"As to the mistake of the murdered man's identity, my dear sir, how could doubt enter the mind? The body lay in Claxton's private room, beside the couch that he constantly occupied—an unrecognizable mass; Mrs. Claxton dead beside him, and neither of self-inflicted wounds; Bertha wailing the loss of her father; Hermione stunned by shock of grief. Who the dead was, seemed so self-evident; who the murderer could be, such a puzzle, that the mind inevitably dwelt exclusively on the latter point. My dear sir, looking back on the matter, even now I cannot see how a suspicion of the truth could have arisen."
With his professional pique adding to his intense private grief for Hermione's long sacrifice, it was, perhaps, not surprising that the return of perfect confidence in her, after the agony of reluctant distrust, did not do more to sweeten the ferment of his little soul. Durgan reflected that on a mind no longer young, filled with long earlier memories of mutual trust, the suspicion of a few recent days could make little impression. And, again, this short-lived emotion of suspicion was succeeded by the pain of knowing that his own happiness and hers had been voluntarily sacrificed for a wretch so devoid of any trace of chivalry or of parental feeling.
Before reaching Hilyard, Alden expressed his opinion upon another aspect of the recent disclosure. "You say, sir, that to you the most amazing part is that such a man as Claxton could do so deadly a deed. My dear sir, my experience of crime is that the purely selfish nature only needs the spark of temptation to flame out into some hellish deed. No doubt you will think me puritanical, but I hold that, while to most cultured egoists such temptation never comes, in God's sight they are none the less evil for that mere absence of temptation. Idleness and self-love, especially where education enhances the guilt, are the dirt in which the most virulent plague-germs can propagate with speed and fecundity."
Durgan felt that, whether his opinion was true or false, it was brought forward now with an energy directed against the class to which he himself belonged.
The two men parted stiffly, but they both felt that Alden would return in a more placable mood.
That day, in a burying-ground near Hilyard, the mulatto called "'Dolphus" was laid beneath the ground. Born the ward of a nation whose institutions had first brought about his existence and then severed him from his natural protectors, he had been given only a little knowledge by way of life's equipment, which, murderer as he was, had proved in his hands a less dangerous thing than in those of many a citizen of the dominant race. No one in that great nation mourned his death or gave a passing sigh to his lone burial; and if anyone set store by that bare patch of grave cut in the unkempt grass among the wild field lilies it must have been God, who is said to gather what mortals cast away.
Durgan took Adam back to Deer with him. Adam was somewhat the worse for the success of his grief and piety, genuine tho they were. These qualities had won him praise and consideration; they were no longer unconscious. Like a child who had been on a stage, he was inclined to pose and show elaborate signs of grief.
Durgan bore with him for a few days, and then spoke his mind:
"Stop that, you absurd nigger! If you don't look alive I'll make you!"
Adam paused in the middle of a pious ejaculation with his mouth open.