste and books. When all is gone, there still remains yourself—alone before the world.”
He made no reply.