No Defense Part 23

Almost the last words the governor used to her were these: "Those only live at peace here who are at peace with me"; and her reply had been: "But Mr. Dyck Calhoun lives at peace, does he not, your honour?"

To that he had replied: "No man is at peace while he has yet desires."

He paused a minute and then added: "That Erris Boyne killed by Dyck Calhoun--did you ever see him that you remember?"

"Not that I remember," she replied quickly. "I never lived in Dublin."

"That may be. But did you never know his history?" She shook her head in negation. His eyes searched her face carefully, and he was astonished when he saw no sign of confusion there. "Good G.o.d, she doesn't know.

She's never been told!" he said to himself. "This is too startling. I'll speak to the mother."

A little later he turned from the mother with astonishment. "It's madness," he remarked to himself. "She will find out. Some one will tell her.... By heaven, I'll tell her first," he hastily said. "When she knows the truth, Calhoun will have no chance on earth. Yes, I'll tell her myself. But I'll tell no one else," he added; for he felt that Sheila, once she knew the truth, would resent his having told abroad the true story of the Erris Boyne affair.

So Sheila and her mother had gone to their lodgings with depression, but each with a clear purpose in her mind. Mrs. Llyn was determined to tell her daughter what she ought to have known long before; and Sheila was firm to make the one man who had ever interested her understand that he was losing much that was worth while keeping.

Then had followed the journey to Salem. Yet all the while for Sheila one dark thought kept hovering over everything. Why should life be so complicated? Why should this one man who seemed capable and had the temperament of the Irish hills and vales be the victim of punishment and shame--why should he shame her?

Suddenly, without her mother's knowledge, she sent Darius Boland through the hills in the early morning to Enniskillen, Dyck Calhoun's place, with a letter which said only this: "Is it not time that you came to wish us well in our new home? We shall expect you to-morrow."

When Dyck read this note he thought it was written by Sheila, but inspired by the mother; and he lost no time in making his way down across the country to Salem, which he reached a few hours after sunrise.

At the doorway of the house he met Mrs. Llyn.

"Have you told her?" he asked in anxiety. Astonished at his presence she could make no reply for a moment. "I have told her nothing," she answered. "I meant to do so this morning. I meant to do it--I must."

"She sent me a letter asking if it was not time I came to wish you well in your house, and you and she would expect me to-day."

"I knew naught of her writing you," was the reply--"naught at all. But now that you are here, will you not tell her all?"

Dyck smiled grimly. "Where is she?" he asked. "I will tell her."

The mother pointed down the garden. "Yonder by the clump of palms I saw her a moment ago. If you go that way you will find her."

In another moment Dyck Calhoun was on his way to the clump of palms, and before he reached it, the girl came out into the path. She was dressed in a black silk skirt with a white bodice and lace, as he had seen her on her arrival in Kingston, and at her throat was a sprig of the wild pear-tree. When she saw him, she gave a slight start, then stood still, and he came to her.

"I have your letter," he said, "and I came to say what I ought to say about your living here: you will bring blessings to the place."

She looked at him steadfastly. "Shall we talk here," she said, "or inside the house? There is a little shelter here in the trees"--pointing to the right--"a shelter built by the late manager. It has the covering of a hut, but it is open at two sides. Will you come?" As she went on ahead, he could not fail to notice how slim and trim she was, how perfectly her figure seemed to fit her gown-as though she had been poured into it; and yet the folds of her skirt waved and floated like silky clouds around her! Under cover of the shelter, she turned and smiled at him.

"You have seen my mother?"

"I have just come from her," he answered. "She bade me tell you what ought to have been told long ago, and you were not, for there seemed no reason that you should. You were young and ignorant and happy. You had no cares, no sorrows. The sorrows that had come to your mother belonged to days when you were scarce out of the cradle. But you did not know.

You were not aware that your mother had divorced your father for crime against marital fidelity and great cruelty. You did not know even who that father was. Well, I must tell you. Your father was a handsome man, a friend of mine until I knew the truth about him, and then he died--I killed him, so the court said."

Her face became ghastly pale. After a moment of anguished bewilderment, she said: "You mean that Erris Boyne was my father?"

"Yes, I mean that. They say I killed him. They say that he was found with no sword drawn, but that my open sword lay on the table beside me while I was asleep, and that it had let out his life-blood."

"Why was he killed?" she asked, horror-stricken and with pale lips.

"I do not know, but if I killed him, it was because I revolted from the proposals he made to me. I--" He paused, for the look on her face was painful to see, and her body was as that of one who had been struck by lightning. It had a crumpled, stricken look, and all force seemed to be driven from it. It had the look of crushed vitality. Her face was set in paleness, her eyes were frightened, her whole person was, as it were, in ghastly captivity. His heart smote him, and he pulled himself together to tell her all.

"Go on," she said. "I want to hear. I want--to know all. I ought to have known--long ago; but that can't be helped now. Continue--please."

