Recovering her consciousness, Beatrix perceived that she was alone. Yet, dimmed though her senses were by the swoon in which she had lain, she was able to observe that some change had taken place in the corridor since she fell prostrate. Sebastian Ritherdon's body was gone now, but the little lamp which he had carried lay close to the spot where she had seen him fall, while near to it, and standing on the floor, was a candlestick. Within it was a candle, which showed to her startled eyes something which almost caused her to faint again; something that formed a small pool upon the shiny, polished floor. And then as she saw the hateful thing, the recollection of all that had happened returned to her, as well as the recollection of other things.
"He was going to the end of the passage," she said to herself as, rising, she drew her skirts closely about her so that they should not come into contact with that shining, hideous pool at her feet; "therefore, Julian must be there. Oh, to reach him, to help him to escape from this horrid, awful house!" Whereon, snatching up the candlestick from the floor, she proceeded swiftly to the end of the corridor; while, seeing that, far down it, there was one door open, she naturally directed her footsteps to that.
Then, as she held the light above her head, she saw that on a bed there lay a man asleep, or in a swoon--or dead! A man whose eyes were closed and whose face was deadly white, yet who was beyond doubt Julian Ritherdon.
"Oh, Julian!" she gasped, yet with sufficient restraint upon herself to prevent her voice from awaking him. "Oh, Julian! To find you at last, but to find you thus," and she took a step forward toward where the bed was, meaning to gaze down upon him and to discover if he was in truth alive or not.
Yet she was constrained to stop and was stayed in her first attempt to cross the room, by the noise of swift footsteps behind her and by the entrance of Zara, whose wild beauty appeared now to have assumed an almost demoniacal expression.
For the girl's eyes gleamed as the eyes of those in a raging fever gleam; her features were working terribly, and her whole frame seemed shaken with emotion.
"It is done!" she cried exultingly--there being a tone of almost maniacal derision in her voice. "It is done. In two hours he will be dead. And I have kept my word to you. You loved him, and you desired to see him. Well, you have seen him! Did you take," she almost screamed in her frenzy, "a long, last farewell? I hope so, since you will never take another," and in her fury of despair she thrust her face forward and almost into the other's.
But, now, hers was not the only wild excitement in the room. For Beatrix, recognising to what an extreme the girl's jealousy had wrought her, and what terrible deed she had been guilty of, herself gave a slight scream as she heard the other's words, and then cried:
"Madwoman! Fool! You are deceived. You have deceived yourself. I never loved him. Nor thought of him. This man lying here, this man whom he would have murdered, is the one I love with all my heart; this is the man I came to save."
Then as she spoke, Julian--who was now either awake or had emerged from the torpor in which he had been lying--cried from out of the darkness: "Beatrix, Beatrix, oh, my darling!" Whereon she, forgetting that in her excitement she had proclaimed her love, forgetting all else but that her lover was safe, rushed toward where he lay, uttering words of thankfulness and delight at his safety. Yet, when a moment later they looked toward the place where Zara had been, they saw that she was gone. For, slight as was the glimmer from the candle, it served to show that she was no longer there; that in none of the deep shadows of the room was she lurking anywhere.
She had, indeed, rushed from the room on hearing Beatrix's avowal, a prey to fresh excitement now, and to fresh horrors.
"I have slain him in my folly," she muttered wildly to herself. "I have slain him. And--and, at last, I might have won him. God help me!"
Then she directed her footsteps toward where she knew Madame Carmaux was, toward where her ears told her that, below the balcony on which the woman stood, they were making preparations to break into the house. Already, she could hear the hammering and beating on the great door from without; and, so hearing, thought they must be using some tree or sapling wherewith to break it in. She recognised, too, the Commandant's voice, as he gave orders to one of his men to blow the lock off with his carbine.
But without pause, without stopping for one instant, she rushed into the room and out upon the balcony where, seizing Madame Carmaux by the arm, she cried:
"Let them come in. It matters not. Sebastian is dead, or will be dead ere long. I deemed him false to me, as in truth he was. I have sent him to his doom. The Indians have taken him away to drown him, thinking he is that other."
Then from a second woman in that house there arose that night a piercing heartbroken cry, the cry of a woman who has heard the most awful news that could come to her, a cry followed by the words--as, throwing her hands up above her head, she sank slowly down on to the floor of the veranda--
"You have slain him--you have sent him to his doom? Oh, Sebastian! Oh, my son!"
"Yes, your son," said Zara. "Your son."
"It is impossible," they both heard a voice say behind them, the voice of Julian, as now he entered the room with Beatrix. "You are mistaken. Madame Carmaux never had a son, but instead a daughter."
