What her decision might have been, we cannot say, for while she stood in this attitude, Middleton stept from his seclusion, and at the noise of his approach she turned suddenly round, looking more frightened and agitated than at the moment when she had first seen the dead body. She faced Middleton, however, and looked him quietly in the eye. “You see this!” said she, gazing fixedly at him. “It is not at this moment that you first discover it.”
“No,” said Middleton, frankly. “It is not. I was present at the catastrophe. In one sense, indeed, I was the cause of it; but, Alice, I need not tell you that I am no murderer.”
“A murderer?--no,” said Alice, still looking at him with the same fixed gaze. “But you and this man were at deadly variance. He would have rejoiced at any chance that would have laid you cold and bloody on the earth, as he is now; nay, he would most eagerly have seized on any fair-looking pretext that would have given him a chance to stretch you there. The world will scarcely believe, when it knows all about your relations with him, that his blood is not on your hand. Indeed,” said she, with a strange smile, “I see some of it there now!”
And, in very truth, so there was; a broad blood-stain that had dried on Middleton’s hand. He shuddered at it, but essayed vainly to rub it off.
“You see,” said she. “It was foreordained that you should shed this man’s blood; foreordained that, by digging into that old pit of pestilence, you should set the contagion loose again. You should have left it buried forever. But now what do you mean to do?”
“To proclaim this catastrophe,” replied Middleton. “It is the only honest and manly way. What else can I do?”
“You can and ought to leave him on the wood-path, where he has fallen,” said Alice, “and go yourself to take advantage of the state of things which Providence has brought about. Enter the old house, the hereditary house, where--now, at least--you alone have a right to tread. Now is the hour. All is within your grasp. Let the wrong of three hundred years be righted, and come back thus to your own, to these hereditary fields, this quiet, long-descended home; to title, to honor.”
Yet as the wild maiden spoke thus, there was a sort of mockery in her eyes; on her brow; gleaming through all her face, as if she scorned what she thus pressed upon him, the spoils of the dead man who lay at their feet. Middleton, with his susceptibility, could not [but] be sensible of a wild and strange charm, as well as horror, in the situation; it seemed such a wonder that here, in formal, orderly, well-governed England, so wild a scene as this should have occurred; that they too [two?] should stand here, deciding on the descent of an estate, and the inheritance of a title, holding a court of their own.