Before pulling the trigger of the air-gun, he was perfectly satisfied that Leigh deserved, richly deserved death. That was as plain as the dome of St. Paul's from London Bridge. It had been equally plain to him that when Leigh was dead, and dead by his hand, he should never because of any compunction be sorry for his act. No sooner was he at the bottom of the water-pipe than he found he had no longer any control over his thoughts, or more correctly that the thoughts in his mind did not belong to him at all, but were, as it might be, thoughts hired in the interest of the dead man, hostile, relentless mercenaries, inside the very walls of the citadel within which he was besieged, and from which there was no escape except by flinging his naked bosom on the bayonets of the besiegers.
It made not the least difference now whether the man merited death a thousand times or not, that man insisted on haunting him. It did not now matter in the least how it pleased him to regard the provoker of that shot, it was how the murdered man regarded him was the real question. He had always told himself that a murdered man was only a dead man after all. Now he had to learn that no man ever born of woman is more awfully alive than a murdered man. He had yet to learn that the blow of the murderer endows the victim with inextinguishable vitality. He had yet to learn that all things which live die to the mind of a murderer except the man who is dead. He had yet to learn that in the mind of a murderer there is a gradually filling in and crowding together of the images of the undamned dead that in the end blind and block up the whole soul in stifling intimacies with the dead, until the murderer in his despair flings himself at the feet of the hangman shrieking for mercy, for mercy, for the mercy of violent and disgraceful death in order to put an end to the fiendish gibes of the dead who is not dead but living, who will not sink into hell, but brings hell into the assassin's brain. The desire to kill is easy, and the means of killing are easy, but the spirit of the murdered man takes immortal form in the brain of the murderer and cleaves to him for evermore.
So that when Stamer descended from the roof and found himself in the yard of the mews, he was not alone. He had seen little of Leigh, but now all he had seen came back upon the eye of his memory with appalling distinctness. He saw each detail of the man's body as though it were cast in rigid bronze and pressed forcibly, painfully, unbearably, upon his perception. He could see, he could feel, the long yellow fingers and the pointed chin hidden in the beard, and the hairs on the neck growing thinner and thinner as the neck descended into the collar. He could see the wrinkles about the eyes, and a peculiar backward motion of the lips before the dwarf spoke. He could see the forehead wrinkled upward in indulgent scorn, or the eyes flashing with insolent self-esteem. He could see. He could see the swift, sharp up-tilt of the chin when a deep respiration became necessary. There was nothing about the dwarf that he could not see, that he did not see, that he could avoid seeing, that was not pressed upon him as by a cold, steel die, that was not pressed and pressed upon him until his mind ached for the vividness, until he turned within himself frantically to avoid the features or actions of the dwarf, and found no space unoccupied, no loop-hole of escape, no resting-place for the eye, no variety for the mind. He was possessed by a devil, and he had made that devil into the likeness of Leigh with his own hands out of the blood of Leigh.