“I am just,” answered the woman. “He deserves to die, but I want to save the man that will kill him when they meet.”
“Who will kill him?” asked Fleda. “Dennis—he will kill Marchand if he can.”
The old man leaned forward with puzzled, gloomy interest. “Why? Dennis left you for another. You say he had grown cold. Was that not what he wanted—that you should leave him?”
The woman looked at him with tearful eyes. “If I had known Dennis better, I should have waited. What he did is of the moment only. A man may fall and rise again, but it is not so with a woman. She thinks and thinks upon the scar that shows where she wounded herself; and she never forgets, and so her life becomes nothing—nothing.”
No one saw that Madame Bulteel held herself rigidly, and was so white that even the sunlight was gold beside her look. Yet the strangest, saddest smile played about her lips; and presently, as the eyes of the others fastened on the woman and did not leave her, she regained her usual composure.
The woman kept looking at Gabriel Druse. “When Dennis found that I had gone, and knew why—for I left word on a sheet of paper—he went mad like me. Trailing to the south, to find M’sieu’ Marchand, he had an accident, and was laid up in a shack for weeks on the Tanguishene River, and they could not move him. But at last a ranchman wrote to me, and the letter found me on the very day I left M’sieu’. When I got that letter begging me to go to the Tanguishene River, to nurse Dennis who loved me still, my heart sank. I said to myself I could not go; and Dennis and I must be apart always to the end of time. But then I thought again. He was ill, and his body was as broken as his mind. Well, since I could do his mind no good, I would try to help his body. I could do that much for him. So I went. But the letter to me had been long on the way, and when I got to the Tanguishene River he was almost well.”
She paused and rocked her body to and fro for a moment as though in pain.
“He wanted me to go back to him then. He said he had never cared for the woman at Yargo, and that what he felt for me now was different from what it had ever been. When he had settled accounts we could go back to the ranch and be at peace. I knew what he meant by settling accounts, and it frightened me. That is why I am here. I came to warn the man, Marchand, for if Dennis kills him, then they will hang Dennis. Do you not see? This is a country of law. I saw that Dennis had the madness in his brain, and so I left him again in the evening of the day I found him, and came here—it is a long way. Yesterday, M’sieu’ Marchand laughed at me when I warned him. He said he could take care of himself. But such men as Dennis stop at nothing; there will be killing, if M’sieu’ stays here.”
“You will go back to Dennis?” asked Fleda gently. “Some other woman will make him happy when he forgets me,” was the cheerless, grey reply.
The old man got up and, coming over, laid a hand upon her shoulder.