Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 3 (1925-09).djvu/128

"'There!' he shrieked at her, pointing to it. 'There is the thing you loved! Look at it and see how lovable it is—now!'

"'Oh—my God!' said his wife. 'You believe that—really believe?'

"And she stretched out her hands like one groping in darkness and swayed on her feet.

"Arnaut answered her with a string of accusing oaths. But she was brave—brave. Arnaut admits that. Suddenly she drew herself up. She was very pale, and her eyes were wide. But her words lashed back at him in scorching scorn.

"'Then—why don't you complete your work?'

"Arnaut says she stretched out her arms. He says her eyes, her face, will haunt him to the grave. But then he was mad—utterly mad. He lifted his smoking weapon and pointed it at her, and with what seemed to him then as absolute deliberation he fired.

"She swayed before him for a moment, and a spot of red grew on the filmy fabric of her gown. Then, then she bent forward slightly and coughed. Red blood spattered from her lips. 'Jean!' she choked, and fell on her knees, on her face.

"Arnaut nodded. He was quite satisfied. He had made all his plans. Yet even as he put his weapon away, something made him stoop and lift her up in his arms, and lay her on the couch. Having done that he straightened her limbs and composed her hands. She was still warm, seemed scarcely more than asleep. Then he walked out of the room without a single backward glance, and turned off the lights at the switch.

"All his rage had left him. He decided to leave the city at once. Going to his room, he took up the bags he had packed earlier in the day and started to leave the house. As he passed the door of his wife's boudoir, he noticed that the lights were burning. He set down his bags and stepped inside to turn them off. Then for the first time he saw what before had escaped his attention. It was a half-smoked cigar lying on the floor in the shadow of the table on the top of which he had seen the ashes. He crossed to it and picked it up. The band about it showed it to be one of the brand he habitually smoked.

"Suddenly, chief, as he stood there holding it in his hand, he began to tremble, because of a terrible thought. His supply of cigars was kept in his own room, in a cabinet to which he held the key, and which he always kept locked. He put down a finger slowly and touched the pile of ashes. They were cold—quite cold—but not more so than his own flesh had become. You see, chief, he had remembered—when it was too late. Now that it was all past—now that the terrible, irrevocable deed had been done, and two innocent souls sent to an unmerited fate—suddenly into his reeling brain came the recollection of the cigar he had smoked in that room before the pretended start on his journey. In that terrible moment which seared all the madness of suspicion from the soul of Jean Arnaut forever, I realized, chief, that the cigar and ashes were mine."

"Yours!"

The chief came to his feet in a bound.

"Mine," the man with the sunken eyes reaffirmed. "I—God help me I—am Jean Arnaut."