Dolan of Sugar Hills (11 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The little lemon moon had come out. Sheila could see it over Cane’s shoulder. Down on the beach a tall gray blue bird—an ibis?—stood motionless as if sculptured out of silvery wood. There was a hush over everything as though time had ceased to flow, at any rate had decided to take no count of hours.

How long had she stood in Cane Dolan’s arms ... and did it matter?

Nothing matters, Sheila thought dreamily. Then all at once she was remembering, remembering Fleur and knowing that it did matter very much.

For an intoxicating moment she had forgotten. Now she remembered ... and she withdrew.

Instantly Cane pulled her back. He kissed her again, but this time she did not respond.

“What is it, Sheila?” His voice was hoarse so that she could scarcely hear the question, but his dark eyes demanded a reply.

“You mustn’t,” she gasped. “We mustn’t... there’s Fleur.”

“What of her?”

She looked at him in astonishment. It was a few moments before she could answer him.

Then she said simply, “Your wife.”

He released her instantly. So definite was the gesture that Sheila swayed a little. He put his hand to his pocket in his old familiar way in search of a cigarette, then he remembered the swim back and how the cigarettes would be ruined, and his hand slid down.

It was fully a minute before he spoke. Then his voice was at the same time both angry and impatient.

“I thought better of you, Guthrie,” he flung irritably. “I thought you’d see at once.”

“See what?”

“That Fleur and I mean nothing to each other.”

“She is still your wife.”

“Good grief, she’s not my wife. Surely you could tell that.”

“Not your wife? Then—” She stared dully at him, remembering back to his behavior on her first night on Silverwake, how he had flung himself away and down to the beach when she had said, “You didn’t tell me you were married.”

Not Cane’s wife, she thought now, Fleur not Cane’s wife... He was finding a rock for Sheila to sit on, finding one for himself. He put her down, then sat beside her. They were only a few inches apart, but they did not touch.

“I suppose I go too quickly,” he apologized grudgingly. “I always have. I thought, though, that of all people you must sense that Fleur and I are not married, not man and wife.”

“I didn’t sense it,” Sheila said quietly. “You said she was Fleur Dolan, and I believed that.”

“She is,” Cane nodded. Again his hand went instinctively down for a cigarette, came up again.

“I suppose I’ll have to tell it all now. I should have told it before. I’ve intended to a hundred times, God knows, and then stopped. It’s just—” he paused “—that it still hurts.”

He waited a moment.

“Fleur is my sister-in-law,” he said presently. “Fleur is my dead brother’s wife.”

“But she thinks that you’re her—” Sheila’s eyes were wide with question.

“Yes, but I’m not, Sheila. This is the way it goes.” It took longer to tell than Cane had promised.

That was because it was punctuated so many times with his abrupt rising from the rock, his violent pacing to the edge of the overhang, his minutes of bitter silence.

He was a lion, Sheila decided sickeningly, a lion pacing up and down, a lion ostensibly obeying the confines of a cage but really waiting his own turn with a rather terrible irrevocableness.

As he unfolded his story she was more sure than ever of the biding lion. Biding his time for whom? For Ursula Dolan?
An old lady will fall over, won
’
t she? Mark says that.

But Cane was not Mark Dolan. For a joyful, relieved, retrieved moment Sheila’s heart leaped. Then she remembered that to Fleur he was Mark, so that all Fleur guilelessly said of him must be true, after all. She felt that nagging fear, that desperation, all over again.

“Sheila—” Cane had stopped in his pacing “—do you know what poison pen letters are?”

“Of course.”

He started pacing once more ... again the lion, Sheila thought. Then he stopped.

“Poison pen letters killed my brother,” he said flatly. “Poison pen letters killed my brother when we were down in the Antarctic.” He came and sat down on the rock again.

“Mark was my brother. I’m Matt—Matthew. I’ve seldom had either name, however. We were both trained in science, but right from early days it was apparent that, unlike Mark, whatever training I received I would still belong primarily to the tall grasses, to the plantation.”

“Were you and—Mark alike?” Sheila asked gently.

