"On this threshold you told me suddenly that Bludyer was a villain, and had betrayed your sister Aldina; that she had fled with him that night; that he could never marry her, as you had reason to know he had a wife alive. You made me swear to help you in your vengeance against him. We entered the room, as we enter it now."
Our leader had opened the door of the room,[53] and we were in the same chamber I had wandered to when I had slept at The Mere. The figure of Geoffrey Ringwood paused at the round table, and looked again at Mr. Maryon, who proceeded:
"You went straight to the fifth panel from the fireplace, and then touched a spring, and the panel opened. You said that the will giving this property to your father and his heirs was to be found there. I was convinced that you spoke the truth, but, suddenly remembering your love of gambling, I suggested that we should play for it. You accepted at once. We searched among the papers, and found the will. We placed the will upon the table, and began to play. We agreed that we would play up to ten thousand pounds. Your luck was marvellous. In two hours the limit was reached. I owed you ten thousand pounds, and had lost The Mere. You laughed, and said, ‘Well, John, you have had a fair chance. At ten o'clock this morning I shall expect you to pay me your debt of honor.' I rose; the devil of despair strong upon me. With one hand I swept the cards from the table into the fire, and with the other seized you by the throat, and dealt you a blow upon the temple. You fell dead upon the floor."
Need I say that as I heard this fearful narrative, I recognized the actions of the sleep-walker, and understood them all?
"To the end!" said the hollow voice. "Confess to the end!"
"The doctor who examined your body gave his opinion, at the inquest, that you had died of apoplexy,[54] caused by strong cerebral excitement. My evidence was to the effect that I believed you had lost a very large sum of money to Captain Bludyer, and that you had told me you were utterly unable to pay it. The jury found their verdict accordingly, and I was left in undisturbed possession of The Mere. But the memory of my crime haunted me as only such memories can haunt a criminal, and I became a morose and miserable man. One thing bound me to life-my daughter. When Reginald Westcar appeared upon the scene I thought that the debt of honor would be satisfied if he married Agnes. Then Bludyer reappeared, and he told me that he knew that I had killed you. He threatened to revive the story, to exhume your body, and to say that Aldina Ringwood had told him all about the will. I could purchase his silence only by giving him my daughter, the heiress of The Mere. To this I consented."
As he said these last words, Mr. Maryon sunk heavily into the chair.
The figure of Geoffrey Ringwood placed one ghostly hand upon his left temple, and then passed silently out of the room. I started up, and followed the phantom along the corridor-down the staircase-out at the front door, which still stood open-across the snow-covered lawn-into the plantation; and then it disappeared as strangely as I first had seen it; and, hardly knowing whether I was mad or dreaming, I found my way back to The Shallows.
For some weeks I was ill with brain-fever. When I recovered I was told that terrible things[55] had happened at The Mere. Mr. Maryon had been found dead in Sir Henry Benet's room-an effusion of blood upon the brain, the doctors said-and the body of Colonel Bludyer had been discovered in the snow in an old disused gravel-pit not far from the house.
A year afterward I married Agnes Maryon; and, if all that I had seen and heard upon that 3d of February was not merely the invention of a fevered brain, the debt of honor was at last discharged, for I, the nephew of the murdered Geoffrey Ringwood, became the owner of The Mere.[56 – 58]
[59] DEVEREUX'S DREAM.
I GIVE you this story only at second-hand; but you have it in substance-and he wasted few words over it-as Paul Devereux told it me.
It was not the only queer story he could have told about himself if he had chosen, by a good many, I should say. Paul's life had been an eminently unconventional one: the man's face certified to that-hard, bronzed, war-worn, seamed and scarred with strange battle-marks-the face of a man who had dared and done most things.
It was not his custom to speak much of what he had done, however. Probably only because he and I were little likely to meet again that he told me this I am free to tell you now.
We had come across one another for the first time for years that afternoon on the Italian Boulevart. Paul had landed a couple of weeks previously at Marseilles from a long yacht-cruise in southern waters, the monotony of which we heard had been agreeably diversified by a little pirate-hunting and slaver-chasing-the evil tongues called it piracy and slave-running; and certainly Devereux was quite equal to either métier; and he was about starting on a promising little filibustering expedition across the Atlantic, where the chances were he would be shot, and the certainty was that he would be starved. So perhaps he felt inclined to[60] be a trifle more communicative than usual, as we sat late that night over a blazing pyre of logs and in a cloud of Cavendish. At all events he was, and after this fashion.
