"Under benedicite, if I must!" whispered the patient.
"Be it so," answered the priest, and signed to Guenllian to quit the chamber. "Now, my son, here be no ears save mine—and His that knoweth all things. Speak on."
"Father!" continued the low but fervent tone, "the Irish never shot him. That shot came from our own side."
"Never!" broke from the amazed priest. "Lawrence, my son, calm thee! Thou art speaking——"
"I am speaking the heavy truth," answered the sufferer. "Nay Father, I am in good wit now, whatso I may have been. I tell you again, the Irish did it not. It was his own men that slew him."
"Christ pardon him that did it!"
"I will say Amen so soon as I can," answered Lawrence Madison with a sob. "That is not yet."
The priest did not reprove him. Perhaps he was too shocked to say anything: or perhaps he felt that in a case like this, nature must have its way at first, and even grace could hardly overcome it in the opening bitterness of love's agony.
Guenllian had felt much afraid of Mr. Robesart's making Lawrence thus speak out the point which in his delirium he seemed unable to utter, like a nervous horse refusing to pass a special object. But the event proved the physician's judgment right. From the hour that the burden was shared with another, the patient began to amend.
Who was it that slew Roger Mortimer, and why? God knoweth, and men never knew. The chroniclers plainly enough assert the fact of his death; but they content themselves with the vaguest possible hints at the further facts—that his own men slew him, and that they did it out of jealousy on account of what they deemed his Irish proclivities. Just enough to make us guess it they suggest: they were evidently afraid to say more.