She started from the grave; an exclamation of terror and surprise broke from her. She looked me wildly in the face as if the spirit of her injured father stood in shape before her, and recognizing the sad features of that father's friend, she sank, sobbing convulsively, upon the grave again, hiding her pale face in the long grass which covered it.
I raised her kindly in my arms, and sitting down beside her, her wondering yet gentle boy between my knees, I heard her sad tale of passion and remorse. No other ever heard that story; she asked my silence and I spoke not.
From that time forward, year after year, the penitent paid frequent visits to her lather's grave; her gentle manner asked for no inquiry, and none was made, and there was nothing left of the once joyous daughter of the school-master to challenge recognition. The boy, too, seemed to love the place, and oftentimes accompanied her. For her sake it was he loved it, seeming to comprehend that here there was something sharing with him her affection, some link which bound them both to the place for ever.
Well, years passed on; and, as I have said, the voice of scandal had long been hushed; the child had almost reached to manhood, and the silver threads of time and sorrow had stolen in among the once golden locks of the mother. Childlike ever, and uniformly good and cheerful, Ned rose each morning, and as it had been for some years, the daylight was not more certain to enter the pleasant bar-room of the "Stag" than was the shadow of the innocent to fall across its threshold, its earliest visitor. Evening brought him home with his caresses, his childish chat; and his petty earnings to his mother, who, happy at the pleasure his employment gave him, was profuse in the praises that he loved to hear.
And so matters had gone on for years, just as if they might have done so for ever, when God in his wisdom brought that sore affliction upon us all—the famine and the sickness of '47. Who that has lived through that year of misery and horror, but shudders at the remembrances its very name recalls? Who but wails some beloved one snatched away with scarce a moment's warning?—the child from its mother's arms; the mother from the child's caresses; the youth standing, full of hope on the threshold of his manhood, when the warm blood froze suddenly in his veins, the glad visions of his future faded before him as the relentless hand of death seized him with a grasp of iron, leaving him upon the earth but one hour of agony, and the breath to say farewell; the aged flung into the grave upon whose brink they had, trembling, stood for years clinging to life with more than the tenacity of the young;—all, all stricken with that horror of dissolution; bowed down as if a curse had fallen upon us for our sins as once came the plague upon the Egyptians.
First amongst the victims was the long-tried, patient Mary. With sufficient warning only to bring the good priest to her side, to receive the last rites of her faith, to press in her enfeebled arms her terror-stricken son, and upon his lips one agonizing kiss—and her soul was with its God.
The agony of the boy when once he realized the great grief that had fallen upon him was, they told me, so fearful and so wild as, to wring with horror the [{800}] hearts of all who heard him. After a time he was somewhat pacified by the gentle persuasion of the priest and the kind soothing of some good-natured neighbors, who, disregarding the danger of the infection, had gathered in, out of love and pity. They strove to lead him from the death-bed; but no! the first paroxysm of despair once over, he sat him down, silent yet stern, by the bed side. He spoke not, he wept not. Apparently unconscious of the presence of others as of his own existence, the icy fingers of one hand clasped in his, he thus sat gazing, motionless as stone, upon the dead face of his mother.
On through the long hours of that autumn night sat the stricken mourner, and though daylight came, aye, even the sunlight that he loved stole in and crept up upon the bed till it fell upon the placid features of the dead illumining them as with the glory of immortality, still he moved not. Dead as the dead he seemed, in all but the strange, weird evidence of being in his eyes. Stolid he remained to all remonstrances; silent as motionless to all words of comfort. The hour came at last for preparation toward the removal of the body—for the cholera did not spare the poor body after death, decay set in so rapidly—when, contrary to the expectation of all, the innocent voluntarily arose and even assisted at the necessary duties, duties which must have conveyed to him the knowledge of his approaching parting with her to whom he still clung as lovingly in death as he had done in life.
It was the afternoon of the day following that of Mary's death when a few neighbors gathered to see her home, poor girl! I should not, say a few either, for they were many at such a time, when the dead cart rattled hourly past the door, and sorrowing and desolation was in every home.
They bore her from the cottage and along the way leading to the burying ground of Castlewellan, the parish she had lived and died in. The wailing orphan walked stealthily behind, his head low bent, unearthly pallor on his face, his fingers interlaced before him every motion and expression speaking of the sorrow unto death, of the mortal agony of desolation.