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.