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Page 27
Her voice was small and troubled, yet the pain was slowly fading out of
her eyes as she felt the passionate embrace of his fingers in her hair.
"No. You are changed."
"Yes, I am changed. A part of Derwent Conniston died seven years ago.
That part of him was dead until he came through that door tonight and
saw you. And then it flickered back into life. It is returning slowly,
slowly. That which was dead is beginning to rouse itself, beginning to
remember. See, little Mary Josephine. It was this!"
He drew a hand to his forehead and placed a finger on the scar. "I got
that seven years ago. It killed a half of Derwent Conniston, the part
that should have lived. Do you understand? Until tonight--"
Her eyes startled him, they were growing so big and dark and staring,
living fires of understanding and horror. It was hard for him to go on
with the lie. "For many weeks I was dead," he struggled on. "And when I
came to life physically, I had forgotten a great deal. I had my name,
my identity, but only ghastly dreams and visions of what had gone
before. I remembered you, but it was in a dream, a strange and haunting
dream that was with me always. It seems to me that for an age I have
been seeking for a face, a voice, something I loved above all else on
earth, something which was always near and yet was never found. It was
you, Mary Josephine, you!"
Was it the real Derwent Conniston speaking now? He felt again that
overwhelming force from within which was not his own. The thing that
had begun as a lie struck him now as a thing that was truth. It was he,
John Keith, who had been questing and yearning and hoping. It was John
Keith, and not Conniston, who had returned into a world filled with a
desolation of loneliness, and it was to John Keith that a beneficent
God had sent this wonderful creature in an hour that was blackest in
its despair. He was not lying now. He was fighting. He was fighting to
keep for himself the one atom of humanity that meant more to him than
all the rest of the human race, fighting to keep a great love that had
come to him out of a world in which he no longer had a friend or a
home, and to that fight his soul went out as a drowning man grips at a
spar on a sea. As the girl's hands came to his face and he heard the
yearning, grief-filled cry of his name on her lips, he no longer sensed
the things he was saying, but held her close in his arms, kissing her
mouth, and her eyes, and her hair, and repeating over and over again
that now he had found her he would never give her up. Her arms clung to
him. They were like two children brought together after a long
separation, and Keith knew that Conniston's love for this girl who was
his sister must have been a splendid thing. And his lie had saved
Conniston as well as himself. There had been no time to question the
reason for the Englishman's neglect--for his apparent desertion of the
girl who had come across the sea to find him. Tonight it was sufficient
that HE was Conniston, and that to him the girl had fallen as a
precious heritage.
He stood up with her at last, holding her away from him a little so
that he could look into her face wet with tears and shining with
happiness. She reached up a hand to his face, so that it touched the
scar, and in her eyes he saw an infinite pity, a luminously tender glow
of love and sympathy and understanding that no measurements could
compass. Gently her hand stroked his scarred forehead. He felt his old
world slipping away from under his feet, and with his triumph there
surged over him a thankfulness for that indefinable something that had
come to him in time to give him the strength and the courage to lie.
For she believed him, utterly and without the shadow of a suspicion she
believed him.
"Tomorrow you will help me to remember a great many things," he said.
"And now will you let me send you to bed, Mary Josephine?"
She was looking at the scar. "And all those years I didn't know," she
whispered. "I didn't know. They told me you were dead, but I knew it
was a lie. It was Colonel Reppington--" She saw something in his face
that stopped her.
"Derry, DON'T YOU REMEMBER?"
"I shall--tomorrow. But tonight I can see nothing and think of nothing
but you. Tomorrow--"
She drew his head down swiftly and kissed the brand made by the heated
barrel of the Englishman's pistol. "Yes, yes, we must go to bed now,
Derry," she cried quickly. "You must not think too much. Tonight it
must just be of me. Tomorrow everything will come out right,
everything. And now you may send me to bed. Do you remember--"
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