It is cruel to have the burden put upon you of another's fate. Sometimes that is done to a woman lightly in the moment of disappointment by a mortified lover. Was this the sort of threat he meant, or was it perhaps—true? Oona, who had no guile, was shaken to the very soul by that doubt. Better to risk an affront in her own person than perhaps to fail of an occasion in which sincere help was wanted and could be given. She had not taken her eyes from him, but searched his face with a profound uncertainty and eagerness. At last, with the sigh of relief which accompanies a decision, she said to Hamish,
"Push off the boat. Lord Erradeen will help me in," with something peremptory in her tone against which her faithful servant could make no further protest.
Hamish proceeded accordingly to push off the boat into the water, and presently they were afloat, steering out for the centre of the loch. They were at some distance from the isle on the other side of the low, green island with its little fringe of trees, so different from the rocky and crested isles about, which is known on Loch Houran as the Isle of Rest. The low wall round about the scattered tombs, the scanty ruins of its little chapel, were all that broke the soft greenness of those low slopes. There was nothing like it all around in its solemn vacancy and stillness, and nothing could be more unlike that chill and pathetic calm than the freight of life which approached it in Oona's boat: she herself full of tremulous visionary excitement—the young man in his passion and desperation; even the watchful attendant, who never took his eyes from Lord Erradeen, and rowed on with all his senses on the alert, ready to throw himself upon the supposed maniac at a moment's notice, or without it did the occasion require. There was a pause till they found themselves separated by a widening interval of water from the shore, where at any moment a chance passenger might have disturbed their interview. Here no one could disturb them. Walter placed himself in front of Hamish facing Oona: but perhaps the very attitude, the freedom and isolation in which he found himself with her, closed his lips. For a minute he sat gazing at her, and did not speak.
"You wished—to say something to me, Lord Erradeen?"
It was she again, as Katie had done before, who recalled to him his purpose—with a delicate flush colouring the paleness of her face, half in shame that after all she had to interfere to bring the confession forth.
"So much," he said, "so much that I scarcely know where to begin." And then he added, "I feel safe with you near me. Do you know what it means to feel safe? But you never were in deadly danger. How could you be?"
"Lord Erradeen, do not mystify me with these strange sayings," she cried. "Do they mean anything? What has happened to you? or is it only—is it nothing but——"
"A pretence, do you think, to get myself a hearing—to beguile you into a little interest? That might have been. But it is more serious, far more serious. I told you it was life or death." He paused for a moment and then resumed. "Do you remember last year when you saved me?"
"I remember—last year," she said with an unsteady voice, feeling the flush grow hotter and hotter on her cheek, for she did not desire to be reminded of that self-surrender, that strange merging of her being in another's which was her secret, of which she had been aware, but no one else. "I never understood it," she added, with one meaning for herself and one for him. The hidden sense was to her more important than the other. "It has always been—a mystery——"
"It was the beginning of the struggle," he said. "I came here, you know—don't you know?—out of poverty to take possession of my kingdom—that was what I thought. I found myself instead at the beginning of a dreary battle. I was not fit for it, to begin with. Do you remember the old knights had to prepare themselves for their chivalry with fasting, and watching of arms, and all that—folly——" A gleam of self-derision went over his face, and yet it was deadly serious underneath.