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So with this highly figurative view of the situation from the lips of the governor of the place and the commander-in-chief of the English as well as the Dutch garrison, they were fain to go home and bury their dead, finding when they returned that another cannonball had carried away poor Bartholomew's coffin-lid.
Often as I repeated this instruction in my mind, firmly as I determined to remember it while I toiled sea-ward again with the coffin-lid, the result was always the same. A moment of rest in the unresting waves, a quick, agile spring, a moment of mad, intoxicating joy, and then disaster. I became a mass of bruises, the skin scraped inch by inch from my chest by contact with the rough wood.
But the bullfinches happened to be away, and she wished that the priests' drone would cease to interrupt the melody of the birds and boughs. The dear Prioress would prefer Nature's own music, it was kinder; and the sound of the earth mixed with the stones falling on the coffin-lid was the last sensation.
"I did not suppose it," I blundered like a fool, never seeing whither her question led. "You did not?" she cried, in deep surprise; and now, when it was too late, I understood. "What was it, then, induced you to lift the coffin-lid?" "You ask me more than I can tell you," I answered, almost roughly. "Do you thank God, Madonna, that it was so, and never plague your mind to learn the 'why' of it."
"Only you now!" whispered Hitty to her child, as Keery's peaceful, shrouded face was hidden under the coffin-lid and carried away to Greenfield Hill. Pitiful whisper! happily all-unmeaning to the child, but full of desolation to the mother, floating with but one tiny plank amid the wild wrecks of a midnight ocean, and clinging as only the desperate can cling to this vague chance of life.
With a shuddering impulse that showed her a woman still, the widow clasped her skinny hands before her face and wished that the coffin-lid were over it, since it could be no longer beautiful. "Yes, friends, ye are old again," said Dr. Heidegger, "and, lo! the Water of Youth is all lavished on the ground.
After this came many sad days, the parting, the silent form which death had made majestic, the funeral hymns, the tolling bell, the clods upon the coffin-lid; and when the sun shone out and the birds sang again, it seemed to me I had dreamed it all, and that the sun could not shine nor the birds sing above a grave on which the grass had not yet had time to grow.
They had dropped their tribute on the coffin-lid when Tom was carried home under their drooping branches. The soldier-boy had loved them so, that a little cluster had been laid on the breast of the gray coat he wore. Night and day they had guarded this old home like silent sentinels that loved it well.
The straggling procession of pedestrians behind wound its slow way in the waning light to the kirk-yard, showing startlingly black against the dazzling snow; and it was not until the earth rattled on the coffin-lid that Little Rathie's nearest male relative seemed to remember his last mournful duty to the dead.
I would have none touch my dead save myself and her favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the rains of spring.
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