"I am Radford Leicester. There is no Signor Ricordo, there never was any Signor Ricordo--except in name."

He spoke quite calmly, yet his voice trembled somewhat. Again she looked, and the truth became clearer to her; nevertheless she could not quite understand what had happened.

"Will you not sit down?" he said. "Do not fear; I quite understand your feelings. I will not sit near you. But before I go away I want to tell you something. I want to remove all haunting fear from your mind.

Naturally you loathe my presence--as you said long ago; naturally you feel defiled at the thought of my being near you. I quite realise that; you told me so, on our wedding-day, at The Beeches. Still, you will be glad to know what I have to tell you. After that I will go away into the darkness, never to trouble you by my presence again."

"But tell me," she said almost piteously, "I--I am afraid I am ill, and don't understand. But you are Radford--that is, Radford Leicester; and, as for the other----"

"There is no other, there never was any other. He was simply my great lie, the lie by which I wished to work my will. Radford Leicester never died, really died--he only pretended. He practised a fraud, a cruel, unworthy fraud; but he never died. He died to the world, that is all. I have been the Eastern stranger all the time--an Eastern stranger with a strange appearance. I have been that to deceive you. I am going to tell you why; then everything will be plain, and then I will go away again."

He took a few steps across the room, and as he did so she saw the Leicester she had known of olden time, and yet a new Leicester, with a new light in his eyes, and with a ring in his voice she had never heard before. Somehow, she did not know why, but in the dazed state of her mind Ricordo had faded away. As Leicester had said, there was no Signor Ricordo--there never had been such a person.

"I must needs speak of things that are painful to you," he said; "and yet perhaps they will not be. They are painful to me. You remember the day which should have been our wedding-day? You know that I came to you with Winfield. The man Sprague had sent you a letter about me. Well, the letter was true, and yet it was black lies. I tried to explain everything to you, but you would not listen. You know whether you were right in refusing."

He related the story of the wager. He did not spare himself; he only told the bare, unvarnished truth. It was not a pleasant story to tell; but he told it truly, while Olive sat and listened without sign or motion.

"Yes, I did love you," he went on, "but I was not worthy of you. My seeming reformation was only a mockery. I thought it was real at the time, but it was not. If you had married me, I should have fallen again, and perhaps I should have cursed you. I know it now and you will see presently why what I say is true. But I was mad with anger, and I gave way to my old vice. You had helped me to conquer it for a time, but all the time I was at heart a bad man, all the time I was a drunkard. If you had saved me really, I should not have given way again; I should not have flown to it the moment you cast me off. Yes, I loved you, all I was capable of loving; but it was a love of self in the main.

"You know what took place at Taviton--the drunkenness, the degradation, the disgrace. I was hooted out of the town, and I laid the blame to your doors. I went away on the moors and tried to think of what I should do, vowing vengeance on you all the time, yet never seeing how my vengeance was to be wreaked. I returned to London, and stayed there some time in hiding. No one knew where I was, save an old lawyer who had managed my money affairs. One night I saw at Blackfriars Bridge the body of a dead man. It had been washed on the steps, and left stranded there. It was beyond recognition; evidently it had been in the water some time. I put a letter of mine in the pocket of the dead man's clothes, and then waited. Everything turned out as I expected. No one had any doubts. I had committed suicide, and this was my body. I will not dwell any longer on that; there is no need. I went away to the East. I did so of a set purpose. I went away so that the world might forget me, and on the whole it did forget me. But I did not forget. One purpose filled my mind and heart; I will tell you what it was presently. I was a bad man when I first saw you; bad with the veneer of respectability and pride.

Afterwards I became bad without that veneer. Think your worst about me, you will not think too badly, save in one thing--I would conquer my craving for drink. Nothing was possible if I did not do that. And I have done that. Never since I left England, more than six years ago, has alcohol ever pa.s.sed my lips. I need not describe the h.e.l.l in which I lived, save to say that all the time I brooded over my dream of vengeance on you. I determined that, as far as you and--Sprague were concerned, there should be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I told you years ago, that my faith in G.o.d was but little. During those years I lived in the East, I learned to believe in a G.o.d; but it was a G.o.d of terror, a G.o.d that seemed to consent to my dream of revenge.

