It is a damned and a bloody work;
The graceless action of a heavy hand,
If that it be the work of any hand.
King John.
The two men eyed me quietly, then Hexford pointed to my shoeless feet and sternly retorted:
“Permit us to doubt your last assertion. You seem to be in better position than ourselves to explain the circumstances which puzzle you.”
They were right. It was for me to talk, not for them. I conceded the point in these words:
“Perhaps—but you cannot always trust appearances. I can explain my own presence here and the condition in which you find me, but I cannot explain this tragedy, near and dear as Miss Cumberland was to me. I did not know she was in the building, alive or dead. I came upon her here covered with the cushions just as you found her. I have felt the shock. I do not look like myself—I do not feel like myself; it was enough—” Here real emotion seized me and I almost broke down. I was in a position much more dreadful than any they could imagine or should be allowed to.
Their silence led me to examine their faces. Hexford’s mouth had settled into a stiff, straight line and the other man’s wore a cynical smile I did not like. At this presage of the difficulties awaiting me, I felt one strand of the rope sustaining me above this yawning gulf of shame and ignominy crack and give way. Oh, for a better record in the past!—a staff on which to lean in such an hour as this! But while nothing serious clouded my name, I had more to blush for than to pride myself upon in my career as prince of good fellows,—and these men knew it, both of them, and let it weigh in the scale already tipped far off its balance by coincidences which a better man than myself would have found it embarrassing to explain. I recognised all this, I say, in the momentary glance I cast at their stern and unresponsive figures; but the courage which had served me in lesser extremities did not fail me now, and, kneeling down before my dead betrothed, I kissed her cold white hand with sincere compunction, before attempting the garbled and probably totally incoherent story with which I endeavoured to explain the inexplainable situation.
They listened—I will do them that much justice; but it was with such an air of incredulity that my words fell with less and less continuity and finally lost themselves in a confused stammer as I reached the point where I pulled the cushions from the couch and made my ghastly discovery.
“You see—see for yourselves—what confronted me. My betrothed—a dainty, delicate woman—dead—alone—in this solitary, far-away spot—the victim of what? I asked myself then—I ask myself now. I cannot understand it—or those glasses yonder—or those marks!” They were black by this time—unmistakable—not to be ignored by them or by me.
“We understand those marks, and you ought to,” came from the second man, the one I did not know.