Pushing painfully against the cold barrier of silence Andrews approached. As feeling returns with agony to a frozen limb, so a small dull pain began to throb in his forehead, with a regular and maddening rhythm. With a kind of caution he stretched out his fingers and touched the body on the shoulder. The warm answer of the flesh smote its way to his brain, cleared his stunned mind and flung it into a passionate rebellion.
She could not be dead. It was impossible, too unfair, too final. The flesh had made to his fingers an exactly similar response to that of life. There was but one difference. The face had not turned to him. He was afraid to touch the face. She is only hurt, asleep, he thought. As long as he did not touch the face so she would remain. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth,” he implored but under his breath not loud enough to wake her if indeed she slept. He shut out the knowledge which lay deep in his mind like an internal sore and clung with passionate persistency to hope. He began to pray out loud in a low voice, ignoring Carlyon’s presence. “O God, let her be asleep,” he whispered, “let her be asleep.” He felt that he could stand there immovable not for hours merely, but for days, weeks, years, never making a sound loud enough to wake her, believing that there was a chance she slept.
Carlyon said across the table, “What’s the use? She’s dead.” The suddenness of the words made Andrews’s heart leap, and for the moment he felt that it would never begin to beat again. He gasped, robbed of air he hoped forever. But his heart started again its regular, hateful rhythm of life, and Andrews jerked himself unwillingly into motion. He seized the pistol which lay upon the table and raised it; “Be quiet,” was all he said, however, in a low trembling voice.
“What’s the use?” Carlyon repeated with an unfeeling voice which dropped the words slowly and heavily into the air like small pellets of lead. “She’s dead.”
“You are lying,” Andrews whispered, but then the suspense became too great and he turned and took the body in his arms. The face fell back against his shoulder and the eyes which he had thought were faultless stared into his with an unwinking and imbecile lack of expression. “My own knife,” he said slowly, tracing the red stain on her clothes to its source.
He let the body down again into the seat and stood with hands pressed to his forehead. Despair and a kind of terror were advancing towards him down a long tunnel, but as yet he defended himself from the realisation that Elizabeth would never speak to him again, that he would never feel her in his arms, though he lived for another fifty years. And then he would die and enter a blank eternity. He stared across the table at Carlyon, but his eyes were glazed and he saw him only through a shaking, hovering veil. He still held the pistol, but he felt no anger against Carlyon. Before this complete destruction of a life which had given a meaning and a possibility to holiness and divinity hatred seemed a child’s game. It was in any case, he felt dimly, not an act of the living which had crumbled life but of the dead, a victory for the old man who had preceded him in this cottage and for his father. There had been no struggle with Carlyon but only with his father. His father had made him a betrayer and his father had slain Elizabeth and his father was dead and out of reach. Out of reach. But was he? His father’s was not a roaming spirit. It had housed itself in the son he had created. I am my father, he thought, and I have killed her.
At the thought the dry, strained despair in which he dwelt gave way before a kind of blessed grief. He flung himself upon his knees beside the body and began to fondle it but without tears and over and over again he kissed the hands but not the face, for he feared to meet the imbecility of the eyes. If I had not run away—the thought doubled him with pain. “It was my father made me,” he said aloud. But how could he prove it, kill that damaging spirit and show a self remaining?
Carlyon’s voice steadied him and brought him back to his feet. “Francis, I didn’t do this.” It seemed in no way unnatural that his enemy should speak to him as Francis, for it was not his enemy. His enemy was his father and lay within himself, confusing him till he had struck his friend.
“Joe came here first,” Carlyon said. “I wasn’t here. She wouldn’t tell him, seemed to be waiting for someone. That made him nervous, he tried to find out where you were. He began to hurt her. She stabbed herself. He’s gone.”
“Do you hate me, Carlyon?” Andrews asked. A plan had entered his head for dealing with his father, and it was as though in fear his father’s spirit had shrunk into a small space leaving Andrews’s own brain more clear and simple than he had ever known it.
“No,” Carlyon said. “You must hate me. You can shoot if you like. If not I’ll wait for the officers. They are coming?”
Andrews nodded his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for what I did against you.” Across the table their hands met. “It’s extraordinary,” Andrews said, “we’ve been sleeping. She’s woken us.” His voice broke and he dropped his hand, for his words had brought up a piercingly clear vision of what seemed to him a perfect holiness which he would never meet again. “Carlyon,” he said, “will you go—now before the officers come?”
“What’s the use?” Carlyon said dully, watching the dead face opposite him. “They’ll find me. I shall be almost glad to hang for
