Carnac gazed at it for a moment, absorbed. “That was your girl, Denzil, wasn’t it?” he asked.
Denzil nodded. “The best the world ever had, m’sieu’,” he replied, “the very best, but she went queer and drowned herself—ah, but yes!”
“She just went queer, eh!” Carnac said, looking Denzil straight in the eyes. “Was there insane blood in her family?”
“She wasn’t insane,” answered Denzil firmly. “She’d been bad used—terrible.”
“That didn’t come out at the inquest, did it?”
“Not likely. She wrote it me. I’m telling you what I’ve never told anyone.” He shut the door, as though to make a confessional. “She wrote it me, and I wasn’t telling anyone-but no. She’d been away down at Quebec City, and there a man got hold of her. Almeric Tarboe it was—the older brother of Luke Tarboe at John Grier’s.” Suddenly the face of the little man went mad with emotion. “I—I—” he paused.
Carnac held up his hand. “No-no-no, don’t tell me. Tarboe—I understand, the Unwritten Law. You haven’t told me, but I understand. I remember: he was found in the woods with his gun in his hand-dead. I read it all by accident long ago; and that was the story, eh!”
“Yes. She was young, full of imagination. She loved me, but he was clever, and he was high up, and she was low down. He talked her blind, and then in the woods it was, in the woods where he died, that he—”
Suddenly the little man wrung his fingers like one robbed of reason. “He was a strongman,” he went on, “and she was a girl, weak, but not wanton ... and so she died, telling me, loving me—so she died, and so he died, too, in the woods with his gun in his hand. Yes, ‘twas done with his own gun—by accident—by accident! He stumbled, and the gun went off. That was the story at the inquest. No one knew I was there. I was never seen with him and I’ve never been sorry. He got what he deserved—sacre, yes!”
There was something overwhelming in the face of the little resolute, powerful man. His eyes were aflame. He was telling for the first time the story of his lifelong agony and shame.