“Strangway!” shrieked Juanita, clasping her hands. “Did I not tell you so from the first? It was the footstep of a Strangway that crept past our window, while we sat together in our happiness, without thought of peril. It was a Strangway who killed my husband. You told me that they were all dead and gone—that the race was extinct—that the people I feared were phantoms. I told you it was a Strangway who fired that shot, and you see my instinct was truer than your reason—and there was a Strangway at our gates—disguised—under a false name—looking at us with smooth, hypocritical smiles—nursing her wrath to keep it warm.”
“Unhappily your instinct hit upon the fatal truth. The hatred of the Strangways was not dead. One member of that family survived, and cherished a more than common malignity against the race that had blotted out the old name.”
“But my father, how had he provoked her hatred?”
“He once loved her, Juanita—many years ago—before he saw your mother’s face. Evelyn Strangway and he had been lovers—pledged to each other by a solemn promise. As a man of honour he should have kept that promise; there were stringent reasons that bound him. But he saw your mother and loved her, and broke with Evelyn Strangway—openly, with no unmanly deceit; but still there was the broken promise, and that involved a deep wrong. He believed that wrong forgiven. He believed the more in her pardon because it was her earnest desire to live unrecognized and unnoticed upon the estate where she was born. He could not fathom the depth of hatred in that warped nature. He did all that there was left to him to do—having taken his own course and entered upon a new and fairer life with the woman he loved—to make amends to the woman he had deserted. He never suspected the depth of her feelings—he never suspected the seeds of madness, with its ever present dangers. He did what in him lay to atone for the sin of his youth; but that sin found him out, and it was his bitter lot to see his beloved daughter the innocent victim of his wrong-doing. He trusted me to tell you this miserable story, Juanita. He humbles himself in the dust before you, stricken at the thought of your suffering. He appeals through me to your love and to your pity. How am I to answer him when I answer for you?”
She was silent for some moments after he had asked this final question, her eyes fixed, her chest heaving with the stormy beating of her heart.
“What has become of this woman—this pitiless devil?” she gasped.
“She is in a madhouse.”
“Is no punishment to overtake her? Is she not to be tried for her life? Let them prove her mad, or let them find her guilty, and hang her—hang her—hang her. Her life for his, her worn-out remnant of wretched, disappointed days for his bright young life, with all its promise and all its hope.”
“It would be a poor revenge, Juanita, to take so poor a life. This unhappy woman is under restraint that will, in all probability, last till the day of her death. Her crime is known only to your father and to me. Were it to become known to others she would have to stand in the dock, and then the whole story would have to be told—the story of your father’s broken promise—of this woman’s youth, bound so closely with his that to many it would seem almost as if they stood side by side at the bar. Do you think that the fierce rapture of revenge could ever atone to you for having brought dishonour upon your father’s declining years, Juanita?”
“And my husband’s death is to go unavenged?”