“What does that face remind you of? See you aught beneath that beauty but treachery without pity, duplicity without shame? Lo! the pity and the shame you should have felt have recoiled upon me—me, who alone have suffered.” He broke off abruptly, as though choked by emotion. She dared not face him; she felt incapable of a reply. After a pause, he resumed, passionately: “Oh! Alice, Alice! The dead rest, yet the living dead can only endure. Amid these crags, and throughout the solitude of years, I have fought and refought the same old battle; but with each victory it returns upon me, strengthened by defeat, while with me all grows weaker but the remorselessness of memory and the capacity for pain.”
She still stood, with bowed head, shivering as though his words were blows.
“Have you nothing to say?” he asked. “Does that picture of your own youth recall no vanished tenderness for one who—self-outcast of men—fell to that pass through you?”
“I have a husband,” she murmured, almost in a whisper.
“Aye, and because of that husband I have no wife—no wife—no wife!” His wailing repetition seemed absolutely heartbroken; but sternly he continued: “You have told me where he is. I say to you—hide him—hide him from me! Even this”—he struck his bosom with his Bible feverishly—“may not save him. I have prayed and wrought, but it is as nothing—nothing—when I think—when I remember. Therefore, hide him from me—lest I slay him—”
“You would not—you dare not harm him!” She faced him now, a splendid picture of an aroused wife and mother. “He is not to blame—he knew you not—he has been good to me—and—and—I love him.”
He shrank from the last words as though from a blow, and stood cowering. Then he hissed out:
“Let me not find him. Hide him—hide him!”
Tommy here awoke with a yawn, and announced that his foot was about well. Herne, closing his lips, busied himself about preparing breakfast, which cheerless meal was eaten in silence. When they finally emerged from the cave the sun was peeping into the Dismal below them; bright gleams chased the dark shadows down the cliffs, and the morning mists were melting. The storm was over; there was a twitter of birds, the tinkle of an overflowing burn, and a squirrel's bark emphasizing the freshness of the morn. The pure air entered the lips like wine, and Mrs. Renfro felt her depression roll off as they retraced the devious trail of the night before.
They found the lady's horse standing dejectedly near where he had been left. The fog, in vast rolls, was climbing out of the Dismal, disclosing dark masses of forest below. The flavor of pine and balsam slept beneath the trees, every grass blade was diamond-strewn, and every sound vivified by the sense of mighty walls and unsounded depths.