Strangely enough, though it had been Mollie who had precipitated this thing, it was Betty who now took the lead. Softly she went over to the shrinking man and put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
"You say you did not kill your brother?" she questioned in so calm a voice that the girls marveled at her. "You are sure you did not?"
"No! no!" cried the man again raising his haggard face, deep-lined with the marks of suffering, "No—I am not sure. Can you not see? It is that that is killing me. Yet in my sane moments I know that he was dead. He lay there, so white, so still, with only that red, red stream of blood to mar his whiteness. I leaned down, I listened to his heart——" The man had evidently forgotten the presence of the girls, engulfed as he was in the horror of the incident he related. Once more he was living the tragedy, and the girls, tense, strained, horrified, lived it with him.
"I listened to his heart," the man repeated, his arms stretched out before him, his long, delicate hands gripped with a fierceness that made the knuckles go white. "There was no beating. I put my face close to his mouth to see if there was breath. But he had stopped breathing—forever!
"My heart went cold. I seized him by the shoulders. I called him by his name—that brother that I had loved! Oh, how I had loved him. I begged him to come back to me, to open those gray lips that a moment before had been beautiful with life—to speak to me—and all the time——" his hand relaxed and pointed to the floor and the girls followed the movement fascinated—"there kept spreading and spreading on the rug a deep red stain—my brother's blood! Mon Dieu! And when I staggered to my feet I found that the horrible stuff had clung to my fingers—they were dark and sticky—the fingers of a murderer! I went mad then, I think. I rushed from the house, from the place. One thing only was in my mind. To get away—to get away from Paris, that accursed city——" He paused, staring at the floor, and the girls waited, hardly daring to move for fear they would break the spell.
"The rest is like a bad dream to me," the man continued in a weary voice. "Ghost-ridden, haunted, I came to this country incognito—under what you call an assumed name. For a short time I stayed in New Orleans——"
"But your violin!" Betty interrupted in a voice that amazed her, it seemed so little and weak. "Surely you were under contract."
The man turned on her what was almost a pitying look from his sunken eyes.
"I could not play," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders. "To have gone to my manager would have been like going to the hangman—the electric chair, what you have in this country. No, mademoiselle, I was a murderer, a man hunted by his fellowmen. There was but one thing for me to do—to hide, to dodge about like a rabbit from a pack of baying dogs. Hide!" he added bitterly. "I could not hide from myself.
"Always when the night grows dark and the wind it makes to howl around this place I can hear my brother's voice uplifted in anger. We quarreled over something my uncle had said—a foolish quarrel. He called me liar, and I—something snapped in my brain, I think, and for a moment everything went red. There was a wine bottle on the table—we had been drinking—blindly I struck out with it—— Now, when the darkness comes and the wildcat calls into the night with a scream like a soul in torment, I hear again the tinkling of that bottle as it shattered, the short groan, the falling of a heavy body.