United States -- History -- Constitutional period, 1789-1809 -- Fiction
Rand rode with closed lips, and with the mark between his brows. Passion
was having its way with him, such passion as had lived with him, now
drowsing, now fiercely awake, in the days at Richmond between his return
from Williamsburgh and the close of the trial. He saw Roselands and
Jacqueline beneath the beech tree, but he also saw, and that with more
distinctness, the face and form of the man who rode toward Greenwood. He
longed for Jacqueline, but he had not forgiven her. He knew that he
would when he saw her face--would forgive her with a cry for the waste
of the hot, revengeful days, the sleepless nights, since they had
parted. Her face swam before him, between the hemlock boughs, but he was
not ready yet to forgive, not yet, not until he got to Roselands and she
met him with her wistful eyes! He was not a fool; the Absolute within
him knew where lay the need for forgiveness, but it was deeply overlaid
with human pride and wrath. He was at the old, old trick of anger with
another when the fault was all his own. As for Ludwell Cary--
His hand closed with force upon the bridle and his eyes narrowed. "From
the first, from that day upon the Justice's Bench, from that day when we
gathered nuts together, I must have hated. Now it is warp and woof, warp
and woof!" He touched Selim with the spur. "If there were truly a heaven
and truly a hell, and I, in flames myself, saw him in Abraham's bosom,
not to escape from that torment would I call to him, 'Once we were
neighbours, once it seemed that we might have been friends--come down,
come down and help me, Cary!'"
He laughed, a harsh sound that came back from the rock above him. By no
means always, far from even often, a hardened or an evil man, to-day the
stream of thought was stirred and sullied from every black pool and
weedy depth, and there came floating up folly, waste, and sin. His
reason slept. Had he, by some Inquisitor not to be disobeyed, been
suddenly obliged to give why and wherefore for his hatred, the trained
intellect must have agreed with the questioner. "These causes fail of
sufficiency." That was true, but the truth was sophistry. He dealt now
with the fact that he hated, and in his mind, as he rode at speed along
the river road, he did not even review the past which had given birth to
this present. He hated, and his hand closed upon the rein within it as
though there was there, in addition, another thread.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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