"Sometimes I have thought I was mad. Perhaps I was, but it was a madness which no one suspected, and it was a madness with a purpose. After I had been away two years, I was able to render a service to the head of the Great Tripoli Company. I need not describe how; but by a piece of good fortune I saved, not only his life, but his honour. He also said that I saved the fortunes of the great company. Be that as it may, those who were his enemies never dreamed that I should be able to help him. I was only an ignorant muleteer, who did not know their language, and who could not fathom their designs. But I did both, and I saved this great man. It seems like some far-fetched melodrama, doesn't it? But the thing is true. It leaked out little by little, I suppose, that I was a man of some education and ability, and by-and-by I became bound up in the fortunes of this great trading concern.

"It all fell in with my plans. I had learnt to hate you more and more, and I determined that nothing should baulk me in my purpose. Only once did I fear that I should fail in that which I had sworn to do. I was stricken with a plague common to that part of the world, and I was given up for dead. Even in my prosperity my great desire to live was that I might express my hatred for you. But I got better, and I felt as though the G.o.d in whom I had learnt to believe would deliver you into my hands; for there was one thing that illness did for me, it altered my appearance very materially--so much so that when I came back here no one suspected who I was.

"I shall soon come to the end now. As soon as I was able I came to England, determined that I would work your ruin, your disgrace. Nay, do not fear; I am only telling you this that you may know what is your right to know. I did not know what had happened to you; but I determined that, wherever you were, I would find you, and whatever your circ.u.mstances were, I would accomplish my purposes.

"I found you here--still unmarried, but apparently happy. I also found that you were much admired, and that you were contemplating marriage with that young squire. I made my plans. I will tell you what they were.

I would win your love; I felt sure I could do it; even if I could not win that, I believed in the devil sufficiently to be sure that I could gain your consent to marry me. I remembered, too, that I had won you in the old days, and I hoped that I possessed something of the power by which I won you then. Even if I failed, my purpose to have my revenge should not be frustrated, for I hated you with all the intensity of my being."

All the time Olive sat with wide, staring eyes and blanched face.

Sometimes she felt as though the recital were only a ghastly nightmare, but when she looked into the man's face she felt its reality. The man was Leicester, the man whom she believed had died six years before; but even yet she could not understand everything. What was this scheme of vengeance which he was going to work upon her? It would be difficult to a.n.a.lyse her feelings just then. The past and the present, the known and the unknown, were so inter-woven that nothing seemed real.

"You wonder how a man can hate so?" he went on. "So do I now; but after all, man is only an incipient devil when he gives way to his pa.s.sions, and I was only a reversion to type. This was the thought I had nursed; through you I had been scorned, disgraced, through you I had been cast into h.e.l.l. I did not realise all that went before; I only remembered those things which fed my hatred. And this is what I determined to do."

He hesitated a second, as though he feared to go on.

"It seems mean, it seems devilish," he said presently, "and it is what it seems. I vowed that I would marry you with all the display of a great wedding, and then when it was all over, when we were known to the world as man and wife, I would tell you who I was, and I would tell you that you were no wife at all, because I had married another woman elsewhere.

This also I would tell the world and leave you, disgraced, ruined, the topic for scandal, the woman who had become the dupe, the plaything of an adventurer, who was the husband of another wife, the father of children in another part of the world."

Again he walked across the room and returned.

"Oh, I know it seems paltry, and it is paltry, the scheme of a harlequin; all the same, I knew that it would make you feel what I had felt. I knew your proud nature, and that you would never be able to hold up your head again. I was sure that this would wound you a thousand times more than poverty, or any other calamity which men fear. As for Sprague, I had prepared for his fall. He should be ruined, disgraced, a penniless vagrant.

