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Here I lived in darkness and misery until my provisions were exhausted, but just as I was nearly dead from starvation the rock was rolled away overhead and I saw that a bier was being lowered into the cavern, and that the corpse upon it was a man.
When in a series of subjects from the life of the Virgin, so often met with in religious prints and in the Roman Catholic churches, we find her death and her assumption followed by her coronation; when the bier or sarcophagus and the twelve apostles appear below, while heaven opens upon us above; then the representation assumes a kind of dramatic character: it is the last and most glorious event of her history.
The public had been with me in our contest; the public knew nothing of my opponent's deathbed accusations; the public knew only that I had attended him in his last moments; it saw me walk beside the bier that bore him to his grave; it admired the respect to his memory which I evinced in the simple tomb that I placed over his remains, inscribed with an epitaph that did justice to his unquestionable benevolence and integrity; above all, it praised the energy with which I set on foot a subscription for his orphan children, and the generosity with which I headed that subscription by a sum that was large in proportion to my means.
He had not yet known the smell of the earth. He had come from his bier. "I was laid out a corpse," he whimpered. "My God, they would have buried me by to-morrow!" The professor gave him wine again. "I saw a light here," he went on. "I beg you will give me some clothes some soup, if you please and I am going back again." Then he said in German: "Meine gute, theure Frau! Meine Kinder!"
But now, in the twilight of the second evening, which was Monday, a quiet procession came silently across from the Manor House to the church, headed by Father Jordan; twelve poor men bore torches beside the bier; the Mass for the Dead was softly sung, and those beautiful, pathetic words which for ages rose beside the waiting coffin:
As we approached, he neither stirred nor looked up, therefore I softly led the Prince to the opposite side of the bier, that he might look quietly on the perished loveliness that lay there at rest for ever.
The dead were placed on a bier and wrapped in some kind of a cover. Priests were called in to perform rites of purification. One of the priests, it will be recalled, is clad in a fish costume. The fish is the symbol of Ea, the god of the deep, who becomes the chief deity appealed to in incantations involving the use of water.
He heard Annette whisper, "How sad it is and beautiful!" felt the clutch of her hand as she stood up on tiptoe; and the crowd's emotion gripped him. There it was the bier of the Queen, coffin of the Age slow passing!
The angel then departed, but the palm-branch shed a light from every leaf, and the apostles, although scattered in different parts of the world, were miraculously caught up and set down at the Virgin's door. The sacred palm-branch she then assigned to the care of St. John, who carried it before her bier at the time of her burial.
Sounds of shunting upon some railway siding came to my ears; train whistles and fog signals hooted and boomed. River sounds there were, too, for we were close beside the Thames, that gray old stream which has borne upon its bier many a poor victim of underground London. The sky glowed sullenly red above. "There's the Joy-Shop, along on the left," said Fletcher, breaking in upon my reflections.
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