"Did you know—did you guess, or even suspect—that your husband was alive?"
"Mr. Denzil," said Lydia, with unusual solemnity, "as I'm a married woman, and not the widow I thought I was, I did not know that Mark was alive! I'm bad, I daresay, but I am not bad enough to shut a man up in a lunatic asylum and pretend he is dead, just to get money, much as I like it. What I did about identifying the corpse was done in good faith."
"You really thought it was my father's body?" questioned Diana doubtfully.
"I swear I did," responded Mrs. Vrain, emphatically. "Mark walked out of the house because he thought I was carrying on with Ferruci, which I wasn't. It was that Tyler cat who made the trouble between us, and Mark was so weak and silly—half crazy, I think, with his morphia and over-study—that he cleared right out, and I never knew where he had gone to. When I saw that notice about the murdered man in Geneva Square, who called himself Berwin, and was marked on the cheek, I thought he might be my husband. When the coffin was opened, I really believed I saw poor Mark's dead body. The face was just like his, and scarred in the same way."
"What about the missing finger, Mrs. Vrain? If I remember, you even gave a cause for its loss."
"Well, it was this way," replied Lydia, somewhat discomposed. "I knew that Mark hadn't lost a finger when he left, but Ferruci said that if I denied it the police might refuse to believe that the body was that of my husband. So, as I was sure it was Mark's corpse, I just said he had lost a finger out West. I didn't think there was any harm in saying so, as for all I knew he might have got it chopped off after leaving me. But the face of the dead man was—as I thought—Mark's, and he called himself Berwin, which, you know, Diana, is the name of the Manor, and the scar was on the cheek. I know now it was all contrived by Ercole; but then I was quite ignorant."
"When did you find out the truth?"
"After that cloak business. Ferruci came to me, and I told him what that girl at Baxter's had said, and insisted that he should tell me the truth. Well, he did, in order to force me to marry him, and then I told him to go and make it right with the girl, so that when Mr. Denzil went again she'd deny that Ercole had bought the cloak."
"She denied it, sure enough," said Lucian grimly. "Ferruci, before he died, told me he had bribed her to speak falsely. What more did the Count reveal to you, Mrs. Vrain?—the conspiracy?"
"Yes. He said he'd found Mark hiding at Salisbury, half mad with morphia, and had taken him up to Mrs. Clear's, where it seems he went mad altogether, so they locked him up as her husband in a lunatic asylum. Ferruci also told me that he had seen Michael Clear on the stage, and that as he was so like Mark, and was likely to die of drink and consumption, he got him to play the part of Mark in Geneva Square, under the name of Berwin. Mrs. Clear visited her husband there by climbing over a back fence, and getting down a cellar, somehow."