Absorbed in a reverie, I wandered on until I found myself at the gate of a cemetery, which I mechanically entered. I had passed the same cemetery often before in my walks with Maud. What a picturesque old place it was! Filled with old crumbling monuments with quaint epitaphs and overgrown with rank grass and weeds.
It was one of Maud's favourite spots for meditation, as she told me. It was so perfectly solitary—overlooked by no houses and shut out from the gaze of passers-by with thick yew trees and cypress. Then, when you entered at the gate, what a silence reigned within! I love those grand old melancholy retreats, and so did Maud. Here the rich and poor of the surrounding villages for miles around were buried. I passed by the elegant marble tombs of the wealthy and the humbler grassy mounds of the peasantry. My thoughts were filled with the shortness of human life, the vanity of its noblest pursuits, and the equalling, never-sparing hand of death.
Even the bracing morning air and the merry sunshine were insufficient to dispel thoughts like these, for the spot had a solemnity of its own about it. The abode of the dead is at all times sacred to us, even when we find it in the heart of a populous city, amidst the bustle and stir of daily life; but how much more is it sanctified when we discover it in some rural and secluded spot ungrimed with the smoke of factories, unbroken in upon by rude voices from without, and the mossy stones and overgrown weeds and brambles of which even the hand of the trim gardener has not disturbed.
I seated myself upon an ancient tomb, and gazed around me. Here lay a knight of old, there a lord of the manor; yonder some poor rustic whose humble grave of turf bore no record of the name, age, or sex of its occupant, what its owner's deeds had been on earth, whether fruitful or unfruitful. Close beside it rose a stately tombstone of white marble with a long inscription. "Doubtless here lays some rich landowner," I thought, "whose supposed virtues are here recorded in full."
I was too far off to read what was inscribed, but the tomb was a new one. It was not there when Maud and I took our rambles together, and I recollected all the most important gravestones. I rose and advanced a few steps, when I suddenly halted a few paces from the tomb, and recoiled in horror. I was seized with trembling, my heart sank, and I felt my brow covered with a cold sweat. The letters on the monument swam before my eyes. I brushed away a tear as I read the following lines:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF
MAUD E——N,
YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF GEORGE E——N,
OF ——
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
THE 31ST OF DECEMBER, 1750.
AGED 21 YEARS.
Then followed one or two verses from the Bible.
"Oh, Maud, Maud!" I cried, in an agony, and throwing myself on her grave, I wept bitterly.
"What says the gravestone? 'On the 31st of December,'" said I to myself. "Good heavens! That was the very evening on which I saw her spirit last in the stage box!"
I had drawn her soul away from her body for too great a length of time. I then was the cause of her death. Poor Maud! She was right in saying she should not live the year out, but I little thought that when her spirit hurried from my presence on that fatal night that it was then about to leave the body for ever.