“True!” cried Miss Armytage in horror.
“Ah, wait,” O’Moy bade her with his heavy sneer. “You interrupt him. He is about to construe those facts so that they shall wear an innocent appearance. He is about to prove himself worthy of the great sacrifice you made to save his life. Well?” And he looked expectantly at Tremayne.
Miss Armytage looked at him too, with eyes from which the dread passed almost at once. The captain was smiling, wistfully, tolerantly, confidently, almost scornfully. Had he been guilty of the thing imputed he could not have stood so in her presence.
“O’Moy,” he said slowly, “I should tell you that you have played the knave in this were it not clear to me that you have played the fool.” He spoke entirely without passion. He saw his way quite clearly. Things had reached a pass in which for the sake of all concerned, and perhaps for the sake of Miss Armytage more than any one, the whole truth must be spoken without regard to its consequences to Richard Butler.
“You dare to take that tone?” began O’Moy in a voice of thunder.
“Yourself shall be the first to justify it presently. I should be angry with you, O’Moy, for what you have done. But I find my anger vanishing in regret. I should scorn you for the lie you have acted, for your scant regard to your oath in the court-martial, for your attempt to combat an imagined villainy by a real villainy. But I realise what you have suffered, and in that suffering lies the punishment you fully deserve for not having taken the straight course, for not having taxed me there and then with the thing that you suspected.”
“The gentleman is about to lecture me upon morals, Sylvia.” But Tremayne let pass the interruption.
“It is quite true that I was in Una’s room while you were killing Samoval. But I was not alone with her, as you have so rashly assumed. Her brother Richard was there, and it was on his behalf that I was present. She had been hiding him for a fortnight. She begged me, as Dick’s friend and her own, to save him; and I undertook to do so. I climbed to her room to assist him to descend by the rope ladder you saw, because he was wounded and could not climb without assistance. At the gates I had the curricle waiting in which I had driven up. In this I was to have taken him on board a ship that was leaving that night for England, having made arrangements with her captain. You should have seen, had you reflected, that—as I told the court—had I been coming to a clandestine meeting, I should hardly have driven up in so open a fashion, and left the curricle to wait for me at the gates.
“The death of Samoval and my own arrest thwarted our plans and prevented Dick’s escape. That is the truth. Now that you have it I hope you like it, and I hope that you thoroughly relish your own behaviour in the matter.”
There was a fluttering sigh of relief from Miss Armytage. Then silence followed, in which O’Moy stared at Tremayne, emotion after emotion sweeping across his mobile face.