It was the simplest and oldest of stories between the two--a story that
began, doubtless, with the beginning, and will never end as long as two
men and one woman, or two women and one man are left on earth--the story
of the love of one who loves another. Only, to the sufferers the tragedy
is always as fresh as a knife-cut, and forever new.
Judith cared for nobody. Crittenden laughed and pleaded, stormed,
sulked, and upbraided, and was devoted and indifferent for years--like
the wilful, passionate youngster that he was--until Judith did love
another--what other, Crittenden never knew. And then he really believed
that he must, as she had told him so often, conquer his love for her.
And he did, at a fearful cost to the best that was in him--foolishly,
but consciously, deliberately. When the reaction came, he tried to
reëstablish his relations to a world that held no Judith Page. Her
absence gave him help, and he had done very well, in spite of an
occasional relapse. It was a relapse that had sent him to the mountains,
six weeks before, and he had emerged with a clear eye, a clear head,
steady nerves, and with the one thing that he had always lacked, waiting
for him--a purpose. It was little wonder, then, that the first ruddy
flash across a sky that had been sunny with peace for thirty years and
more thrilled him like an electric charge from the very clouds. The
next best thing to a noble life was a death that was noble, and that was
possible to any man in war. One war had taken away--another might give
back again; and his chance was come at last.
It was midnight now, and far across the fields came the swift faint beat
of a horse's hoofs on the turnpike. A moment later he could hear the hum
of wheels--it was his little brother coming home; nobody had a horse
that could go like that, and nobody else would drive that way if he had.
Since the death of their father, thirteen years after the war, he had
been father to the boy, and time and again he had wondered now why he
could not have been like that youngster. Life was an open book to the
boy--to be read as he ran. He took it as he took his daily bread,
without thought, without question. If left alone, he and the little girl
whom he had gone that night to see would marry, settle down, and go hand
in hand into old age without questioning love, life, or happiness. And
that was as it should be; and would to Heaven he had been born to tread
the self-same way. There was a day when he was near it; when he turned
the same fresh, frank face fearlessly to the world, when his nature was
as unspoiled and as clean, his hopes as high, and his faith as
child-like; and once when he ran across a passage in Stevenson in which
that gentle student spoke of his earlier and better self as his "little
brother" whom he loved and longed for and sought persistently, but who
dropped farther and farther behind at times, until, in moments of
darkness, he sometimes feared that he might lose him forever--Crittenden
had clung to the phrase, and he had let his fancy lead him to regard
this boy as his early and better self--better far than he had ever
been--his little brother, in a double sense, who drew from him, besides
the love of brother for brother and father for son, a tenderness that
was almost maternal.