"Yes, I did love you," he went on, "but I was not worthy of you. My seeming reformation was only a mockery. I thought it was real at the time, but it was not. If you had married me, I should have fallen again, and perhaps I should have cursed you. I know it now and you will see presently why what I say is true. But I was mad with anger, and I gave way to my old vice. You had helped me to conquer it for a time, but all the time I was at heart a bad man, all the time I was a drunkard. If you had saved me really, I should not have given way again; I should not have flown to it the moment you cast me off. Yes, I loved you, all I was capable of loving; but it was a love of self in the main.
"You know what took place at Taviton—the drunkenness, the degradation, the disgrace. I was hooted out of the town, and I laid the blame to your doors. I went away on the moors and tried to think of what I should do, vowing vengeance on you all the time, yet never seeing how my vengeance was to be wreaked. I returned to London, and stayed there some time in hiding. No one knew where I was, save an old lawyer who had managed my money affairs. One night I saw at Blackfriars Bridge the body of a dead man. It had been washed on the steps, and left stranded there. It was beyond recognition; evidently it had been in the water some time. I put a letter of mine in the pocket of the dead man's clothes, and then waited. Everything turned out as I expected. No one had any doubts. I had committed suicide, and this was my body. I will not dwell any longer on that; there is no need. I went away to the East. I did so of a set purpose. I went away so that the world might forget me, and on the whole it did forget me. But I did not forget. One purpose filled my mind and heart; I will tell you what it was presently. I was a bad man when I first saw you; bad with the veneer of respectability and pride. Afterwards I became bad without that veneer. Think your worst about me, you will not think too badly, save in one thing—I would conquer my craving for drink. Nothing was possible if I did not do that. And I have done that. Never since I left England, more than six years ago, has alcohol ever passed my lips. I need not describe the hell in which I lived, save to say that all the time I brooded over my dream of vengeance on you. I determined that, as far as you and—Sprague were concerned, there should be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I told you years ago, that my faith in God was but little. During those years I lived in the East, I learned to believe in a God; but it was a God of terror, a God that seemed to consent to my dream of revenge.
"Sometimes I have thought I was mad. Perhaps I was, but it was a madness which no one suspected, and it was a madness with a purpose. After I had been away two years, I was able to render a service to the head of the Great Tripoli Company. I need not describe how; but by a piece of good fortune I saved, not only his life, but his honour. He also said that I saved the fortunes of the great company. Be that as it may, those who were his enemies never dreamed that I should be able to help him. I was only an ignorant muleteer, who did not know their language, and who could not fathom their designs. But I did both, and I saved this great man. It seems like some far-fetched melodrama, doesn't it? But the thing is true. It leaked out little by little, I suppose, that I was a man of some education and ability, and by-and-by I became bound up in the fortunes of this great trading concern.
"It all fell in with my plans. I had learnt to hate you more and more, and I determined that nothing should baulk me in my purpose. Only once did I fear that I should fail in that which I had sworn to do. I was stricken with a plague common to that part of the world, and I was given up for dead. Even in my prosperity my great desire to live was that I might express my hatred for you. But I got better, and I felt as though the God in whom I had learnt to believe would deliver you into my hands; for there was one thing that illness did for me, it altered my appearance very materially—so much so that when I came back here no one suspected who I was.
"I shall soon come to the end now. As soon as I was able I came to England, determined that I would work your ruin, your disgrace. Nay, do not fear; I am only telling you this that you may know what is your right to know. I did not know what had happened to you; but I determined that, wherever you were, I would find you, and whatever your circumstances were, I would accomplish my purposes.
"I found you here—still unmarried, but apparently happy. I also found that you were much admired, and that you were contemplating marriage with that young squire. I made my plans. I will tell you what they were. I would win your love; I felt sure I could do it; even if I could not win that, I believed in the devil sufficiently to be sure that I could gain your consent to marry me. I remembered, too, that I had won you in the old days, and I hoped that I possessed something of the power by which I won you then. Even if I failed, my purpose to have my revenge should not be frustrated, for I hated you with all the intensity of my being."
All the time Olive sat with wide, staring eyes and blanched face. Sometimes she felt as though the recital were only a ghastly nightmare, but when she looked into the man's face she felt its reality. The man was Leicester, the man whom she believed had died six years before; but even yet she could not understand everything. What was this scheme of vengeance which he was going to work upon her? It would be difficult to analyse her feelings just then. The past and the present, the known and the unknown, were so inter-woven that nothing seemed real.
"You wonder how a man can hate so?" he went on. "So do I now; but after all, man is only an incipient devil when he gives way to his passions, and I was only a reversion to type. This was the thought I had nursed; through you I had been scorned, disgraced, through you I had been cast into hell. I did not realise all that went before; I only remembered those things which fed my hatred. And this is what I determined to do."
He hesitated a second, as though he feared to go on.
"It seems mean, it seems devilish," he said presently, "and it is what it seems. I vowed that I would marry you with all the display of a great wedding, and then when it was all over, when we were known to the world as man and wife, I would tell you who I was, and I would tell you that you were no wife at all, because I had married another woman elsewhere. This also I would tell the world and leave you, disgraced, ruined, the topic for scandal, the woman who had become the dupe, the plaything of an adventurer, who was the husband of another wife, the father of children in another part of the world."