"No," said still another voice, and now it was Mr. Spranger who spoke, all the party from outside having entered the house at last. "No. She never had a daughter, though it suited her purpose well enough to pretend that such was the case, and that that daughter was dead; the birth of her son being thus disguised."
"You hear this," the man in command of the police said, addressing the crouching woman. "Is it true?"
But Madame Carmaux, giving him but one glance from her upturned eyes, uttered no word.
"I have a warrant for your arrest and for this man called Sebastian Ritherdon," the sergeant said. "If he is not dead we shall have him."
"Then I pray God he is dead," Madame Carmaux cried, "for if you arrest him you will arrest an innocent man."
In answer to which the sergeant merely shrugged his shoulders, while addressing one of his force he bade him keep close to her.
"Was he in truth her son?" Julian asked, turning to where a moment before Zara had been standing. But once more, as so often she had done in the course of this narrative, the girl had vanished. Vanished, that is, so far as Julian and one or two others observed now, yet being seen by some of those who were standing near the door to creep out hurriedly and then to rush madly down the corridor.
"No," said Madame Carmaux, glaring at him with a glance which, had she had the power, would have slain him where he stood. "Though I often called him so. It is a lie."
"Is it?" said Julian quietly. "It would hardly seem so. Here is a paper which was written in England ere I set out for Honduras by the man whom I thought to be my father, and in which he tells in writing the whole story he told me by word of mouth. I looked for that paper after his death--and--I have found it here--in the pocket of Sebastian's jacket."
Such was indeed the case. When Zara had run into the room where Julian was, and had possessed herself of his jacket with the naval buttons on it--she meaning by its use to more thoroughly deceive the Indians who were to take Sebastian away in his stead--she had left behind her the other jacket which the latter had carried over his arm. And that, in the obscurity of a room lit only by the one candle, Julian should have hastily donned another jacket so like his own, and which he found in the place where he had lain for three nights, was not a surprising thing. But he recognised the exchange directly when, happening to put his hand into the pocket, he discovered the very missing papers which Mr. Ritherdon said he was going to leave behind for Julian's guidance, but which he must undoubtedly have forwarded to his brother, as an explanation--an account--of his sin against him in years gone by.
"Whoever's son he was," said Mr. Spranger, "he was undoubtedly not the son of Charles Ritherdon and his wife, Isobel Leigh. There can be no possibility of that. Who, therefore, can he have been--he who was so like you?" while, even as he gazed into Julian's eyes, there was still upon his face the look of incredulity which had always appeared there whenever he discussed the latter's claim to be the heir of Desolada.
"If she," said Beatrix now, with a glance toward where Madame Carmaux sat, rigid as a statue and almost as lifeless, except for her sparkling, glaring eyes--"if she never had a daughter, but did have a son, why may he not be that son? Some imposture may have been practised upon Mr. Ritherdon."
"It is impossible," her father said. "He knew his own child was lost--his brother's narrative tells that; she could not have palmed off on him another child--her own child--in the place of his."
"There is the likeness between us," whispered Julian in Mr. Spranger's ear. "How can that be accounted for? Can it be--is it possible--that in truth two children were born to him at the same time?"
"No," said Mr. Spranger. "No. If such had been the case, your uncle, the man you were brought up to believe in for years as your father, must have known of it."
"Then," said Julian, "the mystery is as much unsolved as ever, and is likely to remain so. She," directing his own glance to Madame Carmaux, "will never tell--and--well. Heaven help him! Sebastian is probably dead by now."
"In which case," said the other, always eminently practical, "you are the owner of Desolada all the same. If Sebastian was the rightful heir, and he is dead, you, as Mr. Ritherdon's nephew, come next."
"Nevertheless," replied Julian, "I am not his nephew. I am his son. I feel it; am sure of it."
But, even as he spoke, he noticed--had noticed indeed, already--that there was some stir in the direction where Madame Carmaux was. He had seen that, as he uttered the words "Heaven help him! Sebastian is probably dead by now," she had sprung to her feet, while uttering a piteous cry as she did so, and had stood scowling at Julian as though it was he who had sent the other to his doom. Then, too, he had seen that, in spite of the sergeant of police and one or two of his men having endeavoured to prevent her, she had brushed them on one side and was crossing the room to where he, with Mr. Spranger and Beatrix, stood. A moment later, she was before them; facing them.
