As we continued in reverent silence round the grave a pale gleam of moonlight faintly lit the scene, throwing dark shadows across the excavation and shining mournfully on the white wrapping of the corpse that lay beside us.
Looking out through the opening of the tunnel I saw as in a frame a portion of the sky. The main body of the great storm cloud had passed, and it was followed by a broken, hurrying rear-guard of ragged clouds through which the moon seemed to battle her way to the west, now submerged, now showing pale and dim, like the terrified face of a swimmer emerging between the waves of a heavy sea.
At a sign from the bishop the body of Jakoub was lowered into the grave. We threw a little soil upon it with the customary words, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Then as the grave was filled in the bishop repeated one verse from the funeral psalm: “For I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were,” and then pronounced the benediction.
Thus with reverence and as much ceremony as is permitted by the rubric which prescribes that “the office ensuing shall not be used for any that die unbaptised or excommunicate,” the body of Jakoub was committed to the earth, and his stormy passage through life ended almost within the precincts of my quiet Sussex vicarage.
As we parted for the night to get what rest we could, I felt that my tranquillity was at last restored. I could think almost kindly of Jakoub, for I believed that with him had gone the malign influence that had darkened Edmund’s life and threatened to destroy his character.
CHAPTER XIX
CONCLUSION
I HAVE done what I needed to do for my own satisfaction by putting in the form of a consecutive narrative the peculiar and perhaps sometimes unseemly transactions which have now been recorded.
I had only a fragmentary diary, occasional notes of conversations written while the spoken words were still fresh and vibrant in my memory, and my own recollection of events.
I dreaded lest the latter might fade as I grew older, and that loose leaves of manuscript might be lost or destroyed before I had even in my own mind a clear perspective of happenings that were often so bewildering to me while I dwelt in the midst of them.