Soon Astral came out with the look of a man thoroughly dumfounded. He grasped Erma by the hand and led her upstairs to her bedroom. They sit down and stare at each other. Astral does not know how to break the news to Erma. At length he says, "Erma, your brother was never hanged. He is downstairs now."
With a mad leap Erma broke out of the room, rushed downstairs, crying, "John! John!! John!!!" When she neared his seat she stopped suddenly, her voice ceased abruptly. John's head lay limp upon his bosom, for his soul had forsaken his body. Becalmed by a more than human power, Erma knelt before his chair in which sat the lifeless form and passionately kissed the mute lips that had passed under the ban of eternal silence.
"Oh!" she gasped, clapping a hand to her heart. She attempted to rise, but fell forward, her head finding a resting place on her dead brother's knee. Erma's beautiful eyelids closed, opened again as if to give a last view, and then closed, alas, forever. Her heart ceased to beat, and her soul stole noiselessly out of her body to return no more.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE FUNERAL.
Death, the subtle, crafty, relentless foe of human life, who lurks within the gloomy shadows which fringe the borderland where time fades away into eternity; Death, who, bursting from his sunless home, mouldy with the dew of darkness, springs upon the unwary traveler, and bears him swiftly to the spirit land—this Death, walking with ceaseless tread along his dismal pathway, has a strange and, to us, uncanny taste for music. When he has borne his victim away, he returns to the homes of the bereft, wearing a mystic veil, plucks with wild abandon at the heart strings of the sorrowing; and with avidity and in ecstasy drinks in the plaintive notes, the time beat of which is kept by the steady, perpetual fall of drops of blood from the heart. However terrible the wail, however loud the cry, it is but sweet music to the ear of death.
But surely, surely, soulless Death, for once in his awful journeyings, had even his unholy taste for the music of agony fully satisfied, as with his ear to Astral's throbbing heart he drank in its anguished notes and heard that overburdened thing of grief make its futile attempts to burst through the walls that confined it. Added to and intensifying his feeling of blighting personal loss, his soul was charged with the thought that fate had so needlessly reared a ladder to the unspotted blue of his sky, and climbing there, had fanned out the sun of his firmament, leaving in its stead the sombre shadows, the inky hues, the gruesome forms of the dread midnight.
Stunned, bewildered, dazed, Astral cast a look of anguish upon the lifeless form of Erma and turned away petrified with sorrow. He staggered out of the room into the hallway and to the door opening upon the street. This he managed to open, and stood with bared head, facing the storm and welcoming the fury of the elements. Motionless, speechless, gazing into the dark abyss beyond, Astral stood as if rooted to the spot, the fury of the skies unconsciously affording congenial association to the wild ragings and frozen sorrows within. Sulkily the night rolled onward. The snowstorm, as if grieved to longer beat upon the brow of one in the iron grasp of fate, gradually ceased. A hush fell upon the winds, and they began to speak in whispers, afterwards not at all.
The remaining hours of the night, hearing the ever approaching footfall of the coming dawn, leapt over the bars of time and sank into eternity. The dawn came, cold and cheerless. The sun struggled from behind an embankment of clouds, and feebly cast a few sickly rays of light over the snow-covered earth, and, as if ashamed of the feebleness of the effort, quickly lifted the clouds to again hide his face. And yet Astral stood in the doorway, as motionless as a stone statue, silent as the Sphinx.