 | CHAPTER XLIII.
HUSBAND AND WIFE. The shadow of Moloch mountain |  |
43. CHAPTER XLIII.
HUSBAND AND WIFE.
Presently, when Mrs. Bliss came to
prepare her mother for tea, and then for
bed, Beatrice glided quietly away, and, after
lingering a moment at the door, entered the
great parlor, where she knew that her grandfather
was lying.
She had not been in the room since that
time—now four years gone past—when she
heard that Marston Brent had forgotten her,
and when Monckton had vainly striven to
comfort her despair. As she closed the door,
she remembered it, and stood for a moment
with vacant eyes looking back into the past,
and pitying the Beatrice who had so suffered
in that almost forgotten time.
“It was her death-agony. She cannot suffer
any more, poor thing!” whispered she at
last, with a smile sadder than any tears; and
then she went softly forward, and stood beside
the quiet figure, stretched, as yet uncoffined,
upon a table in the centre of the room.
Dressed as she had often seen him, with his
shapely hands folded upon his breast—a placid
smile upon his lips, and his eyes naturally
closed, he looked as if indeed he slept, and
should presently awake refreshed and glad.
Or so Beatrice thought at first; but when she
had stood for many moments beside that motionless
form, had, as it were, gathered into
her inmost consciousness the awful calm, the
utter silence of that presence, had tried and
failed to comprehend the suggestions of vastness,
of immeasurable distance, which seemed
to pervade the icy atmosphere of the chamber—
when she touched that brow, so serene in its
white calm, so unlike any thing human in its
feeling—then, for the first time, the shadow of
death fell upon Beatrice Chappelleford's life—
then, for the first time, she knew how puny, how
idle, how impious were the theories and actions
by which she and her teachers had tried
to measure eternity.
Sinking upon her knees, as if crushed by
the weight of that mighty conviction, she hid
her face between her trembling hands, and
murmured:
“O God! I acknowledge thee in death!—
teach me to know thee in life.”
It was the only prayer she had breathed for
years; and the heart she had thought dead
stirred in its slumber as the holy words reechoed
through its silent chambers.
She still knelt, wrapped in strange yet
sweetly familiar reverie, when the door opened
softly, and her aunt's hushed voice summoned
her forth.
“He looks natural, don't he?” whispered
she, as Beatrice silently passed her. “I wonder
how much of him is left in that body, after
all. It don't seem as if he and it could
become strangers all at once, does it?”
“O Aunt Rachel! I dare not think or
speak of such matters,” moaned Beatrice,
gliding past her aunt and hiding from herself
in the lighted, warmed, and human eastern
room.
In the gray twilight of the next morning,
Mrs. Bliss stood beside her niece and laid a
hand upon her shoulder.
“Beatrice! do you know where your grandmother
has gone?” said she in a frightened
voice.
“Gone! No, indeed. Has she gone?” exclaimed
Beatrice, rising hastily.
“Yes. I slept with her because she seemed
so restless and queer, I was afraid she was going
to be sick; and when I woke just now
she was gone. My first thought was that she
might have come up to see you, because she
seemed so pleased yesterday.”
“No, she has not been here. Let us go and
look for her. Can she have gone out of the
house?”
“It may be. Why, where is your husband,
Beatrice?”
“He sleeps upon the couch in the dressing-room.
Come, aunt.”
And Beatrice hastily left the room, followed
by Mrs. Bliss, in whose breast anxiety for her
mother struggled with a curiosity almost as
strong.
The house was hastily searched—the outside
doors tried and found fast, and the rest
of the family roused and alarmed; but still
the childish, bereaved old mother was not
found.
At last, Beatrice laid her hand upon the
door of the great parlor.
“We have not looked here,” said she.
“That door is locked all the time; and before
I went to bed, I took out the key and
put it in my pocket,” said Rachel positively.
“Is it there now?”
“I suppose so.” And Mrs. Bliss thrust her
hand into her pocket, withdrew it, and turned
very pale.
“No, it is not there. Try the door.”
“It is fastened, but I think only by the button
inside. It is not locked,” said Beatrice in
a low voice.
“Let us try.” And Mrs. Bliss, raising the
latch, applied a strong and steady pressure to
the only slightly resisting door, which presently
yielded with a low, rending sound.
The two women passed through and stood
beside the dead, over whose form and face his
daughter had reverently spread a fair linen
sheet before leaving him to his silent watch.
This she now turned down, and stood stricken
dumb at the piteous yet beautiful sight before
her.
The loving wife had found her husband—
the childish mother had passed to wisdom and
knowledge unutterable — the failing, faded
form lay cold and silent there, yet glorified
even to outward sense by the majesty and holiness
of the life to which its soul had passed.
She had crept close to her husband's side,
laid her head upon his breast, and her arm
around his neck, and so had fallen asleep with
a serene smile upon her lips, and a look of
sweet content upon her face, which seemed to
glorify it like that of a saint. Looking down
at her with loving awe, Beatrice remembered
her words of the day before:
“And then we shall know that we're just
the same to each other that we were in those
young days.”
“They know it now,” murmured she, reverently
smoothing away the silver tress of the
wife's hair which fell across the husband's
lips.
“They know it now, and more than that.”
And so, the next day, a double funeral went
out from the Old Garrison House; and they
who had been lovely in their lives were not
divided in their death, and sleep to-day side
by side in the little green churchyard, beneath
the shadow of Moloch.
They sleep? Oh! no, not they, but the
perishing forms that held them here; for they
wake eternally in a life to which this is but
death.
| CHAPTER XLIII.
HUSBAND AND WIFE. The shadow of Moloch mountain | |