His eyes went down. Was it so she would not see the pain in them?

“We were twins.”

Another pause.

“Consider us as a piece of material with a right and an underside. The right side was Mark. Everything that was worthy and good in us was Mark. Everything that was worthwhile was Mark.

“He was an idealist, Sheila. That was what made the letters so much more poisonous. For him to receive them, for Mark to have to get the vile things. Cane Dolan, yes, but never Mark.”

Sheila said in a puzzled voice, “But surely if he was that outstanding a man—”

Cane’s expression looked as frozen as the expedition he was telling her about.

“You haven’t yet learned what the letters were,” he said. “What particular brand of venom. They were to do with Fleur, the fidelity of Fleur.”

Sheila looked steadily at Cane. “Then I should have thought,” she said, “that such a man would have trusted his wife.”

“He scarcely knew her. They were married only a few days before we sailed. He had met her only a few days before that.” Again Carte got to his feet and walked up and down.

“Go on with the story,” Sheila said. “Tell me the parts I can’t believe.”

“What can’t you believe?”

“Why your brother could take notice of such letters if he loved his wife, as presumably he did love her to marry her; why you didn’t tell him that.”

“I’ll answer the second part first,” said Cane. “Why I didn’t tell him. It was because I didn’t know.”

“About Fleur?”

“About the letters. I didn’t know until it was over, until it was too late.” He bit his lip. “As a matter of fact,” he admitted, “I didn’t know Fleur, either. I had never seen her. I happened to be in Melbourne at the time of our acceptance and appointment, so I shipped south from there. Mark married Fleur in Sydney, honeymooned briefly up here in the Reef, then returned to Sydney to leave Fleur behind. After that he joined me—and the ship—in Victoria. My brother was married only a week before we left for the South.”

Sheila was silent a long moment.

“You haven’t answered the first part, Cane,” she pointed out presently, “why a man who loved his wife, even a wife for so short a time, could believe such poison as you say these letters were.” Cane turned from her. She could see that his face was crumpled with emotion.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered, “it’s just that it doesn’t make sense. Surely his trust—”

“Trust doesn’t come into it, Sheila,” Cane said slowly. “I have seen these things, you haven’t. It’s difficult to explain. It’s hard to put into words the isolation, the endless isolation, the effect of frozen wastes and frozen peaks and ice, ice, ice, for weeks and months. Insidiously values seem to change. Stolid, solid men go to pieces over something that before they would have shrugged over. A careless line in a letter from home can start a mountain of worry.” He paused. “And a poison pen can kill.”

“How did he die, Cane?”

“He went out into the ice waste and he didn’t come back. It was deliberate, Sheila. One of the others saw him go and called him. By the time the man had alerted us it was too late. We never found him ... we only found the letters left behind, the killing letters.” Cane’s voice had risen.

Sheila was silent. A lot of things were explained now, she was thinking. Now she knew why this man sitting beside her had become so angry that day she had gone by mistake into his room and seen a picture, a picture of shining ice and frozen peaks. She wondered why he kept it there, reminding him, torturing him, and she said so aloud.

“I want to be reminded,” he answered bitterly. “I don’t want to be allowed to forget.”

“Why, Cane?” As though she did not know, Sheila shivered.

“So that I can avenge,” Cane said.

“The—writer of the letters?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know—have you any idea—”

“Yes,” he said again. “My dear aunt, my late uncle’s wife.”

“Have you any reasonable evidence, Cane?”

“I have,” he said. Again he fumbled instinctively for the cigarettes, brought his hand back.

“I told you I didn’t know Fleur until I returned,” he resumed. “Immediately upon that return I saw to it that I did. I went full of bitterness, suspicion and hate. And then I met Mark’s wife.” His voice trailed off. He was silent a moment.

He resumed again.

“Sometimes—after it had happened—down at the station I would plan how I would secretly trap this wife of Mark’s ... at other times I would see myself storming openly in on her. But it wasn’t like that at all. The clinic interviewed me first.”

“Clinic?”

“Yes, Sheila. You must know by this time, of course, that Fleur—” He paused, shrugged helplessly.

“The doctors told me that, strung up though she always must have been, at the news of Mark the real damage was done.

“The hospital let me see her. I went in, I who had been prepared to break down any pretense, to force an admission, to unearth the basis of those killing letters, whatever condition I found her in, and she ... Fleur—”

“Yes, yes, Cane?”

“She thought I was my brother.”

He got up, walked away, came back.

“From that moment she improved. You might think of her as a reed now, but then she was a wraith, a phantasmal thing, a bit of gossamer, a feather in the wind.

“Before our eyes, though, she sat up. In a few days she got up. In a week she was walking around.

“The specialist advised me to keep up the pretense, take her back to familiar places, places that meant something to her, that might stir her into remembering.”

“Hayman Island,” murmured Sheila, remembering Fleur that afternoon. “A honeymoon lodge.”

“Yes,” nodded Cane. “And that’s why I brought her up here, to be in surroundings that might ring a bell.”

“Why did you bring your aunt, as well?”

“She was here already, waiting to take possession of the place.” Cane’s face was grim.

“I don’t understand, Cane.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” he said. “My late uncle was rich, very rich. “Probably—” his face twisted “—that was why Ursula married him.”

“Had they been married long when your uncle died?”

“A very short time, only a brief period before Fleur and Mark; it was an elderly marriage, Sheila. But before uncle passed on Mark married Fleur and that upset the apple cart, Ursula’s apple cart.”

“How?”

“My uncle was thrilled at the news. He was a queer old bird, very pompous, very family minded. You know the sort—’must keep up the family name’—that kind of thing. You can see what he was like by this house ... prepossessing, overabundant, that was Uncle Tod. Instantly uncle saw a continuance of his beloved name in Fleur and his nephew, so promptly he changed his will and left half to Mark’s family, half to his own widow. It should have been sufficient for Ursula Dolan, there was only her, no one else, and uncle was, as I said, quite rich. But Mrs. Dolan was, is, always will be, money mad. She wanted all of it. She had to have all of it. She’d have done anything for it. I believe—” Cane’s eyes were enigmatical “—that she even killed.”

“But, Cane...” It was all too farfetched, Sheila was thinking, too unbelievable.

“Let me finish, please. In the beginning I believe it was only Ursula’s instinctive venom guiding her nasty pen. God knows she had plenty of that. Then I believe she began to look further. She had met Mark and Fleur while she and Uncle Tod were up here and the kids were on their honeymoon. She could tell the sensitive type Mark was. She could see what a letter, a series of letters, could start... could possibly finish.”

“How do you know she wrote them?”

Cane shrugged unashamedly. “I had her handwriting analyzed by experts,” he said, “and the letters absolutely compared. Oh, it was Ursula Dolan all right.”

“I still don’t understand,” persisted Sheila. “Wouldn’t your uncle’s money, upon your brother’s death, go automatically to Mark’s widow? Perhaps to you?”

“Not to Mark’s widow, not to Mark’s brother, not even to Mark originally, but Mark’s family that wasn’t to be.”

Cane looked directly at Sheila.

“That was why,” he said, “when Fleur accepted me at once as Mark, I became Mark as well to her, to Ursula Dolan. To confuse her, to confound her, to torment her, and—” Cane’s expression was diabolical “—she has been confused, confounded, tormented, believe me.

“It can’t last long, it must finish, I know that, but fortunately the wheels of law grind very slowly and so far the estate is not wound up. It will in time. In time the strong suspicion Aunt Ursula Dolan undoubtedly has that I am not Mark will be verified, but until such time as that happens I can at least have my revenge.” Cane laughed.

Sheila said in a cold little voice, “What sort of revenge, Cane?” Cane shrugged. “The awful revenge of not being sure whether the money she loves so much is going to be hers or not.”

“Is—is that all the revenge?” Sheila whispered. She was thinking of an old lady who will fall over because Mark says ...
Mark says
...

Cane was looking at Sheila rather blankly. He was a good actor, Sheila thought drearily. “What else?” he asked.