“Thank you, love..... You’re so very sweet..... Too bad you’re in love with that other one, eh?” He tried to wink at her, but his face was suddenly changed, as crestfallen as the moment before it had been triumphant. His muscles convulsed from the pain of his mortal wound. “Kiss me, Mary. I’m gone to a better world.”
Trembling, she bent once more to press her lips to his. And when she rose again, he was gone.
“No. Dear God, please! It should have been me,” she sobbed. “It should have been me.”
She rocked him slowly back and forth, for the second time in her young life crying the bitter tears of a loved one lost. A heavy silence reigned about her, and the birds in the heath would not sing.
Fifteen
So it was that Stephen Purceville found her. He had knocked twice on the door of the hut, with growing impatience until, receiving no answer to his summons, he kicked it in. There he had found her gone, the place empty but for a filthy hag who hid her face and said nothing.
Yet for all his indifference and haste, the momentary glimpse of her eyes had struck a chord of memory inside him, though he was far too angry to puzzle it out. His woman (he thought of everything he desired as his) had betrayed him, gone off, when she knew that he wanted to see her.
Riding off in a storm of emotion, he came across Sergeant Billings as he rejoined the main track, who with a scared face spoke of ambush and treachery, and pointed back along the way he had come. Angered still further by the intrusion of duty (and reality) upon his romantic dreams, he forced out of the man what information he could, then bluntly ordered him to be silent, and follow.
So the two rode west together, and found her still in the same attitude, holding the body as she would a sick child. She did not at first seem to hear them approach, till with a vehemence which startled them both, the young Purceville screamed at her:
“What is the meaning of this!”