After a time she spoke, though with difficulty. "Yes—I had rather—for you. For myself, I feel to-night that just to know you were alive would be happiness enough. Either way—either way—to have loved you has been for me my crown of life!"
"I have written to Colonel Churchill, and a line to Fairfax Cary. There was much to do at the last. Now it is all done, and I will go early in the morning. You knew that it was drawing to this end—"
"Yes, I knew—I knew. Lewis, Lewis! what will you do yonder all the days the months—the—the years to come? Oh, unendurable! O God, have mercy!"
"I will work," he answered. "It is work, Jacqueline, with me—it is work or die! I will work. That which I have brought upon myself I will try to endure. And out of effort may come at last—I know not what."
They sat still upon the stone. The wind sank, the air grew colder; near and far there gathered a feeling of the north, a sense of loneliness and untrodden space. The whippoorwill called again.
Rand shuddered. "Our last night—it is our last night. Look!—a star shot over the Three-Notched Road."
Jacqueline slipped from his clasp and stood upright, with her hands over her ears. "Come indoors—come indoors! I cannot bear the whippoorwill!"
Early the next morning he rode away. Halfway down the drive he looked back and saw her standing under the beech tree. She raised her hand, her scarf fluttering back from it. It was the gesture of a princess, watching a knight ride from her tower. The green boughs came between them; he was gone, and she sank down upon the bench beneath the tree. It was there that Major Edward found her, an hour later.
Rand passed along the old, familiar road. He travelled neither fast nor slow, and he kept a level gaze. The May morning was fresh and sweet, the land to either side ploughed earth or vernal green, the little stream laughing through the meadow. He passed a field where negroes were transplanting tobacco, and his mind noted the height and nature of the leaf. At the Greenwood road he looked mechanically toward the distant house, but upon this morning he hardly thought of Cary. He thought of Gideon Rand, and of the great casks of tobacco which he and his father used to roll; of the old, strong horses, and of a lean and surly dog that they had owned; of the slow journeys, and of their fires at night, beneath the gum and the pine, beside wastes of broom sedge.
He came into Charlottesville and rode down Main Street to the Eagle, where he dismounted. A negro took his horse. "Put him up," directed Rand, "until he is called for." He kept his hand for a moment upon Selim's neck, then turned and walked down the street and into the Court House yard.