Upon the grey flat tombstone near the church-gate the great grave yew has been dropping her scarlet berries, one by one—berries that shine, like little lights, amid the night of her changeless foliage: there they lie like a forgotten rosary, that some holy man, having prayed amongst the unpraying dead, going, has left behind him. Evening is closing in fast; the air is raw and chill; no one that can avoid it is outside a house's sheltering walls: there is no one to disturb Esther's meeting with her brother. What cares she for the cold, or for the six feet of miry earth that part them. She flings herself upon the sodden mound; stretching herself all along upon it, as the prophet stretched himself on the young dead child—hand to hand, heart to heart, mouth to mouth. She lays her lips upon the soaked soil, and whispers moaningly, "Good-bye, Jack—good-bye! Oh! why won't they let you answer me? Why have they buried you so deep that you cannot hear me?"
Lord God! of what stuff can Mary and Martha have been made, to have overlived the awful ecstasy of seeing their dead come forth in warm supple life out of the four-days-holding grave! Their hearts must have been made of tougher fibre than ours, or, in the agony of that terrible rapture, soul and body must have sundered suddenly, and they fallen down into the arms of that tomb whence their brother had just issued in his ghastly cerements, in dazed, astonished gladness!
As Esther lifts her streaming eyes, they fall upon the inscription on the cross at the grave-head:
"HERE LIETH THE BODY
OF
JOHN CRAVEN,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
SEPT. 24TH, 186-. AGED 21 YEARS."
"Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!"
She casts her arms about the base of the holy symbol; she presses her panting breast against the stone. "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" she cries too; and surely the live sinner needs mercy as much as the dead one? And as she so lies prostrate, with her forehead leant against the white damp marble, a hideous doubt flashes into her heart—sits there, like a little bitter serpent, gnawing it: "What if there be no Lord! What if I am praying and weeping to and calling upon nothing!
"............... Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no heaven, no earth in the void world—
The wide, grave, lampless, deep, unpeopled world."
They tell us—don't they?—in our childhood, that wickedness makes people unhappy: I think the converse is full as often true—that unhappiness makes people wicked.
A little icy wind creeps coldly amongst the strong nettles and weak sapless bents, blowing them all one way—creeps, too, through Esther's mourning weeds, and makes a numbness about her shivering breast. For a moment an angry defiant despair masters her.
"What if this great distant being, who, without any foregone sin of ours, has laid upon us the punishment of life—in the hollow of whose hand we lie!—what if He be laughing at us all this while! What if the sight of our writhings, of our unlovely tears and grotesque agonies, be to Him, in His high prosperity, a pleasant diversion!"
So thinking, against her will she involuntarily clasps closer the cross in her straining arms—involuntarily moans a second time, "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" No—no! it cannot be so! it is one of those things that are too horrible to be believed! There is no justice here! none! but it exists somewhere! How else could we ever have conceived the idea of it? It is, then, in some other world: we shall find it on the other side of these drenched, nettly charnels—on the other side of corruption's disgrace and abasement: