O’Moy laughed again. “But he had not told you so. He preferred that you should think him guilty of bloodshed, of murder even, rather than tell you the real truth. Oh, I can understand. He is the very soul of honour, as you remarked yourself, I think, the other night. He knows how much to tell and how much to withhold. He is master of the art of discreet suppression. He will carry it to any lengths. You had an instance of that before the court this morning. You may come to regret, my dear, that you did not allow him to have his own obstinate way; that you should have dragged your own spotless purity in the mud to provide him with an alibi. But he had an alibi all the time, my child; an unanswerable alibi which he preferred to withhold. I wonder would you have been so ready to make a shield of your honour could you have known what you were really shielding?”
“Ned!” she cried. “Why don’t you speak? Is he to go on in this fashion? Of what is he accusing you? If you were not with Samoval that night, where were you?”
“In a lady’s room, as you correctly informed the court,” came O’Moy’s bitter mockery. “Your only mistake was in the identity of the lady. You imagined that the lady was yourself. A delusion purely. But you and I may comfort each other, for we are fellow-sufferers at the hands of this man of honour. My wife was the lady who entertained this gallant in her room that night.”
“My God, O’Moy!” It was a strangled cry from Tremayne. At last he saw light; he understood, and, understanding, there entered his heart a great compassion for O’Moy, a conception that he must have suffered all the agonies of the damned in these last few days. “My God, you don’t believe that I—”
“Do you deny it?”
“The imputation? Utterly.”
“And if I tell you that myself with these eyes I saw you at the window of her room with her; if I tell you that I saw the rope ladder dangling from her balcony; if I tell you that crouching there after I had killed Samoval—killed him, mark me, for saying that you and my wife betrayed me; killed him for telling me the filthy truth—if I tell you that I heard her attempting to restrain you from going down to see what had happened—if I tell you all this, will you still deny it, will you still lie?”
“I will still say that all that you imply is false as hell and your own senseless jealousy can make it.
“All that I imply? But what I state—the facts themselves, are they true?”
“They are true. But—”