Tales from Bohemia Part 11

"But before he reached the town, he found it was a dead body he was carrying.

"You see she had kept up until the very last moment, in the hope of reaching the town before dark.

"What the man did, how he felt when he discovered that her heart had ceased to beat, there in the solitude upon the mountains, with the town in sight at the foot of the slope in the gathering night, I can leave to the vivid imaginations of you newspaper men. For four hours he mourned over her body by the side of the track, and those in the train that pa.s.sed could not see him for the darkness.

"Then my pal took the body in his arms and started up the mountain, for the track at that point pa.s.sed through what they call a cut, and the hills rise steep on each side of it. He had his prejudices against pauper burial, my pal had, and he shrunk from going to the town and begging a grave for her. He didn't need a doctor's certificate to tell him that life had gone for ever from her fragile body. He knew that she had died of cold and exhaustion.

"As he turned the base of the hill to begin to descend it, he saw in the clouded moonlight a deserted railroad tool-house by the track. In front of it lay a broken, rusty spade. He shouldered this and proceeded up the mountain. It was a long walk, and he had to stop more than once to rest, but he got to the top at last. There was a little clearing in the woods here, where some one had camped. The ruins of a shanty still remained.

"My pal laid down the body of her who had been his wife, with the dead face turned toward the sky, which was beginning to be cleared of its clouds. Then he started to dig.

"It was a longer job than he had expected it to be, for my pal was tired and numb. But the grave was made at last, upon the very summit of the mountain.

"He lifted up the body of that brave girl, he kissed the cold lips, and he took off his coat and wrapped it carefully about the head, so that the face would be protected from the earth. He stooped and laid the body in the shallow grave, and he knelt down there and prayed.

"He filled the grave up with earth with the broken spade that he had used in digging it. All these things required a long time. He didn't observe how the night was pa.s.sing, nor that the sky became clear and the stars shone and the moon crossed the zenith and began to descend in the west. He didn't notice that the stars began to pale. But he worked on until he had finished, and then he stopped and prayed again.

"When he arose, his face was toward the east, and over the distant hilltops he saw the purple of the dawn."

The outsider ceased to speak.

"What then?"

"That's all. My pal walked down the mountain, jumped upon the first freight-train that pa.s.sed, and has been a wanderer on the face of the earth ever since."

There were various opinions expressed of this narrative. I quietly asked the needy outsider as we left the club at sunrise:

"Will you tell me who your pal was--the man who buried his wife on the mountain-top?"

There was contemptuous pity in the outsider's look as it dwelt a moment upon me before he replied: "The man was myself."

And then he condescended to borrow a quarter from me.

VIII. -- TIME AND THE TOMBSTONE

Tommy McGuffy was growing old. The skin of his attenuated face was so shrunk and so stretched from wrinkle to wrinkle that it seemed narrowly to escape breaking. About the pointed chin and the cheekbones it had the colour of faded brick.

Old Tommy had become so thin that he dared not venture to the top of the hill above his native village of Rearward on a windy day.

His knees bent comically when he walked.

For some years the villagers had been counting the nephews and nieces to whom the savings of the old retired dealer in dry-goods would eventually descend.

Ten thousand dollars and a house and lot const.i.tuted a heritage worth antic.i.p.ating in Rearward.

The innocent old man was not upon terms of intimacy with his prospective heirs. Having remained unmarried, his only close a.s.sociates were two who had been his companions in that remote period which had been his boyhood. One of these, Jerry Hurley, was a childless widower, a very estimable and highly respected man who owned two farms. The other, like himself a bachelor, was Billy Skidmore, the s.e.xton of the church, and, therefore, the regulator of the town clock upon the steeple.

There came a great shock to Tommy one day. As old Mrs. Sparks said, Jerry Hurley, "all sudden-like, just took a notion and died."

The wealth and standing of Jerry Hurley insured him an imposing funeral.

They laid his body beside that which had once been his wife in Rearward cemetery. His heirs possessed his farm, and time went on--slowly as it always does at Rearward. Tommy went frequently to Hurley's grave and wondered when his heirs would erect a monument to his memory. It is necessary that your grave be marked with a monument if you would stand high in that still society that holds eternal a.s.sembly beneath the pines and willows, where only the breezes speak, and they in subdued voices.

Years pa.s.sed, and the grave of Tommy's old friend, Jerry, remained unmarked. Jerry's relatives had postponed the duty so long that they had grown callous to public opinion. Besides, they had other purposes to which to apply Jerry's money. It was easy enough to avoid reproach; they had only to refrain from visiting the graveyard.

"Jerry never deserved such treatment," Tommy would say to Billy the s.e.xton, as the two met to talk it over every sunny afternoon.

"It's an outrage, that's what it is!" Billy would reply, for the hundredth time.

It was, in their eyes, an omission almost equal to that of baptism or that of the funeral service.

One day, as Tommy was aiding himself along the main street of Rearward by means of a hickory stick, a frightful thought came to him. He turned cold.

What if his own heirs should neglect to mark his own grave?

"I'll hurry home at once, and put the money for it in a stocking foot,"

thought Tommy, and his knees bent more than usually as he accelerated his pace.

But as he tied a knot in the stocking, came the fear that even this money might be misapplied; even his will might be ignored, through repeated postponement and the law's indifference.

Who, save old Billy Skidmore, would care whether old Tommy McGuffy's last resting-place were designated or not? Once let the worms begin operations upon this antique morsel, what would it matter to Rearward folks where the banquet was taking place?

Tommy now underwent a second attack of horror, from which he came victorious, a gleeful smile momentarily lifting the dimness from his excessively lachrymal eyes.

"I'll fix 'em," he said to himself. "I'll go to-day to Ricketts, the marble-cutter, and order my own tombstone."

Three months thereafter, Ricketts, the marble-cutter, untied the knot in the stocking that had been Billy's and deposited the contents in the local savings-bank.

In the cemetery stood a monument very lofty and elaborate. Around it was an iron fence. Within the enclosure there was no grave as yet.

"Here," said the monument, in deep-cut-letters, but bad English, "lies all that remains of Thomas McGuffy, born in Rearward, November 11, 1820; died----. Gone whither the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest."

This supplementary information was framed in the words of Tommy's favourite pa.s.sage in his favourite hymn. His liking for this was mainly on account of its tune.

He had left the date of his death to be inserted by the marble cutter after its occurrence.

Rearward folks were amused at sight of the monument, and they ascribed the placing of it there to the eccentricity of a taciturn old man.

Tommy seemed to derive much pleasure from visiting his tombstone on mild days. He spent many hours contemplating it. He would enter the iron enclosure, lock the gate after him, and sit upon the ground that was intended some day to cover his body.

He was a familiar sight to people riding or walking past the graveyard,--this thin old man leaning upon his cane, contentedly pondering over the inscription on his own tombstone.

He undoubtedly found much innocent pleasure in it.

One afternoon, as he was so engaged, he was a.s.sailed by a new apprehension.

Suppose that Ricketts, the marble-cutter, should fail to inscribe the date of his death in the s.p.a.ce left vacant for it!