CHAPTER XXVI.

"YOU HAVE KILLED HIM!"

Before however, Julian descended to confront Sebastian he thought it was necessary to do two things; first, to light the lamp to see how much of that accursed Amancay had been spilt by the broken phial, and next--which was the more important--to recharge and look to his revolver. For he thought it very likely that after he had said all he intended to say to Sebastian, he might find the weapon useful.

When he had obtained a light by the aid of the matches which he was never without, he saw that his surmises were fully justified. Upon the floor there lay, glistening, innumerable pieces of broken glass and the half of a broken phial, while all around the _débris_ was a small pool of liquid shining on the polished wooden floor. And from it there arose an odour so pungent and so f[oe]tid, that he began almost at once to feel coming over him the hazy, drowsy stupefaction that he had been conscious of last night. So seizing his water-jug he unceremoniously sluiced the floor with its contents, washing away and subduing the noisome exhalation; when taking his revolver from his pocket and seeing carefully to its being charged, he dropped it into his pocket again. He took with him, too, the remnants of the broken phial.

"I shall only return here to pack my few things," he thought to himself, "but, all the same it is as well to have destroyed that stuff. Otherwise the room would have been poisoned with it."

And now--taking no light with him, for his experience of the last two hours had taught him, even had he not known it before, the way down to the garden--he descended, going out by the way that Paz had led him and so around to the lower veranda. A moment later he reached it, and mounting the steps, entered the saloon in which he expected to find Sebastian.

The man was there, he saw at once even before he stood close by the open window. He was there, sitting at the great table where the meals were partaken of; but looking dark and brooding now. Upon his face, as Julian could easily perceive, there was a scowl, and in his eyes an ominous look that might have warned a less bold man than the young sailor that he was in a dangerous mood.

"Has she been with him already," Julian wondered, "and informed him that their precious schemes are at an end, are discovered?"

"Ha!" exclaimed Sebastian, looking fixedly at him, as now Julian advanced into the room, "so you are well enough to come downstairs to-night. Yet--it is a little late. You have scarcely come to sing me those wardroom songs you spoke of, I suppose!"

"No," Julian said, "it is not to sing songs that I am here. But to talk about serious matters. Sebastian Ritherdon--if you are Sebastian Ritherdon, which I think doubtful--you have got to give me an explanation to-night, not only of who you really are, but also of the reason why, during the time I have been in this locality, you have four times attempted my life, or caused it to be attempted."

"Are you mad?" the other exclaimed, staring at him with still that ominous look upon his face. "You must be to talk to me like this."

"No," Julian replied. "Instead, perfectly sane. I was, perhaps, more or less demented last night when under the influence of the fumes of the Amancay plant which had been sprinkled on my pillow, as well as on my jacket and waistcoat; and you also were more or less demented to-night when you had by an accident taken some of the poison into your system, owing to you making a meal of the doctored mountain mullet you had prepared for me--your guest. But--now--we are both recovered and--an explanation is needed."

"My God!" exclaimed Sebastian, "you must be mad!"

Yet, in his own heart, he knew well enough that never was the calm, determined-looking man before him--the man who, hitherto, had been so bright and careless, but who now stood stern as Nemesis at the other end of the table--further removed from madness than he was this night. He knew and felt that it was not with a lunatic but an avenger that he had to deal.

"I am not mad," Julian replied calmly. "Meanwhile, take your right hand out of that drawer by your side, and keep it out. Pistol shots will disturb the whole house, and, if you do not do as I bid you I shall have to fire first," and he tapped his breast significantly as he spoke, so that the other could be in no doubt of his meaning.

"Now," he continued, when Sebastian had obeyed him, he laughing with a badly assumed air of contempt as he did so, all the same, laying his large brown hand upon the table--"now," said Julian, "I will tell you all that I believe to be the case in connection with you and with me, all that I know to have been the case in connection with your various attempts to injure me, and, also, all that I intend to do, to-morrow, when I reach Belize and have taken the most eminent lawyer in the place into my confidence."

As he mentioned the word "lawyer," Sebastian started visibly; then, once more, he assumed the contemptuous expression he had previously endeavoured to exhibit, but beyond saying roughly again that Julian was a madman, he made no further remark for the moment, and sat staring, or rather glaring, at the other man before him. Yet, had that other man been able to thoroughly comprehend, or follow, that glance--which, owing to the lamp being between them, he was not entirely able to do--he would have seen that, instead of resting on his face, it was directed to beyond where he stood. That it went past him to away down to the farther end of the room; to where the open window was.

"Charles Ritherdon," said Julian now, "had a son born in this house twenty-six years ago, and that son was stolen within two or three days of his birth by his uncle, George Ritherdon. You are not that son, and you know it. Yet you know who is. You know that I am."

"You lie," Sebastian said with an oath; "you are an impostor. And even if what you say is true--who am I? I," he said, his voice rising now, either with anger or excitement, "who have lived here all my life, who have been known from a child by dozens of people still alive? Who am I, I say?"

