Chapter XLV: Talbot Learns All

Talbot Strangemore thought that he had suffered before, but no such terrible moment as this had ever come to him until now when John Armstrong’s words rang in his ears like the trump of doom. They struck him with all the suddenness of a dreadful blow, depriving him all at once of power, strength and volition. He reeled and staggered dizzily like one drunken, and if the men had not come to his assistance he would have fallen like one dead, to the earth.

“You broke it to him too abruptly,” said Harvey Wilson, compassionately, as he brought water and bathed the face of the almost swooning man.

“I am sorry, but I did not know that he would take it so hard,” Armstrong answered.

“Did you think I had no soul and no conscience, then?” demanded Strangemore, glancing weakly up at him from the chair where they had placed him. “Oh, my God, sir, did you mean the horrible words you spoke to me, or was it but an unseemly jest?”

“Unhappily it was the bitter truth, although had I been more discreet I might have chosen my words so as not to shock you so much. But I will not ask you to believe my unsupported testimony. I have with me some London and New York papers, containing the whole story.”

He made a sign to his servant to unstrap his portmanteau, and bring the papers. Someone struck a light, and with a shaking hand Talbot Strangemore unfolded them. They rehearsed the whole tragic story, thrillingly. There could no longer be any doubt in his mind. His lovely girl-bride, Nina, whom he had so cruelly wronged and whom he thought had died the death of the suicide, had twice been saved from self-destruction only to meet a terrible doom upon the scaffold--dying for the crime of another.

He crushed the papers fiercely in his hand and staggered past them to the place where Oswald Ferris still crouched, wild-eyed, and in mortal terror of his life.

He bent down and hissed fiercely in the ear of the cowering wretch:

“Did you hear what they were saying? Nina, my young wife, was not dead as we supposed. She lives--lives, do you hear?--And she is in prison, my innocent, pure-hearted darling--in prison, and condemned to be hung for the murder of Sibyl St. Alban!”

Oswald Ferris shrank from the fiery lightning of his eyes, but he answered, sullenly:

“Yes, I know. I heard it all.”

“You heard it all? Then what have you to say?” demanded Talbot Strangemore, stormily.

“I have nothing to say. What does it matter to me that your wife will have to swing for her crime?” Ferris answered, with the brutal laugh of a fiend in Hades.

“Wretch! Coward! Liar!” Strangemore panted, springing toward him, and his two strong white hands leaped at the throat of Ferris and closed upon it with a strangling grasp.

The face of the wretch grew swollen and livid, his fierce eyes seemed to start from his head, he uttered fearful inarticulate sounds of rage, fear, and suffering. Presently he grew still, and only a smothered gasp seemed to issue from his purple, foam-flecked lips. In a moment all would have been over, and his crime-stained soul would have been hurled unshriven at the judgment seat, but in that fateful moment the locked hands of Strangemore fell apart suddenly, and he reeled backward from the wretch with a cry that shrilled to the very heavens:

“My God, am I gone mad with the horror of this night that I was about to sink my soul to the level of this fiend’s?”

Ferris glared at him with sullen rage and relief.

“Let there be no more talk of Judge Lynch, now. You have attempted my life, even as I did yours. We are quits, now,” he exclaimed.

“No, we are not quits yet--never until I wring from your cursed cowardly lips the confession of the terrible crime for which my innocent young wife is condemned to suffer death!” Talbot Strangemore answered, with terrible wrath.