CHAPTER XVI
The old Jessamines stared at him, but summed up their curiosity and their resentment in a “Well! So you’re back?”
“Yes,” he said, the answer sufficient to the question.
He was embarrassed to find that a cousin of his wife’s was visiting the farm and the spare room was filled. He had to go back with Patty. But they were like two enemies in the same cell.
Sometimes he would wake suddenly in the night from a hell of self-contempt. He would both sweat and shiver with remorse for the shame of having let Chalender live.
In his half-insanity it seemed a belated duty to go out and assassinate the villain. To shoot him down openly would be too noble a punishment—like shooting a spy. To garrote him, string him up squirming from a tree limb would be best. Major André had wept pleading to be shot, but they had hanged him—not far from Tuliptree Farm. And only recently people had dug up his grave and found the tiny roots of a tree all grown about his curly hair.
Chalender had sneaked into RoBards’ home and Patty had played the Benedict Arnold to surrender the citadel to the enemy. He deserved to be put out of the way like a poisoned dog, a sheep-killer, a lamb-worrier.
Sitting up in his bed with night all about him RoBards would enact some grisly murder, often while Patty slept at his side unheeding the furies that lashed her husband and mocked him for his forgiveness like Christ’s of the woman brought before him.
In the restored innocence of sleep, Patty’s face was like a little girl’s with its embroidery of her curls, one shoulder curved up, a round white arm flung back above her head, her bosom slowly lifting and falling with her soft breath.
Sometimes as he gazed at her, his heart welled with pity for her; at other times he was frantic to commit murder because of her.