Surely a man facing
death could have forgotten all this? Not Alexander Quisante. He could
die, and die bravely; but the world must stand by his bedside. So till
the end, whenever that most uncertainly dated end might come, the old
mixture promised to go on, the great and small, the mean and grand, the
call for tears and throbs of the heart alternating with the obstinate
curling or curving of lips swift to respond to the vision of the
contemptible or the ludicrous.
But she had her appeal to make, the one thing, it seemed, she could do to
put herself at all in the right, the offer she must make, and try to make
with a sincerity which should rise unimpaired from the conflicts of her
heart. She had caught at coming to Ashwood because she thought she could
make it best there, not indeed in the room where she had lied for him,
nor by the tree where she had turned to Marchmont in a pang of wild
regret, but there, on Duty Hill, where he had won her, had touched his
highest, and had seemed a conqueror. She took him there, climbing with
him very slowly, very gently; there she made him sit and sat by him.
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