When suddenly, a shadow—the shadow of a human form—fell on the grass on which his eyes dreamily rested. He looked up with a start, and beheld Lily standing before him mute and still. Her image was so present in his thoughts at the moment that he felt a thrill of awe, as if the thoughts had conjured up her apparition. She was the first to speak.
“You here, too?” she said very softly, almost whisperingly. “Too!” echoed Kenelm, rising; “too! ‘Tis no wonder that I, a stranger to the place, should find my steps attracted towards its most venerable building. Even the most careless traveller, halting at some remote abodes of the living, turns aside to gaze on the burial-ground of the dead. But my surprise is that you, Miss Mordaunt, should be attracted towards the same spot.”
“It is my favourite spot,” said Lily, “and always has been. I have sat many an hour on that tombstone. It is strange to think that no one knows who sleeps beneath it. The ‘Guide Book to Moleswich,’ though it gives the history of the church from the reign in which it was first built, can only venture a guess that this tomb, the grandest and oldest in the burial-ground, is tenanted by some member of a family named Montfichet, that was once very powerful in the county, and has become extinct since the reign of Henry VI. But,” added Lily, “there is not a letter of the name Montfichet left. I found out more than any one else has done; I learned black-letter on purpose; look here,” and she pointed to a small spot in which the moss had been removed. “Do you see those figures? are they not XVIII? and look again, in what was once the line above the figures, ELE. It must have been an Eleanor, who died at the age of eighteen—”
“I rather think it more probable that the figures refer to the date of the death, 1318 perhaps; and so far as I can decipher black-letter, which is more in my father’s line than mine, I think it is AL, not EL, and that it seems as if there had been a letter between L and the second E, which is now effaced. The tomb itself is not likely to belong to any powerful family then resident at the place. Their monuments, according to usage, would have been within the church,—probably in their own mortuary chapel.”
“Don’t try to destroy my fancy,” said Lily, shaking her head; “you cannot succeed, I know her history too well. She was young, and some one loved her, and built over her the finest tomb he could afford; and see how long the epitaph must have been! how much it must have spoken in her praise and of his grief. And then he went his way, and the tomb was neglected, and her fate forgotten.”
“My dear Miss Mordaunt, this is indeed a wild romance to spin out of so slender a thread. But even if true, there is no reason to think that a life is forgotten, though a tomb be neglected.”
“Perhaps not,” said Lily, thoughtfully. “But when I am dead, if I can look down, I think it would please me to see my grave not neglected by those who had loved me once.”
She moved from him as she said this, and went to a little mound that seemed not long since raised; there was a simple cross at the head and a narrow border of flowers round it. Lily knelt beside the flowers and pulled out a stray weed. Then she rose, and said to Kenelm, who had followed, and now stood beside her,—
“She was the little grandchild of poor old Mrs. Hales. I could not cure her, though I tried hard: she was so fond of me, and died in my arms. No, let me not say ‘died,’—surely there is no such thing as dying. ‘Tis but a change of life,—
‘Less than the void between two waves of air,
The space between existence and a soul.’”