MADAME CARMAUX TELLS ALL.
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.