“Yet I have paid the account demanded by the law. And you had no regard for him. You divorced him.”
Sheila had drawn near, and Dyck made a gesture in her direction. “She does not know,” he said, “and she should not hear what we say now?”
Mrs. Llyn nodded, and in a low tone told Sheila that she wished to be alone with Dyck for a little while. In Dyck’s eyes, as he watched Sheila go, was a thing deeper than he had ever known or shown before. In her white gown, and with her light step, Sheila seemed to float away—a picture graceful, stately, buoyant, “keen and small.” As she was about to pass beyond a clump of pimento bushes, she turned her head towards the two, and there was that in her eyes which few ever see and seeing are afterwards the same. It was a look of inquiry, or revelation, of emotion which went to Dyck’s heart.
“No, she does not know the truth,” Mrs. Llyn said. “But it has been hard hiding it from her. One never knew whether some chance remark, some allusion in the papers, would tell her you had killed her father.”
“Did I kill her father?” asked Dyck helplessly. “Did I? I was found guilty of it, but on my honour, Mrs. Llyn, I do not know, and I do not think I did. I have no memory of it. We quarrelled. I drew my sword on him, then he made an explanation and I madly, stupidly drank drugged wine in reconciliation with him, and then I remember nothing more—nothing at all.”
“What was the cause of your quarrel?”
Dyck looked at her long before answering. “I hid that from my father even, and hid it from the world—did not even mention it in court at the trial. If I had, perhaps I should not have gone to jail. If I had, perhaps I should not be here in Jamaica. If I had—” He paused, a flood of reflection drowning his face, making his eyes shine with black sorrow.
“Well, if you had!... Why did you not? Wasn’t it your duty to save yourself and save your friends, if you could? Wasn’t that your plain duty?”
“Yes, and that was why I did not tell what the quarrel was. If I had, even had I killed Erris Boyne, the jury would not have convicted me. Of that I am sure. It was a loyalist jury.”
“Then why did you not?”