Did
he see this, or was he prompted by some old memory of boyish
quarrels that he should give utterance to that quick, sharp laugh
of scorn! I shall never know, but ere the sound had ceased, the
stick was whirling over my head--there came a crash and he fell.
My friend! My friend!
Next moment the earth seemed too narrow, the heavens too
contracted for my misery. That he was dead--that my blow had
killed him, I never doubted for an instant. I knew it, as we know
the face of Doom when once it has risen upon us. Never, never
again would this lump of clay, which a few minutes before had
filled the Hollow with shrillest whistling, breathe or think or
speak. He was dead, DEAD, DEAD!--And I? What was I?
The name which no man hears unmoved, no amount of repetition makes
easy to the tongue or welcome to the ear! ... the name which I had
heard launched in full forensic eloquence so many times in
accusation against the wretches I had hardly regarded as being in
the same human class as myself, rang in my ear as though intoned
from the very mouth of hell. I could not escape it. I should never
be able to escape it again. Though I was standing in a familiar
scene--a scene I had known and frequented from childhood, I felt
myself as isolated from my past and as completely set apart from
my fellows as the shipwrecked mariner tossed to precarious foot-
hold on his wave-dashed rock. I forgot that other criminals
existed. In that one awful moment I was in my own eyes the only
blot upon the universe--the sole inhabitant of the new world into
which I had plunged--the world of crime--the world upon which I
had sat in judgment before I knew--
What broke the spell? A noise? No, I heard no noise.
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