CHAPTER XXXI

HUSBAND AND WIFE

As he rode up the drive, he saw Jacqueline waiting for him, a gleam of white upon the grey doorstone, beyond the wind-tossed beech.  He dismounted, sent Young Isham around with the horses, and walked across the burned grass.  She met him with outstretched arms, beneath the beech tree.  “Lewis, Lewis!”

He held her to him, bent back her face, kissed her brow and eyes and mouth.  There was a wild energy in clasp and touch.  “You love me still?” he cried.  “That’s true—­that’s true, Jacqueline?”

“You know—­you know it’s true!  I was born only to love you—­and I thought that you would never come!”

The thunder crashed above them, and the advance of the rain was heard upon the beech leaves.  “Come indoors—­come out of the storm!” She drew his hand that she held to her and laid it on her bosom.  “Oh, welcome home, my dear!”

They went together into the house and into their own chamber.  The windows were dark with the now furious rain, but a light fire burned upon the hearth.  Rand stood looking down upon it.  His wife watched him, her arms resting upon the back of a great flowered chair.  Suddenly she spoke.  “Lewis, what is the matter?”

He half turned toward her.  “I believed that you would see.  And yet you were blind to that earlier course of mine.”

“Something dreadful is the matter.  Tell me at once.”

After a moment he repeated sombrely, “‘At once.’  How can I tell you at once?  There are things that are slowly brought about by all time, and to show them as they truly are would require all time again.  How can I tell you at all?  My God!”

“I feel,” she answered, “years older than I did two weeks ago.  If there was something then to forgive, I have forgiven it.  Our souls did not come together to share only the lit paths, the honey in the cup.  Tell me, Lewis.”

“It is black and bitter—­there is no light, and it will kill the sweetness.  If I could live with you and you never know it, I would try to do so—­try to keep it secret from you as I did that lesser thing.  I cannot—­even now, without a word, you know in part.”

“Tell me all—­that lesser thing.”

Rand turned from the fire and, coming to the great chair against whose back she leaned, knelt in its flowered lap and bowed his forehead upon her hands.  “I am glad,” he said, in a voice so low that she bent to hear it,—­“I am glad now that I have no son.”

There was a silence while the rain dashed against the window-panes and the thunder rolled overhead; then Jacqueline pressed her cheek against his bowed head.  “What have you done?” she whispered.  “Tell me—­oh, tell me!”

After a moment he told her.  “I have killed a man.”

“Killed—­It was by accident!”

“No.  It was not accident.  I came upon him by accident—­I’ll claim no more than that.  The black rage was there to blind me, make me deaf—­mole and adder!  But it was not accident, what I did.  I’ll not cheat you here, and I’ll not cheat myself.  The name of it is murder.”