“I know, Meg. My dear Meg,” Oldmeadow murmured.
“Oh! I don’t regret it! I don’t regret it!” Meg cried, while her colour rose and her young breast lifted. “It’s the soldier’s death! The consecrating, heroic death! He was ready. And deaths like that atone—for the others. He was not killed instantaneously, Roger.”
“I didn’t know,” said Oldmeadow, looking at her with a pitying, troubled gaze.
“He lived for a day and night afterwards,” said Meg, looking back, tearless. “They carried him to a barn. Only his man was with him. There was no one to dress his dreadful wound; no food. The man got him some water, at the risk of his own life. He was conscious until the end and he suffered terribly.”
Oldmeadow dropped his eyes before her fierce stare while, strangely, dimly, there passed through his mind the memory of the embarrassed, empty, handsome young face in the brougham and, again, the memory of his dog John. He had seen John die and his eyes of wistful appeal. So Eric Hayward’s eyes might have looked as he lay in the barn dying.
“Oh, Roger!” Meg said suddenly, seizing his hand. “Kill them! Kill them! Oh, revenge him! I was not with him! Think of it! I would have had no right to have been with him—had it been possible. I did not know till a week later. He was buried there. His man buried him.”
“My poor, poor child,” said Oldmeadow, clasping her hands.
But, at once, taking refuge from his pity and from her own desperate pain: “So you’ve seen Palgrave,” she said. “And he isn’t going. I knew it was useless. I told Mother it was useless—with that stranger—that American, with him. She has disgraced us all.—Wretched boy! Hateful woman!”
“Meg, Meg; be soldierly. He wouldn’t have spoken like that.”
“He never liked her! Never!” she cried. “I knew he didn’t, even at the time she was flattering and cajoling us. I saw that she bewildered him and that he accepted her only because she was mine. How I loathe myself for having listened to her! How I loathe her! All that she ever wanted was power! Power over other people’s lives! She’d commit any crime for that!”