"You have said," she exclaimed, "that he is probably dead by now," and they saw that her face was white and drawn; that it was, indeed, ghastly. "But," she continued, "if he is not dead--if yet he should be saved, if the scheme of that devil incarnate, Zara, should have failed--will you--will you hold him harmless--if--if--I tell all? Will you hold him harmless! For myself I care not, you may do with me what you will."
"Yes," said Julian. "Yes--if you will----"
"No," said the sergeant of police. "That is impossible. You cannot give such a promise. He has to answer to the law."
"What!" cried Madame Carmaux, turning on the man, her eyes flashing--"what if I prove him innocent of everything--of everything attempted against this one here," and she indicated Julian.
"Do that," said the sergeant, "and he may escape."
"Come, then," she said, addressing Mr. Spranger and Julian; "but not you, you bloodhound," turning on the man. "Not you! Come, I will tell you everything. I will save him."
While, making her way through the others as though she still ruled supreme in the house, and followed by the two men, she led the way to a small parlour situated upon the same floor they were on.
Meanwhile the night grew on, and with it there was that accompaniment which is so common in the tropics: the wind rising, and from blowing lightly soon sprang up into what the sailors call half a gale.
Now and again, far away to the east, flashes of rusty red lightning might be seen also, the almost sure heralds of a storm later.
The wind blew, too, over the dense masses of orange groves and other vegetation which go to form the tropical jungle that hereabout fringes the seashore; compact masses that, to many endeavouring to arrive at that shore, would offer an impenetrable, an impassable, barrier. Though not so to those acquainted with the vicinity and used to threading the jungle, nor to the Indians and half-castes whose huts and cabins bordered on that jungle, since they knew every spot where passage might be made, and the coast thereby reached at last.
Zara knew also each of those passages well, and threaded them now with the confidence born of familiarity; with, too, the stern determination to arrive at the end she had sworn to attain, if such attainment were possible.
She had left the room where Madame Carmaux had been confronted, not only by her but by all the others, in the manner described; had left it suddenly, though mysteriously, even as to her maddened brain a thought had sprung, dispelling for the moment all the agony and passion with which that brain was racked. The thought that, as she had sent the man she loved to his doom, so, also, it might not yet be too late to avert that doom--to save him.
The Indians who were bearing him to the old ramshackle sailing-boat he possessed (a thing half yawl and half lugger--a thing, too, which she supposed those men had been instructed to pierce and bore so that it would begin to fill from the first, and should, thereby, sink by the time it was in deep water) must necessarily go slowly, owing to the burden they had to carry, while she--well! she could progress almost as swiftly as the deer could themselves thread the thickets that bordered the coast.
Surely, surely, lithe, young, and active as she was she would overtake those men with their burden ere they could reach the yawl; she would be able to bid them stop, and could at once point out to them the fatal mistake that had been made. She could give them proof, by bidding them take one glance at the features of the senseless man they were transporting, of the nature of that mistake.
So she set out to overtake the Indians with their burden; set out, staying for nothing, and allowing nothing to hinder her. For, swiftly as she might go, every minute was still precious.
And now--now--as the night wind arose still more and the rusty red of the lightning turned to a more purple-violet hue--sure warning of the nearness of the coming storm--she was almost close to the beach where she knew Sebastian's crazy old craft was kept in common with one or two others; namely, a punt with a deep tank for fish, a scow, and a boat with oars. She was close to the beach, but with, at this time, her heart like lead in her bosom because of the fear she had that she was too late.
"No sound," she muttered to herself. "No voices to be heard. They are gone. They are gone. I am too late!"
Then, redoubling her exertions, she ran swiftly the remainder of the distance to where she knew the boathouse--an erection of poles with planks laid across them--stood.
And in a moment she knew that she was, indeed, too late. Where the yawl usually floated there was now an empty space; there was nothing in the boathouse but the punt and the rowboat.
"Oh! what to do," she cried, "what to do!" and she beat her breast as she so cried. "They have carried him out to sea, even now the yawl is sinking--has sunk--they will be on their way back. He is dead! he is dead! he must be dead by now!"
While, overcome by the horror and misery of her thoughts, she sank down to the ground. But not for long, however, since at such a crisis as this her strong--if often ungovernable--heart became filled with greater courage and resource. To sink to the ground, she told herself, to lie there wailing and moaning over the impending fate of him she loved, was not the way to avert that fate. Instead, she must be prompt and resolute.
She sprang, therefore, once more to her feet and--dark as was all around her, except for the light of a young crescent moon peeping up over the sea's rim and forcing a glimmer now and again through the banks of deep, leaden clouds which the wind was bringing up from that sea--made her way into the boathouse, where, swiftly unloosing the painter of the rowboat, she pushed the latter out into the tumbling waves and began to scull it.
