Chapter XXXII: Talbot’s Suspicions

All unconscious of the portentous events happening at home, Talbot Strangemore pursued his wanderings from city to city, from clime to clime, in restless search after that fabled Lethean stream in whose waves one may bury all the woeful memories found too heavy to carry through the pilgrimage of life. Oswald Ferris bore him indefatigable company in his strange pursuit.

He was a very peculiar man, this Oswald Ferris with his tall, proud form, and dark, corsair like beauty. He was a brilliant conversationalist, and shone in society, although after all, men liked him best. Women like Virgie Mason shrunk from him without a reason why, but Sibyl St. Alban had been hand-and-glove with him for a brief season. She had taught him

“All the cruel madness of love,
The honey of poison-flowers,
And all the measureless ill.”

The little coquette had scarcely understood the nature of the man she had fooled with such charming grace in the early days of her widowhood, when, having been debarred from the pastime for some months, she entered upon it with new zest and pleasure. Ferris had been a splendid subject, too, for he seemed so ignorant of womanly coquetry and was so jealous, passionate, and intense, that he was a constant amusement to Sibyl. She greatly enjoyed “playing this big fish” as Cameron and the others phrased it, enjoyed it, systematically, until Strangemore joined them, then as her slighted lover said, she threw him over.

She was tired of him, and here was another subject, that was all Sibyl thought about it. She did not think about the adoring heart, the fiery temper, the passionate, undisciplined nature of the man she had wronged, nor of the fiery desire and longing for vengeance that rose from the ashes of his dead love. He had served her purpose, and she was done with him. She bent herself to the delightful task of winning Talbot Strangemore from his child-bride at home, and forgot all about Oswald Ferris, save when she was reminded of his existence by the reproachful glances he flashed at her, and by words he sometimes uttered whose barbed point had seemed to be aimed at her heart, and which stung her by their truth, but did not move her to repentance, because she was entirely cruel and heartless.

So now this man whose heart and soul she had wrecked so heartlessly, was an exile for her sake, hating all women because this Circe born without a soul, had made a plaything of his heart and flung it back to him when weary, broken, ruined and worthless from the pastime of an hour.

He was not a pleasant companion for Talbot Strangemore now. All his old brilliant gifts of talk and manner had deserted him. He had grown moody, dull, distrait and restless beyond measure. Once he had loved books, but he never opened one now. He spent hours and hours in long solitary walks. Strangemore rallied him a little drearily on his deep depression.

“Do not give yourself up so wholly to your sorrow,” he said. “It is wrong to speak ill of the dead, but after all, Mrs. St. Alban was not worthy of the feeling we both wasted on her. That truth has come home to me although too late for my happiness.”

They looked deep into each other’s eyes, those two men whose lives had been ruined to please the vanity of a beautiful, heartless butterfly.

“That is the bitterest part of it,” said Oswald Ferris, low and bitterly. “I have lost myself for her sake, and after all she was not worth it. Oh, how I fooled myself with the thought of making that dainty creature my bride. She promised it. She took my ring, my gifts, she let me hold her in my arms, she suffered me to kiss her face, and to toy with her soft gold hair, and after all she was false. She was only feeding her vanity with my admiration, and by and by when a new victim came, she dropped me as coolly as if I had been a soulless clod, instead of a man mad for love and thirsting for vengeance. Was it any wonder I was wrought to frenzy when she lavished her love and her smiles on you, when she even dared try to divorce you from your fair, sweet bride? Oh, my God”--he paused, abruptly, with a startled look, as if in his passion he had uttered too much.

“Why did you not tell me how she had wronged you then, while she was making a fool of me?--doubly a fool, for I had known her wiles before,” said Talbot, with biting self-contempt.

“Did you think I wore my heart on my sleeve for daws to peck at?” demanded Ferris. “No, I was too proud. I bore all in silence, save that now and then I reproached her with bitter looks and barbed words, which she received with tacit defiance. I wondered then why she had no conscience. I often wonder now why she had no fear. Did she think she could drive a great, strong powerful animal mad with impunity?”

“She knew that the animal in this case had a soul,” said Strangemore, with a rather dreary smile. “Women expect men to bear such wrongs as yours, _mon ami_, with meekness and equanimity. You would not have harmed that gilded butterfly, would you? Nay,” he added, springing to his feet while a terrible suspicion smote his brain, “_You_ did not hurt her, did you? You whose wrongs were so deep that your brain was half distraught with rage and resentment, you did not strike the dagger into her white breast, did you?”

The suspicion and the words were born together, and with such suddenness that Ferris was for a moment staggered by them.

He recoiled before the excited speaker with a marble-white face and a startled hunted look that was almost like guilt itself in his blazing eyes. Strangemore believed that he had detected the murderer of Sibyl St. Alban.

“My God, Ferris, then it was you that committed that dastardly deed!” he cried.

Ferris had recovered himself now. He turned upon his accuser with passionate defiance.

“How dare you, oh, how dare you accuse me of the heinous crime committed by your own wife?” he exclaimed, hoarsely, “Have you forgotten that she, too, was maddened by her wrongs?--wrongs that you had inflicted upon her in your mad worship of her rival! Have you forgotten that Sibyl St. Alban’s dying deposition laid her death at the door of Nina Strangemore? Have you forgotten the letter dropped by your wife in the room of the murdered woman? Have you forgotten her flight that was a tacit admission of her guilt?”

He hurled the angry words one after another thick and fast at his accuser and each charge fell upon Strangemore’s heart like a hail-stone. He recoiled with an exceeding bitter cry:

“Oh, God, to think that my folly and madness brought all this upon my poor young wife! Would to God, I had died before my return home!”

Ferris regarded him cynically, with a dark and lowering expression between his brows.

“If your wife had only killed herself instead of sending her rival out of the world, too, how pleasant it would have been for you,” he observed. “You could have married Sibyl and been happy after all.”

He shrunk from the lightning flash in the eyes of his companion.

“Hush,” Strangemore said, hoarsely. “Do not throw my folly and sin into my face. I cannot bear it. No, I could never have married Sibyl even if Nina’s desperate suicide had left me free to do so. I loved my young wife from the first moment we met after my return. At the first sight of her pure young face the wicked infatuation that Sibyl had fostered died within me, and a pure and holy love for my neglected bride took its place. If Sibyl had not formed that mad scheme for coming to Selwyn Heights and ruining my wedded happiness all would have gone well with me. I should not have been caught in the trap she set for me, Nina would not have been driven desperate, nothing would have happened as it did!”

And then he added, hoarsely:

“But, so help me God, Ferris, in spite of all the awful evidence against her, I cannot believe that Nina, my wife, was guilty of that terrible crime. Some dreadful mystery hangs around that murder--a mystery that Sibyl St. Alban hid behind her false declaration that Nina had killed her. It was some other hand that drove that dagger home in her breast.”

And looking steadily at the downcast face of Ferris, he said within himself: “Thou art the man!”

But he did not again charge him with the crime. Some instinct told him to be wary. He said to himself that he would watch Ferris closely, but in silence, for some token that should convict him of his sin.