“Oh, Jim, Jim!” she murmured at last. “Tell me what it’s all about. They say you were married and that you killed your wife. Tell me the truth, I beg you.”
“That is why I wanted to talk to you,” he panted, putting his hand upon her throat as though he would throttle her. “You must know the truth. Ever since I met you again in Cyprus, I’ve been aching to tell you all about it; but I was a coward. I so dreaded the possibility of losing you.” He threw out his arms and then clapped his hands to his head.
She seated herself on a fallen block of stone, and he slid to the ground at her feet. She was wearing an evening cloak, heavy with fur, and against this his face rested, while her mothering arms encircled him, and her hands were clasped upon his. The distant flicker of the lanterns made it possible for him dimly to discern the outline of her pale face; and in this uncertain light she seemed to become a celestial figure gazing down at him with such infinite tenderness that the ferment of his brain abated.
At first in halting phrases, but presently with increasing fluency, he told her of his inheritance of Eversfield Manor, of his marriage to Dolly, and of the three dreary years which followed. Then briefly he described his escape, his supposed death, and his wanderings which brought him to Cyprus.
“When I went back to England,” he said, “it was with the idea of obtaining a divorce, so that you and I might be married. I had come to love you with every fibre of my being, and life without you seemed unthinkable.”
He told her of Smiley-face, of his meeting with Dolly in the woods, and how next day he had read of her murder. “I swear to you, as God sees me,” he declared, “that I had nothing to do with her death. But who is going to believe me? I was the last person to be with her: my supposed motive is clear!”
He went on to relate how he had fled back to Egypt, and how, finding that the crime was placed at the door of another, he had felt himself free to ask her to marry him. Then had come the devastating news that he was wanted by the police, and his worst fears had been substantiated when he had caught sight of Mrs. Darling on his arrival at the hotel.
“The rest you know,” he said. “I ran away just now in a frenzy of fear and rage; but that has left me and I am prepared. Feel my hand: it doesn’t shake, you see. I am quite cool, now. They shall never take me to the scaffold, Monimé. They shall never make our story a public scandal. In a few minutes I am going to shoot myself....”
She uttered a low cry of anguish. “Jim, Jim! What are you saying? We’ll fight the case. We’ll get the best lawyers in England to defend you. They’ll have to realize that you are innocent.”
“Do you believe I am innocent?” he asked.