Explore "A Rogue's Tragedy" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The burden cast, the released soul ran out and on, babbling, half-delirious, growing in noise and volume, until, flowing to waste, it sunk into the silence of exhaustion.
"I knew -- as you all know now -- what he intended, and where he was going. I had been informed secretly, and I set out to waylay him. Coming to the point from which he was to cross the glacier, I hid among the stones; and presently I saw him approach. There were great clouds, but a little starlight between -- enough to make him sure. On the slope of the moraine a drunken scoundrel, who carried a lantern, veiled till then, rose to greet him. He was the other's guide and pander -- and for whose undoing? O, my God! O, my God, Gaston! Think what it meant -- to me! to heaven! and heaven was the coward at the last. It was all for me to do alone -- prevent this horror, if I could not persuade it. God sleeps, I think, when the riddles of mortal wickedness get too much for Him: and then He wakes, and chastises weak Nature for its false solutions. It is so easy to say This must not be, and ignore the circumstances which will make _this_, and no other, inevitable.