What he longed
for with an agonized desire was to stand once more stainless among his
equals; to reach once more the liberty of unchallenged, unfettered life;
to return once more to those who held him but as a dishonored memory,
as one whom violent death had well snatched from the shame of a criminal
career.
"But who would believe me now?" he thought. "Besides, this makes no
difference. If three words spoken would reinstate me, I could not
speak them at that cost. The beginning perhaps was folly, but for sheer
justice sake there is no drawing back now. Let him enjoy it; God knows I
do not grudge him it."
Yet, though it was true to the very core that no envy and no evil lay in
his heart against the younger brother to whose lot had fallen all good
gifts of men and fate, there was almost unbearable anguish on him in
this hour in which he learned the inheritance that had come to him, and
remembered that he could never take again even so much of it as lay in
the name of his fathers. When he had given his memory up to slander and
oblivion, and the shadow of a great shame; when he had let his life die
out from the world that had known him, and buried it beneath the rough,
weather-stained, blood-soaked cloth of a private soldier's uniform, he
had not counted the cost then, nor foreseen the cost hereafter. It had
fallen on him very heavily now.
Where he stood under some sheltered columns of a long-ruined mosque
whose shafts were bound together by a thousand withes and wreaths of
the rich, fantastic Sahel foliage, an exceeding weariness of longing was
upon him--longing for all that he had forfeited, for all that was his
own, yet never could be claimed as his.
Pages:
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533