"They must have gone straight out," she thought, "straight out. And they would not go far. Only to where the water is deep enough for the yawl to sink, or to encounter one of the many reefs--those jagged crested reefs which would make a hole in her far worse than fifty awls could do."
Then still bending her supple frame over the oars, while her little hands clenched them tightly, she rowed and rowed for dear life--as in actual truth it was!--her breath coming faster and faster with her exertions, her bosom heaving, but her courage indomitable.
"I may not be too late," she whispered again and again; "the boat may not yet have filled. I may not be too late."
Suddenly she paused affrighted, startled; her heart seemed to cease to beat, her hands were idle as they clutched the oars. Startled, and despairing!
For out here the water was calmer, there being on it only the long Atlantic roll that is so common beneath the roughness of the winds; except for the slapping and crashing of those waves against the bows of the boat with each rise and fall it made, there was scarcely any noise; certainly none such as those waves had made, and would make against the boathouse and the long line of the shore. So little noise that what she had heard before she heard again now, as she sat listening and terrified in her place. She caught the beat of oars in another boat, a boat that was drawing nearer to her with each fresh stroke--that was, also, drawing nearer to the boathouse.
The Indians were returning. Their work was done!
"I am too late," she moaned. "I am too late. God help us both!"
Then, too, she heard something else.
Over the waters, over the rolling waves, there came to her ears the clear sounds of a man singing in a high tenor--it was almost a high treble--a man singing a song in Maya which she, who was of their race, knew was one that, in bygone days the Caribs and natives had sung in triumph over the downfall of their enemies. A song which, when it was concluded, was followed by a little bleating laugh, one which she knew well enough, a laugh which only one man in all that neighbourhood could give. Then she heard words called out in a half-chuckling, half-gloating tone, still in Maya.
"'Sink him beneath the sea forever,' she say, 'forever beneath the sea.' And Paz he never for get, oh, never, never! Now he sunk," and again she heard the bleating laugh, and again the beginning of that wild Carib song of triumph.
Springing up, dropping the oars heedlessly--her heart almost bursting--the girl rose from her seat, then shrieked aloud--sending her voice in the direction where now there loomed before her eyes a blur beneath the moon's glimmer which she knew to be a boat. "Paz," she cried, "Paz, it is not true, say it is not true. Oh! Paz, where is he?"
"Where you wish. Where you tell me put him," the other called back, while still beneath the brawny, muscular strokes of the Indians rowing it, the boat swept on toward the shore. "Beneath the waves or soon will be. Breaking to pieces on Shark's Tooth Reef. Paz never forget."
"Beast! devil!" the girl cried in her agony, forgetting, or recalling with redoubled horror, that what had been done was her own doing, was perpetrated at her suggestion. "Return and help me to save him. Oh! come back."
But the boat was gone, was but a speck now beneath the moon, and she was alone upon the sea, over which the wind howled as it lashed it to fury at last.
"The Shark's Tooth Reef," she murmured. "The Shark's Tooth Reef, The worst of all around. Yet--yet--if caught on that, the yawl may not sink. Oh! oh!" and she muttered to herself some wild unexpressed words that were doubtless a prayer. Then she grasped the oars once more, which, since they were fixed by loops on to thole pins instead of being loose in rowlocks, had not drifted away as might otherwise have been the case, and set the boat toward the spot where the Shark's Tooth Reef was as nearly as she could guess.
"If I can but reach it," she muttered to herself. "If I can but reach it."
But now her labours were more intense than before, her struggles more terrible. For, coming straight toward the bow of the boat, the Atlantic rollers beat it back with every stroke she took, while also they deluged it with water, so that she knew ere long it must sink beneath the waves. Already there were three or four inches in the bottom--nay, more, for the stretchers were half-covered--another three of four and it would go down like lead. And each fresh wave that broke over the bows added a further quantity.
"To see him once again; only to see him though if not to save," she moaned--weeping at last; "to see him, to be able to tell him that though I sent him to his doom I loved him," while roused by the thought, she still struggled on, buffeted and beaten by the waves; breathless, almost lifeless--but still unconquered and unconquerable.
Suddenly she gave a gasp, a shriek. Close by her, rising up some twenty feet from the sea, there was a cone-shaped rock, jagged and serrated at its summit; black, too, and glistening as, in the rays of the fast rising young moon, the water streaming from off it. It was the Shark's Tooth Reef, so called because, from its long length of some fifty yards (a length also serrated and jagged like the under jaw of a dog), there rose that cone-shaped thing which resembled what it was named from.
