Sayfa 486 / 490

Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up and be put

to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous.

Besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? There was

no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to

him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been

below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. They

would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was his

duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public

atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins

to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would

cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged

his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to

him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust

mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity?

Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his

renunciation than that? There had been something more.