“And you let me love you—you let me be your wife—knowing that you had murdered my brother,” said Eve, trembling in every limb, white as death.
“No, Eve. It was not murder. It is the intention that makes the crime. He was unarmed, drunk. I ought to have spared him, I suppose—but he fell upon me like a tiger. It was brute force against brute force. The knife was an unlucky accident.”
“He had just bought it in the Procuratie,” explained Lisa; “he had no thought of killing him. You do not know how violent the Englishman could be. He was cruel to me sometimes—he struck me many times when he was angry.”
“You take the part of the murderer against the murdered—though this man would have married you, would have made you an honest woman.”
“He had promised,” said Lisa, doubtfully.
Eve put the photograph to her white lips and kissed it passionately, again, and again, and again.
“Oh, Harold,” she said, “to have hoped so long for your return, to have prayed so many useless prayers! You were dead—dead before that child was born.”
She looked at the boy, reckoning the years by the child’s growth. Four years, at least, she told herself.
“And you dared to make me your wife, to let me love you with a love that was almost idolatry,” she cried, turning upon Vansittart with dilated eyes, “knowing that you had killed my brother. You heard me talk of him—you pretended to sympathize with me—and you knew that you had killed him.”
“I did not know. There was no such thing as certainty. When I asked you to be my wife I knew nothing of your brother’s fate. Afterwards, when we were engaged, the idea was suggested to me by your officious friend Sefton—who wanted to put a stumbling-block in the way of our marriage. He succeeded in tracing your brother to Venice, and he read the story after his own lights. He thought Harold Marchant was the man who struck the fatal blow. He did not take him for the victim. But the links in his chain of evidence were not over strong—and I had ample justification for not accepting his assertions as certainties. And you loved me, did you not; and our marriage was likely to make your life fairer and brighter, was it not?”