"Why did she do it? What could have made her," they asked each other.
"It wasn't for love of his beautiful face, be sure," snarled Salt Watson.
"It's hard on the Schoolmaster. He'll not know of it yet," somebody else said.
Deirdre neither heard nor saw them. She was watching for Davey and Dan to pass. She had seen Mrs. Ross and Jessie go by to the Port in Cameron's double-seated buggy. She thought they would ride together to the hills in that, Davey and her father.
If they knew, they would stop at the Black Bull; if no one had told them they would go on, she had decided. They would wonder why she was not on the wharf when the boat got in, to meet them. But McNab would not have that. He would not lose sight of her. Besides she did not want to meet the eyes of the men and women who would be there, and hear what they had to say.
She was cut off from the world as she stood at the window of McNab's house. Her mind was too utterly weary to reason further. As she watched and waited a sense of bleak desolation closed in on her. Her eyes ached for sight of the Schoolmaster's form against the clear sky, although she knew she would hardly see it above the buggy and among other people.
She asked herself what he would do when he found that she was not waiting for him at Steve's—what he would think when he found the letter that was lying for him there.
Steve would have to read it for him. It would break his heart, the letter that she had wept and prayed over; but it was better that his heart should break than that he should go to the Island again. And Steve, poor old Steve, would die in peace some day and be put to rest where they had put Conal. A magistrate—assisted in a fashion by M'Laughlin and a jury—had duly investigated and found that his tragic death was an impenetrable mystery. An "open verdict," they called the finding.
Conal's resting place was on a sunny hillside under a blossoming white gum in which the bees hummed drowsily in the spring time and through which the green parrots flashed all the year. It was good to think that Steve would draw his last breath in freedom, and then sleep there under the blue sky. But for her, there would be no freedom, no open spaces. Life had become a prison from which there was only one gate—Death; and that she would not be able to open because she was a hostage for other lives. Dan's, and Steve's—perhaps Davey's.
Cameron's buggy rounded a turn in the road.