“Aye, would to God I had!” she echoed, with a wistful sadness. “Give me the key, then, Sergeant. I’ll go right on down there now.”
Silently he handed it over, and tried to thank her, but somehow—the words would not come. He only looked at her, with a dumb gratitude showing in his tired eyes, swallowed a little, and turned quickly away.
CHAPTER XIV
“Mother and daughter, father and son,
Come to my solitude one by one;
But come they stranger, or come they kin,
I gather—gather—I gather them in.”
—The Old Sexton
Two days later the little funeral cortège slowly wound its way up to the diminutive cemetery, situated on a rising plateau at the back of the little town.
It was a still, fine afternoon, and the bright sunshine flooded everything around that peaceful spot with its sleepy, golden haze. Far away in the distance arose the purple peaks of the Rockies, white-capped with their eternal snows against the pure, turquoise-blue sky. It was a day to gladden the hearts of all living creatures, but somehow its tranquillity awoke no response in the breasts of the two men who followed the dead to their last resting place.
Arriving at the grave-side they reverently bared their heads, and the clergyman, a kindly, earnest-faced young man with a deep, resonant voice, began the service.
Ellis felt unaccountably oppressed with many conflicting emotions. Though never a downright unbeliever, religion was to him more or less of a sealed book, and the reckless, irresponsible wandering life that had been his since boyhood had not been conducive to much serious thought on that sacred subject. The solemn, beautiful, tremendous words that stand at the head of the burial service, with their glorious, all-powerful promise of Eternal Life affected him strangely now, with their awe-inspiring significance.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life,” saith the Lord: “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
Often—ah, how often—with the callous indifference bred of active service and its cruel, sordid realities, had he listened to them before, out there on the far-away South African veldt, blaspheming, as like as not, under his breath at the heat, and the dust, and the maddening flies as, “Resting upon Arms Reversed,” he stood beside the freshly dug grave of some dead comrade.