She moved slightly. "Yes, Lewis."
"The night is quiet, after the storm. He lies at rest beside the stream. This morning he will be found, lifted tenderly, lamented, mourned. It is not a gruesome place. I remember trees and fluttering birds. He sleeps—he sleeps—like Duncan he sleeps well at last. Is he to be so pitied?"
She moaned, "Yes—but you also, you also! Oh, break, break!"
"Listen, Jacqueline. It lacks but an hour of dawn. When it is day, you may give me up. Rouse Joab and send for the sheriff and your uncles and for Fairfax Cary. I will dress and await them in the library. Indeed, you may do it now—there's no need to wait for dawn."
She rose from her chair and went the length of the room, resting at last, with raised arms and covered face, against the farthest window. He spoke on. "If all thought alike, Jacqueline, if all saw action and consequence with one vision—but we do not so, no, not on this earth! You and I are sundered there. Perhaps it is to my shame that it is so,—I cannot tell. What you asked for this afternoon, that confession, that decision, that accord with justice and acceptance of penalty, I cannot give freely and of conviction, Jacqueline. Why did you think I had that exaltation of mind? I have it not; no, nor one man in five hundred thousand! The man I—murdered—perhaps possessed it; indeed, I think that he did. But I—I do not own it, nor can I see matters with another's vision. I see a struggle to prevent disgrace and disaster, to retrieve and hold an endangered standing-room—a struggle determined and legitimate. I am capable of making it. But though I'll avow that another man's vision transcends mine, I'll dispute with him the power of loving! I love you with a passion as deep, strong, and abiding as if I, too, walked in that rarer air. I am of the earth and rooted in the earth, but I love you utterly. If you want this thing, I will give it to you. It was unmanly of me to say but now, 'You may do this, you may do that, and I will not lift a finger to prevent you.' I will not leave it to you, Jacqueline. I will awaken Joab and send him with a note to your uncles."
He moved toward the door, but before he could reach it his wife was before him, her weight thrown against him, her raised hands thrusting him back to the hearth. She shook her head, and her long hair shadowed her; she strove for utterance, but could find only a strangled "No—no"; then, still clinging to him, she slipped to her knees and so to her face, and lay there in a swoon in the red zone of the firelight.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE BROTHERS
At Fontenoy the deluging rain and pitchy blackness of the night sufficiently warranted Colonel Dick's assertion that it was an evening for a sensible man to stay where he was, and that a bowl of punch and wedding-talk and Unity at the harpsichord were to be preferred to a progress to Greenwood through such a downpour and a foot of mud. Ludwell!—Ludwell wouldn't be there anyway. He was a man of sense and would be sleeping at Red Fields, if indeed he had ever left Malplaquet. Fairfax Cary was persuaded, and after a very happy evening in the drawing-room, went to bed and to sleep in the blue room.