CHAPTER VII. THE CEMETERY

The air as of an ice-house met me crossing the threshold. The door

fell-to behind us. The sexton said something to his wife that made her

turn toward us.--What a change had passed upon her! It was as if the

splendour of her eyes had grown too much for them to hold, and, sinking

into her countenance, made it flash with a loveliness like that of

Beatrice in the white rose of the redeemed. Life itself, life eternal,

immortal, streamed from it, an unbroken lightning. Even her hands

shone with a white radiance, every “pearl-shell helmet” gleaming like

a moonstone. Her beauty was overpowering; I was glad when she turned it

from me.

But the light of the candle reached such a little way, that at first I

could see nothing of the place. Presently, however, it fell on something

that glimmered, a little raised from the floor. Was it a bed? Could

live thing sleep in such a mortal cold? Then surely it was no wonder

it should not wake of itself! Beyond that appeared a fainter shine; and

then I thought I descried uncertain gleams on every side.

A few paces brought us to the first; it was a human form under a sheet,

straight and still--whether of man or woman I could not tell, for the

light seemed to avoid the face as we passed.

I soon perceived that we were walking along an aisle of couches, on

almost every one of which, with its head to the passage, lay something

asleep or dead, covered with a sheet white as snow. My soul grew

silent with dread. Through aisle after aisle we went, among couches

innumerable. I could see only a few of them at once, but they were on

all sides, vanishing, as it seemed, in the infinite.--Was it here lay my

choice of a bed? Must I go to sleep among the unwaking, with no one to

rouse me? Was this the sexton’s library? were these his books? Truly it

was no half-way house, this chamber of the dead!

“One of the cellars I am placed to watch!” remarked Mr. Raven--in a low

voice, as if fearing to disturb his silent guests. “Much wine is set

here to ripen!--But it is dark for a stranger!” he added.

“The moon is rising; she will soon be here,” said his wife, and her

clear voice, low and sweet, sounded of ancient sorrow long bidden adieu.

Even as she spoke the moon looked in at an opening in the wall, and a

thousand gleams of white responded to her shine. But not yet could I

descry beginning or end of the couches. They stretched away and away, as

if for all the disparted world to sleep upon. For along the far receding

narrow ways, every couch stood by itself, and on each slept a lonely

sleeper. I thought at first their sleep was death, but I soon saw it was

something deeper still--a something I did not know.

The moon rose higher, and shone through other openings, but I could

never see enough of the place at once to know its shape or character;

now it would resemble a long cathedral nave, now a huge barn made into

a dwelling of tombs. She looked colder than any moon in the frostiest

night of the world, and where she shone direct upon them, cast a bluish,

icy gleam on the white sheets and the pallid countenances--but it might

be the faces that made the moon so cold!

Of such as I could see, all were alike in the brotherhood of death, all

unlike in the character and history recorded upon them. Here lay a man

who had died--for although this was not death, I have no other name to

give it--in the prime of manly strength; his dark beard seemed to flow

like a liberated stream from the glacier of his frozen countenance; his

forehead was smooth as polished marble; a shadow of pain lingered about

his lips, but only a shadow. On the next couch lay the form of a girl,

passing lovely to behold. The sadness left on her face by parting was

not yet absorbed in perfect peace, but absolute submission possessed the

placid features, which bore no sign of wasting disease, of “killing care

or grief of heart”: if pain had been there, it was long charmed asleep,

never again to wake. Many were the beautiful that there lay very

still--some of them mere children; but I did not see one infant. The

most beautiful of all was a lady whose white hair, and that alone,

suggested her old when first she fell asleep. On her stately countenance

rested--not submission, but a right noble acquiescence, an assurance,

firm as the foundations of the universe, that all was as it should

be. On some faces lingered the almost obliterated scars of strife, the

marrings of hopeless loss, the fading shadows of sorrows that had seemed

inconsolable: the aurora of the great morning had not yet quite melted

them away; but those faces were few, and every one that bore such brand

of pain seemed to plead, “Pardon me: I died only yesterday!” or, “Pardon

me: I died but a century ago!” That some had been dead for ages I knew,

not merely by their unutterable repose, but by something for which I

have neither word nor symbol.

We came at last to three empty couches, immediately beyond which lay the

form of a beautiful woman, a little past the prime of life. One of her

arms was outside the sheet, and her hand lay with the palm upward, in

its centre a dark spot. Next to her was the stalwart figure of a man of

middle age. His arm too was outside the sheet, the strong hand almost

closed, as if clenched on the grip of a sword. I thought he must be a

king who had died fighting for the truth.

“Will you hold the candle nearer, wife?” whispered the sexton, bending

down to examine the woman’s hand.

“It heals well,” he murmured to himself: “the nail found in her nothing

to hurt!”

At last I ventured to speak.

“Are they not dead?” I asked softly.