"That at present I do not know. Perhaps the lawyer to whom I confide my case will be able to discover."

"Lawyer! Bah! A curse for your lawyers. What can you tell him, what proof produce?"

And still, as he spoke, he kept his eyes fixed, as Julian thought, upon him, but in absolute fact upon that portion of the room which was in shadow behind where the latter stood.

Upon, too--although Julian knew it not, and did not, indeed, for one moment suspect such to be the case--a white face, that, peeping round the less white curtains which hung by the window, never moved the dark eyes that shone out of it from off the back of the man who confronted Sebastian. Fixed upon, too, the form to which that face belonged, which, even as Sebastian had raised his voice, had drawn itself a few feet nearer to the other; finding shelter now behind the curtains of the next or nearest window.

"I can at least produce the proofs," Julian replied, his eyes still regarding the other, and knowing nothing of that creeping listener behind, "that my presence in Honduras--at Desolada as your invited guest--caused you so much consternation, so much dismay, that you hesitated at nothing which might remove me from your path. What will the law believe, what will these people who have known you from your infancy--as you say--think, when they learn that three times at least, if not more, you have attempting my life?"

"Again I say it is a lie!" Sebastian muttered hoarsely.

"And I can prove that it is the truth. I can prove that this woman, this accomplice of yours--this woman whom my father--not _your_ father, but _my_ father--jilted, threw away, so that he might marry Isobel Leigh, my mother--fired at me with a rifle known to be hers and used by her on small game. I can prove that she poisoned the meal that was to be partaken of by me; that even so late as to-night she drenched the floor of my room--as she meant again to drench the pillow on which I slept--with the deadly juice of the Amancay--with this," and he held before Sebastian the broken phial he had found above.

"You can prove nothing," Sebastian muttered hoarsely, raucously. "Nothing."

"Can I not? I have two witnesses."

"Two witnesses!" the other whispered, and now indeed he looked dismayed. "Two witnesses. Yet--what of that, of them! Even though they could prove this--which they can not--what else can they prove? Even though I am not Charles Ritherdon's son and you are--even though such were the case--which it is not--how prove it?"

"That remains to be seen. But, though it should never be proved; even though you and that murderous accomplice of yours, that discarded sweetheart of my father's, that woman who I believe, as I believe there is a God in Heaven, was the prime mover in this plot----"

"Silence!" cried Sebastian, springing to his feet now, yet still with that look in his eyes which Julian did not follow; that look towards where the white corpse-faced creature was by this time--namely, five feet nearer still to Julian--"silence, I say. That woman is not, shall not, be defamed by you. Neither here or elsewhere. She--she--is--ah! God, she has been my guardian angel--has repaid evil for good. My father threw her off--discarded her--and she came here, forgiving him at the last in his great sorrow. She helped to rear me--his son--to----"

"Now," said Julian, still calmly, "it is you who lie, and the lie is the worse because you know it. Some trick was played on him whom you still dare to call your father, on him who was mine--never will I believe he was a party to it!--and before Heaven I do believe that it was she who played it. She never forgave him for his desertion of her; she, this would be murderess--this poisoner--and--and--ah!"

What had happened to him? What had occurred? As he uttered the last words, accusing that woman of being a murderess in intention, if not in fact--a poisoner--he felt a terrible concussion at the nape of his neck, a blow that sent him reeling forward towards the other side of that table against which Sebastian had sat, and at which he now stood confronting him. And, dazed, numbed as this blow had caused him to become, so that now the features of the man before him--those features that were so like his own!--were confused and blurred, though with still a furious, almost demoniacal expression in them, he scarcely understood as he gave that cry that in his nostrils was once more the sickening overpowering odour of the Amancay--that it was suffocating, stifling him.

Then with another cry, which was not an exclamation this time, but instead, a moan, he fell forward, clutching with his hands at the tablecloth, and almost dragging the lamp from off the table. Fell forward thus, then sank to his knees, and next rolled senseless, oblivious to everything, upon the floor.

"You have killed him!" muttered Sebastian hoarsely, and with upon his face now a look of terror. "You have killed him! My God! if any others should be outside, should have seen"--while, forgetting that what he was about to do would be too late if those others might be outside of whom he had spoken, he rushed to both the windows and hastily closed the great shutters, which, except in the most violent tempests that at scarce intervals break over British Honduras, were rarely used.

And she, that woman standing there above her victim with her face still white as is the corpse's in its shroud, her lips flecked with specks of foam, her hands quivering, muttered in tones as hoarse as Sebastian's:

"Killed him. Ay! I hope so. Curse him, there has been enough of his prying, his seeking to discover the truth of our secret. And--and--if it were not so--then, still, I would have done it. You heard--you heard--how he sneered, gloated over my despair, my abandonment by Charles Ritherdon, so that he might marry that child--that chit--Isobel Leigh. The woman who cursed, who broke my life. Killed him, Sebastian! Killed him! Yes! That at least is what I meant to do. Because, Heaven help me! you were not man enough to do it yourself."