He stopped speaking, and stood waiting, at attention.
And then, as they stood there in silence, Gerald, looking beyond the still, swathed figure stretched out before him, allowed his eyes to rest on these black boxes, each containing one poor tenantless shell of humanity, from which the unquenchable spirit of man had been suddenly, violently expelled: and as he looked, he missed something that should have been there—the sign, the symbol, of the cross.
A flood of memories came surging through his mind—memories of childish prayers learnt at his mother's knee, of certain revisions which time had brought to his first innocent, unquestioning faith. And with those memories came anger and a sense of humiliation. For there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to show that these boxes before him held what had once been the dwelling-place of that daily miracle, the sentient soul of man. These defenceless dead had been subjected to a last, continuous, intolerable insult; in their flesh he felt that his own humanity was degraded. Here was nothing to separate the human dead from the beasts of the field; these boxes would have looked the same had they held merely the bodies of animals prepared for the inquisitive, probing research of science.
His young imagination, strung to the highest pitch, penetrated those shuttered receptacles and showed him on the face of each occupant that strange ironic smile with which the dead husk of man seems often to betray the full knowledge now possessed by the spirit which has fled. That riddle of existence, of which through the ages philosophers and kings had sought the key, was now an open book to all those who lay here in the still majesty of death. Yes, they could well afford to smile—to smile at the littleness which denied to their tenements of flesh the smallest symbol of belief that death was not the end of all.
His companion had also marked the absence of any sign of the Christian's hope in this house of death, and through her mind there ran the confused recollection of holy words:—
"It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory.
"Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep….
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
Comfortable words! They seemed, merely by their flight through the tense ganglia of her brain, to break into the awful loneliness of these recent tabernacles of the spirit, and bestow on them the benison denied them in its pride by the human family from whose bosom they had been torn.
Then swiftly her mind turned to the thought of those who were still watching and waiting, in that misery of suspense of which she now knew each pang. Every one—surely every one—of these dead who now surrounded her,—silent, solitary, had been loved—for love comes in some guise to all poor human creatures. Those mouths, cheeks, eyes, those rippling waves of woman's hair, had been kissed—ah, how often. The perishing flesh had been clasped heart to heart….