“I am his friend, Blake Shorland.”
“Yes, I remember your name.” She threw her hands up with a laugh, a bitter hopeless laugh. Her eyes half closed, so that only light came from them, no colour. The head was thrown back with a defiant recklessness, and then she said: “I was Lucile Laroche, his wife—Luke Freeman’s wife.”
“But his wife died. He identified her in the Morgue.”
“I do not know why I speak to you so, but I feel that the time has come to tell all to you. That was not his wife in the Morgue. It was his wife’s sister, my sister whom my brother drowned for her money—he made her life such a misery! And he did not try to save her when he knew she meant to drown herself. She was not bad; she was a thousand times better than I am, a million times better than he was. He was a devil. But he is dead now too.... She was taken to the Morgue. She looked like me altogether; she wore a ring of mine, and she had a mark on her shoulder the same as one on mine; her initials were the same. Luke had never seen her. He believed that I lay dead there, and he buried her for me. I thought at the time that it would be best I should be dead to him and to the world. And so I did not speak. It was all the same to my brother. He got what was left of my fortune, and I got what was left of hers. For I was dead, you see—dead, dead, dead!”
She paused again. Neither spoke for a moment. Shorland was thinking what all this meant to Clare Hazard and Luke Freeman.
“Where is he? What is he doing?” she said at length. “Tell me. I was—I am—his wife.”
“Yes, you were—you are—his wife. But better if you had been that woman in the Morgue,” he said without pity. What were this creature’s feelings to him? There was his friend and the true-souled Clare.
“I know, I know,” she replied. “Go on!”
“He is well. The man that was born when his wife lay before him in the Morgue has found another woman, a good woman who loves him and—”
“And is married to her?” interrupted Gabrielle, her face taking on again a shining whiteness. But, as though suddenly remembering something, she laughed that strange laugh which might have come from a soul irretrievably lost. “And is married to her?”