Mr. May had been placed in a chair by the two young men who watched over him; but as Tozer spoke he got up, struggling wildly, almost tearing himself out of the coat by which they held him. “Let me go!” he said. “Do you hear him? Rot in prison! with hard labour; it would kill me! And it used to be hanging! My God—my God! Won’t you let me go?”
Tozer stopped short, stopped by this passion which was greater than his own. He looked wonderingly at the livid face, the struggling figure, impressed in spite of himself. “He’s gone mad,” he said. “Good Lord! But he’s got nothing to do with it. Can’t you take him away?”
“Grandpapa,” said Phoebe in his ear, “here it is, your bill; it was he who did it—and it has driven him mad. Look! I give it up to you; and there he is—that is your work. Now do what you please—”
Trembling, the old man took the paper out of her hand. He gazed wondering at the other, who somehow moved in his excitement by a sense that the decisive moment had come, stood still too, his arm half-pulled out of his coat, his face wild with dread and horror. For a moment they looked at each other in a common agony, neither the one nor the other clear enough to understand, but both feeling that some tremendous crisis had come upon them. “He—done it!” said Tozer appalled and almost speechless. “He done it!” They all crowded round, a circle of scared faces. Phoebe alone stood calm. She was the only one who knew the whole, except the culprit, who understood nothing with that mad confusion in his eyes. But he was overawed too, and in his very madness recognized the crisis. He stood still, struggling no longer, with his eyes fixed upon the homely figure of the old butterman, who stood trembling, thunderstruck, with that fatal piece of paper in his hand.
Tozer had been mad for revenge two moments before—almost as wild as the guilty man before him—with a fierce desire to punish and make an example of the man who had wronged him. But this semi-madness was arrested by the sight of the other madman before him, and by the extraordinary shock of this revelation. It took all the strength out of him. He had not looked up to the clergyman as Cotsdean did, but he had looked up to the gentleman, his customer, as being upon an elevation very different from his own, altogether above and beyond him; and the sight of this superior being, thus humbled, maddened, gazing at him with wild terror and agony, more eloquent than any supplication, struck poor old Tozer to the very soul. “God help us all!” he cried out with a broken, sobbing voice. He was but a vulgar old fellow, mean, it might be, worldly in his way; but the terrible mystery of human wickedness and guilt prostrated his common soul with as sharp an anguish of pity and shame as could have befallen the most heroic. It seized upon him so that he could say or do nothing more, forcing hot and salt tears up into his old eyes, and shaking him all over with a tremor as of palsy. The scared faces appeared to come closer to Phoebe, to whom these moments seemed like years. Had her trust been vain? Softly, but with an excitement beyond control, she touched him on the arm.
“That’s true,” said Tozer, half-crying. “Something’s got to be done. We can’t all stand here forever, Phoebe; it’s him as has to be thought of. Show it to him, poor gentleman, if he ain’t past knowing; and burn it, and let us hear of it no more.”
Solemnly, in the midst of them all, Phoebe held up the paper before the eyes of the guilty man. If he understood it or not, no one could tell. He did not move, but stared blankly at her and it. Then she held it over the lamp and let it blaze and drop into harmless ashes in the midst of them all. Tozer dropped down into his elbow-chair sniffing and sobbing. Mr. May stood quite still, with a look of utter dullness and stupidity coming over the face in which so much terror had been. If he understood what had passed, it was only in feeling, not in intelligence. He grew still and dull in the midst of that strange madness which all the time was only half-madness, a mixture of conscious excitement and anxiety with that which passes the boundaries of consciousness. For the moment he was stilled into stupid idiotcy, and looked at them with vacant eyes. As for the others, Northcote was the only one who divined at all what this scene meant. To Reginald it was like a scene in a pantomime—bewildering dumb show, with no sense or meaning in it. It was he who spoke first, with a certain impatience of the occurrence which he did not understand.
“Will you come home, sir, now?” he said. “Come home, for Heaven’s sake! Northcote will give you an arm. He’s very ill,” Reginald added, looking round him pitifully in his ignorance; “what you are thinking of I can’t tell—but he’s ill and—delirious. It was Mr. Copperhead who brought him here against my will. Excuse me, Miss Beecham—now I must take him home.”
“Yes,” said Phoebe. The tears came into her eyes as she looked at him; he was not thinking of her at the moment, but she knew he had thought of her, much and tenderly, and she felt that she might never see him again. Phoebe would have liked him to know what she had done, and to know that what she had done was for him chiefly—in order to recompense him a little, poor fellow, for the heart he had given her, which she could not accept, yet could not be ungrateful for. And yet
