As soon as I could close up my affairs, I buried myself in the wilds of Australia, where I began life anew. Fortune was kind to me and I prospered. Under another name, I became a respected and honored citizen of a thriving new settlement.
Then the crowning blessing of all came when I won the love of the beautiful Mercedes, a black-eyed, olive-hued immigrant from my old province of Andalusia. Then, indeed, I was at the threshold of Heaven! But how short was my day of bliss!
Four weeks before our wedding day Silvela Castelar suddenly entered our settlement. It is useless to dwell upon that wretched period. Sufficient to say that this hellborn fiend again worked his diabolic sorcery, and Mercedes was lost to me forever.
The report came to me that Silvela, for the first time in his life, loved with a fierce, consuming passion, and that Mercedes soon would be betrothed to him. Then it was that I vowed by all that was holy that Silvela Castelar should pay in full his guilty debt, even though, as a result, my soul should sink into stygian blackness.
Why do I write this? Because I take a grim pleasure in telling of my revenge, and because I want the world to know that I had just provocation. I am not afraid. Life or death—it matters little which is my portion now. When this is read I shall be far from the haunts of men.
Silvela Castelar thought I was a fool. It suited my purpose that he should continue to think so. I treated him as a bosom friend, and he, poor idiot, thought I never guessed that he was the instigator of the ruin which drove me from England, wrecked my business career in America, and in the end left me desolate, without hope of ever enjoying the blessings of love.
So, while we smoked, read, or hunted together, I brooded upon my wrongs, and racked by brain for some method by which I could accomplish that which was now the sole absorbing motive of my life. Then chance threw across my path the instrument of my vengeance.
One day, while I was wandering, desolate and alone, through a wild and unexplored part of the country, I came upon one of the rarest and at the same time one of the most terrible species of the vegetable kingdom ever discovered. It is known as the octopus plant, called by the natives “the devil tree.” When I saw it my heart gave a throb of exultation, for I knew that my search was ended; the means by which I could accomplish my purpose was now at hand.
Silvela and I had but one passion in common—an intense love for botanical investigation. I knew that he would be interested when he heard of my strange discovery, and I believed that his knowledge of the plant was not sufficient to make him cautious. On the evening of the next day but one, as we sat smoking, I broached the subject.