"I can at least produce the proofs," Julian replied, his eyes still regarding the other, and knowing nothing of that creeping listener behind, "that my presence in Honduras--at Desolada as your invited guest--caused you so much consternation, so much dismay, that you hesitated at nothing which might remove me from your path. What will the law believe, what will these people who have known you from your infancy--as you say--think, when they learn that three times at least, if not more, you have attempting my life?"
"Again I say it is a lie!" Sebastian muttered hoarsely.
"And I can prove that it is the truth. I can prove that this woman, this accomplice of yours--this woman whom my father--not your father, but my father--jilted, threw away, so that he might marry Isobel Leigh, my mother--fired at me with a rifle known to be hers and used by her on small game. I can prove that she poisoned the meal that was to be partaken of by me; that even so late as to-night she drenched the floor of my room--as she meant again to drench the pillow on which I slept--with the deadly juice of the Amancay--with this," and he held before Sebastian the broken phial he had found above.
"You can prove nothing," Sebastian muttered hoarsely, raucously. "Nothing."
"Can I not? I have two witnesses."
"Two witnesses!" the other whispered, and now indeed he looked dismayed. "Two witnesses. Yet--what of that, of them! Even though they could prove this--which they can not--what else can they prove? Even though I am not Charles Ritherdon's son and you are--even though such were the case--which it is not--how prove it?"
"That remains to be seen. But, though it should never be proved; even though you and that murderous accomplice of yours, that discarded sweetheart of my father's, that woman who I believe, as I believe there is a God in Heaven, was the prime mover in this plot----"
"Silence!" cried Sebastian, springing to his feet now, yet still with that look in his eyes which Julian did not follow; that look towards where the white corpse-faced creature was by this time--namely, five feet nearer still to Julian--"silence, I say. That woman is not, shall not, be defamed by you. Neither here or elsewhere. She--she--is--ah! God, she has been my guardian angel--has repaid evil for good. My father threw her off--discarded her--and she came here, forgiving him at the last in his great sorrow. She helped to rear me--his son--to----"
"Now," said Julian, still calmly, "it is you who lie, and the lie is the worse because you know it. Some trick was played on him whom you still dare to call your father, on him who was mine--never will I believe he was a party to it!--and before Heaven I do believe that it was she who played it. She never forgave him for his desertion of her; she, this would be murderess--this poisoner--and--and--ah!"
What had happened to him? What had occurred? As he uttered the last words, accusing that woman of being a murderess in intention, if not in fact--a poisoner--he felt a terrible concussion at the nape of his neck, a blow that sent him reeling forward towards the other side of that table against which Sebastian had sat, and at which he now stood confronting him. And, dazed, numbed as this blow had caused him to become, so that now the features of the man before him--those features that were so like his own!--were confused and blurred, though with still a furious, almost demoniacal expression in them, he scarcely understood as he gave that cry that in his nostrils was once more the sickening overpowering odour of the Amancay--that it was suffocating, stifling him.