When I was hardly well from weeks of raving illness that followed,
but yet well enough to walk and go about like a rational being, I
went to the cemetery to see all that now remained to me beyond my
own fearful memory. Dick was beside me. He had insisted on coming
with me, and, when we reached the grave, he stood beside me at its
edge, as he had stood beside me at the altar.
A huge slab of white marble lay horizontal upon the narrow, single
grave. Fools! They should have made it a double one. A heavy iron
chain, swinging great balls, studded with spikes, was linked from
post to post round the tomb. At its head rose a cross, extending its
arms against a background of cypresses.
I looked at it all with dry and savage eyes. The illimitable regret,
the boundless, hopeless remorse for the irrevocable that has been
shaped by our own heedless hands, the unspeakable yearning for that,
once more, which has been freely ours and we have flung away, rose
like a swelling tide within me, and rolled through me in thundering,
deadening waves standing at her grave. I stared half blindly at the
words on the stone--"Wife of V. Hilton." Wife! What a mockery!
I looked, and that slab of white marble--spotless and relentless--
that barred her into the grave, seemed to my still half-unstable
brain symbolical of that last year of virgin purity of life that had
broken her strength to bear.
Pages:
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253