Then with another cry, which was not an exclamation this time, but instead, a moan, he fell forward, clutching with his hands at the tablecloth, and almost dragging the lamp from off the table. Fell forward thus, then sank to his knees, and next rolled senseless, oblivious to everything, upon the floor.
"You have killed him!" muttered Sebastian hoarsely, and with upon his face now a look of terror. "You have killed him! My God! if any others should be outside, should have seen"--while, forgetting that what he was about to do would be too late if those others might be outside of whom he had spoken, he rushed to both the windows and hastily closed the great shutters, which, except in the most violent tempests that at scarce intervals break over British Honduras, were rarely used.
And she, that woman standing there above her victim with her face still white as is the corpse's in its shroud, her lips flecked with specks of foam, her hands quivering, muttered in tones as hoarse as Sebastian's:
"Killed him. Ay! I hope so. Curse him, there has been enough of his prying, his seeking to discover the truth of our secret. And--and--if it were not so--then, still, I would have done it. You heard--you heard--how he sneered, gloated over my despair, my abandonment by Charles Ritherdon, so that he might marry that child--that chit--Isobel Leigh. The woman who cursed, who broke my life. Killed him, Sebastian! Killed him! Yes! That at least is what I meant to do. Because, Heaven help me! you were not man enough to do it yourself."
[CHAPTER XXVII.]
"I WILL SAVE YOU."
Beatrix Spranger sat alone in her garden at "Floresta," and was the prey to disquieting, nay, to horrible, emotions and doubts. For, by this time, not only had forty-eight hours passed since she had heard from Julian--forty-eight hours, which were to mark the limit of the period when, as had been arranged, she was to consider that all was still well with the latter at Desolada! but also another twelve hours had gone by without any letter coming from him. And then--then--while the girl had become almost maddened, almost distraught with nervous agitation and forebodings as to some terrible calamity having occurred to the man she had learned to love--still another twelve hours had gone by, it being now three days since any news had reached her.
"What shall I do?" she whispered to herself as, beneath the shade of the great palms, she sat musing; "what! what! Oh! if father would only counsel me; yet, instead, he reiterates his opinion that nothing can be intended against him--that he must have gone on some sporting expedition inland, or is on his way here. If I could only believe that! If I could think so! But I know it is not the case. It cannot be. He vowed that nothing should prevent him from writing every other day so long as he was alive or well enough to crawl to the gate and intercept the mail driver; and he would keep his word. What, what," she almost wailed, "can have happened to him? Can they have murdered him?"
Even as the horrid word "murder" rose to her thoughts--a word horrid, horrible, when uttered in the most civilized and well-protected spots on earth, but one seeming still more terrible and ominous when thought of in lawless places--there came an interruption to her direful forebodings. The parrots roosting in the branches during the burning midday heat plumed themselves, and opened their startled, staring eyes and clucked faintly, while Beatrix's pet monkey--still, as ever, presenting an appearance of misery and dark despair and woe--opened its own eyes and gazed mournfully across the parched lawn.
For these creatures had seen or heard that which the girl sitting there had not perceived, and had become aware that the noontide stillness was being broken by the advent of another person. Yet when Beatrix, aroused, cast her own eyes across the yellow grass, she observed that the newcomer was no more important person than a great negro, who carried in one hand a long whip such as the teamsters of the locality use, and in the other a letter held between his black finger and thumb.