St. Elmo | Page 7

would leave
wailing orphans in his home, and a broken-hearted widow at the
desolate hearthstone. Absorbed in her melancholy task, she heard
neither the sound of strange voices in the passage, nor the faint creak of
the door as it swung back on its rusty hinges; but a shrill scream, a wild,
despairing shriek terrified her, and her heart seemed to stand still as she
bounded away from the side of the coffin. The light of the setting sun
streamed through the window, and over the white, convulsed face of a
feeble but beautiful woman, who was supported on the threshold by a

venerable, gray-haired man, down whose furrowed cheeks tears
coursed rapidly. Struggling to free herself from his restraining grasp,
the stranger tottered into the middle of the room.
"O Harry! My husband! my husband!" She threw up her wasted arms,
and fell forward senseless on the corpse.
They bore her into the adjoining apartment, where the surgeon
administered the usual restoratives, and though finally the pulses stirred
and throbbed feebly, no symptom of returning consciousness greeted
the anxious friends who bent over her. Hour after hour passed, during
which she lay as motionless as her husband's body, and at length the
physician sighed, and pressing his fingers to his eyes, said sorrowfully
to the grief-stricken old man beside her: "It is paralysis, Mr. Dent, and
there is no hope. She may linger twelve or twenty-four hours, but her
sorrows are ended; she and Harry will soon be reunited. Knowing her
constitution, I feared as much. You should not have suffered her to
come; you might have known that the shock would kill her. For this
reason I wished his body buried here."
"I could not restrain her. Some meddling gossip told her that my poor
boy had gone to fight a duel, and she rose from her bed and started to
the railroad depot. I pleaded, I reasoned with her that she could not bear
the journey, but I might as well have talked to the winds, I never knew
her obstinate before, but she seemed to have a presentiment of the truth.
God pity her two sweet babes!"
The old man bowed his head upon her pillow, and sobbed aloud.
Throughout the night Edna crouched beside the bed, watching the wan
but lovely face of the young widow, and tenderly chafing the numb,
fair hands which lay so motionless on the coverlet. Children are always
sanguine, because of their ignorance of the stern, inexorable realities of
the untried future, and Edna could not believe that death would snatch
from the world one so beautiful and so necessary to her prattling,
fatherless infants. But morning showed no encouraging symptoms, the
stupor was unbroken, and at noon the wife's spirit passed gently to the
everlasting reunion.

Before sunrise on the ensuing day, a sad group clustered once more
under the dripping chestnuts, and where a pool of blood had dyed the
sod, a wide grave yawned. The coffins were lowered, the bodies of
Henry and Helen Dent rested side by side, and, as the mound rose
slowly above them, the solemn silence was broken by the faltering
voice of the surgeon, who read the burial service.
"Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full
of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it
were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. Yet, O Lord God
most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour,
deliver us not into the pains of eternal death!"
The melancholy rite ended, the party dispersed, the strangers took their
departure for their distant homes, and quiet reigned once more in the
small, dark cottage. But days and weeks brought to Edna no oblivion of
the tragic events which constituted the first great epoch of her
monotonous life. A nervous restlessness took possession of her, she
refused to occupy her old room, and insisted upon sleeping on a pallet
at the foot of her grandfather's bed. She forsook her whilom haunts
about the spring and forest, and started up in terror at every sudden
sound; while from each opening between the chestnut trees the hazel
eyes of the dead man, and the wan, thin face of the golden-haired wife,
looked out beseechingly at her. Frequently, in the warm light of day,
ere shadows stalked to and fro in the thick woods, she would steal, with
an apronful of wild flowers, to the solitary grave, scatter her treasures
in the rank grass that waved above it, and hurry away with hushed
breath and quivering limbs. Summer waned, autumn passed, and winter
came, but the girl recovered in no degree from the shock which had cut
short her chant