Mrs. Julia Daly was staring at the speaker. Her eyes were just interrogation. There was no horror upon her face. Her lips were parted.
The man continued.
"Drink," he said, "began in me, caught me up, twisted me, destroyed me. The terrible False Ego, which many of you must know of, entered into my mind, dominated, and destroyed it.
"I was possessed of a devil. All decent thoughts, all the natural happinesses of my station, all the gifts and pleasant outlooks upon life which God had given went, not gradually, but swiftly away. Something that was not myself came into me and made me move, and walk, and talk as a minion of hell.
"I do not know what measure of responsibility remained to me when I did what I did. But this I know, that I have been and am the blackest, most hideous criminal that lives to-day."
The man's voice was trembling dreadfully now, quite unconsciously his left hand was gripping the shoulder of the Abbot of Mullion. His eyes blazed, his voice was so forlorn, so hopeless and poignant that there was not a sound among the several hundreds there.
"My lord,—" he turned to the Bishop with the very slightest inclination of his head—"ladies and gentlemen, I killed my wife.
"My wife—" The Bishop had risen from his chair and Father Joseph Edward was supporting the swaying figure with the pale, earnest face.—"My wife loved me, and kept me and held me and watched over me as few men's wives have ever done. I stole poison with which to kill her. I stole poison from, from you, doctor!"
He turned to Dr. Morton Sims and the doctor sat in his seat as if frozen to it by fear.
"Yes! I stole it from you! You were away in Paris. You had been making experiments. In the cupboard in the laboratory which you had taken from old Admiral Custance, I knew that there were phials of organic poisons. My wife died of diphtheria. She died of it because I had robbed your bottles—I did so and took the poison home and arranged that Mary. . . ."