Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-39.djvu/67

Rh was seldom seen in life. Tom shrank, appalled, at the aspect of those quiet features; and John broke down and cried like a child. I felt neither appalled nor inclined to weep: I was conscious only of a stern determination to see justice done upon his assassin.

Some trees had been felled near by a few days before: we selected some stout stakes cut from their boughs, placed the body on them, and carried it slowly and with difficulty up the hill to the house, and laid it on the sofa in my library. Then I sent Tom for the coroner, and wrote a note to mother, which John carried. It told her that Henry had had a bad fall, and bade her return at once. When he had gone, I was left alone with my dead brother. It was about four o'clock, and the dawn was already in the east.

That strange serenity of mind did not abandon me, though I was fully aware of its strangeness. During the past week or two I had thought of this man as an enemy: I believed he had done a great wrong, and circumstances had brought the wrong home to me, to be shared with his immediate victim. I had even admitted the thought that his presence, if not his very existence, was hostile to my happiness; and now, like a swift answer to that unspoken thought, he was dead, and his body lay upon the same sofa where he had lounged and smoked so short a while ago. But I felt as little fear as animosity. All passions, both good and evil, were absolutely still in me. I stood and looked down at him for a long time. It was to be; and I, like him, was the creature of destiny.

I stood with my back towards the door. I heard no sound, but I was suddenly aware that I was not alone. I turned; and there stood Sinfire.

There was nothing miraculous in her appearing at that moment; but it is certain that I was never more startled in my life. So far as I have noticed, genuine surprises are not nearly so common as they are popularly supposed to be. For my own part, at any rate, I have generally found myself in an attitude to accept whatever happens as something to be more or less expected: it is not a conscious premonition, but a kind of instant and instinctive accommodation of one's self to circumstances. It simply means that the man and his environment are essentially in harmony. But now and then there is an abrupt exception to this rule, and then everything seems to break away, and there is chaos.

The news of Henry's death, profoundly though it affected me, and amazed me too, did not startle me at all. Perhaps it struck too deep for that; perhaps the dream from which I had just awakened had been