I have the honour to restore to you the letter which you will find enclosed. If you ask how it came into my hands, I have but to say that, in times of crisis and peril, rules of conduct, on the part of a government as of an individual, have somewhat to bow to necessity. Enough that it did come into my hands—last autumn. Judge if I have used it against you! It is now returned to you because I no longer conceive it necessary to hold it. I might have burned it; I prefer that you shall do so.
I have but a word to add to our conversation of last August at Monticello. I am a man of strong affections. Your youth and all the eager service you did me in those years, and the great hopes I had for you, endeared you to me. These things are present in my mind. Were they not so, you would have heard from me in other wise! Were they not so, that which I now enclose should not travel back to the writer's hand; it should remain, distinct and black, upon your Country's records, for your children's children to read with burning cheeks! I spare you, but you are of course aware that the affection of which I spoke is dead, dead as the trust with which I regarded you, or as the pride with which I dwelt upon your future! Reread and destroy that which I place in your hand.
THOMAS JEFFERSON.
Jacqueline laid down the large, blue, crackling sheet, and took from the floor beside her, where it had fallen, the President's enclosure. Hand and eye moved mechanically; she neither thought nor feared. Her judgment was in suspension, and she was unconscious of herself or of her act. The seals upon this second letter were broken. She unfolded it. On the outside it was addressed in a hand that, had she thought, she would have recognised for Tom Mocket's, to an undistinguished person at Marietta upon the Ohio; within, the writing was her husband's and the address was to Aaron Burr. The date was last August, the subject-matter the disruption of the Republic and the conquest of Mexico, and the detail of plans included the arrangement by which Rand was to leave Albemarle, ostensibly to examine a purchase of land beyond the mountains He would leave, however, not to return. Once out of the country, he with his wife would press on rapidly to the Ohio, to Blennerhassett's island.
The summer night deepened, hot and languorous, with a sweep of moths to the candle flames, with vagrant odours of flowering vines and vagrant sounds of distant laughter, voices, footsteps down the long street. Jacqueline sat very still, the letter in her lap. The curtains at the window moved in the fitful air. Through the open doors from the kitchen in the yard behind the house came the strumming of a banjo, then Joab's deep bass:—
"Go down, go down, Moses,
Tell Pharaoh let us go!
Go down, go down, Moses,
King Pharaoh, let us go!"
There was a wave of honeysuckle, too faint and deadly sweet. A party of men, boatmen or waggoners, went by, and as they passed, broke into rough laughter.
Jacqueline rose, letting fall the letter. With her hand to her forehead she stood for a minute, then moved haltingly to the window. Her eyes were blank; she wanted air, she knew, and for the moment she knew little else. She was whelmed in deep waters, and all horizons were one. When she reached the casement, she could only cling to the sill, raise her eyes to the stars, and find nothing there to help her understand. There was in them neither calm nor sublimity; they swung and danced like insensate fireflies. The honeysuckle was too strong—and she must tell Joab she did not wish to hear his banjo to-night. The men who had passed were still laughing.
She put her hand again to her forehead, then presently withdrew it and looked over her shoulder at the paper lying upon the floor beside the table. By degrees the vagueness and the absence of sensation vanished. She had had her moments of merciful deadening, of indifference to pain; they were past, and torment now began.
Perhaps half an hour went by. She rose from the sofa upon which she had thrown herself, face down, pressed her hands to her temples, then, moving to the table, wrote there a word or two, folded and addressed the paper, and rang the bell. Young Isham appeared and she gave him the note, bidding him, in a voice that by an effort she made natural, to hasten upon his errand. When he was gone, she stooped and gathered from the floor the fallen letters—the President's and Lewis Rand's—and laid them in a drawer. The touch seemed to burn her, for she moaned a little. She wandered for a moment uncertainly, here and there in the room, then, returning to the sofa, fell upon her knees beside it, stretched out her arms along the silk, and laid her head upon them. "O God! O God!" she said, but made no other prayer.