I forget now exactly how the subject was led up to. Expression of some philosophic incredulity on my part regarding certain matters, followed by a ten-minutes' silence on his side pregnant with unwonted words to come-that was it, perhaps. At last he said, more to himself, it seemed, than to me:
‘Such stuff as dreams are made of.' Well, who knows? You're a Sadducee, Bertie; you call this sort of thing, politely, indigestion. Perhaps you're right. But yet I had a queer dream once."
"Not unlikely," I assented.
"You're wrong; I never dream, as a rule. But, as I say, I had a queer dream once; and queer because it came literally true three years afterward."
"Queer indeed, Paul."
"Happens to be true. What's queerer still, my dream was the means of my finding a man I owed a long score, and a heavy one, and of my paying him in full."
"Bad for the payee!" I thought.
Paul's face had grown terribly eloquent as he spoke those last words. On a sudden the expression of it changed-another memory was stirring in him. Wonderfully tender the fierce eyes grew; wonderfully tender the faint, sad smile, that was like sunshine on storm-scathed granite. That smile transfigured the man before me.
[61] "Ah, poor child-poor Lucille!" I heard him mutter.
That was it, was it? So I let him be. Presently he lifted his head. If he had let himself get the least thing out of hand for a moment, he had got back his self-mastery the next.
"I'll tell you that queer story, Bertie, if you like," he said.
The proposition was flatteringly unusual, but the voice was quite his own.
"Somehow I'd sooner talk than think about-her," he went on after a pause.
I nodded. He might talk about this, you see, but Icouldn't. He began with a question-an odd one:
"Did you ever hear I'd been married?"
Paul Devereux and a wife had always seemed and been to me a most unheard-of conjunction. So I laconically said:
"No."
"Well, I was once, years ago. She was my wife-that child-for a week. And then---"
I easily filled up the pause; but, as it happened, I filled it up wrongly; for he added:
"And then she was murdered."
I was not unused to our Paul's stony style of talk; but this last sentence was sufficiently <ins class="translit" title="original has start ling">startling</ins>.
"Eh?"
"Murdered-in her sleep. They never found the man who did it either, though I had Durbec and all the Rue de Jérusalem at work. But I forgave them that, for I found the man myself, and killed him."
[62]He was filling his pipe again as he told me this, and he perhaps rammed the Cavendish in a little tighter, but that was all. The thing was a matter of course; I knew my Paul, well enough to know that. Of course he killed him.
"Mind you," he continued, kindling the black brûle-gueulethe while-"mind you, I'd never seen this man before, never known of his existence, except in a way that-however, it was this way."
He let his grizzled head drop back on the cushions of his chair, and his eyes seemed to see the queer story he was telling enacted once more before him in the red hollows of the fire.
"As I said, it was years ago. I was waiting here in Paris for some fellows who were to join me in a campaign we'd arranged against the African big game. I never was more fit for anything of that sort than I was then. I only tell you this to show you that the thing can't be accounted for by my nerves having been out of order at all.
"Well: I was dining alone that day, at the Café Anglais. It was late when I sat down to my dinner in the little salon as usual. Only two other men were still lingering over theirs. All the time they stayed they bored me so persistently with some confounded story of a murder they were discussing, that I was once or twice more than half-inclined to tell them so. At last, though, they went away.
"But their talk kept buzzing abominably in my head. When the waiter brought me the evening paper, the first thing that caught my eye was a circumstantial account of the probableway the fellow did his murder. I say probable, for they[63] never caught him; and, as you will see directly, they could only suppose how it occurred.
"It seemed that a well-known Paris banker, who was ascertained beyond doubt to have left one station alive and well, and with a couple of hundred thousand francs in a leathern sacunder his seat, arrived at the next station the train stopped at with his throat cut and minusall his money, except a few bank-notes to no great amount, which the assassin had been wise enough to leave behind him. The train was a night express on one of the southern lines; the banker travelled quite alone, in a first-class carriage; and the murder must have taken place between midnight and 1 a.m. next morning. The newspapers supposed-rightly enough, I think-that the murderer must have entered the carriage from without, stabbed his victim in his sleep-there were no signs of any struggle-opened the sac, taken what he wanted, and retreated, loot and all, by the way he came. I fully indorsed my particular writer's opinion that the murderer was an uncommonly cool and clever individual, especially as I fancy he got clear off and was never afterward laid hands on.