And again she shrieked as, looking beyond the base of the cone, peering through the hurtling waves and white filmy spume and spray, she saw upon the further edge of the base of the reef a black, indistinct mass being beaten to and fro. She heard, too, the grinding of that mass against the reef, as well as its thumps as it was flung on and dragged off it by the swirling of the sea; she heard, how each time, the force of the impact became louder and more deadly.
"To reach him at last," she cried, "to die with him! To die together."
Then it seemed that into that quivering, nervous frame there came a giant's strength; it seemed as though the cords and sinews of her arms had become steel and iron, as though the little hands were vises in the power of their grip. "To die together," she thought again, as, with superhuman efforts, she forced her boat toward the battered, broken yawl.
Now, she was close to it--now!--then, with a crash her own boat was dashed against the larger one, its bow crushed in, in a moment, its stem lifted into the air. But, catlike, desperate, too, fighting fate with the determination of despair, she had seized the top of the yawl's side; had clung to it one moment while the sea thundered and broke against her feet below, and had then drawn herself up onto the deck over the side.
And he was there, lying half-in, half-out the little forecastle cuddy, bound and corded--insensible.
"I have found you, Sebastian," she whispered, her lips to his cold ones. "I have found you."
With an awful lurch the yawl heeled over, the man's body rolling like a log as it did so, and then Zara knew that the end had come. Even though he lived, nothing could save him now; his arms were bound tightly to his sides, the cords passing over his chest from left to right. He was without sense or power.
"Nothing can save him now--nor me," she said. "Nothing."
Then she forced her own little hands beneath those cords so that, thereby, she was bound to him; whereby if ever they were found, they would be found locked together; she grasping tightly, too, the top ply, so that neither wave, nor roll of sea, nor any force could tear them apart again. And if they were never found--still--still, nothing could part them more.
"Together," she murmured, for the last time, her own strength ebbing fast, "together forever. Together at the end. Always together now--in death!"
Calmly--almost contemptuously--as though she were in truth mistress of Desolada and a woman who conferred honour upon those who followed her, instead of one who was in actual fact their prisoner, Madame Carmaux led the way to that parlour wherein she had promised to divulge all; to reveal the secret of how another man had usurped for so long the place and position which rightfully belonged to Julian Ritherdon.
And they who followed her, observing how rigid, how masklike were the handsome features; how the soft, dark eyes gleamed now with a hard, determined look, knew that as she had said, so she would do; so she would perform. They recognised that she would not falter in her task, she deeming that what she divulged would tell in Sebastian's favour.
Still firm and calm, therefore, and still as though she were the owner of that house which she had ruled for so long with absolute sway, she motioned to Julian and Mr. Spranger to be seated--while standing before them enveloped in the long loose robe of soft black material in which she had been clad, and with the lace hood thrown back from her head and setting free the dark masses of hair which had always been one of her greatest beauties--hair in which there was scarcely, even now, a streak of white.
"It is," she murmured, when the lights had been brought, "for Sebastian's sake, if he still lives. And to prove to you that he is innocent--was innocent until almost the day when he, that other, came here," and her glance fell on Julian--"that I tell you all which I am about to do. Also, that I tell you how I alone am the guilty one."
Her eyes resting on those of Julian and Mr. Spranger, they both signified by a look that they were prepared to hear all she might have to narrate. Then, ere she began the recital she was about to make, she said:
"Yet, if you desire more witnesses, call them in. Let them hear, too. I care neither for what they may think of me, nor what testimony they may bear against me in the future. Call in whom you will."
For a moment the two men before her looked into each other's faces; then Mr. Spranger said:
"Perhaps it would be as well to have another witness, especially as Mr. Ritherdon is the most interested person. My daughter is outside, if--if your story contains nothing she may not hear----"
"It contains nothing," Madame Carmaux answered, there being a tone of contempt in it which she did not endeavour to veil, "but the story of a crime, a fraud, worked out by a deserted, heartbroken woman. Call her in."
Then, summoned by Julian, Beatrix entered the room, and, taking a seat between her father and her lover, was an ear-witness to all that the other woman had to tell.
For a moment it seemed as if Madame Carmaux scarce knew how to commence; for a few moments she stood before them, her eyes sometimes cast down upon the floor, sometimes seeking theirs. Then, suddenly, she said:
"That narrative which George Ritherdon wrote in England when he was dying, and sent to his brother Charles, who was himself close to his end, was true."
"It was true!" whispered Julian, repeating her words, "I knew it was! I was sure of it! Yet how--how--was the deception accomplished?"
