“Then, Dick,” he said, “I can take my destiny like a brave man. Better to stand for the truth—than shirk it for a lie. May I call you still my friend?”
Wilson turned with something between a snort and a sigh.
“Egad, sir, I will remain your friend despite all the women in Christendom.”
And the two men shook hands.
Jeffray, remembering what had happened at the parsonage, and realizing that the Grimshaws of Pevensel were desperate men, determined to remain on the watch all night with pistols and a drawn sword on the table before him. Bess was alone in the great bedroom, sleeping in the very bed, with its carved pillars and red silk canopy, in which Jeffray had been born. Wilson stumped off to his room about midnight, after talking over with Jeffray the events of the day, and listening for the twelfth time to Richard’s passionate assertion that Bess had not come of a peasant stock.
When Wilson had taken his candle and gone to bed, Jeffray settled himself in the library, unlocked the bureau, and prepared for the composing of several letters. He wrote to the Lady Letitia at The Wells, informing her of the result of his quarrel with the Hardacres. He wrote also to Jilian a single letter, expressing his sorrow that he should have spilled her brother’s blood.
Feverish with the ever-flowing current of his thoughts, he went and seated himself before the open window of the library. The night was calm and windless, blessed by the faces of a thousand stars. The trees slumbered about the house; the scent of roses and of honeysuckle hung heavy on the air.
Jeffray turned and looked round the shadowy room. The candles on the table where the pistols lay were burning steadily towards their silver sockets. The books ranged close along the walls seemed to recall unnumbered memories of the past. There were the books he had loved and leaned over as a boy—Mandeville’s travels, old Froissart, Chaucer’s tales, Shakespeare, Milton, and The Book of Martyrs. There on the bureau lay the brown-covered Thomas à Kempis that had been daily in his dead father’s hands. Jeffray seemed to see the old man’s figure moving dimly in the dusk, with Roger, his black spaniel, at his heels. Poor Roger lay in the rose garden under a red rose-tree. The bent but stately figure in its black coat, white ruffles, and cravat, with the heavy peruke falling on either side of the pale and courtly face, had vanished hardly a year ago from the old house. Jeffray wondered like a child whether his father could see him still, whether he was grieved by his son’s madness.
As Jeffray watched on the dawn began to creep up into the eastern sky. The trees about the house, still wrapped in the mystery of the night, stood outlined against a broadening sheet of gold. The chanting of birds flooded up from the thickets; wild life began to wake; the stars sank back behind the deepening blue of day. Rabbits scurried over the dew-drenched grass-land of the park and came and went amid the bracken. Blackbirds bustled and chattered in the garden. The woods flashed and kindled. Vapors of rose flushed the opalescent bosoms of the clouds.
Jeffray leaned his elbows on the window-sill and watched the deepening of the dawn. It was mysteriously strange to him, instinct with a new and prophetic beauty. How still the whole world seemed save for the singing of the birds! The garden, with its many colors of gold and scarlet, azure, purple, and white, spread itself like some rich tapestry for the coming of the daughters of the dawn. The great cedars still seemed asleep. The cypresses and yews were webbed with gold.