“I should prefer that loneliness to the company you would thrust upon me,” she answered him.
“Ungracious speech!” he protested. “Is this your gratitude for that lad’s burning devotion, for his patience, his gentleness, and all the rest!”
“He is Oliver Tressilian’s brother,” she replied.
“And has he not suffered enough for that already? Is there to be no end to the price that he must pay for his brother’s sins? Besides, consider that when all is said they are not even brothers. They are but half-brothers.”
“Yet too closely kin,” she said. “If you must have me wed I beg you’ll find me another husband.”
To this he would answer that expediently considered no husband could be better than the one he had chosen her. He pointed out the contiguity of their two estates, and how fine and advantageous a thing it would be to merge these two into one.
He was persistent, and his persistence was increased when he came to conceive his notion to take the seas again. His conscience would not permit him to heave anchor until he had bestowed her safely in wedlock. Lionel too was persistent, in a quiet, almost self-effacing way that never set a strain upon her patience, and was therefore the more difficult to combat.
In the end she gave way under the pressure of these men’s wills, and did so with the best grace she could summon, resolved to drive from her heart and mind the one real obstacle of which, for very shame, she had made no mention to Sir John. The fact is that in spite of all, her love for Sir Oliver was not dead. It was stricken down, it is true, until she herself failed to recognize it for what it really was. But she caught herself thinking of him frequently and wistfully; she found herself comparing him with his brother; and for all that she had bidden Sir John find her some other husband than Lionel, she knew full well that any suitor brought before her must be submitted to that same comparison to his inevitable undoing. All this she accounted evil in herself. It was in vain that she lashed her mind with the reminder that Sir Oliver was Peter’s murderer. As time went on she found herself actually making excuses for her sometime lover; she would admit that Peter had driven him to the step, that for her sake Sir Oliver had suffered insult upon insult from Peter, until, being but human, the cup of his endurance had overflowed in the end, and weary of submitting to the other’s blows he had risen up in his anger and smitten in his turn.
She would scorn herself for such thoughts as these, yet she could not dismiss them. In act she could be strong—as witness how she had dealt with that letter which Oliver sent her out of Barbary by the hand of Pitt—but her thoughts she could not govern, and her thoughts were full often traitors to her will. There were longings in her heart for Oliver which she could not stifle, and there was ever the hope that he would one day return, although she realized that from such a return she might look for nothing.
When Sir John finally slew the hope of that return he did a wiser thing than he conceived. Never since Oliver’s disappearance had they heard any news of him until Pitt came to Arwenack with that letter and his story. They had heard, as had all the world, of the corsair Sakr-el-Bahr, but they had been far indeed from connecting him with Oliver Tressilian. Now that his identity was established by Pitt’s testimony, it was an easy matter to induce the courts to account him dead and to give Lionel the coveted inheritance.