"To carry where?" asked Shagarach, but the man's brain was all clotted with a single idea.
"Will you bury me by Ellen's side, misther, in the green churchyard under the soft turf that the wind combs smooth like in my own dear counthry? Will you bury me beside Ellen I disgraced so, misther? She'll know I'm wid her there. Will you bury me, misther?"
"I will. I will. Where did Ellen bid you carry the letter?"
"The letther? Och, I carried the letther in me mouth. Sure, I wouldn't be afther givin' up Ellen's letther to the warden."
"I mean——" But the man was passing through the delirium that precedes the last fainting calm. Several times his lips moved, murmuring "Ellen." His fingers clutched the love-lock to his breast. Once he turned his head and asked for "Father Flynn." But Father Flynn was ministering now at another ceremony as opposite to this as laughter is to tears.
Toward the end a smile of singular sweetness irradiated his rough face, made delicate by the waxy color of death. Were his thoughts playing back again among the memories of childhood, in the beloved island, perhaps at the knee of that honest mother whom he feared to disgrace? Or were they leaping forward to the joy of the cool bed under the churchyard daisies at Ellen's side? Shagarach, holding the shred of paper in his hand, brooding over the answer to his unanswered question, could only watch the flickering spark in reverential awe.
But he did not default his side of the pact they had made, he and Dennis Mungovan, with clasped hands in the hospital alcove. At a great sacrifice of time he sought out Ellen Greeley's sister, explained the secret of Ellen's marriage and Mungovan's repentance for his follies, and, with the help of Father Flynn, persuaded her to consent to an interment of the couple together. He even went to the pains of communicating the death to Mungovan's worthy mother, having obtained her address from Ellen Greeley's sister and heir. But the circumstances and place of the "accident" which killed him were humanely concealed.
In return for all this solicitude the lawyer had an unaddressed and ambiguous scrawl in his possession. Three facts were established in relation to the person for whom it was intended. In the first place whoever it was he knew that Harry Arnold had "got his deserts" under his uncle's will. Secondly, he had employed Ellen Greeley as a spy upon the doings in the professor's household. Thirdly, he was in league with the missing peddler, who seemed to act as a go-between for Ellen and her correspondent.