CHAPTER XXXIII.

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.