“I cannot answer you,” he replied in a subdued voice. “I almost forget

what they mean by DEAD in the old world. If I said a person was dead, my

wife would understand one thing, and you would imagine another.--This is

but one of my treasure vaults,” he went on, “and all my guests are not

laid in vaults: out there on the moor they lie thick as the leaves of a

forest after the first blast of your winter--thick, let me say rather,

as if the great white rose of heaven had shed its petals over it. All

night the moon reads their faces, and smiles.”

“But why leave them in the corrupting moonlight?” I asked.

“Our moon,” he answered, “is not like yours--the old cinder of a

burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them. You

observe that here the sexton lays his dead on the earth; he buries very

few under it! In your world he lays huge stones on them, as if to keep

them down; I watch for the hour to ring the resurrection-bell, and wake

those that are still asleep. Your sexton looks at the clock to know when

to ring the dead-alive to church; I hearken for the cock on the spire to

crow; ‘AWAKE, THOU THAT SLEEPEST, AND ARISE FROM THE DEAD!’”

I began to conclude that the self-styled sexton was in truth an insane

parson: the whole thing was too mad! But how was I to get away from it?

I was helpless! In this world of the dead, the raven and his wife were

the only living I had yet seen: whither should I turn for help? I was

lost in a space larger than imagination; for if here two things, or

any parts of them, could occupy the same space, why not twenty or ten

thousand?--But I dared not think further in that direction.

“You seem in your dead to see differences beyond my perception!” I

ventured to remark.

“None of those you see,” he answered, “are in truth quite dead yet, and

some have but just begun to come alive and die. Others had begun to die,

that is to come alive, long before they came to us; and when such are

indeed dead, that instant they will wake and leave us. Almost every

night some rise and go. But I will not say more, for I find my words

only mislead you!--This is the couch that has been waiting for you,” he

ended, pointing to one of the three.

“Why just this?” I said, beginning to tremble, and anxious by parley to

delay.

“For reasons which one day you will be glad to know,” he answered.

“Why not know them now?”

“That also you will know when you wake.”

“But these are all dead, and I am alive!” I objected, shuddering.

“Not much,” rejoined the sexton with a smile, “--not nearly enough!

Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not

death!”

“The place is too cold to let one sleep!” I said.

“Do these find it so?” he returned. “They sleep well--or will soon. Of

cold they feel not a breath: it heals their wounds.--Do not be a coward,

Mr. Vane. Turn your back on fear, and your face to whatever may come.

Give yourself up to the night, and you will rest indeed. Harm will not

come to you, but a good you cannot foreknow.”

The sexton and I stood by the side of the couch, his wife, with the

candle in her hand, at the foot of it. Her eyes were full of light, but

her face was again of a still whiteness; it was no longer radiant.

“Would they have me make of a charnel-house my bed-chamber?” I cried

aloud. “I will not. I will lie abroad on the heath; it cannot be colder

there!”

“I have just told you that the dead are there also,

‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks

In Vallombrosa,’”

said the librarian.

“I will NOT,” I cried again; and in the compassing dark, the two gleamed

out like spectres that waited on the dead; neither answered me; each

stood still and sad, and looked at the other.

“Be of good comfort; we watch the flock of the great shepherd,” said the

sexton to his wife.

Then he turned to me.

“Didst thou not find the air of the place pure and sweet when thou

enteredst it?” he asked.

“Yes; but oh, so cold!” I answered.

“Then know,” he returned, and his voice was stern, “that thou who

callest thyself alive, hast brought into this chamber the odours of

death, and its air will not be wholesome for the sleepers until thou art

gone from it!”

They went farther into the great chamber, and I was left alone in the

moonlight with the dead.

I turned to escape.

What a long way I found it back through the dead! At first I was too

angry to be afraid, but as I grew calm, the still shapes grew terrible.

At last, with loud offence to the gracious silence, I ran, I fled

wildly, and, bursting out, flung-to the door behind me. It closed with

an awful silence.

I stood in pitch-darkness. Feeling about me, I found a door, opened it,

and was aware of the dim light of a lamp. I stood in my library, with

the handle of the masked door in my hand.

Had I come to myself out of a vision?--or lost myself by going back to

one? Which was the real--what I now saw, or what I had just ceased to

see? Could both be real, interpenetrating yet unmingling?

I threw myself on a couch, and fell asleep.

In the library was one small window to the east, through which, at this

time of the year, the first rays of the sun shone upon a mirror whence

they were reflected on the masked door: when I woke, there they shone,

and thither they drew my eyes. With the feeling that behind it must lie

the boundless chamber I had left by that door, I sprang to my feet,

and opened it. The light, like an eager hound, shot before me into the

closet, and pounced upon the gilded edges of a large book.

“What idiot,” I cried, “has put that book in the shelf the wrong way?”

But the gilded edges, reflecting the light a second time, flung it on

a nest of drawers in a dark corner, and I saw that one of them was half

open.

“More meddling!” I cried, and went to close the drawer.

It contained old papers, and seemed more than full, for it would

not close. Taking the topmost one out, I perceived that it was in my

father’s writing and of some length. The words on which first my eyes

fell, at once made me eager to learn what it contained. I carried it

to the library, sat down in one of the western windows, and read what

follows.