"Heknew that I had discovered the secret, and wrote urging me to take theutmost precautions to preserve what he guardedly referred to as theSilence."
"But you say that Madame herself took tea with her victims?" I said."She did not suffer."
"Certainly not," responded my beloved. "In her expert hand thesepoisons, discovered by Hartmann, may be fatal to one person andperfectly harmless to another. She no doubt drank some prophylacticfirst, which at once counteracted any ill effect of poison takenafterwards. Hartmann seems to have re-discovered the secrets dead withthe Borgias, for Madame can, I believe, secrete a swift and deadlypoison within almost anything."
"Where is she now?" asked Boyd quickly. "We must take immediate stepsfor her arrest, as well as Blain's."
"Madame has flown to the Continent, but where I have no idea," shereplied. "To-night I intended to go to Paris and try to obtain asituation as governess, for I feared to remain longer in England,knowing of the body of Hartmann lying in that closed room at theHollies."
"You must remain," Boyd said quietly. "Your evidence will be required."
"Ah, no! I cannot," she declared, bursting into a torrent of tears."After this confession I--" and her voice was choked by sobs as shecovered her haggard face with her hands.
"After this confession, darling," I said tenderly, "I love you none theless."
Then, clasping her swaying figure to me in wild ecstasy, I felt theswell of her bosom against my breast, and I covered her cold,tear-stained cheeks with passionate kisses, while she, for the firsttime, raised her sweet full lips to mine in a fervid, passionate caress,and murmured that she loved me.
Ah! what joy was mine at that moment. A new life had been renewedwithin me, for I knew that by the sacred bond of an undying affectionshe was bound to me for ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.
CONCLUSION.
Upon events which occurred immediately afterwards there is little needto dwell, save to declare that the hours that followed were the mostjoyous of all our lives; and further, that the post and the telegraphthat night carried over the seas a demand to the police for the searchand arrest of Madame Damant and the unscrupulous schemer Henry Blain.
A little more than a year has now gone by since that well-remembered dayof confession, and Eva and I are happily united man and wife, while LilyLowry no longer toils at her counter but is married to Dick, againstwhom Boyd's suspicions were, of course, entirely unfounded. By thedeath of a maiden aunt, who never gave me sixpence while alive, I havefortunately found myself possessed of sufficient to live independentlyin a house embowered in trees on the banks of the Exe, in Devon, whileDick, who is still "the _Comet_ man," lives in a neat villa out atBeckenham. Eva and I are frequent guests there, and on such occasionsthe conversation often turns to those breathless summer days up theThames and that extraordinary mystery so intricate and puzzling--amystery which never, after all, appeared in the _Comet_.
Of Mrs. Blain and Mary we hear but very little. They left Riverdenebroken and crushed, poor things, and went to live in a small house atBournemouth upon the wreck of the fugitive's fortune. No word has sincebeen heard of him, but as the deed-box containing many of the papers wasfound by the police in a garret in the Rue du Maure in Paris, from whichthe occupier--an Englishman answering to Blain's description--hadmysteriously disappeared, it is almost beyond doubt that he hadcommitted suicide rather than starve. Hartmann's unclaimed scientificdiscovery is still the wonder of the Royal Institution, and Patterson isstill stationed at Kensington. As for Madame Damant, she was threemonths ago arrested in Venice, where, in the course of a sensationaltrial, it was proved that she had most ingeniously poisoned a wealthyGerman contractor whom she had inveigled into marriage, and to-day sheis serving a life-term of imprisonment. The Italian Government does notgive up its subjects for offences committed abroad, or she wouldotherwise have been brought to London for trial, and the readers ofnewspapers would have been startled by the details of this, one of themost skilful and extraordinary plots of secret assassination everdevised by the devilish ingenuity of man or woman.
The End.
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends