Prometheus Unbound.
The moment I felt Sweetwater’s hand lifted from my shoulder I sprang into the first hack I could find, and bade the driver follow the Cumberland sleigh post-haste. I was determined to see Carmel and have Carmel see me. Whatever cold judgment might say against the meeting, I could not live in my present anxiety. If the thunderbolt which had struck her had spared her life and reason she must know from my own lips that I was not only a free man, but as innocent of the awful charge conveyed in Sweetwater’s action as was the brother, who had just been acquitted of it by the verdict of his peers.
I must declare this, and she must believe me. Nothing else mattered—nothing else in all the world. That Arthur might stop me, that anything could stop me, did not disturb my mind for a minute. All that I dreaded was that I might find myself too late; that this second blow might have proved to be too much for her, and that I should find my darling dead or passed from me into that living death which were the harder punishment of the two. But I was spared this killing grief. When our two conveyances stopped, it was in the driveway of her old home; and as I bounded upon the walk, it was to see her again in Arthur’s arms, but this time with open eyes and horror-drawn features.
“Carmel!” rushed in a cry from my lips. “Don’t believe what they say. I cannot bear it—I cannot bear it!”
She roused; she looked my way, and struggling to her feet, held back Arthur with one hand while she searched my face—and possibly searched her own soul—for answer to my plea. Never was moment more surcharged. Further word I could not speak; I could only meet her eyes with the steady, demanding look of a despairing heart, while Arthur moved in every fibre of his awakened manhood, waited—thinking, perhaps, how few minutes had passed since he hung upon the words of a fellow being for his condemnation to death, or release to the freedom which he now enjoyed.
A moment! But what an eternity before I saw the rigid lines of her white, set face relax—before I marked the play of human, if not womanly, emotion break up the misery of her look and soften her youthful lips into some semblance of their old expression. Love might be dead—friendship, even, be a thing of the far past—but consideration was still alive and in another instant it spoke in these trembling sentences, uttered across a threshold made sacred by a tragedy involving our three lives:
“Come in and explain yourself. No man should go unheard. I know you will not come where Adelaide’s spirit yet lingers, if you cannot bring hands clean from all actual violence.”
I motioned my driver away, and as Carmel drew back out of sight, I caught at Arthur’s arm and faced him with the query:
“Are you willing that I should enter? I only wish to declare to her, and to you, an innocence I have no means of proving, but which you cannot disbelieve if I swear it, here and now, by your sister Carmel’s sacred disfigurement. Such depravity could not exist, as such a vow from the lips guilty of the crime you charge me with. Look at me, Arthur. I considered you—now consider me.”
Quickly he stepped back. “Enter,” said he.