Recalled to Life | Page 2

on his left breast. I didn't
even know at the moment the man was my father; though slowly,
afterward, by the concurrent testimony of others, I learnt to call him so.
But his relationship wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only
in my eyes a man--a man well past middle age, with a long white beard,
now dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from
the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round
toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been shot
with lay on the ground not far from him.
But that wasn't all the Picture. The murderer was there as well as the
victim. Besides the table, and the box, and the wounded man, and the
pistol, I saw another figure behind, getting out of the window. It was
the figure of a man, I should say about twenty-five or thirty: he had just
raised himself to the ledge, and was poising to leap; for the room, as I
afterwards learned, though on the ground floor, stood raised on a
basement above the garden behind. I couldn't see the man's face, or any
part of him, indeed, except his stooping back, and his feet, and his neck,
and his elbows. But what little I saw was printed indelibly on the very
fibre of my nature. I could have recognised that man anywhere if I saw
him in the same attitude. I could have sworn to him in any court of
justice on the strength of his back alone, so vividly did I picture it.
He was tall and thin, but he stooped like a hunchback.
There were other points worth notice in that strange mental photograph.
The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a gentleman.
Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had learned once more
what words and things meant, I could feel instinctively this was no
common burglar, no vulgar murderer. Whatever might have been the
man's object in shooting my father, I was certain from the very first it
was not mere robbery. But at the time, I'm confident, I never reasoned

about his motives or his actions in any way. I merely took in the scene,
as it were, passively, in a great access of horror, which rendered me
incapable of sense or thought or speech or motion. I saw the table, the
box, the apparatus by its side, the murdered man on the floor, the pistol
lying pointed with its muzzle towards his body, the pool of blood that
soaked deep into the Turkey carpet beneath, the ledge of the window,
the young man's rounded back as he paused and hesitated. And I also
saw, like an instantaneous flash, one hand pushed behind him, waving
me off, I almost thought, with the gesture of one warning.
Why didn't I remember the murderer's face? That puzzled me long after.
I must have seen him before: I must surely have been there when the
crime was committed. I must have known at the moment everything
about it. But the blank that came over my memory, came over it with
the fatal shot. All that went before, was to me as though it were not. I
recollect vaguely, as the first point in my life, that my eyes were shut
hard, and darkness came over me. While they were so shut, I heard an
explosion. Next moment, I believe, I opened them, and saw this Picture.
No sensitive-plate could have photographed it more instantaneously, as
by an electric spark, than did my retina that evening, as for months after
I saw it all. In another moment, I shut my lids again, and all was over.
There was darkness once more, and I was alone with my Horror.
In years then to come, I puzzled my head much as to the meaning of the
Picture. Gradually, step by step, I worked some of it out, with the aid of
my friends, and of the evidence tendered at the coroner's inquest. But
for the moment I knew nothing of all that. I was a newborn baby again.
Only with this important difference. They say our minds at birth are
like a sheet of white paper, ready to take whatever impressions may fall
upon them. Mine was like a sheet all covered and obscured by one
hateful picture. It was weeks, I fancy, before I knew or was conscious
of anything else but that. The Picture and a great Horror divided my life
between them.
Recollect, I didn't even remember the murdered man was my father. I
didn't recognise the room as one in our own old house at Woodbury. I
didn't know anything at all except what I