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When the body was removed, the poor, tearless mourner followed it from the room through the halls and gates of the palace until it was laid in the grave. Then she returned home, and, without a word, retired to her own apartments. There, on a table, lay heaps of papers and letters with unbroken seals. But the empress heeded nothing of all this.
Where was the spirit of religion, as it was even in India and Egypt, when women were debased; when every man and woman held a human being in cruel bondage; when home was abandoned for the circus and the amphitheatre; when the cry of the mourner was unheard in shouts of victory; when women sold themselves as wives to those who would pay the highest price, and men abstained from marriage unless they could fatten on rich dowries; when utility was the spring of every action, and demoralizing pleasure was the universal pursuit; when feastings and banquets were riotous and expensive, and violence and rapine were restrained only by the strong arm of law dictated by instincts of self-preservation?
It was a touching sight to see Calyste, or rather his shadow, leaning on the arm of the old Chevalier du Halga a spectre leading a shade and following the baron's coffin as chief mourner. The church and the little square were crowded with the country people coming in to the funeral from a circuit of thirty miles.
Cissy's death had removed the only cause he had for concealing his real identity. There was nothing more to prevent his revealing all to Miss Boutelle and to offer to adopt the boy. But he reflected this could not be done until after the funeral, for it was only due to Cissy's memory that he should still keep up the role of Dick Lasham as chief mourner.
In this scene, our superiority to Electra, in the knowledge we possess, refines and softens our compassion, blending it with hope. And most beautifully here does Sophocles remove far from us the thought of the hard hatred that hitherto animates the mourner the strong, proud spirit is melted away the woman and the sister alone appear.
Had she gone in her young years, with her warm affections, her new hopes, all green and unwithered at her heart, at once into dust, stillness, ice? And had I known her only for one year, one little year, to see her torn from me by a violent and bloody death, and to be left a mourner in this vast and eternal charnel, without a solitary consolation or a gleam of hope?
He hardly remembered receiving the hurt, and was at first too busy to heed it, or to call off any one attention, until a dread of falling, and being trodden on, had seized him and made him speak; and indeed he was so dizzy that Berenger with difficulty kept him on his feet over the bridge, and in the court lifted him in his arms and carried him almost fainting into the cloister, where by the new-made grave still knelt the black-veiled mourner.
When this happens we examine the professional deadhead with interest. He reminds one of the hired mourner at the Hebrew funeral. He may not be ornamental, nor even she, despite her sex; perhaps they give little encouragement to the players; they bring nothing directly to the exchequer, but they fill a place.
If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation, I tell how a friend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark, and the sad, true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been nine days missing, when his drowned body floated into the very pathway on Marble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride, as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was.
Honora turned to his man, and dismissed him. "I wish to speak to Mr. Chiltern alone." Chiltern paused in his tugging at the straps, and looked up at her. "What's the matter with you to-day, Honora?" he asked. "You looked like the chief mourner at a funeral all through lunch." He was a little on edge, that she knew.
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