Danton started back with a cry that seemed to him loud enough to have reached to the river, but which in reality was scarcely heard by the detective a few feet away, and then he stood there as if paralyzed, staring into the face of his sister with glassy, unseeing eyes. “You saw me!” he whispered shrilly. “Then it is true after all. I did it without knowing that I did it, and all the assurances given me by Mr. Carter, were wrong. I did it, you say, and you saw me. Oh, God! Oh, God! I did it after all, and I did it without knowing it!”
Mercedes raised her eyes again and fixed them coldly upon her brother.
“Reginald,” she said slowly, “you are dearer to me than anybody in all the world, and I will keep your secret so well that all the tortures in the world shall never draw it from me—so well that the keeping of it will kill me, for I feel as if I were dying even now; but, Reginald, do not think that I shall hold you guiltless. Do not suppose that I can be made to believe that you did not commit that awful deed with deliberation and after full premeditation. I saw you, I say. I saw every motion that you made, everything you did.”
“Tell me what you saw,” he said slowly.
“You did not latch the door when you entered the room, and a draft had swung it partly ajar. I stood in the hallway. I saw you approach the chair in which Ramon was seated, asleep. You held a bottle in your hand, and I saw you hold it under his nostrils so that he might inhale the fumes of whatever it contained—and then I became conscious of the odor of chloroform.”
“But there is no chloroform in the room. I have never in my life had chloroform in my possession,” groaned Danton, whose only thought then was to convince himself that his sister might be mistaken. Still, she paid no heed to what he said.
“Wait,” she said. “I saw you hold the chloroform under his nose. Then you crossed the room to your desk. You found the casket and opened it, and I knew then what you were going to do. I tried to cry out. I tried to rush into the room, but I could neither speak nor move. All power of sound and motion had been taken from me. I was as a dead body, standing there, chained, compelled to witness the most terrible sight the eyes can behold—the infamy of my own brother. You opened the casket and you took from it that terrible instrument you have shown to me. I recognized it by the cork handle, and again I tried to call out to you and stop you—but I could not make a sound. I could not move.”
“And then——” asked Danton tensely.
“Then? Then you passed behind the chair in which he was seated; you pushed his head forward until his chin rested upon his breast, for the chloroform had stupefied him so that there was no fear that he would awaken; and then, while you held his head forward with your left hand, you did something with your right, and I saw a shudder like a spasm shoot through Ramon’s figure—and I knew that you had killed him, even as that terrible man, Cadillac, had murdered his victims in Paris.”
She broke out into sobbing again, and he made no effort to stop her; presently she recovered sufficiently to continue.