“Keep back, you — policeman! Hands off, or I’ll brain you! Hach! You’ve got the rope round my neck! Curse the thing! It’s choking me. Hach!”
And with his fingers clutching at his throat, as if to undo a noose, he gasps out in husky voice:
“Gone by God.”
At this he drops over dead, his last word an oath, his last thought a fancy, that there is a rope around his neck!
What he has said in his unconscious confessions lays open many seeming mysteries of this romance, hitherto unrevealed. How the pseudo-priest, Father Rogier, observing a likeness between Miss Wynn and Mary Morgan—causing him that start as he stood over the coffin, noticed by Jack Wingate—had exhumed the dead body of the latter, the poacher and Murdock assisting him. Then how they had taken it down in the boat to Dempsey’s house; soon after, going over to Llangorren, and seizing the young lady, as she stood in the summer-house, having stifled her cries by chloroform. Then, how they carried her across to Dempsey’s, and substituted the corpse for the living body—the grave clothes changed for the silken dress with all its adornments—this the part assigned to Mrs Murdock, who had met them at Coracle’s cottage. Then, Dick himself hiding away the shroud, hindered by superstitious fear from committing it to the flames. In fine, how Gwendoline Wynn, drugged and still kept in a state of coma, was taken down in a boat to Chepstow, and there put aboard the French schooner La Chouette; carried across to Boulogne, to be shut up in a convent for life! All these delicate matters, managed by Father Rogier, backed by Messieurs les Jesuites, who had furnished him with the means!
One after another, the astounding facts come forth as the raving man continues his involuntary admissions. Supplemented by others already known to Ryecroft and the rest, with the deductions drawn, they complete the unities of a drama, iniquitous as ever enacted.
Its motives declare themselves; all wicked save one. This a spark of humanity that had still lingered in the breast of Lewin Murdock; but for which Gwendoline Wynn would never have seen the inside of a nunnery. Instead, while under the influence of the narcotic, her body would have been dropped into the Wye, just as was that wearing her ball dress! And that same body is now wearing another dress, supposed to have been prepared for her—another shroud—reposing in the tomb where all believed Gwen Wynn to have been laid!
This last fact is brought to light on the following day; when the family vault of the Wynns is re-opened, and Mrs Morgan—by marks known only to herself—identifies the remains found there as those of her own daughter!