"He loved me," madame exclaimed, she hardly, as it seemed, hearing or heeding Julian's remark. "Charles loved me--till he saw her, Isobel Leigh. And I--I--well, I had never loved any other man. I did not know what love was till I saw him. Then--then--he--what need to seek for easy words--he jilted me, and, in despair, I married Carmaux on the day that he married her. It seemed to my distracted heart that by doing so I might more effectually erase his memory from my mind forever. And my son was born but a week or so before you, Julian Ritherdon, were born."
"Sebastian. Not a daughter?" Julian said.
"Yes; Sebastian; not a daughter. Yet, later, when it was necessary that my child should be registered, I recorded the birth as that of a daughter, and at the same time I registered that daughter's death. Later, you will understand why it was necessary that any child of mine should disappear out of existence, and also why, above all things, it must never be known that I had a son."
Again Julian looked in Mr. Spranger's eyes, and Mr. Spranger into his, their glances telling each other plainly that, even now, they thought they began to understand.
"I heard," Madame Carmaux went on, "that she too had borne a son, and in some strange, heartbroken excitement that took possession of me, I determined to go and see Charles Ritherdon, to show him my child, to prove to him--as I thought it would do--that if he who had forgotten me was happy in marriage, so, too, was I. Happy! oh, my God! However, no matter for my happiness--I went.
"I arrived here late at night, and I found him almost distracted. His wife was dying: she could not live, they said; how was the child to live without her? Then I promised that, if he would let me stay on at Desolada, I would be as much a mother to that child as to my own, that I would forget his cruelty to me, that I would forgive.
"'Come,' he said to me, on hearing this, 'come and see them--come.' And I went with him to the room where she was, where you were," and she looked at Julian.
"I went to that room," she continued, "with every honest feeling in my heart that a woman who had sworn to condone a man's past faithlessness could have; before Heaven I swear that I went to that room resolved to be what I had said, a second mother to you. I went with pity in my heart for the poor dying woman--the woman who had never really loved her husband, but, instead, had loved his brother. For, as you know well enough, she had been forced to jilt George Ritherdon even as Charles had jilted me. I went to that room and then--then we learned that she was dead. But, also, we learned something else. There was no child by her side. It was gone. Its place was empty."
"I begin to understand," murmured Julian, while Beatrix and her father showed by their expression that to them also a glimmering of light was coming.
"Yet," said Madame Carmaux, "scarcely can you understand--scarcely dream of--the temptation that fell in my way. In a moment, at the instant that Charles Ritherdon saw that his child was missing, he cried, 'This is my brothers doing! It is he who has stolen it. To murder it, to be avenged on me for having won his future wife from him. I know it.' And, distractedly, he raved again and again that it was his brother's doing. In vain I tried to pacify him, saying that his brother was far away in the States. To my astonishment he told me that, on the contrary, he was here, close at hand, if not even now lurking in the plantation of Desolada, or at Belize.
"'I saw him there yesterday,' he cried, 'I saw him with my own eyes. Now I understand what took him there. It was to steal my child--to murder it. Great God! to thereby become my heir.'
"As he spoke there came a footfall in the passage; some one was coming. Perhaps the nurse returning; perhaps, also, if George Ritherdon had only been there a short time before us, she did not know that the child had been kidnapped. 'And if she does not know, then no one else can know,' he cried. 'While,' he said, 'if that unutterable villain, George, thinks to profit by this theft, I will thwart him. He may rob me of my child, he may murder the poor innocent babe--but he at least shall never be my heir,' and as he spoke his eyes fell on my child in my arms. 'Cover it up,' he whispered, 'show its face only, otherwise the clothes it wears will betray it. Cover it up.'"
"If this is true, the crime was his," whispered Julian.
"That crime was his," said Madame Carmaux, "the rest was mine. But--let me continue. As Charles spoke, the nurse was at the door--a negro woman who died six months afterward--a moment later she was in the room. Yet not before I had had time to whisper a word in his ear, to say, 'If I do this, it is forever? If your child is never found, is mine to remain in its place?'--and with a glance he seemed to answer, 'Yes.'
"None ever knew of that substitution, no living soul ever knew that the child growing up as his, its birth registered by him at Belize as his, was, in truth, mine. Not one living soul. Nor were you ever heard of again. We agreed to believe that you had been made away with. Yet, as time went on, Charles Ritherdon seemed to repent of what he had done; he came to think that, after all, his brother might not have been the thief, or, being so, that he had not slain the child; to also think that perhaps some of the half-castes or Indians, on whom he was occasionally hard, might have stolen it out of revenge. And it required all my tears and supplications, all my prayers to him to remember that, had he not been cruelly false to me, it would in truth have been our child which was the rightful heir, which was here--his child and mine! At last he consented--provided that the other--the real child--you--were never heard of again. My son should remain in his son's place, if you never appeared to claim that place.
