At length the hour of eleven was slowly struck from the belfry tower, and Brand hurried to the nearest cab-stand. He hired a cab to convey him in the direction of the silent street, and discharged it some little distance from his destination. He went forward on foot, and when he got close to the house he knew so well, he noticed a small crowd of people congregated before the door. They were all Malays. He moved in among them and listened to their conversation. He heard one man relating to another, evidently a stranger, how every member of the old priest’s family had been carried off by the scourge, and how the young girl, his grand-daughter, whose body they were now about to bury, had almost recovered, but had died of weakness through refusing to take nourishment after her convalescence had set in.
Then the door opened, and the body, wrapped in white linen, was carried out and borne onward upon a bier by four men. The little crowd of people formed a procession behind it. Brand, with a heart of frozen stone in his desolated breast, followed after the others.
The cortege wended slowly to the Malay burial-ground high on the mountain-side, and here Brand stood among the tinselled tombs and saw Aiäla’s body lowered into the dark grave. He listened in dread for the first sound of the earth falling upon the flesh that he loved, and that had thrilled to his kisses, but found to his surprise that it had little or no effect upon his feelings. The funeral was hurriedly and unceremoniously conducted, so in a very few minutes the grave was filled in, and those who gathered round it dispersed.
Brand threw himself upon the new-made grave. As yet no wailing mourners had come to desecrate the spot. All around him the weird howls arose, but they smote unheeded on his ear. He was just stupidly trying to recall Aiäla’s face, and finding to his annoyance that he could not do so clearly. Then he began to murmur her name over and over to himself softly, in different cadences.
An old man, probably a priest, came quietly up and bent over him. Brand had kept on repeating Aiäla’s name. The old man laid a kindly hand on his shoulder and reminded him in the Malay tongue of the Prophet’s words of consolation to mourners, and promises to such as die in the faith. Brand listened without being able to understand a word of what he was saying for some time; but an expression that Aiäla had been in the habit of using in her poetical moods fell from the old man’s lips, and startled the stunned hearer into momentary animation. The passage where the expression occurs is at the beginning of that chapter of the Koran known as “The Rending Asunder.” Brand interrupted the garrulous flow of the old man’s talk by continuing the passage which he had unconsciously quoted:
“When the seas are let loose, and when the tombs are turned upside down, the soul shall know what it hath done and left undone.”
The old man stood up and moved quietly away.