For the first time her own eyes filled with great tears as the name of her beloved land paused upon her lips; she stretched her arms out with a gesture of infinite longing, like a lost child that vainly seeks its mother.
"If I could only see France once more! France"——
It was the last word upon her utterance; her eyes met Cecil's in one fleeting upward glance of unutterable tenderness; then with her hands still stretched out westward to where her country was, and with the dauntless heroism of her smile upon her face like light, she gave a tired sigh as of a child that sinks to sleep, and in the midst of her Army of Africa the Little One lay dead.
STRATHMORE.
The sun was setting, sinking downward beyond purple bars of cloud, and leaving a long golden trail behind it in its track—sinking slowly and solemnly towards the west as the day declined, without rest, yet without haste, as though to give to all the sons of earth warning and time to leave no evil rooted, no bitterness unhealed, no feud to ripen, and no crime to bring forth seed, when the day should have passed away to be numbered with hours irrevocable, and the night should cast its pall over the dark deeds done, and seal their graves never to be unclosed. The sun was setting, and shedding its rich and yellow light over the green earth, on the winding waters, and the blue hills afar off, and down the thousand leafy aisles close by; but to one place that warm radiance wandered not, in one spot the rays did not play, the glory did not enter. That place was the deer-pond of the old Bois, where the dark plants brooding on the fetid waters, which only stirred with noisome things, had washed against the floating hair of lifeless women, and the sombre branches of the crowding trees had been dragged earthward by the lifeless weight of the self-slain, till the air seemed to be poisonous with death, and the grasses, as they moved, to whisper to the winds dread secrets of the Past. And here the light of the summer evening did not come, but only through the leafless boughs of one seared tree, which broke and parted the dark barrier of forest growth, they saw the west, and the sun declining slowly in its haze of golden air, sinking downward past the bars of cloud.
All was quiet, save the dull sounds of the parting waters, when some loathsome reptiles stirred among its brakes, or the hot breeze moved its pestilential plants; and in the silence they stood fronting each other; in this silence they had met, in it they would part. And there, on their right hand, through the break in the dank wall of leaves, shone the sun, looking earthward, luminous, and blinding human sight like the gaze of God.
The light from the west fell upon Erroll, touching the fair locks of his silken hair, and shining in his azure eyes as they looked up at the sunny skies, where a bird was soaring and circling in space, happy through its mere sense and joy of life; and on Strathmore's face the deep shadows slanted, leaving it as though cast in bronze, chill and tranquil as that of an Eastern Kabyl, each feature set into the merciless repose of one immovable purpose. Their faces were strangely contrasted, for the serenity of the one was that of a man who fearlessly awaits an inevitable doom, the serenity of the other that of a man who mercilessly deals out an implacable fate; and while in the one those present saw but the calmness of courage and of custom, in the other they vaguely shrank from a new and an awful meaning. For beneath the suave smile of the Duellist they read the intent of the Murderer.
The night was nigh at hand, and soon the day had to be gathered to the past, such harvest garnered with it as men's hands had sown throughout its brief twelve hours, which are so short in span, yet are so long in sin. "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath." There, across the west, in letters of flame, the warning of the Hebrew scroll was written on the purple skies; but he who should have read them stood immutable yet insatiate, with the gleam of a tiger's lust burning in his eyes—the lust when it scents blood; the lust that only slakes its thirst in life.
They fronted one another, those who had lived as brothers; while at their feet babbled the poisonous waters, and on their right hand shone the evening splendour of the sun.