"You despise me. Yes, yes, I know; but it was my plan of revenge, and knowing you as I do, it was the most fiendish thing I could conceive of.

Not that I have a wife; no, great G.o.d, after knowing you, I could never marry another, but this was my plan. I determined, too, that a history of the man you had married, this Leicester whom you had scorned, should be published in all the newspapers--a history which told of him as one who for six years had lived in the foulest corruption. I fancied your being discussed in every clubroom in London, in every ale-house in England, that you, the proud Olive Castlemaine, who had driven away Radford Leicester because of your pride, had afterwards married him--him who was the husband of another woman, and the most corrupt blackguard who ever walked G.o.d's earth.

"Yes, yes, it was mean enough, paltry enough, but it was cruel too, and I gloated over my plan, for the devil possessed me. I had risen again from the dead to wreak my vengeance.

"Well, you remember last night? You promised to be my wife. I held you in my arms, I kissed you, you kissed me. For a moment I ceased to hate; I loved again, and the love was heaven. But when I left you, I vowed that I would not turn aside from the path I had marked out. This morning I could not come to you, I wanted to go away on the hills alone, I wanted to visit the scenes in which I had made my vows years ago.

"I went into a farmhouse where a simple and pure farmer's dame talked to me in the old days. To-day she talked to me again, and she made me feel that I was a fool. She made me realise that if I dragged you into h.e.l.l, I should go into a deeper h.e.l.l myself. She made me realise that there was a G.o.d in the world other than I knew of. Still I determined to go on as I had begun."

He stopped again, as if not knowing how to proceed with his story; then he told her of his walk across the moors, and of that wondrous experience which was too deep for words, of how G.o.d had come to him and had given him a new heart.

"Ever since last night I have known that I love you," he said; "ay, I knew that I loved you with a love too deep for words, but I would not confess it to myself until to-day. But I knew, too, that it was too late, because if I were unworthy of you years ago, I am a thousand times less worthy now. Then G.o.d told me to tell you what I have told you."

Leicester rose to his feet.

"Now I have told you--what I came to tell you," he said. "It was right that you should know, and I have told you. That is all, I think; so I will go. I do not ask you to forgive me--I do not, cannot expect that.

Good-night."

He hesitated a second as though he expected her to speak, but not a word escaped her lips. He thought the look in her eyes hard and repellent. As he moved towards the door he took a last look at her, but she made no sign, nor spoke a word.

"Good-night, good-bye," he said, and was gone.

She heard him go into the hall, and open the front door; afterwards the sound of his footsteps on the drive reached her; but she did not move.

The man's revelations had stunned her; she felt incapable of acting or thinking. All she knew was that a feeling of utter desolation possessed her.

She was glad her father was out of the house, for she had a great dread of meeting any one just then. In a vague way she had a longing to understand the meaning of what she had heard. For more than an hour she sat in utter silence. Little by little the reality of Leicester's story came to her. Leicester was not dead. He had come back to wreak his revenge on her.

At first she was angry. That he whom she had driven away should come back as a stranger in order to drag her into disgrace, hurt her pride.

But the anger did not long remain. She reflected that he had renounced his plan of revenge. Nay, more, he had come to her almost humbly, and told her that he had learnt to be ashamed of his unworthy designs.

Without knowing it she began to a.n.a.lyse her feelings. What was to become of her? Ricordo was gone--there never had been a Ricordo, except in name. And yet she had loved him. The night before, when she had promised to be his wife, and felt his lips upon hers, she knew that her life had gone out to his. Even although she could not understand it, she knew it was so. In spite of the fear which had possessed her, her heart had responded to his pleadings. Even then the thought of it was strange. If, years before, any one had told her that she would have given her heart to a man with Ricordo's professed antecedents, she would have laughed at such a suggestion as impossible. And yet, in spite of herself, she had loved him, she did love him. And yet there was no Ricordo; there never had been.

