“Yes, I am sure it is as she would like it to be,” I cried, and I held her hand in mine all the way to the house, and wondered if she knew I was glad for her—that I was congratulating her.
But, Oh, Carin, how one’s throat can ache! How one’s heart can hang heavy, like a weight! How one’s eyes can burn and head can throb, and how one’s thoughts can heavily turn and turn, like an iron wheel! Did you ever have a great sorrow? Oh, yes, I remember that you did, when your three brothers were lost in that horrible theater fire. Well, I have had a great sorrow before, too, when I lost my little mother. But I was so young then and so generally miserable, and life had been hideous for so long, that it was only one added pang. It was different from this. I seem unable to get that scene in the garden out of my mind. Grandmother seems still to be fluttering before those portraits of herself, or in among the cabinets in the drawing-room, or along the corridors, beckoning to her old Martha, or calling out to me: “Your arm, Azalea, please.”
The funeral was strangely quaint and beautiful. So many old people came—old friends from far away as well as near at hand, and I cannot begin to tell you about the curious coaches and carriages that some of them came in. The bishop preached the service, the funeral being held, oddly enough, in the old ballroom of the house—the room where grandmother had danced as a bride. But it looked very imposing and solemn on the day of her burial. It is paneled in dark wood, and all about it were candles burning in their sconces, and from grandmother’s coffin trailed a great cloth of gold and black brocade.
The bishop had a voice like an organ, and when I heard him reading:
“I am the resurrection and the life,” my sorrow seemed to lighten.
Everyone was very kind to me—much kinder than I had any right to expect. I had to meet many of the old family friends. It was really required of me, Aunt Lorena explained, for there were a number present on this occasion who had not been at my coming-out party. So, after the funeral, I was introduced to them.
You understand, Carin, grandmother was not taken from the house after the funeral. No, she was left lying up in that splendid room, and downstairs the funeral guests were given some refreshments—for most of them had come a long way, and many were old—and then, at midnight, the old servants carried the coffin to the great vault that stands in a grove near the house, and Uncle David and Aunt Lorena and Keefe and I followed, and she was laid away with others of her family, my father among the rest.
There are cypress trees and hemlocks round about this vault, and they stood up black against the dark sky, swaying and crying. Not one of us spoke a word, and the only sound was the sobbing of the black people. I felt more like crying than I ever had before in my life—yes, I wanted to sob aloud and to call to grandmother to come back. Little sweet, proud, loving, laughing grandmother! But I kept very still. It seemed as if I could read Keefe’s thoughts and as if he were telling me to be quiet. So I said over and over to myself the last line of a lovely poem I read the other day. “‘O waters of quiet, go softly.’”
After so long a life, one must be glad to rest. I found out that night, Carin, how that death, like life, is sweet and all in the course of things and nothing to be afraid of.
Going back to the house I told Keefe that.