“All right,” he said; “pull a long breath and prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
The truth came upon me in a flash. I fell back, panting at him.
“Harry! They’re there!”
He nodded.
“Yes, they’re there. If you like to shut your eyes, I’ll lead you past.”
But he had shamed me once.
“No,” I said, with a catch in my voice. “If you stood it, so can I. Go on—quick. Are they—are they—very——”
We were in the further vault before I could shape my question; and I took one glance, and shrieked, and shrunk back under the wall. And so, in the very act, at a leap the horror was gone.
Why? I cannot tell. The problem is again for the psychologists. All I know is that, as I cried out, the sickness left me. A spring of some human sympathy gushed up in my heart and expelled it. These pitiful remnants seemed to greet us as with a wistful hail of comradeship. They were ugly, disjointed, ghastly enough in all conscience; but they appealed as from the lost to the lost, and seeing them, their quiet, sad decay, I no longer feared them as I had feared them unseen. Who might swear, indeed, that our own bones would not mingle with these others presently? They were dust of our dust in the great Commonwealth of death. If I had been a desert castaway, lying down to die beside some parched human skeleton, I could not better have testified to my sense of the sorrow that makes us kin than I did now in my changed emotions.