“At the break of day we will bury him.”
The men wrapped the body in a shroud of rough cloth, and when darkness began to give away to that cold grey dusk that, without being night nor day, is yet the sick pallor of Time, they went forth and followed along the embankment of the paddy-fields until they came to a low hillside close to the sea.
It was natural that this casket of the derelict should mould near the ocean’s wash, for on its turbulent stream he had been blown hither and thither, unknown, unseen, a wreck in its wayward currents. There had he drifted and fought and mourned—a sad and perhaps terrible soul. Well might the sea dirge to his spirit its eonic plaint—that melancholy chant of Eternity. And well was it that they should remain forever together, the living sorrow and the dead.
Low down on the hillside they dug his grave.
A rift of light, almost lurid, glowed just above the rim of swaying waters.
They put the derelict in his grave, and the priest, holding his crucifix above him, stood over the open tomb. Upon his upturned face shone the red light of morning, while a vaporous mist like streams of incense rose from the grave and broken earth around him. As the priest prayed the Great Symbol rose and fell upon his bosom with the rhythm of his silent prayer, quivering and afire in the red glare of heaven.
The men, seeing the Great Eye flashing redly, knelt down before the Breton and rested their foreheads upon the earth.
The prayer ended; then the priest sounded, terrifying in its majestic intonations, the awful Taps of the God of Wrath.
“Dies Irae, dies illa
Solvet saeculum in favillâ