"Sebastian grew up in utter ignorance of all; he grew up also to resemble strangely the man who was supposed to be his father--perhaps because from the moment I married Monsieur Carmaux it was not his image but that of Charles Ritherdon which was ever in my mind.
"But when George Ritherdon's statement came, and with it the information that you were in existence, Charles determined to tell Sebastian everything. He would have done so, too, but that the illness he was suffering from took a fatal termination almost directly afterward--doubtless from the shock of learning what he did. Yet it made no difference, for the day after his death Sebastian found the paper and so discovered all."
"He knew then," said Julian--though as he spoke his voice was not harsh, he recognising how cruel had been this woman's lot from the first, and how doubly cruel must have been the blow which fell on her when, after twenty-five years of possession, the son whom she had loved so, and had schemed so for, was about to be dispossessed--"he knew then who I was when we first met, and--and--God forgive him!--from that moment commenced to plot my death."
"No!" cried Madame Carmaux. "No! Have I not said that he was innocent? It was I--I--who plotted--alas! he was my son. Will not a mother do all for her only child? It was I who changed the horses in their stalls, putting his, which none but he could ride in safety, in place of the sure-footed one he had destined for you; it was I--God help and pardon me! who put the coral snake in your bed--I--I--who did the rest you know of."
"And did you, too, procure the Indians who were to take me out to sea and drown me?" asked Julian with a doubtful glance at her. "Surely not. There was a man's hand in that. And it was Sebastian who was advancing along the passage when Zara's knife struck him down."
"By instigation I did it," Madame Carmaux cried, determined to the last to shield the son she still hoped to meet again in this world--"the suggestion, the plot was mine alone. While because he was weak, because from the first he has ever yielded to me, he yielded now. Spare him!" she cried, and flung herself upon her knees before that listening trio, her calmness, her contemptuousness, vanished now. "Spare him, and do with me what you will."
So the story was told, so the discovery of all was made at last. Julian knew now upon how simple a thing--the fact of Madame Carmaux having taken that strange determination to go and see the man who had cast her off and jilted her, carrying her child in her arms--the whole mystery had rested. But what he never knew was that, had Zara lived, she could have also told him all. For in the savage girl's love for the man, who in his turn had treated her badly, and in her determination to be ever watching over him, she had long since overheard scraps of conversation which had revealed the secret to her in the same way as they had done to Paz.
And it was to her, and her determination to prevent Sebastian from committing any crime by which his life or his liberty might become imperilled, that Julian owed the fact that he had not long since died by the hand of Madame Carmaux--if not by that of Sebastian.
"And on her lover's arm she leaned,
And 'round her waist she felt it fold."
Some two or three months of Julian's leave remained to expire at the time when the foregoing explanation had taken place, and perhaps nothing which had occurred since the day when he first set foot in British Honduras had caused him more perplexity than his present deliberations as to how to make the best of that period.
For now he knew that he had done with the colony for ever; he had achieved that for which he had come to it; he had proved the truth of George Ritherdon's statement up to the hilt, and--in so far as obtaining the possession of that which was undoubtedly his--well! the law would soon take steps to enable him to do so.
Only, when he told himself that he had done with the colony, when he reflected that henceforth his foot would never tread on its earth more, he had also to tell himself that he could alone consent to sever his connection with it by also taking away with him the most precious thing it contained in his eyes--Beatrix Spranger.
"For," he said to that young lady, as once more they sat in the garden at "Floresta," with about and around them all the surroundings that he had learned to know so well and to recall during many of the gloomy nights and days he had spent at Desolada--the great shade palms, the gorgeous flamboyants and delicate oleander blossoms, as well as the despairing looking and lugubrious monkey--"for, darling, I cannot go without you. If I were to do so, Heaven alone knows when I could return to claim you; and, also, I cannot wait. Sweetheart, you too must sail for England with me, and it must be as Mrs. Ritherdon."
He said the same thing often. Indeed at night, which is--as those acquainted with such matters tell us--the period when young ladies pass in review the principal events that have happened to them during the day, Beatrix used to consider, or rather to calculate, that he made the same remark about twenty times daily. While, since, loving and gentle as she was, she was also possessed of a considerable amount of feminine perspicacity, she supposed that he reiterated the phrase upon the principle that the constant drop of water which falls upon a stone will at last wear it away.
