"Carlita!"
The name escaped him in a hoarse, gasping cry as she staggered across
the room toward him, her frail strength almost exhausted in her effort
to reach him. She would have fallen there at his feet, but that he
caught her in his arms, and as he would have placed her in a chair she
caught the lapels of his coat and held herself close to him by the very
strength of despair.
"No!" she gasped. "Give me courage by the strength of your touch to
tell my awful story. If you turn from me I shall die before it is
finished, and then all will be lost! I told you that I was betraying
you to ruin and death, but you would not believe me, would not listen.
Great God, Leith, it was so hideously true! Do you know what I have
done? Will you despise me, when you have heard, as I despise myself?"
He looked down at her. Knowing what he knew, he still could not keep
his arms from supporting her. Knowing what he knew, he could force his
lips to say no word of blame.
"Let me hide my face while I tell you!" she cried, concealing it in his
bosom. "I have betrayed you! I have sought your ruin! I discovered that
you had killed Olney Winthrop--see? I can say it without so much as a
shiver now--and I have put you in the hands of the law with every chain
of the ghastly story complete. They are coming even now to arrest you.
There is not a moment to lose. You must go at once!"
He held her back from him and strove to look at her downcast face.
"Why have you come here to tell me this?" he asked hoarsely. "Now that
you have about accomplished your revenge, why do you warn me of the
danger?"
It never occurred to her to wonder at his apparent knowledge of it all.
She only cried out in an agony of remorse:
"Why, don't you understand without my telling you? Don't you see it
all? I love you! Surely you know that. Surely you have read it from
the beginning, even when I was so hideously unconscious. I have loved
you from the first, best of all, and I love you now as it never seemed
possible that any human thing could love. I would give my life, my very
soul itself to undo this awful thing that I have done!"
"And yet you believe me guilty of this crime?"
"What right have I to judge you?" she cried, feverishly, endeavoring
to remove her face from his gaze. "What do I know of your temptation?
Oh, just God, it is that which has cursed me! I shut my eyes to the
sweetest sentiment He ever put into a human soul, and set myself up to
usurp His authority--to avenge! This is my punishment. See, Leith, I do
not endeavor to conceal my face. I do not try to hide my shame. If you
go to the gallows, I go too, for the crime is half mine. I have striven
not to lose my reason during these last few, awful days when I was kept
a prisoner in my own room, from which I have only now escaped in order
that I might know all that was taking place, in order that I might die
with you!"
"Wait, Carlita! You are speaking so wildly that I don't quite follow
you. You say--"
"There isn't time!" she gasped. "There isn't time! They may be here
at any moment, and you must make your escape before they come. I will
find some means of throwing them off the track--of preventing their
following you until your escape is assured. But you must go at once--at
once!"
He looked at her curiously, a strange expression crossing his face.
"With you?" he asked.
"I will follow you, if you wish it!" she cried, desperately. "You can
find some means of communicating with me--of letting me know where you
are--and I swear I will come to you when you send."
"Believing me to be a--murderer?"
She shivered.
"We will never mention that between us," she groaned. "We will begin a
new life--a new life in a new country--and forget. Oh, Leith, there is
no more time! For God's sake--for my sake--go!"
He smiled and kissed her.
For some reason the ghastly whiteness had disappeared from his
countenance. He held her very closely in his arms, observing that she
did not shrink from the embrace. He lifted her face so that her lips
rested close to his own, as he said gently:
"How great must be the strength of love when innocence does not turn
away appalled at guilt. Darling, suppose I should tell you that I do
not fear the coming of these men? Suppose I should tell you that I do
not fear the investigation of all the world, because I am innocent of
the crime with which I have been charged--because I was not even by
when Olney was pushed into the Donato Mine?"
She staggered back from him, her face growing whiter, more sunken than
it had been before. She did not touch him then, but as he would have
taken her again in his arms, motioned him back, passing her hands
across her eyes to clear her vision.
"I thought to spare you and--and him," Leith cried swiftly, hurrying
through the tale, because he saw how she was suffering; "but I have
realized now that nothing under heaven will justify a lie. That was my
sin, Carlita; but nothing beyond that, I swear to you. Half an hour
ago I would have scorned to justify myself in your eyes, but such love
as yours does not come into the lives of many men. Listen, darling.
Even in those old days when you scorned me, I loved you so well that I
wished to spare you any pain that it lay in my power to save you from.
I knew your pure white innocence and the suffering it would entail
upon you to discover that the lover you had chosen in preference to
me was not the man you had pictured him. Carlita, a woman's idea of a
man--particularly a young girl's brought up in the untarnished school
you were--and a man's idea of a man are not the same. You demand purity
of him as he demands it of you, and while Olney was my friend--while
I loved him like a brother--I wished to save you from a knowledge
of--his past. Two years ago, when Olney was in Mexico he met a girl
with whom he thought he fell in love. She was a hot-blooded Mexican,
who loved him in return, but with a sort of savage ferocity. She was
the daughter of Manuel Meriaz. When Olney left Mexico there was some
kind of an understanding between them--a relationship with which I
would not offend your pure ears. But Olney forgot her in a short time.
When he went back to Mexico, I believe he had ceased to remember her
very existence; but she had not forgotten him. She and her father were
at the mines. She reminded Olney of his old promise to marry her. She
even pleaded with him to keep his word. She loved him fondly, and--well
Carlita, he should have made good his broken troth, because there was
a--a little infant in Mexico--a tiny dead child, upon whose tomb there
was no name."
"Great God!"
"Olney could not be brought to see the justice in her claim, because he
loved you, and one day, after a violent scene, in which she besought
him to make good the old promise, for their dead baby's sake, there,
under the desolation of the forsaken mine, where she had summoned him
for a rendezvous, she pushed him to his death. I swear to you that I
do not believe she meant to kill him, and so, in pity for her blighted
life, I tried to save her from the punishment of her crime--to save him
from the shame of public infamy, and you from the bitter knowledge of
it all. Manuel Meriaz knew this story. He cared little enough, Heaven
knows, for the disgrace of the poor girl, so long as he could gain
money through it, and so I bought his silence, which he had discovered
was of value to me because of my affection for Olney and my love for
you. Carlita, before God, this is all the truth!"
They were both so interested that they had not heard the opening of the
front door again, nor the low-spoken words in the hall, for Carlita had
fallen upon her knees at the feet of the man she loved.
"Father in heaven, the punishment is greater than I can bear!" she was
crying aloud, in her agony. "Innocent! Innocent, and I have--"
But already she was in his arms, the wild words hushed by his
passionate kisses.
"Darling," he whispered, "my full forgiveness is measured by the
magnitude of your love. I should have told you--I should have trusted
you."
And then, as he lifted his head, he saw two men standing already inside
the door--Stolliker and the Mexican officer in uniform.