Then, like a flash, the whole truth came to her. It was Leicester she had loved all the time. She realised now why, even at their first meeting, he had such an influence over her. It was not a stranger with an Italian name, it was Leicester, the man who had won her years before, and whom she had sent away in anger, but whom she had never been able to forget. Her heart had thrilled its recognition of the man, even although she thought him to be a stranger. It was Leicester all the time.

Everything was plain to her now; there never had been any Signor Ricordo; at most he was only a name, a fancy. That was why, the night before, it had seemed to her that it was Leicester who had kissed her.

It was not a new love at all. It was but the resurrection of an old love, the one love of her life.

For a moment she forgot everything in this one great thought. Leicester was still alive, that she still loved him, and that she had never loved any one else. She had only cared about the stranger because her heart knew it was he.

Then she realised that he had gone, and with that realisation a great blackness fell upon her life. In spite of all he had told her, she loved him still. She might be angry at the revenge of which he had told her, her anger was lost in her longing for him. Nevertheless he had gone, and left her desolate.

Where was he now? she wondered. He had meant what he said when he had told her that he was leaving her for ever. He believed that she scorned him now as she had scorned him years before, and he would not wait to be driven away, as he had been driven then. He had gone away, and she would never see him again. If he only knew!--oh, if he only knew!

The room was oppressive; she could scarcely breathe. She went to the cas.e.m.e.nt window and opened it wide. The sweet pure air of the summer night was wafted to her, and there, lying beneath the moon's rays, was one of the loveliest sights in England. But she thought not of it; her heart was torn at the thought that she had bidden good-bye to the only man she had ever loved or could love.

Slowly she dragged her feet to her own bedroom, and tried to face the thought of the future. She had lived the past six years without him, and she must face the prospect of living her whole life without him. He did not know of her love, and he never would, except she told him, and that she could never do, for she knew he would never come to her again.

For a long time she sat alone, and faced what seemed to her inevitable darkness, then suddenly she started to her feet. It was her pride which caused her to drive him away six years before, and it was still pride that kept her from letting him know the truth now. She was allowing a poor and unworthy vanity to stand between her and happiness.

A few minutes later she was on her way to the Manor Farm. There had been a battle between love and pride, and love had won. She believed that not only her happiness, but his was at stake. She almost flew across the park, so eager was she to reach him. Pride was gone, the fear of what the world might think, if the world knew, was gone. She only knew that she loved, and that she would, if needs be, plead for forgiveness.

Crossing the bridge which spanned the river, she made her way up the footpath, until she reached the garden gate. A minute later she was on the lawn outside his window. For a moment her heart seemed to stop beating. What if he should drive her away, as she had driven him? Could she go to him, and offer him a love that might be repulsed? Standing there on the lawn, she could see him plainly. Evidently he was preparing to leave. In the middle of the room was a large box, in which he was placing his belongings. Like one fascinated she watched. Now and then he would stop in his work and stand still seemingly staring into vacancy, and then, as if spurred on by some secret thought, would eagerly continue his work.

The room in which she saw him was the Manor House parlour, a low ceiled apartment, with large cas.e.m.e.nt windows opening out on the lawn. The light from the window fell upon the spot where she was standing, but he did not see her. She, however, could see his face plainly. She wondered how she had failed to recognise him, even although he had been disguised by his thick beard, for as she watched him she saw the Leicester she had known years before. But his face seemed terribly hard and stern, and she did not understand the look in his eyes. How dare she go to him, and tell him what was in her heart? Would he not scorn her, as she had scorned him? Thus minute after minute she waited, afraid to do what she had set out to do. So hard and unforgiving did his expression seem to her that she was almost on the point of turning away, when she saw him sit down like a man overcome, and pillow his face in his hands. Then she hesitated no longer. Approaching the window, she knocked gently, and instantly he lifted his head with a look of eager inquiry.