“I shall never, never forgive myself,” she said, in pained accents. “Mr. Garner and all your friends say that your election was the one thing you held desirable, the one thing that would—would thoroughly reinstate you in your father's confidence, and yet I—I—oh, Carson I did want you to win! I wanted it—wanted it—wanted it!”
“Oh, well, don't bother about that,” he said, and she saw that he was trying to hide his own disappointment. “I admit I started into this because—because I knew how keenly you felt for Linda, but to-day, Helen, as I rode from mad throng to mad throng of those good men with their dishevelled hair and bloodshot eyes, their very souls bent to that trail, that pitiful trail of revenge, I began to feel that I was fighting for a great principle, a principle that you had planted within me. I gloried in it for its own sake, and because it had its birth in your sweet sympathy and love for the unfortunate. I could never have experienced it but for you.”
“But you failed,” Helen almost sobbed. “You failed.”
“Yes, utterly. What I've done amounted to nothing more than irritating them. Those men, many of whom I love and admire, were wounded to their hearts, and I was only keeping their sores open with my fine-spun theories of human justice. They will learn their lesson slowly, but they will learn it. When they have caught and lynched poor, stupid Pete, they may learn later that he was innocent, and then they will realize what I was trying to keep them from doing. They will be friendly to me then, but Wiggin will be in office.”
“Yes, my father thinks this thing is going to defeat you.” Helen sighed. “And, Carson, it's killing me to think that I am the prime cause of it. If I'd had a man's head I'd have known that your effort could accomplish nothing, and I'd have been like Mr. Garner and the others, and asked you not to mix up in it; but I couldn't help myself. Mam' Linda has your name on her lips with every breath. She thinks the sun rises and sets in you, and that you only have to give an order to have it obeyed.”
“That's the pity of it,” Carson said, with a sigh.
At this juncture there was the sound of a window-sash sliding upward, and old Dwight put out his head.
“Come on in!” he called out. “Your mother is awake and absolutely refuses to believe you haven't a dozen bullet-holes in you.”
“All right, father, I'm coming,” Carson said, and impulsively he held out his hand and clasped Helen's in a steady, sympathetic pressure.
“Now, you go to bed, little girl,” he said, more tenderly than he realized. In fact, it was a term he had used only once before, long before her brother's death. “Pardon me,” he pleaded; “I didn't know what I was saying. I—I was worried over seeing you look so tired, and—and I spoke without thinking.”