Carnac's Folly

"Where are you going? Don't you want to talk to me?"

"I'm going home, m'sieu'. If you'll come with me I'll give you a drink of hard cider, the best was ever made."

"I'll come. Denzil, I've never been in your little house. That's strange, when I've known you so many years."

"It's not too late to mend, m'sieu'. There ain't much in it, but it's all I need."

Carnac stepped with Denzil towards the little house, just in front of three pine-trees on the hill, and behind Junia's home.

"I always lock my door--always," said Denzil as he turned a key and opened the door.

They entered into the cool shade of a living-room. There was little furniture, yet against the wall was a kind of bunk, comfortable and roomy, on which was stretched the skin of a brown bear. On the wall above it was a crucifix, and on the opposite wall was the photograph of a girl, good-looking, refined, with large, imaginative eyes, and a face that might have been a fortune.

Carnac gazed at it for a moment, absorbed. "That was your girl, Denzil, wasn't it?" he asked.

Denzil nodded. "The best the world ever had, m'sieu'," he replied, "the very best, but she went queer and drowned herself--ah, but yes!"

"She just went queer, eh!" Carnac said, looking Denzil straight in the eyes. "Was there insane blood in her family?"

"She wasn't insane," answered Denzil firmly. "She'd been bad used--terrible."

"That didn't come out at the inquest, did it?"

"Not likely. She wrote it me. I'm telling you what I've never told anyone." He shut the door, as though to make a confessional. "She wrote it me, and I wasn't telling anyone-but no. She'd been away down at Quebec City, and there a man got hold of her. Almeric Tarboe it was--the older brother of Luke Tarboe at John Grier's." Suddenly the face of the little man went mad with emotion. "I--I--" he paused.

Carnac held up his hand. "No-no-no, don't tell me. Tarboe--I understand, the Unwritten Law. You haven't told me, but I understand. I remember: he was found in the woods with his gun in his hand-dead. I read it all by accident long ago; and that was the story, eh!"

"Yes. She was young, full of imagination. She loved me, but he was clever, and he was high up, and she was low down. He talked her blind, and then in the woods it was, in the woods where he died, that he--"