“Go on,” she said quietly. “Someone will have to tell me. I—would rather hear it from—you.”
The sweat of agony glistened on Jarvis’s forehead.
“If I must,” he said hoarsely. “It was an accident, Barbara. It would never have happened if David had not been excited, wild with success; Bamber attacked him first, without due provocation, it would seem, and Whitcomb retaliated—struck him, in self-defence.”
Barbara heard his voice as if from a great distance. She seemed to herself to be drifting away on a sea of strange dreams. Then she roused suddenly to find herself supported by Jarvis’s arm. He was holding a cup of water to her lips. She sat up, her face white and wan, her hands clutching the arms of her chair.
“I ought to have told you in the beginning,” he reproached himself, “Bamber was not killed by the blow; but he fell and—struck his head against the edge of a stall.”
“The girl dragged him away from the scene of the accident, and he—escaped. You know he had a fast horse.”
She was looking at him dizzily through a mist of pain.
“The girl went with him,” he said, reading aright the question in her eyes. “There was talk of a pursuit, of an arrest. But unless Bamber should—— I think I may assure you that David will not be molested.”
He did not tell her that he had used all the official power at his command to shield the fugitives from the fury of the crowd, and further that the injured man had already received the best medical attention procurable in the county. Barbara learned these things long, long afterward, when the pain of that hour had been assuaged.
It was more than three months afterward, and the first snow was flying past the windows in big, feathery flakes, when a letter came to Barbara from a town in the Far West. It was from David, she saw, with a painful throb of surprise, and postponed the reading of it for a difficult hour, during which she reviewed once more and for the last time all the futile anguish and passion of a love that had bruised and hurt her from its beginning. Then she opened the letter with fingers that trembled not at all.
“Dear Barbara [he wrote]: I suppose by this time you have set me down as a poor skate of a fellow. It probably hasn’t occurred to you that it is entirely your own fault that you will never see me again. If you had gone with me to the fair that day, as I wanted you to do, I should not have met Jennie, nor gotten into a squabble with that unutterable cad, Bamber. I hear he got off with nothing worse than a crack in his foolish skull to remind him what it is like to try conclusions with a gentleman.