"I am here to seek my revenge, my lord, as you know," said Farish M'Kissock slowly at length, and licked his bloodless lips. "There is still a small matter betwixt your lordship and me that remains to be settled—an old wrong done, which your lordship has almost forgotten, it seems. I neither forget nor forgive.
"I may not have time left to tell all I owe Captain Dove there—for that goes back through long years to what I owe you. But, before I am done with, I think I can settle with you as well as with him.
"Sallie is no sister of yours, as Captain Dove knows—though she herself has been beguiled as easily as your lordship. Your lordship's sister, the Lady Josceline Justice, died in my arms eight or nine weeks ago: and she was my wife. Sallie there, knowing nothing, saw her a few hours before—"
He blinked and hung his head for a moment, as if recalling all that had come to pass since he had laid the light, wasted body aside on the sand, and set a guard over it until—until he could spare time to see to a decent grave.
"She was my wife," he said again, looking up at the last of the haughty Juras with hate unquenchable in his glance. "And that's the revenge I have taken on you and yours, my lord, for the ill your lordship lightly wrought—the other, that should have been."
A woman's voice came wailingly from the musicians' gallery and Mr. Jobling uttered a low moan of abject fear. His nerves had evidently failed him altogether. Hasty steps were descending the short stone stairway which led to the gallery, and then Janet M'Kissock came tottering forth across the floor from the foot of it.
"Oh, Farish!" the old woman cried to her brother. "Have you no heart at all! Are there not enough lives ruined already that you would wreck her ladyship's here as well?" And she turned toward Sallie with a poor, pitiful gesture as of protection. "It cannot be as you say," she whimpered. "For how could I be mistaken, that knew her father far better than you—ay, and the countess her mother too; whose locket she was wearing at her neck the day she first came to Loquhariot. I'll swear to it, at any rate! I had it for a time in my own keeping, before the countess—went away.
"Ask her ladyship where she got the locket, your grace. And then my poor, distracted brother will maybe admit that he's been deceived about her."
The duchess's anxious, encouraging look seemed to beg an answer of Sallie. But the girl was gazing, with dumb dismay in her wide, wounded eyes, at Farish M'Kissock, recalling as well as she could amid such a maze the incidents of the hours she had spent in his camp on the African coast.
Under the spell of his piercing glance the shadowy banquet-hall of Loquhariot seemed to fade away from her, and in its place she saw again the spacious rose-pink pavilion behind the carved chair on which he was seated in state among his staring councillors, under a great green flag with a golden harp on its heavy folds. Behind her, from about the picket-lines where she had noticed the negro slaves at their work, she seemed to hear the whinnying of the horses, the vicious squeals of the restless camels. In the dim crimson glow of the dying fires she was gazing again at the horsehair tents in the background, and the multitude of men and women and children all busy about them in the open air.