And that very day Freke appeared.
The hatred that Judith had always felt for him was now intensified into a horror of him—he was the murderer of the poor child lying on her death-bed up-stairs—and she had thought her heart so hard toward him that nothing could soften it; but, strange as it might seem, she did soften toward him when she saw how acute was his misery.
Remorse was new to him. He had rather gloried in going against the antique notions and prejudices of the people in that shut-in, provincial place; but that anything tragic could come of it never really dawned upon him until he saw the terrible consequences before his eyes. He was, indeed, a free man, legally, when he came back; but the moral law, the social prejudice, stood like an everlasting wall between him and Jacqueline. Moreover, there could be no talk of marriage with Jacqueline then—she was the bride of death!
Judith herself told him this. Whether Jacqueline had ever had any deep hold upon him or not, there was no doubt of the sincerity of his grief and his remorse. He said but little, but one look at his changed and agitated face was enough. He asked to see her—a request Judith could not refuse. But the sight of him threw Jacqueline into such a paroxysm of agitation, that Judith almost forced him from the room. There was something a little mysterious about the whole thing, to General and Mrs. Temple, but mercifully they suspected nothing of the real state of affairs. After one more attempt to see Jacqueline, and the extreme agitation into which it threw her, it became plain that it could not be repeated. Jacqueline herself begged that she might not see him.
“Not that I don’t love him—don’t think that for a moment, Judith!” she cried; “but the sight of him nearly kills me. Then I am sorry that I am going to die—I am so sorry for myself that I feel as if I should cry myself into convulsions.”
Judith tried gently to check this sort of talk, but Jacqueline, with a shadowy smile, laughed at her.
“Don’t be silly, Judith—you know how it is. All that I hope is, that those hard-hearted people will be sorry when they have killed me with their cruelty.”
Freke, still coming every day, walked about the lower floor dismally. Jacqueline, whose senses became preternaturally sharp, soon recognized his footsteps. Even that unnerved her. Judith told him so kindly, and afterward he would sit motionless before the dining-room fire, always turning his head away from Jacqueline’s little chair. Like Judith, he was clear-sighted about her. Of them all, General and Mrs. Temple were the only ones who would not or could not see that Jacqueline would soon be gone. Mrs. Temple had never seen anybody die without being ill, and could not believe that Jacqueline, who suffered no pain, should go. She had been in truth much frightened at the time of Jacqueline’s illness; but, now, there was nothing to prevent her getting well except—except—
“That she is determined to die,” Dr. Wortley inwardly remarked when Mrs. Temple talked to him in this way.
Jacqueline began to show a strange eagerness for Throckmorton’s arrival. He was somewhere in the Northwest; but Jack, acting on his own responsibility, telegraphed his father, and put him on the track of Judith’s letter.