He spoke aloud in the sunny solitude, and his words were of Bertha and her sister. "My God! She has lived alone with her there for two years believing this."
He had very often of late thought slightingly of Bertha's excitability. Last night he had thought scorn of her conclusions. Now, when he perceived how the terrible form of death which had befallen her loved father must have wrought upon her nerves, and how much more reason she had to believe her sister guilty than the most bigoted member of the public who had tried to condemn her, he felt only reverence for the courage and devotion of such a life. No doubt her womanly proneness to nervous fears, and the undisciplined activity of her imagination, had sometimes pictured scenes of impossible distress, and resulted in words and looks inconsistent with her resolution of secrecy; but, also, how much did this timorous and excitable disposition heighten the heroism of the office she had so perseveringly filled.
Yet while he remained in deep admiration of this heroism, he thought that he himself could never forgive Bertha's suspicion of her sister. How much less could Alden forgive? And if it ever reached the trustful mind of that loving sister that the child of her delight had thought her prone to madness, the word "forgiveness" would have no meaning between them. A wound would be made that no earthly love could ever heal.
Bertha's beauty came vividly before him—her kind, honest, impulsive girlhood. "God help her," he said slowly. "She has cheerfully borne worse than hell for love's sake, and such is the extreme tragedy of love, that if she is mistaken, all this loyalty and suffering can never atone for her mistake."
Chapter XXIII WHAT 'DOLPHUS KNOWS
Durgan left the breeze of the sunrise and the mountains behind him, and after that one first gallop, rode slowly down into the stillness of the lower country and the heat of the midday hours. The smoke of some distant forest fire filled the air, diffusing the sunlight in a golden glow. Who can tell the sweetness that the flame of distant pine-woods lends? It is not smoke after it has floated many hundred miles; it is a faint and delicious aroma and a tint in the air—that is all.
On the lower side of the road now the hill dropped, in ragged harvest fields and half-cultivated vineyards, towards the wide hot cotton plains of the sea-board. On the other side were enclosed pastures where tame cattle were straying among young growths of trees, which were everywhere again conquering the once smooth clearings.
In the long, central street of Hilyard, behind the weathered palings, garden flowers brimmed over. Great heads of phlox, white and crimson, sent forth the sweetest and most subtle fragrance. Petunias, large as ladies' bonnets, soft and purple, breathed of honey. Rose and poppy, love-in-a-mist and lovelies-bleeding, marigold and prince's feather, all fought for room in tangles of delight. Over the old wooden houses the morning-glory held its gorgeous cups still open under the mellow veil of smoke. No house in the town was newly painted, or bore to the world the sharp, firm outline of good repair; but there was not one which nature had not adorned with flower or vine or moss. Everywhere there was the trace of poverty and languor after war; everywhere there was beauty, sweetness, and warmth, and the gracious outline of repose.