I
will relate only one thing yet, belonging to this twilight time.
CHAPTER XII.
MARY'S DREAM.
That night, and every night until the dust was laid to the dust,
Mary slept well; and through the days she had great composure;
but, when the funeral was over, came a collapse and a change. The
moment it became necessary to look on the world as unchanged, and
resume former relations with it, then, first, a fuller sense of
her lonely desolation declared itself. When she said good night
to Beenie, and went to her chamber, over that where the loved
parent and friend would fall asleep no more, she felt as if she
went walking along to her tomb.
That night was the first herald of the coming winter, and blew a
cold blast from his horn. All day the wind had been out. Wildly
in the churchyard it had pulled at the long grass, as if it would
tear it from its roots in the graves; it had struck vague sounds,
as from a hollow world, out of the great bell overhead in the
huge tower; and it had beat loud and fierce against the corner-
buttresses which went stretching up out of the earth, like arms
to hold steady and fast the lighthouse of the dead above the sea
which held them drowned below; despairingly had the gray clouds
drifted over the sky; and, like white clouds pinioned below, and
shadows that could not escape, the surplice of the ministering
priest and the garments of the mourners had flapped and fluttered
as in captive terror; the only still things were the coffin and
the church--and the soul which had risen above the region of
storms in the might of Him who abolished death.
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