“Yes, it seems so. I’d known your little white soul ever since you were a baby. I knew that in all your life you’d never had a thought that was not the best, the truest, the loyalest for me. I knew that there was never a time when you wouldn’t have given everything, even life, for me. 336 I knew it that day in the Bishop’s house. I knew it that morning when you came to me in the sugar cabin.”
“Yes, I knew all that,” he went on bitterly. “I knew you loved me, and I knew what a love it was. I knew it. And yet that day––that day in the courtroom, the only thing I could do was to call you liar!”
She put up her hands with an appeal to stop him, but he went on doggedly.
“Yes, I did. That was all I could think of. I threw it at you like a blow in the face. I saw you quiver and shrink, as though I had struck you. And even that sight wasn’t enough for me. I kept on saying it, when I knew in my heart it wasn’t so. I couldn’t help but know it. I knew you. But I kept on telling myself that you lied; kept on till yesterday. I wasn’t big enough. I wasn’t man enough to see that you were just facing something that was bigger than both of us––something that was bigger and truer than words––that there was no way out for you but to do what you did.”
“Jeffrey, dear,” the girl hurried to say, “you know that’s a thing we can’t speak about––”
“Yes, we can, now. I know and I understand. You needn’t say anything. I understand.”
“And I understand a lot more,” he began again. “It took that little French girl to tell me what was the truth. I know it now. There was 337 a deeper, a truer truth under everything. That was why you had to do as you did. That’s why everything was so. I wasn’t innocent. Things don’t happen as those things did. They work out, because they have to.”
The girl was watching him with fright and wonder in her eyes. What was he going to say? But she let him go on.
“No, I wasn’t innocent,” he said, as though to himself now. “I fooled myself into thinking that I was. But I was not. I meant to kill a man. I had meant to for a long time. Nothing but Rafe Gadbeau’s quickness prevented me. No, I wasn’t innocent. I was guilty in my heart. I was a murderer. I was guilty. I was as guilty as Rafe Gadbeau! As guilty as Ca––!”
The girl had suddenly sprung forward and thrown her arms around his neck. She caught the word that was on his lips and stopped it with a kiss, a kiss that dared the onlooking world to say what he had been going to say.