Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/351

 In the great concourse of people that followed all that was mortal of Philip Rondelet to the grave, all distinctions of class and sect were swept away, as they never fail to be in times of deep feeling. Roman priest and Jewish rabbi, the noisy atheistical preacher and the rigid Presbyterian divine, walked together behind the two chief mourners,—his foster-brother and servant Hero, and Therese, the woman whom he had saved from death. Only these two, out of all the friends who had known and admired him before he had joined the forsaken garrison at Thebes! The bells of the churches tolled as the procession wound through the streets, their harsh iron clangor, echoing from belfry to belfry, resounding in the aisles of the silent city of the dead, toward which the crowd was moving. It may be that their deep, hoarse notes were wafted even farther, and that they blended faintly with the marriage-chimes with which the Woodbridge woods were so merry that day. It may be that to one sensitive ear the mournful echo of a dirge was audible above the wedding-bells, and that the tears of Hero and Therese were not the only ones shed that day for Philip Rondelet.