Her words had come slowly, in gasps almost, and her voice was so frayed he could scarcely recognize it. All the pride of her nature seemed shattered.

"If I killed him," he said presently, "it was because he tried to tempt me from my allegiance to the Crown to become a servant of France, to--"

He stopped short, for a cry came from her lips which appalled him.

"My G.o.d--my G.o.d!" she said with bloodless lips, her eyes fastened on his face, her every look and motion the inflection of despair. "Go on--tell all," she added presently with more composure.

Swiftly he described what happened in the little room at the traitor's tavern, of the momentary reconciliation and the wine that he drank, drugged wine poured out but not drunk by Erris Boyne, and of his later unconsciousness. At last he paused.

"Why did these things not come out at the trial?" she asked in hushed tones.

He made a helpless gesture. "I did not speak of them because I thought of you. I hid it--I did not want you to know what your father was."

Something like a smile gathered at her pale lips. "You saved me for the moment, and condemned yourself for ever," she said in a voice of torture. "If you had told what he was--if you had told that, the jury would not have condemned you, they would not have sent you to prison."

"I believe I did the right thing," he said. "If I killed your father, prison was my proper punishment. But I can't remember. There was no other clue, no other guide to judgment. So the law said I killed him, and--he had evidently not drawn his sword. It was clear he was killed defenceless."

"You killed a defenceless man!" Her voice was sharp with agony. "That was mentioned at the trial--but I did not believe it then--in that long ago." She trembled to her feet from the bench where she was sitting.

"And I do not believe it now--no, on my soul, I do not."

"But it makes no difference, you see. I was condemned for killing your father, and the world knows that Erris Boyne was your father, and here Lord Mallow, the governor, knows it; and there is no chance of friends.h.i.+p between you and me. Since the day he was found dead in the room, there was no hope for our friends.h.i.+p, for anything at all between us that I had wished to be there. You dare not be friends with me--"

Her face suddenly suffused and she held herself upright with an effort.

She was about to say, "I dare, Dyck--I do dare!" but he stopped her with a reproving gesture.

"No, no, you dare not, and I would not let you if you would. I am an ex-convict. They say I killed your father, and the way to understanding between us is closed."

She made a protesting gesture. "Closed! Closed!--But is it closed? No, no, some one else killed him, not you. You couldn't have done it.

You would have fought him--fought him as you did Lord Mallow, and in fighting you might have killed him, but your sword never let out his life when he was defenceless--never."

A look of intense relief, almost of happiness, came to Dyck's face.

"That is like you, Sheila, but it does not cure the trouble. You and I are as far apart as noon and midnight. The law has said the only thing that can be said upon it."

She sank down again upon the wooden bench. "Oh, how mad you were, not to tell the whole truth long ago! You would not have been condemned, and then--"

She paused overcome, and his self-control almost deserted him. With strong feeling he burst out: "And then, we might have come together?

No, your mother--your friends, myself, could not have let that be. See, Sheila, I will tell you the whole truth now--aye, the whole absolute truth. I have loved you since the first day I saw you on the hills when you and I rescued Christopher Dogan. Not a day has pa.s.sed since then when you were not more to me than any other woman in all the world."

A new light came into her face, the shadows left her eyes, and the pallor fled from her lips. "You loved me?" she said in a voice grown soft-husky still, but soft as the light in a summer heaven. "You loved me--and have always loved me since we first met?"

Her look was so appealing, so pa.s.sionate and so womanly, that he longed to reach out his arms to her, and say, "Come--come home, Sheila," but the situation did not permit that, and only his eyes told the story of what was in his mind.

"I have always loved you, Sheila, and shall do so while I have breath and life. I have always given you the best that is in me, tried to do what was good for us both, since my misfortune--crime, Lord Mallow calls it, as does the world. Never a sunrise that does not find you in the forefront of all the lighted world; never a flower have I seen that does not seem sweeter--it brings thoughts of you; never a crime that does not deepen its shame because you are in the world. In prison, when I used to mop my floor and clean down the walls; when I swept the dust from the corners; when I folded up my convict clothes; when I ate the prison food and sang the prison hymns; when I placed myself beside the bench in the workshop to make things that would bring cash to my fellow-prisoners in their need; when I saw a minister of religion or heard the Litany; when I counted up the days, first that I had spent in jail and then the days I had still to spend in jail; when I read the books from the prison library of the land where you had gone, and of the struggle there; when I saw you, in my mind's eye, in the cotton-fields or on the verandah of your house in Virginia--I had but one thought, and that was the look in your face at Playmore and Limerick, the sound of your voice as you came singing up the hill just before I first met you, the joyous beauty of your body."

"And at sea?" she whispered with a gesture at once beautiful and pathetic, for it had the motion of helplessness and hopelessness. What she had heard had stirred her soul, and she wanted to hear more--or was it that she wished to drain the cup now that it was held to her lips?-drain it to the last drop of feeling.