They were standing at the window together. Robert heard the feeling in the words.
"Yes," he answered, "I know the world is full of sunshine, and flowers are always fresh and life is always young and new hands are always caressing. This I well know, and I do not complain. The bride and the future are always new. But Charlie," he laid his hand on his brother's shoulder, "we can't all play the game of life with the same counters; some play white but some must play black. It's the white for you, the black for me. The sun for you, the shadow for me. Don't speak; I know, I have chosen it; I know it is my fault. I know the opportunities wasted. I might have had success, I asked for failure. But it all comes back to the same thing--some play the white, some the black."
CHAPTER XLIV
A second shock within a week at The Towers found Kimberly still dazed. In the confusion of the household Uncle John failed one morning to answer Francis's greeting. No word of complaint had came from him. He lay as he had gone to sleep.
Hamilton stood in the room a moment with Kimberly beside his dead uncle.
"He was an extraordinary man, Robert," said the surgeon, breaking the silence at last. "A great man."
"He asked no compromise with the inevitable," responded Kimberly, looking at the stern forehead and the cruel mouth. "I don't know"--he added, turning mechanically away, "perhaps, there is none."
After the funeral Dolly urged Robert to take Hamilton to sea and the two men spent a week together on the yacht. Between them there existed a community of mental interest and material achievement as well as a temperamental attraction. Hamilton was never the echo of any expression of thought that he disagreed with. Yet he was acute enough to realize that Kimberly's mind worked more deeply than his own and was by this strongly drawn to him.
Moreover, to his attractive independence Hamilton united a tenderness and tact developed by long work among the suffering--and the suffering, like children, know their friends. Kimberly, while his wound was still bleeding, could talk to Hamilton more freely than to any one else.
The day after their return to The Towers the two men were riding together in the deep woods over toward the Sound when Kimberly spoke for the first time freely of Alice. "You know," he said to Hamilton, "something of the craving of a boy's imagination. When we are young we dream of angels--and we wake to clay. The imagination of childhood sets no bounds to its demands, and poor reality, forced to deliver, is left bankrupt. From my earliest consciousness my dreams were of a little girl and I loved and hungered for her. She was last in my sleeping and first in my waking thoughts.