‘Is it only you that hears? I have—lied to you.’
‘How?’
‘I am not really—of English blood—I have not a drop of it—in my veins.’
‘Dear Clerivault; I knew. What then?’
‘You knew? And yet—would let me speak—for England—claim—to represent her?’
‘O, Clerivault, Clerivault! Whatever your blood, you have an English heart. You have loved England and died for her. Now are you for ever more one of her dearest sons.’
A radiance came into the fading eyes; the dying man rose with a sudden powerful effort from his pillow. ‘England!’ he cried hoarsely. A rush of blood rumbled from his mouth, and he fell back dead.
* * * * * *
They dropped him the next day into the blue sea, with a shot at his feet. Brion looked on with tearless eyes and a numbed brain. It was all right, he supposed, and they could do nothing else; but he wished they had lashed them together first, and ended the whole business then and there. He had a curious feeling of being half-dead himself, as if a moiety of his vitality had been withdrawn with that dear inseparable comrade. How could he ever care for life again without Clerivault? His love, and now his friend? Surely Destiny had dealt with him unduly at so early an age. He was sad and alone—no longer with any definite object in the world.
So he thought in his unhappiness, poor soul. He had gone forth so radiantly, and only, after all, to find Desolation. With that he was returning to face the desolate house, his home; with that to vindicate his desertion of a trust and duty. His dead comrade’s words returned upon him with a pitiful force which shook his heart. Ought he to have allowed himself to be tempted away? A fever was upon him all at once to be back in England—in Devonshire; a mad longing to cancel the intervening space which lay between him and surety.