Ferdinand Ramero rose to his feet and stood in the aisle near the door.  His face hardened, and all the suave polish and cool concentration and dominant magnetism fell away.  What remained was the man as shaped by the ruling passions of years, from whose control only divine power could bring deliverance.  And when he spoke there was a remorseless cruelty and selfishness in his low, even tones.

“You have called me a plotter for my father’s life—­based on some lying Mexican’s love of blackmail.  You do not even try to prove your charge.  The man who would have killed him was Theron St. Vrain, and his brother, Bertrand.  That Theron was disgraced by the fact you know very well, and the blackness of it drove him to an early grave.  So this young lady here, whom I would have shielded from this stain upon her name in the marriage to my son, may know the truth about her father.  He was what you, Father Josef, try to prove me to be.”

He paused as if to gather venom for his last shaft.

“These two, Theron and Bertrand, were equally guilty, but through tricks of their own, Theron escaped and Bertrand took the whole crime on himself.  He disappeared and paid the penalty by his death.  His body was recovered from the river and placed in an unmarked grave.  Why go back to that now?  Because Bertrand St. Vrain’s clothes alone on some poor drowned unknown man were buried.  Bertrand himself sits here beside his niece, Eloise St. Vrain.  John Doe to the world, the man who lives without a name, and dares not sign a business document, a walking dead man.  I could even pity him if he were real.  But who can pity nothing?”

A look of defiance came into the man’s glittering eyes as he took one step nearer to the door and continued: 

“Esmond Clarenden drove me out of the United States with threats of implicating me in the death of my father, and I knew his power and brutal daring to do anything he chose to do.  It was but his wish to have revenge for this nameless thing—­”

The scorn of Ramero’s eyes and voice as he looked at Jondo were withering.

“And this thing keeps me here by threats of attacks, even when he knows that by such attacks he will reveal himself.  It has been a grim game.”  Something of a grin showed all of the man’s fine teeth.  “A grim game, and never played to a finish till now.  I leave it to you, Father Josef, to judge who has been the stronger and who comes out of it victor.  I make restoration—­of what?  I leave the St. Vrain money that I have guarded for Eloise, the daughter of the man who killed, or helped to kill, my father.  You can control it now, among you:  Clarenden, already rich; your Church, notorious in its robbery of the poor by enriching its coffers; or this uncle here, who is dead and buried in an unknown grave.  That is all the restoration I can make.  Repentance, I do not know what that word means.  Keep it for the poor devils you will gather in to-morrow night to be shriven.  They need it.  I do not.”