Witness to the Deed Part 68

"Why have you hidden yourself away?" cried Stratton fiercely.

"Ah! Why?" said Brettison, gazing at him thoughtfully from beneath his thick, grey eyebrows. "You want a reason? Well, I am old and independent, with a liking to do what I please. Malcolm Stratton, I am not answerable to any man for my actions."

Stratton started up, and took a turn to and fro in the dusty room before throwing himself again in his chair, while the old man quietly took the long, snake like tube of his pipe in hand, examined the bowl to find it still alight, began to smoke with all the gravity of a Mussulman, and the tobacco once more began to scent the air of the silent place.

Stratton's lips parted again and again, but no words would come. In his wild excitement and dread of what he knew he must learn, he could not frame the questions he panted to ask in this crisis of his life, and at last it was with a cry of rage as much as appeal that he said:

"Man, man, am I to be tortured always? Why don't you speak?"

"You have hunted me from place to place, Malcolm Stratton, in your desperation to find out that which I felt you had better not know; and now you have found me--brought me to bay--I wait for you to question me."

"Yes, yes," said Stratton hoa.r.s.ely; and, with a hasty gesture, as he clapped his hand to his throat, "I will speak--directly."

He rose again and paced the room, and it was while at the far end that he said in a low voice:

"Yes; you know all."

"All."

"Tell me, then--why have you done this? Stop! I am right--it was you."

"You are right; it was I," said Brettison, smoking calmly, as if they were discoursing upon some trivial matter instead of a case of life and death--of the horror that had blasted a sanguine man's life, and made him prematurely old.

"Tell me, then; how could you--how could you dare? Why did you act the spy upon my actions?"

The old man rose quickly from his chair, brought his hand down heavily upon the table, and leaned forward to gaze in Stratton's eyes.

"Answer me first, boy. Me--the man who loved you and felt toward you as if you were a son! Why did you not come to me for help and counsel when you stood in danger--in peril of your life?"

The gentle, mild face of the old botanist was stern and judicial now, his tone of voice full of reproof. It was the judge speaking, and not the mild old friend.

"Did you think me--because I pa.s.sed my life trifling, as some call it, with flowers, but, as I know it to be, making myself wiser in the works of my great Creator--did you think me, I say, so weak and helpless a creature that I could not counsel--so cowardly and wanting in strength of mind and faith in you, that I would not have stood by you as a father should stand by his son?"

Stratton groaned.

"Forgive me," he said feebly; "I was half-mad."

"Yes."

"How could I, crushed by the horror of having taken a fellow-creature's life, cursed by the knowledge that this man was--But you cannot know that."

"Take it, boy, that I know everything," said the old man, resuming his seat.

"Then have some pity on me."

"Pity for your folly? Yes."

"Folly! You are right. I will take it that you know everything, and speak out now. Brettison--"

He paused--he could not speak. But by a mighty effort he mastered his emotion.

"Now think, and find some excuse for me. I was in my room there, elate almost beyond a man's power to imagine; in another hour the woman whom I had idolised for years was to be my wife. Recollect that, two years before, my hopes had been dashed to the ground, and I had pa.s.sed through a time of anguish that almost unhinged my brain, so great was my despair."

"Yes," said Brettison, "I recall all that."

"Then that man came, and I was face to face with the knowledge that once more my hopes were crushed, and--he fell."

Stratton ceased speaking, and sat gazing wildly before him into the past.

It was in a husky whisper that he resumed:

"I stood there, Brettison, mad with horror, distraught with the knowledge that I was the murderer of her husband--that my hand, wet with his blood, could never again clasp hers, even though I had made her free."

The old man bent his head; and, gathering strength of mind and speech, now that he was at last speaking out openly in his defence, Stratton went on:

"It was horrible--horrible! There it is, all back again before my eyes, and I feel again the stabbing, sickening pain of the bullet wound which scored my shoulder, mingled with the far worse agony of my brain. I had killed her husband--the escaped convict; and, above the feeling that all was over now, that my future was blasted, came the knowledge that, as soon as I called for help, as soon as the police investigated the matter, my life was not worth a month's purchase. For what was my defence?"

Brettison satin silence, smoking calmly.

"That this man had made his existence known to me, shown by his presence that his supposed death was a shadow--that, after his desperate plunge into the sea, he had managed to swim ash.o.r.e and remain in hiding; the dark night's work and the belief that he had fallen shot, being his cloak; and the search for the body of a convict soon being at an end.

You see all this?"

Brettison bowed his head.

"Think, then, of my position; put yourself in my place. What jury--what judge would believe my story that it was an accident? It seemed to me too plain. The world would say that I slew him in my disappointment and despair. Yes, I know they might have called it manslaughter, but I must have taken his place--a convict in my turn."

"You thought that?"

"Yes, I thought that--I think it now. I could not--I dared not speak.

Everything was against me, and in my horror temptation came."

Brettison looked at him sharply.

"The hope was so pitiful, so faint, so weak, Brettison; but still it would linger in my maddened brain that some day in the future--after years, maybe, of expiation of the deed--I might, perhaps, approach her once again. I thought so then. The secret would be between me and my Maker, and in his good time he might say to my heart: 'It is enough.

You have suffered all these years. Your sin is condoned--your punishment is at an end.' I tell you I thought all that, and in my madness I dared not let the thing be known. She would know it, too, and if she did I felt that hope would be dead indeed, and that I had, too, better die."

Stratton ceased speaking, and let his head fall upon his hand.

"Put yourself in my place, I say. Think of yourself as being once more young and strong--the lover of one whom, in a few short hours, you would have clasped as your wife, and then try and find excuse for my mad action--for I know now that it was mad, indeed."

"Yes, mad indeed," muttered Brettison.

"Well, I need say no more. You know so much, you must know the rest.

They came to me, fearing I had been killed--robbed and murdered. They found me at last, when I was forced to admit them, looking, I suppose, a maniac; for I felt one then, compelled to face them, and hear the old man's reproaches, in horror lest they should discover the wretched convict lying dead, and no word to say in my defence. Nature could bear no more. My wound robbed me of all power to act, and I fainted--to come to, fearing that all was discovered; but their imaginations had led them astray. They had found my wound and the pistol. It was an attempt at suicide. Poor Guest recalled the first--I do not wonder. And they went away at last, looking upon me as a vile betrayer of the woman I loved, and sought in their minds for the reason of my despair, and the cowardly act I had attempted to escape her father's wrath. Brettison, old friend, I make no excuses to you now; but was I not sorely tried?

Surely, few men in our generation have stood in such a dilemma. Can you feel surprised that, stricken from my balance as a man--a sane and thoughtful man--I should have acted as I did, and dug for myself a pit of such purgatory as makes me feel now, as I sit here making my confession, how could I have gone through so terrible a crisis and yet be here alive, and able to think and speak like a suffering man."

The silence in the room was terrible for what seemed an age before Brettison stretched out his trembling hand and took that of the man before him.

"Hah!"