"But when George Ritherdon's statement came, and with it the information that you were in existence, Charles determined to tell Sebastian everything. He would have done so, too, but that the illness he was suffering from took a fatal termination almost directly afterward--doubtless from the shock of learning what he did. Yet it made no difference, for the day after his death Sebastian found the paper and so discovered all."
"He knew then," said Julian--though as he spoke his voice was not harsh, he recognising how cruel had been this woman's lot from the first, and how doubly cruel must have been the blow which fell on her when, after twenty-five years of possession, the son whom she had loved so, and had schemed so for, was about to be dispossessed--"he knew then who I was when we first met, and--and--God forgive him!--from that moment commenced to plot my death."
"No!" cried Madame Carmaux. "No! Have I not said that he was innocent? It was I--I--who plotted--alas! he was my son. Will not a mother do all for her only child? It was I who changed the horses in their stalls, putting his, which none but he could ride in safety, in place of the sure-footed one he had destined for you; it was I--God help and pardon me! who put the coral snake in your bed--I--I--who did the rest you know of."
"And did you, too, procure the Indians who were to take me out to sea and drown me?" asked Julian with a doubtful glance at her. "Surely not. There was a man's hand in that. And it was Sebastian who was advancing along the passage when Zara's knife struck him down."
"By instigation I did it," Madame Carmaux cried, determined to the last to shield the son she still hoped to meet again in this world--"the suggestion, the plot was mine alone. While because he was weak, because from the first he has ever yielded to me, he yielded now. Spare him!" she cried, and flung herself upon her knees before that listening trio, her calmness, her contemptuousness, vanished now. "Spare him, and do with me what you will."
So the story was told, so the discovery of all was made at last. Julian knew now upon how simple a thing--the fact of Madame Carmaux having taken that strange determination to go and see the man who had cast her off and jilted her, carrying her child in her arms--the whole mystery had rested. But what he never knew was that, had Zara lived, she could have also told him all. For in the savage girl's love for the man, who in his turn had treated her badly, and in her determination to be ever watching over him, she had long since overheard scraps of conversation which had revealed the secret to her in the same way as they had done to Paz.
And it was to her, and her determination to prevent Sebastian from committing any crime by which his life or his liberty might become imperilled, that Julian owed the fact that he had not long since died by the hand of Madame Carmaux--if not by that of Sebastian.
[CHAPTER XXXIV.]
CONTENTMENT
"And on her lover's arm she leaned,
And 'round her waist she felt it fold."