"AND THEY LAID HIM TO HIS REST"
I remember next being in my own bedroom. I was taking off the
cavalier's dress, and I felt like a traveller who had returned from
some far and beautiful land. I never wept, nor even sighed. And I
remember the rest of that strange and ghostly day, the silence of
the house, and the room beyond the pretty corridor that held a thing
stranger than anything on earth or in the sea. It rained slightly
towards dusk. I was looking out of a window on to the garden, later--it
may have been midnight for aught I know, I came down the painted
corridor, and entered the bedroom. A lamp was burning, and on the bed
lay something small and straight, covered with a sheet. I drew away the
sheet, and saw the face I had known so well; just the same it looked,
only smaller and more helpless, and the smile had faded away into a
vague, beseeching look.
Then I remember days that passed, and one day when Wilder said to me,
"You will not come?" "Where?" I asked. "To the graveyard."
I was in the library when he spoke. I shook my head.
He left the room; and a little later I heard heavy footsteps, and the
tolling of a bell in the distance. I counted, one, two, three--sixteen,
then the bell ceased.