“It is not you who have killed me; it is your crime. Had you been innocent of Mr. Hasbrouck’s death, your bullet would never have found my heart. Did you think I could survive the proof that you had killed that good man?”
“I—I did it unwittingly. I——”
“Hush!” she commanded, with an awful look, which, happily, he could not see. “I had another motive. I wished to prove to you, even at the cost of my life, that I loved you, had always loved you, and not——”
It was now his turn to silence her. His hand crept over her lips, and his despairing face turned itself blindly towards us.
“Go,” he cried; “leave us! Let me take a last farewell of my dying wife, without listeners or spectators.”
Consulting the eye of the physician who stood beside me, and seeing no hope in it, I fell slowly back. The others followed, and the Doctor was left alone with his wife. From the distant position we took, we saw her arms creep round his neck, saw her head fall confidingly on his breast, then silence settled upon them and upon all nature, the gathering twilight deepening, till the last glow disappeared from the heavens above and from the circle of leafless trees which enclosed this tragedy from the outside world.
But at last there came a stir, and Dr. Zabriskie, rising up before us, with the dead body of his wife held closely to his breast, confronted us with a countenance so rapturous that he looked like a man transfigured.
“I will carry her to the boat,” said he. “Not another hand shall touch her. She was my true wife, my true wife!” And he towered into an attitude of such dignity and passion, that for a moment he took on heroic proportions and we forgot that he had just proved himself to have committed a cold-blooded and ghastly crime.
The stars were shining when we again took our seats in the boat; and if the scene of our crossing to Jersey was impressive, what shall be said of that of our return.
The Doctor, as before, sat in the stern, an awesome figure, upon which the moon shone with a white radiance that seemed to lift his face out of the surrounding darkness and set it, like an image of frozen horror, before our eyes. Against his breast he held the form of his dead wife, and now and then I saw him stoop as if he were listening for some tokens of life at her set lips. Then he would lift himself again, with hopelessness stamped upon his features, only to lean forward in renewed hope that was again destined to disappointment.