Chapter XLVI: Talbot Accuses Ferris

Full of wonder and surprise the men gathered around them. They did not understand the new complication of affairs.

“What is the meaning of this?” they asked, and Ferris answered with triumphant malice:

“Strangemore attempted to choke me, and but for my superior strength with which I threw off the villain’s grasp I must have been a dead man now!”

Talbot Strangemore looked at him with superb scorn, and hissed out the single word:

“Liar!”

“What, do you deny that you attempted to strangle me?” said Ferris, in pretended amazement and reproach.

“I deny that I was prevented from doing so by any superior strength on your part. I simply desisted myself because I suddenly realized to what enormities my frenzy was driving me,” Talbot Strangemore answered, folding his arms across his broad breast, and looking at the man before him with proud, defiant scorn.

Ferris laughed aloud, a low jarring gurgle of sarcastic ridicule.

“You hear him, gentlemen of the jury,” he exclaimed. “It is a very plausible tale, is it not?”

They gazed in wonder, scarce knowing what to say. All had witnessed the attack, but it was not easy to determine whether Strangemore had desisted himself or been forced to do so by the superior strength of the other.

John Armstrong looked at the colorless, convulsed face of hapless Nina’s husband. Somehow he was prepossessed in favor of the man, in spite of the harsh opinion he had held before meeting him.

“Why did you attack him?” he said.

“He intimated that my unfortunate and innocent young wife was guilty of the crime with which she is charged,” Talbot Strangemore answered, angrily.

“And you do not believe that she is guilty?” asked Mr. Armstrong, watching his face, narrowly.

“Great heavens, no. Could one believe an angel guilty of murder? No sooner could I believe that my fair, wronged Nina committed that terrible deed!”

“Perhaps you have some idea whom the real culprit may be?” said Harvey Wilson, curiously.

“Yes, I have an idea, and I have been on the track of the man I suspect of the murder for many weeks now, but I have failed as yet to fasten his guilt upon him,” Talbot Strangemore answered, with deep despondency.

The listeners started and looked at each other significantly. The coming of John Armstrong had let in a flood of light upon the mysterious shadow that seemed to hang over the lives of these two men. They began dimly to scent a tragedy.

“You say that you are on the track of the real murderer now. Is he then in Egypt?” inquired Mr. Armstrong, gravely.

“Yes, he is in Egypt; but gentlemen, let me tell you a little story that will throw light upon this subject which seems to possess a great interest for you all.”

All agreed that they were deeply interested, and anxious to hear the story he had to tell. They forgot that it was long past midnight and that they had had no sleep that night. They gathered around Talbot Strangemore and waited anxiously for what he was going to say, while Ferris glared at them with the fury of a baffled tiger.

“I am not going to talk about myself,” said Talbot Strangemore. “My guilt and sin toward my fair and faithful young bride admits of no excuse or palliation. It is of that other one I would speak. The woman whose beauty cursed and ruined my life!”

“And mine!” Oswald Ferris ejaculated, under his breath.

“Two years ago, when I first met Mrs. St. Alban after her widowhood she had another lover,” went on Talbot. “He was fine-looking, brilliant in conversation, with many intellectual attainments, and a favorite with men. I will do him the credit to say that if he had never come under the fatal sway of that arch coquette he might have been a good man--at least he might not have gone very far wrong.”

He looked straight at Ferris and did not flinch at the angry threatening glare of his eyes.

“But Sibyl St. Alban taught to this strong, fiery brilliant spirit all the madness of love,” he went on. “She made him the slave of her imperious will and idle caprices, and with her soft words and tender smiles she made him believe that she loved him in return and promised him her hand in marriage. It was while he was reveling in his Fool’s Paradise that I came upon the scene.”

A low, smothered execration came from the bearded lips of Oswald Ferris.

“The papers have told my own story so plainly that I need scarcely rehearse it,” he said, with faint bitterness. “Sibyl and I had been lovers once in my college days when she was the poor professor’s daughter and I a student with a small income--so small that it did not tempt Sibyl to keep her troth to me when a richer man tempted her with his gold. She threw me over heartlessly, and I went home and married Nina Selwyn the little stepdaughter of my dying mother. I went abroad after my mother’s death and left my little child-bride in the care of my aunt. Three years later when I was thinking of returning to my home an evil chance threw me in Sibyl St. Alban’s way again!”

“An evil chance for all,” muttered Oswald Ferris in his beard.

“If I had not been a vain weak fool, nothing would have happened as it did then,” Talbot continued, bitterly. “I should have known better by my experience of the past, but I fell straight into the glamour of her toils again. She threw over the lover of whom I have spoken, as heartlessly as she had once done me. She ignored him as if he had never existed. He bore all in gloomy silence, but with inward rage and fierce resentment that was all the deeper because he bore his cruel injury in silence, brooding upon it when alone and yearning for revenge upon the heartless coquette who had ruined his peace of mind.”

Instinctively every eye turned upon Oswald Ferris, and while they gazed upon his craven face Talbot Strangemore asked, with bitter emphasis:

“Is it not more likely, gentlemen, that Sibyl St. Alban met her death at the hands of that enraged and vengeful lover than from the fair, weak girl whose jealousy was manifested with simple childish directness, not endured with the deep, silent cunning of the man’s vindictive nature?”

He turned his flashing dark eyes upon their eager, interested faces, and instantly every man’s hand went up in the air, and every man’s voice answered in the affirmative.

Oswald Ferris regarded the spirited demonstration with an uneasiness that he vainly strove to hide. He had seen the men’s eyes turned upon him in suspicion and distrust, and the terrible dread upon his mind grew greater every moment.

He could not avoid saying, with a convulsive sneer:

“Mr. Strangemore has omitted the most important fact in his whole story. Is the dying testimony of the murdered woman to be wholly disregarded? Sibyl St. Alban declared that Mrs. Strangemore killed her.”

“And perjured her soul by the declaration,” affirmed Talbot Strangemore, bitterly. “She hated my innocent Nina, and so to take revenge upon her she blackened her own soul and condemned it to Hades by her lying deposition. She had first worked upon Nina’s feelings until the girl had fled from her home, and I believe Mrs. St. Alban was cognizant of that fact before she was murdered, and so in her dying hours took her fatal revenge, choosing to shield the man who had killed her at the expense of my poor young wife!”

“The theory looks very plausible, certainly,” said Mr. Armstrong, with subdued bitterness, born of his own consciousness of wrong and suffering. “There is nothing too monstrous for a bad woman to do to further the ends of her despotic will.”

“Nothing!” echoed Talbot Strangemore, and suddenly one of his comrades said to him, significantly:

“And this slighted lover, this angry man whom you suspect of Mrs. St. Alban’s murder, where is he now?”

Talbot Strangemore drew his breath hard for a moment between his compressed lips. The question was taken up and repeated from lip to lip:

“You say that you have been upon the track of the murderer for many weeks. Where is he now?”

He answered, pointing a scornful finger at the cowering wretch before him:

“Behold him in Oswald Ferris!”