DEATHBED REVELATIONS.
When Emily Barlow ran down to Shagarach's office at noon this Saturday
she was accompanied by her friend, Beulah Ware. Beulah Ware was as dark
as Emily was fair. In temperament, as in complexion, the two girls
offered a contrast, Beulah's carriage having the recollected dignity of
a nun's, while Emily's sensibilities were all as fine as those Japanese
swords which are whetted so keenly they divide the light leaves that
fall across their edges.
"We should like to leave a note with the flowers, Mr. Aronson. Could you
furnish us paper?"
Aronson was only too eager to furnish not only paper, but envelope,
ink-well and a ready-filled pen. When the young ladies went out he
thought a cloud passed over the arid chapters of his Pickering XII. This
was the note, pinned to a graceful bouquet, that Shagarach read on his
return:
"My Dear Mr. Shagarach: You must have read of the riot yesterday in
which Robert behaved so nobly. But he is even more pleased with a
discovery which he made during the affair. It seems that one of the
wounded convicts, who has been passing under the name of Quirk, is
no other than the coachman, Mungovan, whom none of us could find.
Could you manage to call at the prison to-day? The poor fellow is
seriously injured and may have important evidence in his
possession. Yours truly,
"EMILY BARLOW."
The violets seemed to move Shagarach far more than the note, momentous
as its revelation might be. His hand trembled when he reached to clasp
the stems. Then he withdrew it and stood irresolute. A procession was
passing through the street below. From the window he could see the
tilted necks of a line of fifers. Was it a horror of music that made him
shut out these sounds so often? A dread of perfume and loveliness that
made him leave the room at once with brief directions to Aronson? The
casual observer would have said that he merely hurried to obey the
suggestion of Emily's note, for he took his way at once to the state
prison across the river.
When Col. Mainwaring took hold of the prison that morning it was
expected that two out of every five of the convicts would have to be
bastinadoed before peace could be restored. Against the advice of all
the deputies, including Hawkins, he had summoned his wards to the
rotunda and outlined his course of action in a cool speech. The burden
of it was that he intended to begin with a clean sheet and to look out
for their interests rather than their sensibilities, or, as he expressed
it, "to give them hard words but soft mattresses."
The matter and manner of the address had a tranquillizing effect and
some of the shops that day wore as quiet and decent an aspect as any
factory-room in the state. Moreover, as soon as it became known that the
colonel had resolved to adopt several of the reforms demanded in Dickon
Harvey's petition, even the moodiest of the ring-leaders felt that they
could submit without any hurt to pride.
Stretched on a hospital cot, whispering with contrite eyes to a
black-robed clergyman, lay Dennis Mungovan. The look on his face was
peaceful and exalted. His hands were clasped. The groans of patients and
the odor of drugs which filled the chamber did not reach his senses. He
had just finished his deathbed confession and stood upon a secure
footing on the terra firma of faith, awaiting the summons from above.
"A lawyer to speak with Quirk," announced the attendant.
"Not Quirk, but Mungovan," said the clergyman, making way.
"And must you lave me, father dear?" besought the patient, stretching
out his hands as a cold man in winter reaches toward the fire.
"I have a wedding to perform, my son. Remember, your hours in this
valley of tears are few, and you have left everything worldly behind
you. Thank God, who in His infinite mercy has given you the grace of a
happy death."
"I do, father, I do," cried the pallid sufferer.
"And an opportunity to repent of your sins. God bless you. Good-by."
The clergyman bowed to Shagarach and departed--from the deathbed to the
wedding service, from the grave to the cradle of life, so wide was the
compass of his ministrations.
"You are dying, then?" asked Shagarach.
"Wid a bullet in me breast, misthur, that the doctors can't rache. Och,
they murdhered me wid their probin'. And all for what? All for nawthin'.
What was I to be mixin' in their riots for? Wirrasthrue! Wirrasthrue!"
"You know Robert Floyd is in the prison here?"
"Robert Floyd! For the love o' heaven, misthur, don't tell him it's me.
Tell him I'm Quirk. Och, that lie is a sin on me sowl."
"The truth will be best when you are so near death," said Shagarach,
quietly. "Perhaps it would be better at all times. Besides, Mr. Floyd
knows you are here."
"Misther," the dying man drew Shagarach toward him. "Misther! Do me a
favor for the love o' doin' good."
"What is it?"
"Will you do it--an' I'll pray for your sowl before the throne, so help
me----"
"I will if I can. What is it?"
"Keep it from Ellen."
"Keep what?"
"My name, my disgrace. Never let the poor girl know. She was my wife."
"Your wife?" Shagarach was puzzled a moment. "You mean Ellen Greeley?"
"Ellen Mungovan, before God."
"Ellen Greeley is dead. She perished in the fire."
The man started up in his bed so violently as to burst the bandage of
his wound. His blood began to stain the linen and Shagarach was obliged
to call an attendant, who adjusted it and tucked the patient snugly in.
Still his glassy eyes were fixed on Shagarach and his muttering lips
seemed to say over the word: "Dead! Dead! Dead!"
"She was burned to death in the Arnold fire. Robert Floyd is accused of
setting it and causing her death."
"Burned to death!" The man's brain seemed bewildered.
"Didn't you know these things?"
"Shure, how would I know them, misther, all cooped in here like a bat in
a cave?"
"How did you come here?"
"Och, the foolishness came over me, wid my head tangled in dhrink. What
does a man know in dhrink? He can't tell his friend from his inimy. And
me that had a dacent mother in the ould counthry and a dacent wife in
the new, look at this, where it druv me."
"What crime are you charged with?"
"Wid breakin' and enterin', misther; and, sure, it was the stableman put
me up to it that night I was full, and they got away and I was caught
wid the watches on me and I was so shamed of Ellen and me mother at
home, says I, I'll niver disgrace them, says I, and so I gev in me name
Quirk, and none of them could tell the differ."
"When was it you were arrested?" asked Shagarach.
"It's three weeks and three days yesterday, misther; that I know by the
scratches I made in me cell."
"Can't you read?"
"Only the big, black letthers, misther."
This explained Mungovan's ignorance of Floyd's arrest. It seemed to be
an accident that the two had never met in prison. Though they occupied
cells in the same ward, their daily work carried them to opposite parts
of the yard, Mungovan's to the harness-shop under "Slim" Butler;
Robert's to the greenhouses near the team gate.
"Misther!" The poor wretch clasped Shagarach's wrist and drew the
lawyer's ear to his lips again.
"Misther, will you bury me where Ellen is buried?"
"I'll see if that can be done."
"Misther!" The man's eyes were glazing. "Look!" He fumbled with aspen
fingers in his breast, finally drawing forth an envelope. From this he
removed a ringlet of black hair, probably a love-lock of Ellen's. Then
he showed the inclosed writing to Shagarach. It was not addressed.
"Read it," he whispered. "Ellen gev it me to carry."
Shagarach opened the envelope and read in a servant-girl's painstaking
hand the following words:
"The peddler has not come for two days, so I send you this by a
trustworthy messanger. As I rote you in my last, the professor said
in the study, 'Harry gets his deserts.' That was all I could hear
only he and Mr. Robert talked for a long time afterwards. The will
is in the safe in the study. If I hear ennything more I will let
you know, and please send me the money you promised me soon."
There was neither address nor signature to this document.
"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.