And he fell--he
fell--and all was done."
None heard or saw my lord Duke when, later, he passed out from the
empty room. He went forth into the fair day again, and through the Park
and into Camylott Wood. The deep amber light was there, and the
gold-green stillness, and he passed onward till he reached the great
wood's depths, and stood beneath an oak-tree's broad-spread branches,
leaning his back against the huge rough trunk, his arms folded.
This was her secret burden--this. And Nature had so moulded him that he
could look upon it with just, unflinching eyes, his soul filled with a
god-like, awful pity.
In a walled-in cellar in the deserted Dunstanwolde House lay, waiting
for the call of Judgment Day, a handful of evil dust which once had
been a man--one whose each day of life from his youth upward had
seemed, as it had passed, to leave black dregs in some poor
fellow-creature's cup. One frantic, unthinking blow struck in terror
and madness had ended him and all his evil doing, but left her standing
frenzied at the awfulness of the thing which had fallen upon her soul
in her first hour of Heaven. And all her being had risen in revolt at
this most monstrous woe of chance, and in her torture she had cried
out that in that hour she would not be struck down.
"Of ending his base life I had never thought," he had heard her wail,
"though I had thought to end my own.
Pages:
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397