Chapter XL: In Egypt

It was no wonder that Miss Strangemore’s and the lawyer’s efforts to find Talbot Strangemore had so persistently failed, for, following the bent of Oswald Ferris, he had penetrated the wilds of Egypt.

Since that day when Talbot Strangemore had sternly accused him of the murder of Sibyl St. Alban, Oswald Ferris had been a changed man, to the one whom he had once denominated his friend.

A terrible fear had come over him that was not dissipated by the efforts Strangemore constantly made to place him at his ease, and to obliterate from his mind the impression made by his rash and startling accusation.

When they had first gone abroad, Strangemore hating himself for the evil he had wrought, remorseful, wretched, and heartbroken, unfitted by his incurable despair for the society of his fellow-beings, had longed with bitter impatience to forsake this self-imposed companion. Their positions were now reversed.

Oswald Ferris under the impulse of a terrible fear that made the blood run coldly through his veins, was determined to fly from Talbot Strangemore’s suspicious companionship and hide himself in the remotest accessible spot on earth. He feared and distrusted the man who had so great an interest in finding out the real murderer of Sibyl St. Alban.

“He cannot fool me now by his apparent cordiality and friendship,” he muttered, uneasily to himself, “I must go away from him, or he will track me to my doom. By my foolish outburst against Sibyl St. Alban that day I have roused his suspicion, and the instinct of the hound will never be diverted until he runs his prey to earth. I will not remain with him. I must find some plausible excuse for going on alone.”

Talbot Strangemore on the other hand was equally determined not to lose sight of his companion.

He had not a single doubt over Sibyl St. Alban’s murderer. He believed firmly that the hand of Oswald Ferris had struck that fatal dagger into the false breast of the woman who had played with his heart for pastime and flung it away like a broken toy.

“He is the murderer, and in time I will bring it home to him. And to further that end I will never lose sight of him, never permit him to leave me, until I have obtained proofs of his crime. I will be like a blood-hound upon his track until the memory of my injured martyred bride shall be cleared from the foul blot cast upon it by Sibyl St. Alban’s falsehood and Oswald Ferris’ cowardly silence,” he swore to himself.

In the meantime Ferris proposed all kinds of impracticable trips and plans in the hope that his companion in misery would desert his standard and leave him alone. He was tempted often to desert Strangemore and fly beyond his reach, but he dared not yield to the temptation for fear of confirming the suspicion he had already awakened. His sense of guilt made him a miserable coward.

And Strangemore in those days was imperturbably good-natured. He acceded to everything Ferris proposed. His most impracticable schemes and plans were met with careless raillery and final acquiescence.

“Where thou goest I will go,” Strangemore said to him one day, with a veiled significance, that thrilled the coward’s heart with deadly terror. He grew desperate.

“The best of friends must part,” he said to Strangemore, veiling his uneasiness under a light laugh. “To-morrow I shall bid you farewell, ‘it may be for years and it may be forever.’ I have joined a party going on an exploring tour into Egypt and Africa.”

Strangemore stared at him a moment, then he gave a reckless laugh.

“There is nothing that would please me better than such a tramp,” he said. “Fancy gazing at the sphinx in Egypt, then shooting lions and tigers in the African jungles. Your friends must take me, too, Ferris, I would not miss the sport for the world!”

Ferris turned upon his heel with a muttered imprecation, and a frown as black as night.

“Your doom be on your own head, my implacable blood-hound,” he raged within himself, “I owe you no pity and no mercy. You took Sibyl from me, and now you have chosen to hunt me down because I revenged myself for her cursed falsity. So be it, my handsome Irresistable, but you have sealed your own fate. You will never come out of the African jungles alive. You will be the first tiger slain!”

* * * * *

So it fell out that in those golden May days while Nina was being tried for her life, the two men who had such a terrible interest in each other sat by night around their camp-fires amid Egyptian wilds, and thought awake, and sleeping dreamed, of the two fair women who had so blended with the current of their lives that they were exiles now for their sakes--the one dead by the assassin’s stroke, the other by the work of a doom self-sought. And who could measure the agonizing remorse that preyed upon these two men’s hearts.

Not Talbot Strangemore surely, the victim of a mad remorse that “spurned atonement’s power.” A ghost went with him through those days and nights of reckless tramping and suicidal exposure. It was the ghost of the fair and trusting bride his sin had slain. And ever and always the white arms beckoned him, the dark eyes prayed him, the faint voice appealed to him to come to her. He had one answer always to excuse his tarrying:

“Wait a little while, my darling, until I have brought home his guilt to Sibyl’s murderer, and cleared your memory from all stain, and then I will hasten to greet you in the spirit land.”

Only for that mission that held him back, Talbot Strangemore would have sought death even as Nina had sought it. He was unutterably wretched, remorseful beyond all telling, and his love for the young bride, loved too late, was deeper than all. The passionate, despairing strength of his love for the dead girl startled him by its yearning force.

“I never knew that I could love like this,” he said to himself, in wonder. “Surely the fancy I had for Sibyl was but a fancy compared with this, it was:

‘Like moonlight unto sunlight,
Like water unto wine.’”