She noticed his hesitation, and said: “Speak. I know that there is sorrow on him. Someone—someone—he loved?”
“Someone he loved,” was the reply.
“And she died?” The priest bowed his head.
“She was his wife—Shon’s wife”? and Mary Callen could not hide from her words the hurt she felt.
“I married her to him, but yet she was not his wife.” There was a keen distress in the girl’s voice. “Father, tell me, tell me what you mean.”
“Hush, and I will tell you all. He married her, thinking, and she thinking, that she was a widowed woman. But her husband came back. A terrible thing happened. The woman believing, at a painful time, that he who came back was about to take Shon’s life, fired at him, and wounded him, and then killed herself.”
Mary Callen raised herself upon her elbow, and looked at the priest in piteous bewilderment. “It is dreadful,” she said.... “Poor woman!... And he had forgotten—forgotten me. I was dead to him, and am dead to him now. There’s nothing left but to draw the cold sheet of the grave over me. Better for me if I had never come—if I had never come, and instead were lyin’ by his father and mother beneath the rowan.”
The priest took her wrist firmly in his. “These are not brave nor Christian words, from a brave and Christian girl. But I know that grief makes one’s words wild. Shon McGann shall be found. In the days when I saw him most and best, he talked of you as an angel gone, and he had never sought another woman had he known that you lived. The Mounted Police, the Riders of the Plains, travel far and wide. But now, there has come from the farther West a new detachment to Fort Cypress, and they may be able to help us. But listen. There is something more. The man Pretty Pierre, did he not speak puzzling words concerning himself and Shon McGann? And did he not say to you at the last that they were even now? Well, can you not guess?”
Mary Callen’s bosom heaved painfully and her eyes stared so at the candle in the window that they seemed to grow one with the flame. At last a new look crept into them; a thought made the lids close quickly as though it burned them. When they opened again they were full of tears that shone in the shadow and dropped slowly on her cheeks and flowed on and on, quivering too in her throat.
The priest said: “You understand, my child?”