Dan at first saw all, but reflected nothing of this beauty in his thought. His animal nature satisfied, he craved nothing as yet. But presently memory and remorse knocked for admittance—the twain were seldom long banished. They sat like skeletons at every banquet. At a bound thought flew back to that day when his brother had fallen before his eyes.
Dan groaned as the awful vision loomed before him. He saw again the trickling blood, the strange, astonished protest on that dying face, with its eyes turned up to his. That was what he could not bear—that Will should have believed he did it, even in carelessness. If the unspoken reproach of that last minute could be removed Dan felt he would be a free man once more. But that hung over him like a curse.
"I didn't do it, Will!" he moaned half aloud. "I wasn't even fooling with the trigger, as you thought. If I'd been careless in that way—but I wasn't. I never see a gun without thinking it may be loaded, and though we both believed that one wasn't still I was careful. But it caught either in your sleeve or mine—nobody will ever know, and it killed you and left me to live on. Who did it, Will? It wasn't you; it wasn't me. Was it the devil, or was it God himself? What is that awful Something that makes things happen just when you're guarding against 'em? For that's what I was doing. I had just looked up to caution you when you pressed so close, and then came the stroke!" He groaned again, as if in physical pain, then presently went on in a moaning voice: "Oh, Will, if you can hear me, believe me and not what other folks may say. They all believe it was me, but that I was so crazy over it I couldn't bear to own up; and the doctor bid them let me alone or I should go mad. But Will, it is not true. You must hear me, wherever you are. It is not true!"
He broke into a passion of sobs, and rolling over, muffled his face in the blanket's folds. Even in that solitude some living being might hear, and the thought that anyone should ever witness this agony of soul, should ever lay the lightest touch upon that sacred wound, was torture to him.
Poverty, orphanage, and physical weakness had always set him apart, but while Will lived he had not greatly minded. He had kept in touch with his world through its greatest favorite, that handsome, witty brother; and it had been the same when Will was praised, or courted, as if it had been himself. Death had torn from him the best part of himself, and as if this loss were not cruel enough simply as a loss, it had left behind the conviction that in dying that worshiped brother believed the one who would gladly have died for him to be his slayer. No wonder Dan moaned and writhed, incapable of comfort. He wonder he shunned everybody, knowing what they believed of him.
No wonder he groped in black despair and could not yet look up, or listen to the voices of consolation that might have come to him in different moods.
It was night for Dan in more senses than one.