Then she turned again to the dying man, relentlessly almost in her determination to extract all vital truth from him ere he fell silent.
“Tell them,” she bade him, “under what circumstances Sir Oliver sent you last night to the Silver Heron.”
“Nay, there is no need to harass him,” Lord Henry interposed. “He has said enough already. May God forgive us our blindness, Killigrew!”
Sir John bowed his head in silence over Lionel.
“Is it you, Sir John?” whispered the dying man. “What? Still there? Ha!” he seemed to laugh faintly, then checked. “I am going....” he muttered, and again his voice grew stronger, obeying the last flicker of his shrinking will. “Noll! I am going! I...I have made reparation... all that I could. Give me... give me thy hand!” Gropingly he put forth his right.
“I should have given it you ere this but that my wrists are bound,” cried Oliver in a sudden frenzy. And then exerting that colossal strength of his, he suddenly snapped the cords that pinioned him as if they had been thread. He caught his brother’s extended hand, and dropped upon his knees beside him. “Lionel...Boy!” he cried. It was as if all that had befallen in the last five years had been wiped out of existence. His fierce relentless hatred of his half-brother, his burning sense of wrong, his parching thirst for vengeance, became on the instant all dead, buried, and forgotten. More, it was as if they had never been. Lionel in that moment was again the weak, comely, beloved brother whom he had cherished and screened and guarded, and for whom when the hour arrived he had sacrificed his good name, and the woman he loved, and placed his life itself in jeopardy.
“Lionel, boy!” was all that for a moment he could say. Then: “Poor lad! Poor lad!” he added. “Temptation was too strong for thee.” And reaching forth he took the other white hand that lay beyond the couch, and so held both tight-clasped within his own.
From one of the ports a ray of sunshine was creeping upwards towards the dying man’s face. But the radiance that now overspread it was from an inward source. Feebly he returned the clasp of his brother’s hands.
“Oliver, Oliver!” he whispered. “There is none like thee! I ever knew thee as noble as I was base. Have I said enough to make you safe? Say that he will be safe now,” he appealed to the others, “that no....”
“He will be safe,” said Lord Henry stoutly. “My word on’t.”