All that I can do for you it to
advise you to submit to the law, to plead guilty, and to conceal
nothing. When did you do this deed?"
The guilty man rose to his feet, and leaned heavily against the
table. His answer came reluctantly, like the speech of one dreaming.
"On the 22d of September!"
On the 22d of September! I looked in Jonathan Jelf's face, and he
in mine. I felt my own smiling with a strange sense of wonder and
dread. I saw his blanch suddenly, even to the lips.
"Merciful Heaven!" he whispered. "_What was it, then, that you
saw in the train?_"
What was it that I saw in the train? That question remains unanswered
to this day. I have never been able to reply to it. I only know
that it bore the living likeness of the murdered man, whose body
had then been lying some ten weeks under a rough pile of branches
and brambles and rotting leaves, at the bottom of a deserted chalk-pit
about half-way between Blackwater and Mallingford. I know that it
spoke and moved and looked as that man spoke and moved and looked
in life; that I heard, or seemed to hear, things revealed which
I could never otherwise have learned; that I was guided, as it
were, by that vision on the platform to the identification of the
murderer; and that, a passive instrument myself, I was destined,
by means of these mysterious teachings to bring about the ends of
justice.
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