"Though," the girl would say to herself in those soft hours of maiden meditation, "he need not fear. He cannot but think that his longing is also shared by me."
Aloud, however, when once more he repeated what had become almost a set phrase, she said:
"You know that you have taken an unfair advantage of me. Indeed, though it was only by chance, you have put me to terrible mortification. You overheard my avowal to that unhappy girl, my avowal that--that--I loved you." And Beatrix blushed most beautifully as she softly uttered the words. "Think what an avowal it was. To be made by a woman for a man who had never asked for her love."
"Had he not," Julian said, "had he not, Beatrix? Never asked for that love on one happy day spent alone by that woman's side, when he confided everything to her that bore upon his presence here; and she, full of soft and gentle sympathy, told him all her fears and anxiety for the risks he might run. And, did he not ask for that love on the night which followed that day, as they rode back to Belize beneath the stars?"
And now his eyes were gazing into hers with a look of love which no woman could doubt, even though no other man had ever looked at her so before; while since loverlike, they were sitting close together, his arm stole round her waist.
To the inexperienced--the present narrator included--it may be permitted to wonder how lovers learn to do these things as well as how they discover, too, the efficacy of such subtle tenderness; yet one is told that they are done, and that the success thereof is indisputable.
Nor, with Beatrix, did either the look of love or the soft environment of his arm fail in their effort, as may be judged from her answer to his whispered question, "It shall be, shall it not, darling?"
"Yes," she murmured, blushing again and more deeply. "Yes. If father permits."
And so Julian's love grew toward a triumphant termination; yet still there were other matters to be seen to and arranged ere he, with his wife by his side, should quit the colony forever. One thing, however, it transpired, would require little trouble in arranging; namely, the property of Desolada, when the law should put him in possession of it, since, on investigation being made after the disappearance of Sebastian, it was found to be so heavily mortgaged that to pay off the loans upon it would leave Julian without any capital whatever; while, at the same time, he would be saddled with a possession in a country with which he had nothing in common. Of what had become of the money left by Charles Ritherdon at his death (and it had been a substantial sum) or of what had become of the other sums borrowed on Desolada, there was no one to inform them.
Sebastian had disappeared, was undoubtedly gone forever--and of his fate there could be little doubt. Certainly there could be no doubt in the minds of either Beatrix or Julian or of Mr. Spranger, who had of course been made acquainted with the substitution of Sebastian for Julian. Zara also had disappeared, and Madame Carmaux had--escaped.
How she had done it no one ever knew, but in the morning which followed that eventful night when she made her confession, she was missing from her room, at the door of which one of the constabulary had been set as a guard. That she should be able so to evade those who were passing the night at Desolada was easily to be comprehended when, the next day, her room was examined; they understood how she might have passed on to the balcony outside that room, have traversed it for some distance, and then have made her way into some other apartment, and so from that have descended the great stairs in the darkness, and stolen away into the plantations. At any rate, whether these surmises were correct or not, she was gone, and she has never since been seen in British Honduras.
Yet one planter, who makes frequent journeys to New Orleans in connection with his imports and exports, declares that only a few months ago he saw her in Lafayette Square in that city. It was at the time when the terrible scourge of Louisiana, the yellow fever, is most dreaded, and even as the planter entered the Square he saw a man lying prostrate on the ground, while afar off from him, because of fear of the infection, yet regarding him with a gaping curiosity, was a crowd of negroes and whites. Then, still watching the scene, this gentleman saw a woman clad in the garb of a Nun of Calvary, who approached the prostrate man, and, while calling on those near to assist him, ministered to his wants in so far as she could. And, her veil falling aside, the planter declared that he saw plainly the face of the woman who, in British Honduras, had been known for a quarter of a century as Miriam Carmaux. He also recognized her voice.
If such were the case, if, at last, that tempestuous soul--the soul of a woman who, in her earlier days, had had meted out to her a more cruel fate than falls to the lot of most women--if at last the erring woman who had been driven to fraud and crime by the love she bore her child--had found calm, if not peace, beneath that holy garb, perhaps those who have heard her story may be disposed to think of her without harshness. Such was the case with Julian Ritherdon, who, as she made her confession, forgave her for all that she had attempted against him--since she was scarcely a greater sinner than his own father, who had countenanced the fraud she perpetrated, or his uncle, whose early vindictiveness led to that fraud. Such, also, was the case with Beatrix, from whose gentle eyes fell tears as she listened to the narrative told by the unhappy woman while she was yet uncertain of the doom of the son for whom she had so long schemed and plotted. And so let it be with others. If she had erred, so also she had suffered. And, by suffering, is atonement made.