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Updated: May 3, 2025
It was thus that he meant to bear her with him. He mounted now the bench, and I could imagine with what elation of mind he put out his hands to remove the coffin-lid. As well as if his soul had been transformed into a book conceived for my amusement did I surmise the exultant mood that then possessed him.
The lady was buried with a valuable ring her husbands gift upon her finger; this excited the cupidity of the sextons, who, resolved to obtain possession of it, opened the tomb in the night and wrenched off the coffin-lid. Their difficulties, however, were not at an end, for when they tried to possess themselves of the ring it resolutely adhered to the finger of the corpse.
We found a rope and bound the coffin-lid lightly down, and having given our promise to our hostess to recover, if we could, the body of her daughter Jean and give it proper burial, we bade her good-bye for the present and set off to the inn where the 'Dean' would be anxiously expecting us.
One way or the other she must at once dispel this torturing doubt. But ere she had taken three paces, she stood arrested again, her hands jerked suddenly to the height of her breast, her lips parting to let out a scream of terror. For the coffin-lid had slowly raised and clattered over.
Standing on the withered grass, from which the spring sunshine was beginning to melt the winter snow, they listened to the saddest sound that can fall on children's ears, the fall of the clods on their father's coffin-lid, and then they went back to the empty house to begin life all over again without their father's care. Mr Oswald, Frank's father, came home with them.
My knees bent under me. I bowed my face on the sofa; and tears, hot and fast as tropic rain, gushed from my eyes. I wept for him even more than myself, wept for the "dark-spotted flower" twined with the roses of love. I heard him walking the room with troubled steps; and every step sounded as mournful to me as the earth-fall on the coffin-lid.
One would have thought that he would live for ever, and that the horrible things of life, such as pain and doubt and suffering, were unknown to him, would never touch him. Yet one fine day this very man is swept away like dust, after passing through a terrible ordeal known to none but himself. Now he's gone, and will never, never return. All that's left of him is the cap on the coffin-lid."
Suddenly and without warning I heard a creak behind my chair, but I took no heed. Then a further creaking and a grinding noise and I looked round. I saw the coffin-lid lift upward and a white shroud show below. Slowly the shrouded corpse rose with creaking bones before my staring eyes rose to a sitting posture, and sat still.
While this was going on, the father and mother stood weeping at the upper end of the grave, at the head of the little procession, the mother sobbing with stifled violence, and peeping forth to discover why the coffin was drawn up again. It being fitted in its place, Orrin S strewed some straw upon it, this being the custom here, because "the clods on the coffin-lid have an ugly sound."
The straggling procession of pedestrians behind wound its slow way in the waning light to the kirkyard, 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.
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