“You have not tell any one—never?”
Finden laughed. “Though I’m not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight as anny. There’s no tongue that’s so tied, when tying’s needed, as the one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets.”
“So you t’ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon is sick-hein?”
“Oh, I think—”
Finden stopped short, for a horse’s hoofs sounded on the turf beside the house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.
He lifted his hat to the priest. “I hear there’s a bad case at the hospital,” he said.
“It is ver’ dangerous,” answered Father Bourassa; “but, voila, come in! There is something cool to drink. Ah yes, he is ver’ bad, that man from the Great Slave Lake.”
Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions, and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases which had passed through his hands—one a man with his neck broken, who had lived for six months afterward.
“Broken as a man’s neck is broken by hanging—dislocation, really—the disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don’t mind technicalities,” he said. “But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him to repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if you can, to the last inch of resistance.”
The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden’s eyes were screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to Varley’s remarks. There was a long minute’s silence. They were all three roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.